About
Hi, I’m Jo Musker-Sherwood (she/her); culture worker, activist, mother and deeply feeling human.
Coming to environmental work in my early twenties filled my life with meaning. I worked right in the belly of the beast; lobbying politicians and helping to drive policy change.
But after time it began to take an unbearable toll.
And I thought that perhaps it was a ‘me’ problem. That I was too sensitive, needed too much, was too much.
After giving my all to founding and running a fast growing and effective charity I truly believed in, I was devastated to realise I wasn’t cut out for the work. I was mentally and physically broken, scared for my own financial survival and full of despair about whether it was really possible to make any kind of meaningful change in the world.
What I wish I could have told myself then was that this burnout experience was a kind of dying experience that would ultimately birth a whole new way for me to be in the world.
I see our individual experiences, such as burnout, as an expression of our collective experiences under late stage capitalism. There is a dying to the old way of violently extracting from ourselves and each other that needs to happen in order for us to adapt, survive and thrive.
With that in mind, I have come to believe that some of our most courageous acts of resistance start from within ourselves, rippling out.
Through culture work, workshops, facilitation, 1:1 coaching, and my online programmes I come alongside changemakers and their organisations who are wanting to find healthy, non-violent and transformational ways of being in the world.
Drawing especially on the wisdom of grief tending practices, nature/ body connection, and radical governance practices I help people find their most powerful and authentic way of turning up to the work that is there’s to do in the world.
Current Offerings
Creative coaching for changemakers and activists. Includes rites of passage, nature connection, grief tending, movement medicine and so, so much more. Held online as either one off sessions or on an ongoing basis.
Step away and into held space for a personalised day retreat in my garden cabin. We’ll journey together in tending to what feels most pressing in your life currently, all while you enjoy some delicious food, music and guided rest.
My Training Lineage
I am grateful to a variety of religious and spiritual ways of meaning making which heavily influence my work. In addition to my own personal experiences and practices, I have completed a six month spiritual growth and transformation course with the Anglican Church, as well as a week long training at Plum Village in embodied Buddhism with Christiana Figueres, specifically in relation to environmental work.
I have trained in indigenous wisdom through the Ancestral Activism programme with Guardians Worldwide, and I am also trained to offer the Japanese energy healing practice, Reiki.
My grief tending training lineage includes apprenticing to grief training with Sophie Banks, who trained under Malidoma and Subonfu Somé; spiritual teachers from the Dagara Tribe in Burkina Faso.
I am trained as a nature connection facilitator with Change in Nature, and some of my other trainings include coaching with The Coaching Academy, authentic relating with ART International, charity leadership with NCVO, Internal Family Systems with the IFS Institute, and group systems dynamics with the Tavistock Centre. I am currently completing a course is Systems Wayfinding with the Centre for Climate Psychology.