Shownotes
- Katie Hodgetts’ Website: https://www.katiehodgetts.co.uk/
- Katie Hodgetts’ essays in The Ecologist
- The Beauty Myth book, by Naomi Wolf
- Eating disorders and climate anxiety, Climate Magic episode on this topic
- Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulations, more here
- The Extended Mind, by Annie Murphy Paul
- Buddhism’s three tenets (correction: I referred to these as the three “jewels,” but the three jewels are in fact Buddha, Dharama, and Sangha) are the 3 Ps: anatta (no-self), dukkha (life is suffering), and anicca (impermanence)
- “Inner Development Goals” group
- Rumi’s “Guest House” poem
Transcripts
Katie Hodgetts: So, for me, the greatest climate strategy that we have is preserving and protecting the ingenuity, and the vibrancy, and clarity, and beauty, and joy, and creativity of the human spirit.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Welcome to Climate Magic, a show where we explore the messy, human side of climate politics. We ask what if our hearts and minds are the most radical leverage points at our disposal? How do our human emotions, and mindsets, and cognitive biases, and wounds shape climate policy?
I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, an author and a professor of environmental studies at Cal Poly Humboldt. My guest today is Katie Hodgetts. Katie Hodgetts has a lot of legit cred, which I'll get to in a bit if you're itching for that just so you know how to contextualize this conversation.
But I want to introduce Katie the way I was introduced to her without any of the credentials, without knowing her last name, and without her knowing who I was either. We were at a climate retreat/conference with an organization founded by Christiana Figueres called Global Optimism, which works with the Plum Village Monastery, the monastics in the lineage of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, to support climate leaders.
The organizers must have known me as a human already somehow because they bunked me with this 30-year-old, quiet, twitchily delightful English human, Katie. And meeting her felt like destiny. Okay, I'll give you her official creds now, but I hope you'll enjoy a conversation where that stuff is really secondary to the humanity that Katie has to offer and the humanity she is uniquely equipped to draw out of the rest of us.
In her 20s, Katie became heavily involved in youth climate organizing, from coordinating an anti-fracking campaign to co-founding Bristol Youth Strike 4 Climate. She was named a Global Youth Awards finalist in 2018 for empowering young people throughout her 20s as she mobilized over 80,000 people for climate action. No surprise here, burnout started to happen.
And in noticing the burnout culture of the Youth Climate Movement and in herself, Katie set up The Resilience Project, a youth-led organization weaving spaces of peer support, intergenerational mentoring, and emotional resilience. Over five years at the helm, she worked with grassroots leaders to expand their work from the UK to Europe, East Africa, and beyond. In the spring of this year, 2026, she published her first book about all of this, Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat: Create Change Without Burning Out, which will be the focus of our conversation today. Okay, now that we have those official creds out of the way, let's hear from Katie herself. Roommate Katie, welcome to the show.
Katie Hodgetts: Oh, thank you. If you could hear tears through the audio, that's happening right now. What a beautiful introduction. You're such a beautiful writer. Thank you. And you're my best friend too.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I just love the way that they did that for us. Isn't it so amazing? Just to think we were meeting each other as humans. It was great. And that's why you're on this show now too, which is so fun. Okay, so we're going to start with just the sort of standard question of your story. Tell our listeners how you got into climate activism, and what your journey's been through creating The Resilience Project and about writing this book a little bit. What's your -- You know, I know the story can be a million things, but that's kind of the thread there, right?
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah, where do we start? I think I was really radicalized through the lens of politics when we're talking about the climate crisis. I would always see the kind of melting ice caps, the polar bears, you know, violins, and it didn't move me in the same way that it moved some of my peers. So I really found my entry into the climate crisis through learning about injustice and learning about how it's not just this environmental thing that's happening to us, it's actually something that is being orchestrated by a few wealthy individuals in unequal ways and it is jeopardizing my right to a just and a fair future. And that made me super angry, super angry.
And I used that anger to get active. So I joined the Youth Climate Movement. And it's always a funny thing, you know, and I work in the space of climate anxiety and there's this idea that action alleviates anxiety. I hear lots of people talking about that. And here I was joining a Youth Climate Movement to alleviate that anxiety. And I was now meeting with people each week. And each one of us knew a different harrowing fact about environmental degradation and the ecological disaster.
So, in a way, it actually fueled my climate anxiety because we didn't have any of the tools to process it. And we felt like it was indulgent to be talking about it. Why would we talk about it when we have the privilege to act? So we spent a lot of our time focusing on actions, and action points, and direct action, which was extraordinary from an impact perspective but from us. When you pay the price with your body, soul and spirit, that cannot be our blueprint for change. So during this time, I saw such an extraordinary amount of burnout. Young people would come into the movement, usually for three months. They'd run a hundred miles an hour, and then they'd have to leave because they were so exhausted. Very minimal support, especially because we felt this sense of innergenerational -- intergenerational betrayal.
So I also didn't want support. I felt like a fierce defendant and embodiment of youth leadership, and that looks like infallible and doesn't need your support. We're just fine. And there was very little support aside from people saying, 'You're the future', 'You're giving us hope', 'Keep going'. And I am super grateful for that, I am.
But it created this kind of parental narrative from the generation above us that we were being rewarded for taking action, and averting climate catastrophe rested on our generation. It was on our generation to fix it. And in all of this, I recognized that there were issues with burnout and infighting, so I became the well-being officer for one of our organizations and started designing these workshops. And usually the kind of success metric was has someone cried? Great. We're doing some of the work we need to be doing. That's not my metric anymore.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: You'll have to tell me why it's not, because that's still my metric. We can come back to that later.
Katie Hodgetts: And this was kind of the beginnings of the later creds. You spoke about, like, The Resilience Project. So I was building these workshops and during that time I really felt like, okay, so now I'm the wellbeing officer. Now I'm responsible for these people's wellbeing. Well, that's a story I told myself. It made -- It shrank the space even more for me to not be okay. Because I was now this my story custodian of my movements, well-being, welfare. And then the youth strike happened.
So this was pre-youth strike, pre-Greta. The youth strike happened. And I was now working with -- I co-founded Bristol Youth Strike 4 Climate, and I was now working with people as young as 13. And there were more people in our group that were medicated for depression and anxiety than were not. And I thought, oh, this is going to take more than one well-being officer. This is a sign of something deeper, some deeper spiritual, systemic, and structural misalignments.
Which led me towards The Resilience Project. But before that, with the youth movement, we now became spokespeople with no media training. We were designing marches where adult men were messaging us saying that they were going to drive their diesel cars through our marches. There were threats that we didn't know how to respond to. There was trolling. It was a wild time. And a few of us who lived through that have spoken together and we kind of didn't realize at the time how wild it was because we felt like heroes. We were made to feel like heroes. And we felt like puddles on the floor. And so, for me, I found a way to cope. And I found a way to cope through food. And I ended up developing bulimia at the age of 23.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Thank you for sharing that. That's an experience that I have heard from so many of my students. And I've had my own experiences with as well. So I get it. And I'm imagining many listeners also see that connection. Do you feel like you've done some thinking about the connections between that particular manifestation of your overwhelm and burnout with climate anxiety? Was that something that you now learn a lot of other people were experiencing too?
Katie Hodgetts: At the time, the word climate anxiety was really new when I was starting The Resilience Project. And it was -- Everyone was talking about it being the fear of the future. And I looked at myself and I looked around me, and I thought I don't feel fearful of the future. Maybe I do somewhere deep down. I feel angry, I feel stressed, I feel frustrated, I feel ignored, I feel lonely. And none of those experiences were captured in this word climate anxiety.
And that was really one of the beginnings, one of the academic beginnings or research questions beginnings of The Resilience Project, which was, okay, what is the lived experience of climate anxiety that isn't being defined by an NGO or a think tank? What is happening on the ground? Because in all the literature of climate anxiety, I never saw disordered eating. And it's changed a bit now. So it meant that when I went and I got support for bulimia, I needed professional help to connect the dots between stress and then how I was mitigating stress.
And how I view it now is that bulimia really became my secret superpower because I could binge and binge so that I could keep up this high octane work, and I could do my uni, and then I could go organize, and then I could go protest, and I could just use that sugar as fuel. And then with purging, I could erase my mistakes. So I could retain to myself this image of perfect leadership, which I spoke about earlier, this kind of pressure to feel like we're the generation to fix it. And bulimia, when I started purging, it felt -- When I started binging, it felt so far away from the idea of the perfect activist. Or, you know, if people were saying, 'Keep going, you're doing great work', I would think about the shame of all of the binges which led to the purging. So there are these really nuanced psychological experiences and drivers which climate anxiety at that time just really didn't capture.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I often have thought that part of the problem here, another connection, and you write about it beautifully in your book, is that the environmental movement for a long time, and also the climate movement, asks people to refrain from stuff, right? Refraining is part of the perfection.
And so in the individualization of actions you can do to save the planet, I'm putting that in quote marks because I want to put that on the shelf as not the most important stuff we can do. But it certainly has been upheld as the most important stuff we can do by corporations mostly, of course. In the actions we can do to save the planet bucket, it has a lot to do with refraining from stuff. And so this kind of net zero right? Not doing -- Net zero, zero waste, you know, no meat, all of these like no this, no that, no this, no that.
And the kind of leave no impact energy that comes out of the environmental movement, even from the '70s, this kind of humans are bad for the planet. The way that I see that show up in my students often is I should not be here. I am so disgusted with myself. I have so much shame for just being human. Because humans are so awful. And look what we're doing. And I'm learning about it in my classes. So humanity, it's just greedy, and awful, and disgusting. And that there really is no solution to the planetary crises that doesn't involve getting rid of humans and, therefore, I can start with myself.
And then this kind of merges painfully and powerfully with all the discourse, especially for young women, around making themselves not take up a lot of space, and looking very thin, and all of these other beauty myth kind of things to, you know, quote an old book from my era about this, you know, that ends up making a lot of young people, I think, equate the best environmental thing they can do and to also have credibility is to kind of wipe themselves out that way. Erase their bodies that way. The disgust of body, and disgust of self, and disgust of humanity kind of all come together. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, but I -- did that -- does that resonate with your experience too?
Katie Hodgetts: Absolutely. Absolutely. The life with limits, and particularly in the context of the youth movement when you're so hyper visible on social media. So your actions don't become just actions, they become emblems of who you are and your identity. And it's how you pillar yourself. It's how I built my whole identity, really, when I was in the youth movement.
And I speak about this in my book as an example of when I go through some of the followers who start following The Resilience Project account. Everyone has, like, the same bio. And it's, like, anti-capitalist, anti-this, anti, anti. And it's like we -- the structure means that we have boiled and whittled ourselves down to being a set of virtues, a set of clauses. And what that does is, it transforms our psyche so that we identify as changemakers or activists first and humans second. Which is not totally, totally right. Not totally the picture of what's going on here. And when you impose all of those limits -- You know, I do advocate for many of these strategies as an environmentalist, but when you are dogged about restriction and limitations, what you start doing is eroding your sense of humanity.
And it is the vibrancy, and clarity, and ingenuity, and creativity, and joy of the human spirit which will reshape and form the world, which will make the changes that we need. So, for me, the greatest climate strategy that we have is preserving and protecting the ingenuity, and the vibrancy, and clarity, and beauty, and joy, and creativity of the human spirit. And that might --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah.
Katie Hodgetts: -- mean that you have a chocolate bar and an ice cream sometimes.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. I mean, there's a -- The misanthropic temptation to hate humans and therefore it extends to yourself. I mean, this is so prevalent. And so this kind of description you just had of how online people become these sort of boxed in just surface representations of themselves. And a lot of that identity is packaged in what you're against, right? Politically against. And it just flattens the multi-dimensionality of the human that is behind it. And you could say we become memes. Or if you want to use a French theorist who I love, Jean Baudrillard, we become simulacra. You know, we become simulacra of our real --
Katie Hodgetts: Exactly.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: -- selves. You know what I'm talking about. You know, drop a little Jean Baudrillard here. Right? So there's -- And I love how you -- In your book, by the way, you have a whole description of like the panopticon, which is Michel Foucault, another French theorist's concept of the panopticon, which is this Jeremy Bentham architecture of designing prisons so that we become -- we discipline and control ourselves, and we have this constant sense of a gaze being on us.
And, God, if the internet and social media isn't the panopticon, you beautifully describe it in your book. And so that's why I'm dropping that too, just so people pick it up because it's so beautiful. But I wanted to point out that, like, that kind of constriction of identity, narrowing of humanity into what you are online, how much damage it did to you and how much damage it did to your peers. And you said -- You know, and this is kind of why at the retreat where we met they were like, you got to leave all that identity stuff at the door. What happens when you're not that person anymore? And you and I talked about it so much. It's hard, you know, it caused -- Not you so much, but me. I was like, who am I if I'm not this person? Oh my gosh. So it was beautiful and also challenging, right?
And so one of the things that you write about in your book that kind of gets to this is these seven types of rest, because one of the key words in your title is rest. And we're just jumping to rest right now. But one of the types of rest, there were seven from Saundra Dalton-Smith, physical, mental, sensory, creative, emotional, social, spiritual. And you and your colleagues, and all the work you did with The Resilience Project came up with another one, identity, which seems really relevant here. Can you describe how identity rest became kind of an antidote to what you were just describing? Or even talk about --
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: -- rest in general, if that's where you want to go with this?
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah. I am so fanatical that rest goes beyond bathtubs. I used to equate rest with hangovers. That was when I would rest. It was when I would give myself permission to watch -- binge watch 'Desperate Housewives'. And as I say in my book, propping my head on, like, a stack of garlic bread. And I thought, rest, tick. And I equated rest with physical inertia. And then I was confused why I'd wake up on Monday and think, oh, I don't feel better. And I spent yesterday watching TV the whole day and lying still. So I had defined rest as physical abandon. And then I started -- I moved to the Scottish Highlands. That's a really important part of my personal story because I felt -- I couldn't explain to you how I felt when I was hill walking in the mountains. It was like the white noise of life just with every step would recede and I'd get to this place of clarity and something I would call truth. So without all of the noise and echoes of who am I, and how many likes did my Instagram post get, and what am I doing with the next 10 years, being in the hills was a way for me to feel super insignificant in a beautifully humbling way. And I felt like part of an ecosystem rather than my life, which was full egosystem.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Ego, E-G-O. Just want to make sure.
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Let's go with the egosystem. Yes. I love that.
Katie Hodgetts: And so I started calling my mountains active rest. And active rest to me was not physical abandon, not physical inertia. It was actually moving my body and it was a way to rest from my mind. So those --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Oh my gosh.
Katie Hodgetts: -- six hours on the hill would just allow me to not be in my head and be totally in my body.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'm coming. I'm coming. I got to go on to the Scottish Islands. I need that.
Katie Hodgetts: Which is one of the reasons why we looked at these seven pieces of rests that are proposed. We being a group of youth activists. And we said, hang on, this doesn't cover -- this doesn't totally capture my experience. And like I said with the climate anxiety, we were given a framework that didn't reflect our experience. And we had this other framework and it didn't, again, reflect the nuances of being born into social media AI age with profound levels of uncertainty and being able to be reachable 24 hours a day for seven days a week.
So we developed this eighth concept of rest and we imperfectly labelled it identity rest. And for me now, a few years on, I would maybe call it perceived identity rest. Because some people, especially who are persecuted or marginalized for their identity, it's not an outfit they can put on and off, but this perceived identity. For example, I would always be the climate correspondent for all my friends. So if something vaguely climatey happened, they would want my opinion or say, 'Why haven't you said anything about that online?' And I was like, 'I don't know about carbon capture and storage. I'm 21 years old.'
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Really appreciated that you, and your colleagues, and peers added that category. When I read that in the book, I thought that's really feeling right on, even for someone at my ripe old age, you know, I have that too. Yeah. So we've talked about identity. We've talked about the panopticon. We've talked about rest a little bit. I kind of want to ask you about vulnerability. We already -- We've already gone to vulnerability, so I feel like we can open up a little bit theorizing vulnerability. You write in your book, you say that climate change at its core is an unfolding story of collective vulnerability. And you even have a section called vulnerability: our untapped superpower.
Can we speak a little bit about why? Why is vulnerability so important? Because I'm starting to see it pop up in lots of places and it feels super gendered, female. You know, Brene Brown writes about it a lot when it comes to, like, leader -- good leaders are vulnerable. What's going on with climate work and vulnerability for you?
Katie Hodgetts: The word vulnerability comes up a lot in sustainability work and it's often vulnerable ecosystems, vulnerable populations, vulnerable livelihoods, vulnerable infrastructure. So I do feel the word vulnerability can indict a sense of panic immediately. But then there's emotional vulnerability. And, you know, contrary to this being a kind of woo-woo soft concept, I am so fierce and firm in vulnerability being our untapped superpower, because vulnerability breeds connection. It is the quickest lightning rod to one's humanity, the humanity in which we all share. And to give a really concrete example, you mentioned in my bio about becoming a finalist. I was a finalist because I was nominated by my anti-fracking team. I was coordinating an anti-fracking team. And I decided that when we were going to do the campaign, it was going to be one that was rooted in humanity and humidity -- No, humanness. It's going to be rooted in humanity.
So we would meet every Tuesday online and usually we'd be talking about the next campaign or action points. And I introduced something called clap or cry. And that was a check-in at the beginning of everyone on the call. And we would either clap, so it's something you are celebrating that week, or you would cry, you'd say something that was really hard. And that simple check-in changed the entire year of our campaign. Because slowly, slowly, people started to show up with what was really happening for them. They felt seen, they felt heard, they felt understood. And it started to build not just a group of passionate people, but a group of people that we could see pieces of ourselves in. That minimized levels of infighting. It increased our levels of patience towards one another.
And some weeks someone would say, 'I'm crying because of', and say something about burnout or climate anxiety. And it started to prompt conversations in all of us, which were not happening at all back in 2018, 2017. From this check-in, this group, not only did we blockade a fracking site for three days, we sat outside Westminster in silence for eight hours, we hand-delivered 500 letters to Westminster calling for banning fracking.
We became a tiny part of the UK win, which was the memorandum on fracking. Not only did that happen, I was then nominated in the empowerment category because they said that I made space for them to feel like humans. And when you make someone -- give them the gift to feel like a human, you aren't just impacting their climate work. You're impacting their sense of self-worth. You're impacting maybe how they show up in their relationships. Like, if we're so obsessed with impact, why are we keeping it so narrow to the level of CO2 particles in the atmosphere? Why are we not thinking about how loved people feel, how empowered they feel, how fierce they feel? Because it's those impacts that have the long ripples to protect the people that are protecting the planet.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And yet it's systematically denied. It's not in my workplace. It is not in most nonprofit workspaces. It is, as you described, really only becoming prevalent in activist's movement spaces. This notion that one's capacity for vulnerability as a superpower, one's capacity to create space for other people to be human, to create the conditions for themselves to be human, that that somehow supercharges all the things in our lives. Seems so obvious to you and me.
Katie Hodgetts: I --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: But it's not the way it is, you know? Yeah, yeah. Go on, sorry.
Katie Hodgetts: That's why I feel so hot on inner work being such a core piece of the puzzle moving forward. And, more and more, it's being recognized that sustainable change does not hinge on policy change alone. It hinges a reckoning with the inner dimensions of who we are as well. Because, sure, we find the tech solution, we find the silver bullet, we manage to bring carbon emissions down. We are still left in a world where I don't feel safe raising daughters.
Where, in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer for men under the age of 35. The climate crisis is one of a polycrises, and we have the opportunity to mature our strategies and our approach to speak to the deep human nature, which is a thread that's woven through each of these different crises.
Do we want to build a world that is full of burnout, and exhaustion, and tired people, and division, and not talking to our families because we disagree with their politics? Or do we want to build a world of connection, and joy, and less competition, and really understanding who we are? You know, and if we want to be building that world, we need to be thinking about how do we get there? And how are we treating our activism? Not as a project we take on, but a posture that we move from.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Ooh, I like that. I like that. I often think of the relationship part, or the connection part, or the humanity part as being made valuable or being -- Maybe there's some room for that. Maybe we can fund it a little bit. Maybe we can bring some coffee and muffins to that meeting to make the social capital a little bit stronger. But only if we can make the argument that it is a really strong means to an end. And what I'm hearing you say is no, the whole point is that it's the end in itself. It's the reason why we would even want to have sustainability and climate justice, because we want to have a world where we have all of these other things happening.
So I am really compelled by that. I'm compelled by what you've just offered, that that is not the means to the end. It's the end in itself. And if we want to get to that end, we could do that right now. And the uphill battles that we're climbing you've described so beautifully, the forces working against us. It's all the capitalism stuff. It's all the panopticon stuff. It's all the social media stuff. It is all the gender stuff. It is all the race stuff. It is the water we're swimming in stuff that you just described. And I think this sort of -- There is no other way to get out of that stuff, which is the structural change we all want to see, without figuring out how to do that right now in our own hearts and lives. So, yeah, if we want it in the future, a good way to get there is to practice it right now, you know, so.
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah, absolutely. And that's why in the book I distinguish between climate action and climate activation. And climate action being this external thing with an outcome, we're focused on the destination. And climate activation is this more of an inner to outer journey, where we are focused on the path and the path we tread to move through these layers of heart, mind, culture, cognition, community, who's around us, what do those communities feel like, what do they look like, how safe do I feel? And then through that activation, through that process, then the action comes. And I trust much more action that is designed by someone who's been through a process of inner learning, of feeling a sense of belonging, of connection, than someone, me in my 20s, who's designing an action from a place of urgency, and shame, and wanting to prove my worth.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. Yeah. The motive there being, again, egocentrism, right? Like, that ego motivation for doing it. And I need to do this work to heal my own wounds kind of thing. Yeah.
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah, exactly. And then from that, this action, then it becomes a byproduct of the path. The path --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah.
Katie Hodgetts: -- being the inner work. It expands how we can understand action and activism. So detaching it from protests and pickets. And when we take this holistic view of world change, not just fighting the climate crisis but also these other threads of the polycrisis. Then activism, to me, really looks like, yes, protest pickets, campaigns, vital and important. And it's expanded to anything which fundamentally challenges the tenets of neoliberalism, which challenges individualism, liberalization, privatization, which challenges competition, challenges ego, and challenges accumulation, achievement, and productivity.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I love it. I'm -- I can't help myself but quote from your book too. You just did it so beautifully. You have a bullet point of these kinds of things, right? Actions become offerings to the world we are trying to usher in.
Katie Hodgetts: Mm.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: In social movement theory, this is known as pre-figurative politics. I'm reading from your book now. Which is simply to be the change you want to see in the world. “Actions taken pre-figuratively include showing up to a community event when your instinct is to isolate, choosing to stay curious when judgment would be easier, having a hard, heartful conversation with a relative about how their opinions might make life feel unsafe for others, choosing not to numb out when the news gets heavy, gently refusing to disconnect, attending a summit, event, or conference where you're connecting to something bigger than yourself, talking to the cashier at the checkout instead of opting for self-service because it might be the first meaningful conversation someone has had the whole day.”
Katie Hodgetts: That's my --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: These are your personal --
Katie Hodgetts: That's my big one.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Your big one.
Katie Hodgetts: That's my big one. I go see Billy every Sunday at Tesco.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: And, for me, one of these practices that -- along those lines is when I can ask a human being something that I would ask Google or AI. I should ask the human being. Can we have this -- I mean, it's such a tiny, tiny action. It's such a micro, tiny thing. And most of the time I go, oh, never mind, I'll just ask Google, it's so easy.
But the politics, the political impact of all of those micro actions of all of us all the time is slowly taking away intergenerational wisdom transfer, it is slowly undermining the role of those -- all of those synapses and wires in our brains that do all that learning through connection. That is beautifully described in another book called 'The Extended Mind', which I just finished and I'll definitely want to put in the show notes. But this idea that our brains need those connections in order to learn and the kind of transfer of knowledge that happens across generations. I'm going off on a rabbit hole right now.
But, yes, we need to hang out with Billy. Or just get the groceries from him. We don't even have to hang out with him. That's the point.
Katie Hodgetts: You know, it doesn't replace the big actions. It doesn't replace the local grassroots organizing. But instead of thinking of activism as just a thing that we do, like I said before, seeing it as this posture that we move from, that we are the walking embodiment of the world that we want to bring in. And that's why the inner work is so important because my gosh, do you need a level of patience and self-compassion to be able to tread that path when you feel like you're the only one walking countercurrent? You need an anchor, you need routing, you need support.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. And you have to notice -- You have to be able to notice when you're doing just the convenient thing because you're just swimming with the current of the mainstream, you know? It takes so much awareness to figure out, wait, maybe I don't want to go down this current, you know?
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah. Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'm going to step out right now.
Katie Hodgetts: And one that I --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: How am I going to do that? Yeah.
Katie Hodgetts: I don't practice all the time. It's daily. You know, we both know how difficult and challenging it is to cultivate that presence and that awareness through your whole day and your whole life. But it doesn't mean it's not a --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: However -- You describe it so beautifully. However, yes, I agree with you. It's very difficult. But two things. One, you describe in your book the feedback loop where the more you do it, the easier it becomes. And secondly, along those lines, the more you do it, the more you meet other people doing it, and the more other people around you are doing it, the easier it becomes. And then, third, I do think that there's a sense of, like, it's relieving to think that if I am -- The one thing I can do right now if I feel terrible about the state of the world, and I feel urgency is burning at me, and I feel so despairing, I can at least talk to Billy. Do you know what I mean? It's not so big. It's something I can do right now to just practice the way I want to -- The pre-figurative politics can be right now and right here. It doesn't have to be something huge and big that I would probably never start because I'm too busy, you know?
Katie Hodgetts: And to share what was said to us at our retreat, when you do that, let's call it light work, spreading light, activism, whatever you want. The candle. You light the candle and the candle flame, you do it because the candle flame lights up the room around it. You hope it lights Billy. But when we do that work as lighting the match and lighting the candle, you don't just light -- the candle doesn't just illuminate the room. The candle illuminates the candle. So when you are doing this impact work and you think, oh, I don't want to do it. I feel so alone. It doesn't make a difference. It does because you're not just lighting up the room. You also trust that you are lighting up yourself. You are lighting up the candle, the candle inside you.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Meaning you're increasing your own happiness, and well-being, and capacity to be an antidote to all of those feelings of despair, and hopelessness, and nihilism. Yeah. Yeah.
Katie Hodgetts: Yes.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Would you like to talk about burnout, Katie? I'd love to hear your thoughts on burnout. I think you have some intimate experience with it. And I just -- I would say too, I'm sure you are familiar with this too, you know, I'm seeing in the social media spaces and in the research too, this kind of pushback against the concept of burnout, not being -- not putting enough blame on systems for causing the burnout. So, caveat, your analysis in your book and in your life does do that beautifully. But, yeah, go for it. What's -- You know, what do we do with burnout? And the thing about your book I think is so beautiful is you don't say to people don't be burned out. Burnout is undermining. Burnout is bad. You say that if you're really going to do this work, you are always operating in proximity to burnout. Maybe that's a place for you to share your wisdom about burnout for us.
Katie Hodgetts: I learned through my own journey that burnout is not a personal failure. It's what happens when you put passionate people in unsustainable structures.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Gosh --
Katie Hodgetts: I realized --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: -- that was a beautiful definition. It's what happens when you put passionate people in unsustainable structures. Okay, go on.
Katie Hodgetts: I'm one of them. I'm one of them. So I am a passionate person. I am in unsustainable structures. So I kept rubbing up to this same point of burnout again and again. I will add, during times when I was giving workshops on burnout.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, how ironic.
Katie Hodgetts: Uh-huh. Yeah, writing a book about burnout. And then, yeah, I had this really obvious a-ha moment, which was like, of course I feel burnt out. I am, like I've mentioned, living in a structurally uncertain world. We're in the patriarchy of social media. Of course I feel burnt out. I'm up against the fossil fuel lobby, which is valued at $4.3 trillion, and I'm at home alone. Like, of course I'm burnt out. I'm trying to push, and drive, and fundraise for this organization that's rooted in care in a world that systematically devalues care and makes it free, unpaid labor of women.
So when I came to terms with that, I thought I need to stop trying to eradicate burnout and get it out of the picture, because I'm seeing it as a personal failing. And now I need to start thinking about burnout is something which will always be in the picture because I am choosing to do something to minimize, dismantle structures and systems of harm. I am doing change-making. It's really hard. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, surely.
So instead -- We hope. Instead I started thinking about, okay, so if burnout is always going to be in the picture somewhere, then my job really is now to start understanding through this, I'm going to call it inner development, that through this observation, awareness, and honesty, where am I in proximity to burnout at all times? And now I know that if I get too close, I've figured out some strategies that I can do to pull myself away. And that if I'm really far away, I can have a chat with myself and say, okay, Katie, it's time to stand in the fire. We can probably do a bit more.
We can probably maybe fill up some of our free time with a bit more organizing. And that conception of burnout has deshamed it for me and made it feel more like a dynamic relationship that is part of the contractual agreement of wanting to do meaningful work. And that doesn't mean that everyone who does meaningful work will burn out.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Or should, yeah.
Katie Hodgetts: It just means --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Mm-hmm.
Katie Hodgetts: Or -- Exactly. It just means that you're given this opportunity to understand it as relational. So you're constantly aware of where am I to it.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Mm. Mm.
Katie Hodgetts: On your point about it being -- I'll let you respond. I was just --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: No, I was just thinking of it --
Katie Hodgetts: Blah blah blah blah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: -- imagining it. Like, you have a whole thing about the Rumi's 'Guest House' poem, and I'm thinking about all of a sudden I'm like, oh, burnout is this guest in my house. That's the proximity, you know? It's just right there. It's not -- I'm not identifying with it, but I don't have to pretend that life would only be good if it was banished forever, you know?
Katie Hodgetts: Sometimes now I start thinking about it as parts of me.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Mm.
Katie Hodgetts: So, at this point in time, a part of me is burnt out. Yes, like genuinely right now, it feels like a part of me is burnt out and it might be the three fingers on my right hand. But there are other parts of me that feel so alive, and so joyful, and so active. And when we say I am burnt out, you give yourself almost a sentence whereas there could -- there's still space for brightness. There's still space for the flame, and the flicker, and the aliveness, you know? You're not a pile of ash, but there might be a part of you that feels very burnt out. And then my question has become, okay, so how do I midwife this part of me?
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Mm.
Katie Hodgetts: How do I mother this part of me? What does this part need? With no shame, no blame. Or like, okay, you want ice cream for breakfast? Let me get you a spoon.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: It's such a really important detail and insight about -- that comes out of the world of maybe emotional intelligence, but certainly Buddhism and all kinds of methodologies, if you will, of inner development, if you will. To not over-identify with an emotion that way. And you write about it in your book, too, this sort of need to recognize that you are not entirely identifying with an emotion.
I am -- Even saying something like I am angry or I am hungry, right? It's like -- It's sort of this -- It has -- Reinforces in our own minds that that state of being is maybe permanent or that it is who I am. And both of those things are not true. Both of those things are really, actually, impermanent and dynamic, and not static at all. And so we know from the research that we are -- we experience emotions for very short periods of time. And so one could -- You know, in my practice, I often try to shift my -- In order for the emotions that are particularly uncomfortable to not have such sticking power with me, one step I have to take is to say anger, or fill in the blank of uncomfortable emotion, is arising in me right now, right? Instead of I am angry, right?
It has this fully over-identification and this permanence to it. And some of the sort of three jewels of -- Some of the -- There's this concept of the three jewels, impermanence, and imperfection, and not personal are all these things that happen when we can say this thing is temporary, this emotion is passing through me, I am not this emotion, the guest house concept in your book of Rumi's poem. I just love that. You just offered that analysis of burnout. And I think of my -- I love these three fingers needing ice cream. Is there anything else --
Katie Hodgetts: Yeah.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: -- about burnout you'd like to say?
Katie Hodgetts: I guess all I can share is from my own experience. And I've become this beautiful living lab of burnout after building an organization in my 20s. And where I've come to now, I'm sure this will change, is that burnout is structural, is systemic, and is psychological. And this is -- links to a really important part of why the word reset is in the title of the book, instead of just act, rest, act, rest, act, rest. Because, in theory, the cycle of act, rest, act, rest, act, rest protects us from burnout. In practice, that's not what happens. You tend to end up back in the same place again and again and again. And so you mentioned that there's been more discourse on the structural and systemic aspects of burnout, which are -- they're very true and very valid. And when I went through a second burnout I thought, oh, my inquiry needs to go a bit deeper here.
And I had to really inquire, like, what are the deep, deep narratives that sit inside me that are sustaining patterns of behavior that I can't blame on capitalism anymore? Or I can, I still can. But, at some point, I actually need to drop that story and be honest with what behaviors I am allowing or inflicting on myself. And, you know, very, very deep down, hidden maybe in my left toe, I found still attaching my productivity to my worth and this, like, deep discomfort of If I'm not paying my rent to be here as a human by doing meaningful work, do I even mean anything? And those are difficult ones to reconcile with. It's so much easier to blame my organizing group or something someone said to me. It's harder to appreciate, and unweave, and untangle your own complicity and your own suffering.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Mm. Thank you for describing that. And it also reminds me a little bit of, you know, this maturing process that happens sort of. Maybe I'll just describe it from my perspective. But my own maturing process of kind of going through therapy and blaming my parents for stuff, and then getting to a point where it's like I can't be free from this suffering if I don't actually change this thing. And it almost got to a point where it's like, it doesn't even matter what my parents did. It doesn't even matter what the world did. Because the suffering's still here. And yelling about it to these sources of the pain isn't getting rid of it.
And at some point, I just wanted to get rid of the suffering. And it did -- It required that turn of saying yeah, it might be systemic, it might be structural, it might be coming from my parents, it might be coming from these messages in society. And until I can change those messages in society, or change my parents, or change my own parenting for my future kid, I can do that for sure, or change these systems, which I'm going to keep trying to do, the harm reduction is actually starting with owning my own complicity and my own harming of myself and the stories I tell myself and what's happening in my little left toe. Yeah. Totally.
Katie Hodgetts: Completely. And that's why I talk about, you know, less self-care and more self-change. And I think there's so much value in the self-care and the bubble baths. Love that, love that for me. But self-care can keep us trapped in unsustainable patterns because we're not addressing them, we're just anesthetizing them. So the reset part is act, rest, okay realize, unpack, reflect. What happened? What can I own here? What can I change? And then implementing that into the repeat.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: So coming -- I could talk to you all day. Coming towards this sort of arc of our conversation, I thought -- I don't do this all the time. I've only done this with one person and I really liked it. And I -- For you, it felt natural. I want to do a lightning round. Are you ready?
Katie Hodgetts: Okay. I'm ready.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: It just means --
Katie Hodgetts: Roll up my sleeves.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah. It's just, like, just fun, okay? Just fun. And, you know, quick -- quick and dirty answers, words you've made-up in your book. You are such a beautiful writer, and you have these turns of phrase and these concepts that I don't know where they came from in the depths of your imagination, but they make your ideas really stick for me, okay? And so I'm hoping that listeners can get a little vibe from this.
Okay. So lightning round, define some of these really fun words that you've made-up in your book.
Emotional permaculture.
Katie Hodgetts: Oof, taken from the idea of agricultural permaculture, which is the process of letting nature lead the way. So, you know, anti-monoculture, pro diversity of crop. Emotional permaculture is the same, but letting the mind lead. So no monocultures. So not just I only want hope, I only want joy, good vibes only. But it's celebrating the diversity of emotions that exist in the garden of our mind and really tending to them, tending to each of them. They each have flowers, and bloom, and seeds.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I love it. Okay. Miracle goggles.
Katie Hodgetts: I love this so much. Okay, you put on your -- This is from my yoga teacher. You put on your miracle goggles and you see everyone as a living, breathing miracle. And, you know, that doesn't mean that they're not flawed, or difficult, or controversial. It just means that we're seeing them from the very miracle that is life. It is so miraculous for one to be born, for them to have gone through their life to be where they are, to show up for you with all their wounds and their scars. So seeing people first as miracles.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Yeah, that's really helpful to beat back my cynicism and insecurity in the stories I tell myself. When I show up in spaces and I put on all my walls and defenses, I can put on my miracle goggles. And this is, like, a deep compassion practice. I really appreciate that.
Katie Hodgetts: And sometimes I do it through gritted teeth. I'll be listening to someone and I'll be going, they are a living miracle. They're a living miracle. They're a living miracle. It's hard.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: The stress bucket.
Katie Hodgetts: Ah, the stress bucket is a concept from Mental Health First Aid, and it's the idea that each of us has a bucket and stress flows into the bucket. And if too much stress flows in, we overflow and we might move to states of breakdown. But the stress bucket also has taps. So these are our strategies to alleviate stress. So we need to be finding -- To find balance, you want to balance how many taps you have alleviating stress and how many stresses are going into the bucket. And it's a really helpful visualization of how we can get to places of overwhelm if we have too much stress or not enough stress relief strategies.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: Wow, good job. Okay. My favorite, the mind beavers.
Katie Hodgetts: The mind beavers came from day four of kind of self-confinement, I need to finish this book. And the mind beavers live in our brains. And they build dams in our minds that stop the flow --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'm sorry.
Katie Hodgetts: -- of --
Sarah Jaquette Ray: I'm so sorry. I'm laughing really -- I just love these mind beavers. So I'm just going to go with the metaphor. Keep going. Sorry.
Katie Hodgetts: They exist within us to, yeah, restrict flow of truth, of emotion, and the mind beavers we can put in place are things like busyness or work. They're great strategies for avoidance, and they can build walls in our mind to protect us from not seeing and sitting with emotions.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: So these metaphors, and turns of phrase, and the way you're describing it, I'm sure has been just so helpful for people to have some of these really abstract concepts that are definitely evidence-based, researched by psychologists, and social psychologists, and wisdom traditions, and spiritual traditions. And then they come in these beautiful pity descriptions in your book and they're beautiful. Thanks so much, Katie.
Katie Hodgetts: Thank you.
Sarah Jaquette Ray: That was my conversation with Katie Hodgetts, founder of The Resilience Project and author of 'Act, Rest, Reset, Repeat', a book that just came out spring of 2026. You can hear this full episode and find show notes at khsu.org.
Follow Climate Magic on LinkedIn and Instagram at Climate Magic Pod and wherever you find your podcasts. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray and thanks for listening to Climate Magic, produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
