Are we as a species doomed to repeat our patterns? Power-over, displacement, exploitation, harm? Or can we practice our way into the possibility that we are the world—which means we can change?

This is Hanna’s invitation from the TEDx stage. Not external change (new continent, new career, new relationship, PC to Mac). Real transformation. The kind that requires meeting what she calls “monsters”—limiting beliefs, fear, past pain and trauma. The crossroads where we choose: resist or avoid and stay trapped, or move through discomfort toward something new.

The talk moves through stories that land with humor and punch. Animal welfare workers discovering they’d “had it wrong.” Managers naming their fears instead of buckling up. Students making art from the painful patterns inherited through generations. Each one an example of what becomes possible when we stop deferring hope to outside forces and engage the difficult work of becoming.

This talk happened before Hanna’s ALS. Before terminal illness made transformation urgent. But the invitation already contained everything: “I want to invite you not to run. And not to numb. When you feel the pain coming up, don’t go to overwork or peanut butter or whiskey. Feel the pain.”

Hanna painted the slides for this talk herself—images full of deep playfulness partnering with serious ideas. (These paintings are the basis for a future illustrated book.) The whole thing demonstrates what she teaches: we can choose to practice, a little at a time, the skills that help us stitch together a better world.

Can you accept what you cannot change? Should you?

Two months after her ALS diagnosis, Hanna stood before a crowd of people—using a ventilator to breathe, friends to speak her words when her mouth ran out of stamina—and asked the audience to practice making gross noises with her. To cup their hands behind their ears if they couldn’t hear. To breathe through the tears that were coming, the 90% forecast for crying.

Then she took them through her own attempts at acceptance: the white-knuckled forcing of it after divorce, the fury-filled throwing of snowballs at a frozen pond while screaming “I hate this!”, the desperate scampering through past mistakes looking for what she did wrong, the moment of asking “Is life worth living with ALS?” What follows is unflinching and tender. Personal and political. She refuses to separate her dying from the world’s dying—extinct species, melting glaciers, people silenced to avoid harm.

Near the end she asks:

“How do we feast on this precious gift amidst the pain, loss and hurt, and extend that life-sustaining-force outwards? How do we say yes to the mess and co-create with it?”

Her answer is, practice. Not acceptance as embrace, but practice as showing up: allowing space to rage without getting stuck there, bringing devastation into community, trusting each other to hold us, resting into life’s abundance.

This is a masterclass in holding shadow and light together.