Yearning for Healing with Deepa Patel and Dr. Angel Acosta (part 1 of 2)

How do we foster healing in communities impacted by trauma? And how can leaders and educators adopt a healing-centered approach to their work?  

In this episode, we’re joined by Deepa Gulrukh Patel, a creative facilitator blending arts, sciences, and social justice. Her work spans refugee camps, cultural diversity, bereavement support, and contemplative education, collaborating with organizations like the UNHCR, the London College of Fashion, and the Fetzer Institute to build healing-centered, sustainable initiatives.  

We’re also joined by Dr. Angel Acosta, a leader in mindfulness, social justice, and healing-centered education. With a doctorate in curriculum and teaching from Teachers College, Columbia University, Angel creates transformative frameworks like the Contemplating 400 Years of Inequality Experience to address structural inequities and foster restorative practices.  

Together, Deepa and Angel share profound insights on healing trauma, supporting frontline workers, and building resilience through mindful education and community-centered approaches.

In this first part of our conversation, we talk about:

• Healing through stillness
• Beauty as a path to healing
• Healing ourselves to help the world
• Healing-centered education
• Creativity heals

To learn more about Dr. Angel Acosta and Deepa Gulrukh Patel follow these links:

Deepa:
Jordan Refugee Camps - https://www.dress4ourtime.org/
Center for Sustainable Fashion- https://www.sustainable-fashion.com/vital-signs
Inayitiyya Org - https://inayatiyya.org/
Tamasha Theatre Company - https://tamasha.org.uk/
The Loss Foundation - https://thelossfoundation.org/
Charis Interspirituality Org - https://charisinterspirituality.org/ 

Dr. Angel:
Website - https://www.drangelacosta.com
Podcast - https://www.drangelacosta.com/podcast
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-angel-acosta-1886653b 

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/ )
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

(preview)

Angel: 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.

Deepa: 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.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

What does it mean to pursue healing in a world that is marked by crisis, chaos, and collective grief? In this episode, my two guests are doing extraordinary work on this front, integrating contemplative practice with work on justice and structural reform.

Deepa Gruk Pao is a creative facilitator who works at the intersection of arts, sciences, and social justice with a passion for heartful conversation and the contemplative life. She works with organizations like UNHCR, the University of Sheffield, the London College of Fashion on projects in refugee camps and sustainable fashion. Deepa is also a guide in the Inaa tradition of Sufism and is working with the Fetzer Institute on projects about sacred space in the virtual world and on shared spiritual heritage. 

Doctor Angela Costa chairs the Acosta Institute, where he bridges leadership, social justice, and mindfulness. He focuses on healing centered education and contemplative practices. With a doctorate from Teachers College at Columbia University, he develops learning experiences that combine leadership development with conversations on inequality and healing. Angel created the contemplating 400 years of inequality experience and is exploring how technology can advance racial equity and dismantle structural inequality. 

In our conversation, we explore how storytelling, mindfulness, and creativity can transform woundedness into resilience, foster connection in times of crisis, and empower individuals and communities to be agents of healing.
Let's get started.

(interview)

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.