Yearning for Healing with Deepa Patel and Dr. Angel Acosta (part 2 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 second part of our conversation, we talk about:

• Becoming wounded healers
• The importance of listening and presence
• Resilience for frontline workers
• Burnout in caregiving jobs
• Agency over labels

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: 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.

Deepa: 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.

(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.

Hey everyone, this is the 2nd half of my conversation with Deepa Patel and Doctor Angela Costa on our yearning to bring about healing in the world. In the second half, we're going to talk about what it means to be a wounded healer. Our guests are going to reflect on the resilience needed by frontline workers, the challenges posed by professionalism in human connection, and the importance of agency in fostering healing, particularly for vulnerable communities like refugees. And finally, we're going to conclude with a guided meditation to center you and inspire you on your own journey to be an agent of healing.
Let's get started.

(interview)

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.