Yearning for Healing

Most of us carry wounds—whether from personal struggles, social injustice, or the weight of caring for others. But what if our wounds were not just sources of pain, but pathways to healing? What if, rather than seeking to eliminate suffering entirely, we could transform it into something meaningful—something beautiful?

In my latest conversation, I explore this idea with two remarkable thinkers and practitioners working at the intersection of healing, contemplative practice, and social justice.

Deepa Gulrukh Patel is a creative facilitator in the interdisciplinary field between the arts and sciences and a strategic thinker passionate about social justice, heartful conversation and the contemplative life. She was born in Kenya to Indian parents and lives in England. This experience has influenced what she does with her life. Deepa has worked with young people, in the field of cultural diversity, as a Live Music producer and in music education. She currently works in refugee camps in Jordan and Africa with UNHCR, the University of Sheffield, and the London College of Fashion, where she is an associate at the Centre for Sustainable Fashion.  She is also working with the Fetzer Institute on two projects, one on creating sacred space in the virtual world and the other on their shared spiritual heritage project. Deepa is a Sufi guide and teacher in the Inayatiyya, and chair of the Inayatiyya International Board. In addition, she is the chair of Tamasha Theatre Company, an advisor to the Loss Foundation, a bereavement support service for those who have lost someone to Cancer or COVID-19 and Charis Interspirituality on their interfaith dialogue projects.

Dr. Angel Acosta has worked for the past decade to bridge the fields of leadership, social justice, and mindfulness. He holds a doctorate degree in curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. Acosta has supported more than educational leaders and their students by facilitating leadership trainings, creating pathways to higher education, and designing dynamic learning experiences. His dissertation explored healing-centered education as a promising framework for educational leadership development. After participating in the Mind and Life Institute’s Academy for Contemplative Leadership, Acosta began consulting and developing learning experiences that weave leadership development with conversations about inequality and healing, to support educational leaders through contemplative and restorative practices. As a former trustee for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, he participated as a speaker and discussant at the Asia Pacific Forum on Holistic Education in Kyoto, Japan. He designed the Contemplating 400 Years of Inequality Experience–a contemplative journey to understand structural inequality. He’s a proud member of the 400 Years of Inequality Project, based at the New School. Lately, he has become curious about the ways in which technology can be used as a force for advancing racial equity and dismantling structural inequality.

Together, we discuss:
* The power of storytelling: how sharing our wounds can open the door to healing
* The role of beauty in crisis: how moments of creativity and connection emerge in the most challenging circumstances
* Mindfulness in activism: why slowing down and cultivating presence is essential in the fight for justice
* Burnout and resilience: how those in healing professions can sustain themselves and avoid emotional exhaustion
* Agency in healing: why reclaiming one’s own sense agency is crucial, especially for those in marginalized communities

Our conversation is an invitation to shift how we think about healing: not as a process of erasing pain, but as a practice of wounded healing—transforming our suffering into a source of connection and wisdom for others.

You can listen to our conversation in two parts (here and here), or watch the full video or read an unedited transcript below.

Transcript:

Brandon: Welcome you both, first of all. So to Deepa and Angel, thank you both for joining us, for reconnecting again. You were just saying how you've met a few years ago at the House of Beautiful Business. Tim was a guest on the podcast a few episodes ago, and the house is very dear to me. So it's great to see the generative potential of that initiative paying off, paying dividends. So welcome. It's so good to have you both on the show. I had suggested to both of you all, since you're masters in contemplative practice, that we could give our listeners and viewers a bit of a gift and launch the episode perhaps with a centering practice that perhaps Deepa could lead. And then Angel, we could close the episode off with something that you might offer. So Deepa, please go ahead.

Deepa: Thank you, Brandon. It's lovely to be here with the both of you. The main practice that I'm working with at the moment is with the breath, to help to center us. It's very simple. The practice is to just become aware of how our breath comes towards us. There's actually nothing that we have to do in this process of breathing. You can feel it as it enters us and on this beautiful body does its magic as we exhale. So just become aware of what it's like, to feel this breath coming towards you. Feel it touching your heart. There's no effort in letting it go. You literally don't even have to welcome it because it does the work. For a minute, see what it's like to feel how this breath comes. What's it like to know that you don't have to do anything? You don't have to be a certain way and literally just be here. And in a moment, we'll start a conversation. The interesting thing is that the breath will just carry on coming towards us, and our body will do the work of releasing it. Nothing will get really in the way of this extraordinary thing which keeps us alive, that allows us to be here. And so if your eyes are closed, gently open them. Just feel what it's like to be right here, nowhere else.

Brandon: Beautiful. Thank you, Deepa. That is a gift. It's a great way to begin. I know often in these conversations, myself and my guests are hurried, juggling from one Zoom call to another and so forth. And so this is a gift to be able to just get in touch with that which sustains us, and we don't have to work to generate.

Deepa: Thank you.

Brandon: Yeah, you know, the theme for our episode is our yearning for healing. Then that was a small taste of the kind of healing we can experience simply by staying still. I want to ask you a little bit more about what that word means to you both. But to get started, I'd love to — because our podcast is on beauty and beauty at work and then we'll talk about the beauty of healing, I'd be curious to hear your reflections on experiences of beauty that have stayed with you. And so if you have a story or a memory of beauty from your childhood, something that remains with you till today, something that is meaningful, something that comes to your mind, I'd love to know what memory do you associate with that word beauty. Perhaps, Angel, if you would like to start by sharing whatever comes to your mind there.

Angel: Thank you, Brandon, for the invitation to be a part of this podcast and, Deepa, thank you for that opening practice. I was reflecting on the question, and there were so many moments in my upbringing and in my just overall development of both profound beauty. I would say that witnessing being held by a very large family was probably one of the most profound experiences of beauty I've ever had. In particular, in Dominican Republic, my grandfather, Angel Acosta — I'm named after — had 11 children. Those 11 children, each had a minimum of 5 children. So I have many, many cousins and beautiful aunts and uncles. And so I grew up going to Dominican Republic in the summers. Dominican Republic is being wrapped by coconut trees and mango trees and chickens and ducks and just nature, just enveloped in nature and the sounds of nature, the smells of nature, the sun, the hot sun just kissing my skin on a daily basis. That was beautiful. But there was something about the humility and the gentle hand of my aunts, the gentle support of my cousins, just being there and just feeling this. It was just odd. It was like this everybody was an individual, but there was this collective force. Still to this day, I can't put a word to it. I can only feel it. I can only feel it when I'm there. We have a shared WhatsApp group now. Just the way that we talk, the way that we engage just as a collective spirit there, that was always overwhelming for me because I felt so seen. The unique thing about that is that in Dominican culture, you have a variety of ancestral lineages. Not just Spanish. You have mestizo folks who had indigenous and also African. And it just so happens that this part of my family is African. I have all kinds of lineages. My maternal grandfather had blue eyes. This part of my family is like the darker skin. But just to grow up and see the grace, the confidence, it was a really stark juxtaposition of being raised in New York in the '90s in the United States. So it was just a lesson in how to stand firm, tall, confident and know that you're worthy.

Brandon: Wow. Amazing. Deepa, what memory comes to your mind?

Deepa: Well, I'm a bit like Angel. I was thinking there's a few, but the one that really stays with me was my grandmother. I was brought up a lot by my grandmother as a kid. She had a spiritual practice that she had. She had a little meditation place in her room, and she was sitting there meditating. I remember creeping into the room as a little child, first kind of noisily and then realizing that she was doing something special. I remember just crawling into her lap and sitting there for a moment and experiencing — well, the only word that I do have for it is, it was like the numinous. It was something so extraordinarily beautiful and light filled and still in that moment. And, you know, I didn't last long in that lap as a kid. But the memory of it stays with me, even just invoking it. A little bit like actually feeling your family, Angel, even though I don't know them, as you were talking about them. It's the same thing. This memory just reminds me of the beauty of light and stillness really.

Brandon: Wow. Those are both precious, I mean, both memories of love and affection, of being embraced. I'm interested to learn about the journeys you've all been on, because you're both doing some really important work at the intersection of justice and healing and both suffused by contemplative practice. I'd be curious if you could perhaps trace a little bit of your stories, of your journeys. I know you've both had complex journeys through many countries and so forth. But if you could say a little bit about what that path has been like just to sort of maybe frame for our listeners and viewers how you're approaching the work you're doing today. So I wonder, Deepa, perhaps you could say a little bit about your own path from Africa to the UK but also into Sufism and then how that has shaped your own work you're doing today.

Deepa: So I was born in Kenya, third-generation Indian, as it were. My heritage is Indian. I moved to England when I was 10. I think that from the moment I landed in England, I had this yearning, this sense of not belonging anywhere but a real yearning for home. I went to India for the first time when I was 17 and really thought that I would get there and that would be the place, that it would finally I'd come around to this place of yearning. And instead, of course, they recognized immediately that I wasn't an Indian in the same sense. That was the first time I had a touch. I really understood depression or that sense of this cloud just coming over me and kind of going, "Wait. Now what?" I was 17. This had been the thing.

I came back to England and went to university. And while there, one of the really interesting things at that time was that, in England, we were seeing sort of second-generation Asians starting to make music. It was this mix of punk and dance and Indian classical music. And when I started to listen to that music, every part of my being went, "That's where I belong. I belong in that music." I think that really has been one of the key threads through my life. It's the power of music. That never goes away. And in the end, it's what led me to Sufism. The lineage of Sufism in which I practice is from a teacher called Hazrat Inayat Khan, who is one of India's great musicians. Within that, it really has been this thing about, what does it mean to become an instrument? An instrument, I would say, Sufism for me is how to become an instrument of the moment, to be clear enough, to be able to listen out to both the notes that are around me but also the note that I'm playing, and to really kind of that healing is in that kind of sense of feeling disharmony and harmony and all of those things. That was a really big experience, to have music be at the center of my own healing. And it carries on. It's still what I go to even today. There's a song I can play. You hear a song, and the whole world feels better in that moment. So I'm always listening for whatever that song is.

Brandon: Speaking of that music, could you name a piece or two that maybe our listeners and viewers might be able to check out?

Deepa: Well, in terms of that music, the bands that were playing around that time were Asian Dub Foundation, Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh. These are all UK. But really, they were mixing this music together in different ways that had such a massive impact. I mean, we could just talk about music in this whole session, right? It'd be like, each one of us will go, "Oh, yeah, that piece of music." But those are the artists of that time.

Brandon: Thank you. Angel, tell us your own journey. I'd love to know both in terms of your own sort of moving to New York City and then your relationship to Dominican Republic, but also your contemplative journey and then the work you've done on healing-centered education and how that came about.

Angel: Yeah, obviously, it's a long journey. Just acknowledging the fact that in my paternal side of the family, and even in my maternal side of the family, they're amazing too, there was always this theme around here. Many of them were teachers, nurses. And if they weren't tending to people, they were tending to land by way of being agricultural workers. So whether I was conscious of it or not, that was just kind of a theme throughout my life—of tending to people and having an ability to hold space for community and having this empathic sensitivity towards people's suffering.

My initial exploration into real, formal study of people was in anthropology. My first deep dive was in studying cultural anthropology in undergrad and being able to study abroad in a variety of different places and being exposed to just different communities. I studied in Senegal, Czech Republic, in Europe. I got a chance to go to Mexico as well, in Cuba. Throughout those experiences, I just noticed that, especially in religious communities, there was always this contemplative contemplative touch. That most spiritual communities had this ability to slow down and pause, whether it be in the form of a prayer or in the Sufi tradition, that would be one of the dancing that you all do, or the Hare Krishnas with their good food, place, PR. So through anthro, I got a chance to lean into a variety of different communities by way of formal study. That was where I became curious about mindfulness, secular mindfulness in particular, practicing it to still myself, to create a sense of stillness. I remember starting to try to meditate for like two minutes and being utterly not successful. Then, gradually, playing with yoga, playing with a little bit of yoga — Bikram yoga at the time was really popular — and simultaneously developing an interest in justice work, understanding social justice, social justice pedagogy, critical pedagogy, just developing a language and understanding of different systems that generate inequality, cross gender sexuality, class, different forms of oppression.

So I ended up graduating with that degree and being exposed to the 2008 crisis. There were no jobs. So what was a young anthropologist to do with all this knowledge around people? So I actually jumped back into school and studied leadership, leadership studies. That kind of matured my understanding of culture. It began to shape how I began to ask questions around mindfulness in the concept of leadership, in the context of institutional trauma and interpersonal trauma. I later spent about eight years working to help low-income communities prepare for higher education. So I traveled the country, visiting different public school systems, just kind of developing the leadership skills and indirectly integrating mindfulness. I was doing more mindfulness at that time in my own practice. But overall, what would occur was that, after eight years of watching and witnessing our wonderful public school system, I developed a sensitivity towards how much suffering there was for teachers and for students and for school leaders who are trying to do a good job. I had decided to get more education and pursue a doctorate in education. The question that I was trying to answer was, what's the relationship between mindfulness and social justice? What's that relationship? Because, on one hand, I was seeing so many people burnout trying to support within public school systems and also trying to be activists, to change the systems that are causing suffering. And I was also seeing so many people in the yogic and the mindfulness communities blissing out and setting out on the mat but disconnecting themselves from the very suffering, and that these folks over here were trying to change. Well, that's where after refining the question further was more, is a healing-centric education possible? So that's kind of like if I had to give you a five-minute pitch. There's so much else that really tied that inquiry. But that's the core of it. It's the center of it. Healing and trauma are shared experiences across communities that are trying to respond to these systems.

Brandon: Thanks, Angel. That's really a critical point, because I do think a lot of folks think that the inner life, the inner work that is associated with contemplative practice, with contemplative work, with spirituality, and so on, are an escape. There's a lot of criticism of looking inward as a kind of naval gazing escape from dealing with the real work of reforming social structures and changing society. And yet you find that there's a lot of burnouts among activists, humanitarian workers, et cetera, who are trying to change large-scale systems, policies, et cetera without attending to that in our world. So how do you reconcile those things, right? And so what is a healing-centered education? You've done what you would call a healing-centered social science or healing-oriented approach to social science, which is a bit different even research-wise. Could you describe, perhaps for the listeners who are not familiar with that term, what does that concretely look like?

Angel: Yeah, so part of the exciting work is that we documented. We were part of a cluster of scholars who just happened to begin to think about this work at around the same time. It's a healing-centered paradigm. And so there's enough evidence to suggest that the last 150 years of different approaches to education suggest that there's a healing-centered paradigm afoot from the explosion of mindfulness globally in the United States to the integration of social-emotional learning across K through 12, and even adult learning curriculum, restorative justice as a way to deal with the incarceration and penal system, somatic and embodiment practices, this attempt to integrate mind-body from the historical Cartesian logic of mind-body dualism. So there's enough evidence to suggest that there's this thrust for healing-centered education and healing-centered movement. In fact, civil rights movement was a healing-centered movement. The abolitionist movement, the brick in the back of Western transatlantic slaves trade was a healing-centered movement. So you could suggest that we've been on a trajectory of healing, especially as the women's movement, the environmental movement, disability rights movement in the '70s have all tried to correct the ways in which white supremacy and our political economy cuts the life trajectories of certain communities in very specific ways. So it gets interesting though now with the current political context. DEI is an example. DEI's success is an example of the healing-centered turn. But fundamentally, healing-centered education is a kind of education that asks, what are the conditions that community needs to thrive and leveraging mindfulness, social-emotional learning and embodied practices to do that.

Brandon: Deepa, what does your own path been like to — if you could say a little bit perhaps about the work you've been doing in Africa with refugees, with displaced persons. What led you in that direction, and perhaps whether the concept of healing plays a role in that, is that a way in which you would frame or see the work you're doing?

Deepa: Yeah, I think alongside that, the power of music has been a journey of an activist from a very young age. Those things have always kind of, I've been weaving them together. I worked with a thinker called Theodore Zeldin. The first time I met Theodore, he showed me something that was broken. It was just a stool. And he said, "When I look at this, my first question isn't, how do I fix it? My first question is, how do I make this more beautiful?" The power of that has sort of stayed with me in all of the work that I've done, whether it's been with young people — I worked a lot with young people who were either at the risk of offending or were considered to be offenders. There's something about the role of making something beautiful that always took us on a different journey. I think it relates to some of the things that Angel is talking about. That power of creativity in that moment which brings us to slowing down, to seeing our lives in different ways, all of those kind of have played a really important part.

One of my passions, I'd say, is of what happens when people who come from very different worlds. So I work with a fashion designer and a chemistry professor. I've been working with them for over 20 years. What happens when we come together in our worlds that we speak different languages? How do we kind of create something different? And Helen, who's the fashion designer that I worked with, we at the time were looking at climate, the climate crisis. Paris was just happening. The question that we had was, what is the dress for our time, which seems very superficial on one level. But I think you can all understand that if you're really going to approach this as wide an angle as possible, then it sort of takes you to a different place. In our conversations, what came out of it was that Helen ended up designing a dress out of a refugee tent. Once it had been designed, it's like one of those things that as it, you know — there was a model that wore it in King's Cross as people were getting on the Eurostar to go to Paris, and then it was in Paris. It sort of is the way that beauty does that. It just stops you. It stops the mind and you're sort of like, "Wait. What is this?" You can't make sense of it. And I think that that element of surprise and awe, I would say, is also a kind of central theme in the work that I do.

So what happened was, as children started asking questions about the dress, who do the fingerprints belong to, eventually, we went back to UNHCR and Helen was invited to go to Zachary where this tent had come from, which is in Jordan. And as part of that, she took turning the chemistry professor and myself there. That was our first experience of kind of walking in. It's really wonderful to hear Angel's story which has this lovely progression. Mine often feels a little bit chaotic in how I end up in places, which I also think is part of healing really. There's a kind of messy chaos to everything. So suddenly, we're in this refugee camp. I guess for me, the really important thing was, I didn't feel I was going to the camp to help. I have a relationship with this idea of, what does it mean to help anyone or to be involved in it? I'm just not sure about it. I was going because it was like these are amongst some of the bravest people that I can think of. I mean, the journeys that they've been on, there's nothing quite like it. And I wanted to learn from that journey in particular.

So we started doing these projects which were really around imagination and courage. And what happens when you help people to connect with their imagination? Often, that's relational work, that's slowing down work. In a way, all of the things that we're talking about in terms of healing education. And we saw the power of that. I could tell you lots of stories. But I think that, for me, it's still the case. I mean, now we work in Malawi in a camp called the Dzaleka camp. There's 54,000 people living in a camp that was made for 10,000 people. Just all of the xenophobia that we see in all of our countries at the moment applies in Malawi. And it really does feel like, for a refugee, that level of dehumanization, that happens on a daily basis because of the system is just, I mean, it's heartbreaking every day. And yet there is something, that spirit that allows for possibility in a way that's quite phenomenal in those sorts of spaces. And what does it mean to be in relationship with people in those camps, where we have an exchange of those stories, where we really experience those moments of making something together? So I feel like making is a kind of central part of that, because most of our work is about making. And in that process of making together, it's like not only do we discover ourselves, but we also discover the power of what we're doing.

So the latest project that's come out of that was, we're working on digital platforms, looking at how you make artifacts. The refugees that we work with, we've just given them a grant to be able to make something. And so they went off to the local market. They'd got an idea about what they wanted to design, and they got scammed. They bought these big bundles of cloth thinking that they could do all kinds of things with it. Two weeks later when they opened them — they'd been told there were skirts. And when they opened them, they found a bag of shorts, denim shorts. And so suddenly, they're confronted with both dealing with the pain of being scammed and at the same time, like, what do we do as a result of it? The result of it has been that they've created the most amazing piece called the "pockets of love." They essentially sewed all the pockets together. And within that, I think that right now I'm just — and then what's happened is that they put messages in those pockets. When we first went back, they were like, we were all in. "Tell us what the messages are." They were like no, no, no, whoever is invited to the pocket, they will see the message. The surprise of that is really interesting. I've been thinking a lot about how the work really is about these pockets of love. There are pockets of love all over the place. They've kind of stitched them together. But what does it mean when all these pockets connect in the same way? So there's always surprise in the work, and it really is about that courage and that imagination.

I could tell you one more thing that this time really influenced me, because the work is so dehumanizing on so many levels. One of the things, one of the people that we work with is a pastor in a church. She became a pastor when she arrived at the camp. She's done the most. She's doing the most incredible work. And this time, we went to her church. It's three hours on a Sunday to sit in her church, and we went. It was like the music of that church was extraordinary, but it's also how the stories of the Bible aren't just stories in the Bible. They're kind of taken. We know that in other cultures when you take the story and it's like, this is how this story relates to you in this world right now. We always go with, oh, yes, we're doing this work. Then I realized these people are able to keep facing everything because they go to church three times a week for three hours. They sing together. They listen to stories of how you overcome all kinds of things. And of course, there's all of the trauma. There's all of the work that goes on there. But just that. I mean, in the world in which I live, that doesn't happen. I don't go to a community in that way. So it was this, like you said, Angel, you're talking about humbling. I actually think whatever work we do around healing and justice is humbling work. It's not there if there isn't a humbling effect, where the ego just kind of gets put in this place of like whatever you thought you were doing, you're not doing that. So that was the experience of that. I'm just like, yeah, whatever I thought I was doing, it's got nothing on what's going on here.

Brandon: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that. I was reflecting on the work of a Christian spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, who has a book called The Wounded Healer. He writes there that nobody escapes being wounded. We're all wounded people whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not how can we hide our wounds so that we don't have to be embarrassed, but how can we put our woundedness in the service of others? And I wonder whether in the work you've done, and perhaps, Angel, in the work you've done with teachers, with leaders, with marginalized communities, are there ways in which you've learned something about your own woundedness or experience to healing of your own woundedness, or found yourself putting your own woundedness in the service of healing? I don't know if that resonates and evokes any memories for you.

Angel: Yeah, it relates profoundly because, you know, the Greek — he may have been a demigod. Chiron, just the the wounded healer archetype where it comes from. Jung reinterprets Chiron story of leveraging that wound that he had in the surface of humanity. Jung ends up having larger conversations around the wounded healer archetype and doctors and the doctor's role of attending to his or her or their own wound to be able to support the patient. But that was a data point in my research, was this concept of the wounded healing. So it was a playful concept that we played with a lot in significant, so much so that we created a wounded healer project in the context of educators. We worked with educators who had committed to staying in the classroom during the pandemic. For those of you who might not know this, there was a crisis on top of the pandemic, where teachers were leaving the classroom because it revealed so much of the tensions in education. We did this whole Wounded Healer Portrait Series. We took these beautiful, elegant portraits of these educators who were staying in the classroom. We're leveraging and using healing-centric pedagogy.

What we found was a classic insight, that I'm sure Deepa can relate to this. It's the power of story and how much healing story is, storytelling. The storytelling, both via the orator and the listener and the audience. So for me, what I've found is, when you create conditions for people to tap into their own stories and be able to own the layers of those stories and their lived experiences that make the wounds, you create wounded healers—people who have an understanding of the wounds that they've been experiencing. But the wounds don't have a last word. In fact, one of the questions that you had primed us for this is this idea of yearning, yearning for healing. Honestly, I don't yearn for healing. I think if I were to yearn for healing, I would yearn for a sense of arrival that I know will never never come. I yearned for wounded healing. I yearned for wounded healing. I yearned for the courage to be able to taste my own suffering and doing it so much so in an open way that would allow me to be in the cycle of wounded healing, wounded healing while wounded.

Deepa: I'm really curious, Angel, also about something else. In my experience of working, there's of course my own woundedness. I wonder if you'd say more about that capacity to sit, to just be present to another's wounding without having to fix it or do something with it. Because that's the bit, the place that I got closest to my own woundedness in the work that I've been doing, and it carries on, is to be aware that — I hadn't realized how there was this thin layer over my heart that whenever I saw the wounding of others, it was like a protective little barrier. Not even always conscious, and I would pride myself of like I'm not a fixer or whatever. But it was still there, which would just protected me just enough so that I wouldn't have to fully experience the wound of another. Do you know what I mean? The biggest lesson has been of what it means to actually let myself feel the suffering of another with nothing else there. And to the point of going, "There might not be anything that can be done here," I just wonder whether in what you found in your research about that idea that how we approach healing is always, "Oh, yes, we'll find a way for this to happen."

Angel: Yeah, so much there in formal scholarship around vicarious trauma. We do a lot of work around the vicarious trauma that teachers experience holding space for students. Because there was so much burnout. There are some discourses around that now around teacher wellness you might find. But I don't have to go too deep into the research to get insights around what you're saying. Even recently, with the passing of my father and the way that transpired and the way that I was able to hold the grief. The last several months, I've had people who've lost people and have shared. There's something about the ways in which I held my grief that allowed me to be there and hold space for folks in such a profound way, that even in my silence of just like, just hold it. Because sometimes when someone shares something with you, you want to immediately just kind of support. But no, since I was able to hold my own grief and hold my own wounds around that, there's a container I think that you can create for folks. In formal scholarship, they'll call it a "generative social field." There's a field you can create between you and another, between you and the community, when you're facilitating. And the way in which you hold yourself activates that field, in a way that we might learn more about that in the future when we have more metrics for studying group dynamic.

Deepa: Actually, you just reminded me. One of the pieces of work that I did was with teachers in Delhi. Because COVID was so horrific in Delhi. We got invited, through some other work that I was doing, to actually kind of be with teachers as to how they respond to the level of death that was going on for their students. One of the pillars of this work was listening in silence. You could see the skepticism on everyone's face as you're kind of sitting there going, "Wait. Yeah, we're going to ask you to see if it's possible for you to not say anything, to not look to do anything but to just be silent, to be a silent witness for the person that's speaking to you." They go away and come back and go, "Oh my God, that was unbelievable. I didn't say anything, and this person was so grateful that I was listening." In India, in particular, you get given so much advice. It's like the moment you name a problem, you've got 10 solutions. But that idea that you don't have to say anything, that you can hold that resonant space and how extraordinary healing that can be that someone feels heard from is really quite a thing. Maybe that's where yearning comes in, that yearning to just be able to say what's truly there.

Brandon: A few years ago, I was working with a foundation in Texas. We were trying to equip teachers to better frontline mental health. You know, caregivers, right? Because a lot of students in classrooms were struggling with serious mental health challenges. Our assumption at the beginning was that, teachers don't really know how to recognize what's going on and make referrals and so forth. And it turned out from our research that we were wrong. They were actually pretty good at figuring out what was going on. At least our surveys indicated that their mental health literacy was pretty good, and they had the right set of responses. The challenge was they themselves were burnt out, that they didn't have the ability to hold space for others because they didn't have anyone. They didn't have any place to go to with their own challenges. And so then it gets to the point where, "I know what I'm supposed to do to help this other person, but I can't get there. I can't allow myself to go there because I'm just so frustrated and can't deal with what's going on inside me." I'm sure this kind of thing happens with a lot of other folks on the front lines—activists, people who are doing development work and so forth, humanitarian work, et cetera. Are there concrete practices that you all have seen, that you've used, that could help folks who are in this situation? How do you train them, or how do you help them to better engage in these contexts and to find help for this kind of challenge?

Angel: Yeah, there's a lot of work around contemplative-based resilience. One of our strategic partners, the Garrison Institute, has a whole program. So check out Garrison Institute, contemplative-based resilience, a very powerful work around helping folks who are in the front lines of change, of transformation in refugee camps or post-earthquake, post-disaster. They've developed all kinds of applications and mindfulness-based apps to support folks in the front lines. From dipping my toe into some of that work, part of it is kind of connecting to what Deepa said around the communities that she had access to, who were going to church often. You've got to understand that church or a spiritual community is a kind of psychosocial coding. Music, too. So it's kind of a psychosocial somatic, sonic coding. That once you exit that space, the brutality and the realness of the world has a less of a weathering effect on the person, on the community. So when it comes to frontline workers and contemplative-based resilience, you just want to create the spaces and the containers or the time, right? That's what the theory of change when it comes to the app, is that you would create these many videos that somebody who's in the frontline can just stop, pull away from the work and just kind of hold themselves in these practices, in this knowledge, in these videos. So that's kind of like what I would immediately say, is that when it comes to frontline workers, it's giving them the resources and the support, to pull them away from the frontline, to turn to their inner landscape whatever way they can, whether it be through contemplative practice or consequent spiritual practice.

Deepa: I'll say it again. This is more from experience than necessarily giving you a body of work. The thing that I see more and more is that experience of making something together where your label of you're the teacher, or you're the aid worker, or you're the refugee. Because often, what we do whenever we're together, we'd go, "Hi, my name is da, da, da and this is what I do." But if you drop that and you're all making something together, which you might not know how to do it, just doing embroidery or making something, that creates a kind of equalizing factor of stillness and concentration which is really different. Because when we're learning or we're trying something new, it does the same thing, right? You're out of the thing that you're in, and you're somewhere else. There's just a sense of what's possible then in that quietude. And I really am just more and more surprised by what happens. It doesn't matter who walks in the room. If they can take part in an activity, it changes the nature of it.

Brandon: Yeah, that was fascinating. Yeah, I think these lessons are really crucial. I mean, we've been talking about healing. And of course, for a lot of people, the first thing that comes to mind is medicine, right? Medical profession is one of the places where you see the highest levels of burnout among physicians, nurses, and so on. And so that's really a space that's in desperate need of reform, of finding ways to better support healers, and to have a more sustainable model, more generative model, a feeling. Perhaps there might be something that could carry over from the practices that you're always suggesting to that world. I don't know how that could happen given all of the pressures that hospital systems are in and positions are in. But I wonder if there might be anything you've seen there or anything you might recommend that could work even in a context like that.

Angel: Yeah, I'll just say briefly that when it comes to burnout, some of the scholarship around it when burnout became to be a thing in the 1970s as a concept, three things. There are many more. But one, a sense of emotional exhaustion. You're so exhausted, you can't even feel your feelings. Two, a lack of appreciation, a lack of appreciation from those who you report to or those who you work for. And then three, a reduced satisfaction in the work you're doing. Part of what happens is what's called a "burnout cascade." You're feeling emotionally exhausted. Even for years, you're being disrespected or just not acknowledged at work. And then you just kind of lose your mojo when it comes to work. Then there's a cascade. Meaning, there's that one event, that one argument, that one instance, and literally your system just get flooded and you're fully, fully, fully burn out. One of the little things that I think, in this case hospitals or in this case anybody in the health professions can begin to do is, one, create opportunities, constantly creating opportunities to discuss your "why" around the work, your why around the work. Because your why around the work allows you to stay connected to the satisfaction around why you're doing it. Then two, developing inside the hospital peer-to-peer connections that are supportive to express and articulate the emotional and difficult work of working in the hospital. Because that helps with the emotional fatigue. Then lastly, supervisors. Supervisors can do a better job at just acknowledging micro moments with residents. Just kind of really just like, "I saw you, the way you took care of that patient. I really appreciate it." Just like little affirmative moves help with reducing this sense of not being appreciated from. So these are the really tactical things that people can do and then the administrators can do. It works the same way in schools. People and principals just acknowledging teachers more, helping teachers think more about the why of why they're doing things more often. It all helps to reduce burnout.

Deepa: I have more of a question. Angel has got wonderful examples.

Brandon: Sure.

Deepa: One of the questions that I'm holding in all of the work that I do and my own experience of being in hospital, all of those things, the question that I have is around effect and impact of professionalizing things in terms of how that then impacts on our capacity to relate to each other. Because that professionalizing of being a customer or a client, da, da, da, da, that seems to always take away from that very simple act, right? I'm just more and more curious about it. I understand that it can be used as a, particularly if you're working on the front lines of anything, you need something that allows you to protect. So that's there. But that question of professionalism and relation is sort of there in my mind maybe as an inquiry.

Brandon: Yeah, it's a very tricky one, right? Because there's the need for boundaries. There's the prevention of abuse and so forth, as well as, you know, especially in the US, the constant fear of lawsuits. There are so many things that conspire to generate.

Deepa: Yes, we just have more and more of those and within it. Because I certainly see that in the refugee camp, where a refugee is a beneficiary, or their identity is caught up. So it is like they lose their humaneness and their humanity. There's a wonderful young man that we work with. He has this wonderful jacket which says, "Refugee is a situation, not an identity." I think that's where my curiosity about this question has come from. That often, we're in situations. They're not our identities.

Brandon: Great. Listen. I have so many more questions for you, but I know we're running up against time. I wonder if you all could perhaps maybe say a word about what it is that you're really excited about, or what's really sort of in front of you these days, in this coming year or the next little phase of the work you're doing that you're either most hopeful about, or where you find yourself called, or perhaps longing to maybe bring about healing or to serve? What does that look like for you these days? I know, Angel, you're doing a lot of work on AI these days. I don't know if that's something you might want to speak to. But anything else too.

Angel: The AI work is interesting and it's too complicated, especially with ethics around it. So I kind of dipped in and out of it because it's a lot, especially with the ways in which it consumes so much water.

Brandon: Yeah.

Angel: So much water is needed in one of my favorite states, California. So I struggle there. But I think we're in an interesting time in terms of the different challenges that are being thrown at us. I'm actually excited to figure out a way to make beautiful work, right? In light of your podcast, what is beautiful work, beauty at work? And so I just broadly commit to taking the heat, taking the heat of the challenges that are within my community and try to kind of mold programming that is beautiful. So for example, the poly-opportunity with the House of Beautiful Business. What does it mean to look at the most pressing challenges, and look at them as gentle opportunities for intervention—not even intervention in terms of changing the actual world but to be in this relationship, as Deepa kind of eludes to. I think the sustainable development goals, development goals, all these ways to professionalize and create metrics, intervene, just have maybe fallen short in some regards. So what does it mean to be in this dynamic relationship with poly-opportunities? I think that is where a lot of my energy is in right now.

Brandon: Great.

Deepa: Oh, that's such a nice, juicy question. I kind of want to piggyback off in terms of what you've just said about opportunity, poly-opportunity. And I really feel that within the refugee context but just others as well, where the US is one of the biggest resettlers of refugees. And of course, with the new administration that's coming in, literally, it wipes out any opportunity for resettlement for refugees around the world for many different reasons. But in a way, what it did for me was, it started to bring up that question of what happens when you move from being a beneficiary to having agency, and how an agency is so much about a mindset in particular. So I'm excited about thinking through what agency looks like in any given situation within this, which I think is relational work rather than metrics work. It has creativity in it. But just for a moment, there was this mind shift of like, oh, what if I just turn this around and went, "Right now, everything's open. You might be in a refugee camp. But hey, you're amongst the bravest. You're amongst the most courageous. You know how to do all kinds of stuff that most of us don't know how to do. You know how to play the system, right?" I'm so interested in the fact that many people know how to play the system, and how do we work off the back of that play and the black of that agency? So it still speaks to the beautiful work that you're talking about, Angel. But I'm really fascinated by that. I think the other in agency is the whole notion of, my own playfulness is around what it would mean to be a secret agent in this time. I feel like a whole redefinition of secret agent is up. So that's a playful thing, which isn't metric-based but has something of the relational. And you're both smiling. And that's where I know that, secretly, we all want to be secret agents.

Brandon: Right. That's amazing. Well, I wonder, Angel, if you might perhaps maybe close us with some kind of a centering practice or meditation that could help us to move forward from this episode as secret agents of healing in the world.

Angel: Yeah, of course. My pleasure. And to be in that playful spirit, I am a double agent.

Brandon: Okay.

Deepa: Oh, yeah.

Angel: Secret, not secret.

Deepa: Double. Got it.

Angel: Yeah, but just inviting everybody here and listening to just, as we began that wonderful contemplative practice with Deepa, just if you feel comfortable, you can gently just close your eyes. Take a gentle deep breath in through your nose and gently out through your mouth. Just gently find your own gentle rhythm with your breath, feeling into the breath as it comes in as a way to take in the world. And as you exhale, a way to letting it go.

So this rhythm of taking it in, both the breath and the world, as you exhale, letting it go as a way to metabolize life. We'll take a few more gentle deep breaths before we close. One last full breath into the nose. And as you exhale, just gently, gently, gently opening your eyes back up, coming back to your space, coming back to this moment. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure.

Brandon: Amazing. Wonderful. Thank you, Angel. Thanks, Deepa. That'll be a treat for those of us listening on 2x. Yeah, this is such a joy. Can we direct our viewers and listeners to any of the work you're doing, if you want to point them to? Perhaps, Deepa, where can I direct them to your work?

Deepa: The work that I'm doing is called Vital Signs. There's a website that you can go to that you can learn more about the refugee work. The Sufi work is directed towards the inayatiyya, which is one of the lineages of Sufism.

Brandon: Great. Yeah, we'll put those links in our show notes. And, Angel, what about you?

Angel: Just check out the AcostaInstitute.com.

Brandon: Great. Excellent. Great.

Deepa: It's really wonderful to see how well it's going, Angel. It's just like flourishing, flourishing. It's magic.

Angel: Thank you.

Brandon: Well, thank you both for the beautiful work you're doing. It's a pleasure to start the year off with you all. I wish you the very best in everything that lies ahead.

Deepa: And thank you for the work you're doing. This a really nice thing.

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