00:00:01 Brooke

It’s really interesting how we criminalize trauma and we’re criminalizing poverty and we’re criminalizing all these things just by way of how we’ve been conditioned, in society, to look at these topics. As opposed to understanding that the perpetrator, if you will, was the original victim. But we often forget. We just think of what they did, the act and behavior, as opposed to what does it actually mean? What else is going on? What happened? Why did it happen? 

There’s so many ways that we’ve gotten to this mass incarceration standpoint. I just so passionately believe Compassionate Inquiry^® can interrupt those pipelines:** If people were more knowledgeable and society really knew what was going on, there would be more compassion. I have to think that, because I want to believe that humans would ultimately do the right thing when they actually have that deeper understanding for people who’ve experienced these things.

00:01:03 J’aime
And what do you think is the first step towards that?

00:01:09 Rosemary
This.Is the Gifts of Trauma podcast stories of transformation and healing through Compassionate Inquiry®. 

J’aime:
Welcome back to the Gifts of Trauma. This is J’aime and I am so excited to be welcoming Brooke Harper here today. How are you doing today, Brooke?

00:01:37 Brooke
I’m doing really well. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.

00:01:41 J’aime
So grateful that you’re here and that we could have this conversation. And Brooke, as I was starting to lean into your experiences in the world, you really strike me… I want to say first, as a tapestry of a being. But as soon as I say that, I want to change it, and I want to say a mosaic of a being, because I do believe that before me is a woman who looks at different things and takes them apart and rearranges them and creates a pattern that comes from a deep place within herself. Does that feel fair and accurate to you?

00:02:14 Brooke
Yeah, I want to acknowledge, in the spirit of Compassionate Inquiry®, what’s happening in my body, as you say that is actual goosebumps because that resonates with me deeply and my experience somehow with Compassionate Inquiry® and immersing myself in it. How I can clearly see also my familial history and trauma and things that I processed over the years, how that was also informed that mosaic, if you will, in my approach to my professional work and my personal work, yeah.

00:02:48 J’aime
Yeah, you went through the 2019 cohort. Do you want to talk a little bit about how Compassionate Inquiry® has flavored your work?

00:02:55 Brooke
Yeah, I would say I certainly wasn’t prepared for how it would change my life personally in that sense of understanding what was actually a belief or perception, and just stripping away all the narratives that we tell ourselves about what happened because it’s less about what happened, and looking at what happens inside of us. So I would just say it changed me on a personal level and certainly made me a better therapist. It just goes without saying, I couldn’t imagine my life without it and the lens through which I look at things and I feel really grateful for that. 

I remember Sat Dharam was my facilitator. And I remember saying something to Sat Dharam about being able to look at my life through a Kaleidoscope now. And it’s brilliant really being able to look at all of this and say these experiences have changed my life in a way that I’m grateful for. So I feel grateful to be able to hold space for people while they heal themselves. We’re not fixing them or anything like that. So I genuinely just feel extremely grateful and joy really to be able to help people and be a container and a safe space for them to heal and come to things on their own.

00:04:09 J’aime
For me, I got into criminology because I thought, wow, this is the most applied psychology and philosophy and ethics that we could ever look at. How do we think of good and bad and what do we do with it? And I’m curious to know what brought you down this path?

00:04:27 Brooke
I think having family members, school, experienced incarceration and substance use and a history of intergenerational trauma. So understanding it at that level and feeling so much compassion and seeing family members vilified or their belief or perception of them, that was incongruent with how I knew them to be. 

They weren’t what happened to them even before I knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. Kind of saying from a young age, wow, just having compassion at a young age. So that really informed my experience, informed my journey. And then also seeing as a family member, seeing gaps in systems and seeing people let down, my own family members. And that really just lighting the fire in my belly, if you will, for change and approach. And when I found Gabor’s work many years ago, yeah, I cried. I was just like, this is it, this is the kind of work that will change the world. But we have to first look at ourselves through this process of Compassionate Inquiry. And so I think again, whether therapists, clinicians, you know, social worker or nurses, no matter what profession we’re in, doing this is so important for us to connect to our essence and look at our own trauma, our experience, to ensure that we’re connected to our essence and doing these things for the right reasons and healing ourselves so that we can hold space for other people, is something that I have really felt passionately about for some time. And I feel really fortunate to have done the work myself, so I know it works.

00:06:10 J’aime
So we’re talking today about the criminal justice system in general. We’ll, I would love to hear from you what your walk has been in the years, and how long it’s been that you’ve been on this path. And then tell us how that meandered into working and including Compassionate Inquiry® to begin with.

00:06:35 Brooke
Actually before we get into that, just want to acknowledge now just as a standard, I invite people to say carceral system or juvenile legal system. So that’s the vernacular I will use because I think semantics are really important, especially again, how we know of Compassionate Inquiry and just the words we assign to things. right. And I want to just really be clear. There isn’t justice being done in these facilities. And so to say it, feels antithetical or I believe is antithetical to what we’re doing in the field. And I see you nodding and understand completely. So just for people who maybe aren’t familiar with those terms and just inviting them to really just shift the narrative. Yeah. So I want to invite you to respond to that.

00:07:26 J’aime
Thank you for saying that. Thank you so much for saying that. Like I was a being a criminology major so long ago in college and still having that criminal justice system just roll off of my tongue. And I just want to be really clear that we’re also here today to examine and to explore. There is not real justice happening. And we’re going to leave the listener with a feeling of possibility at the end of this conversation. But we’re also here to land reality. This is a woman who has walked this path and is going to open a lot of windows for us to peek in. And I appreciate you also offering carceral system because when we do say words like prison inmates, really think about like, we’re all conditioned and we know politically, we’ve all been conditioned to have visceral responses to these words as well. So from the outset, thank you for saying that. Please do continue.

00:08:22 Brooke
Yes, you’re welcome. I love that you studied criminal justice and just psycho linguistically, how important that is to acknowledge these different words that exist and what they’re designed to do to us. It’s really interesting because it’s like how we then criminalize trauma and we’re criminalizing poverty and we’re criminalizing all these things just by way of how we’ve been conditioned in society to look at these topics as opposed to understanding that the perpetrator, if you will, was the original victim. 

That’s been a theme that I’ve seen throughout my career and my personal experience as well. I think that’s really important to acknowledge, what we often forget. We just think of what they did, the act, and then caviar as opposed to what does it actually mean? What else is going on? What happened? Why did it happen? I think that it also is important to recognize the juvenile population because it really starts there. The school to prison pipeline is a thing, right? The foster care to prison pipeline is a thing. There’s so many ways that we’ve gotten to this mass incarceration standpoint. I just so passionately believe Compassionate Inquiry® can interrupt those pipelines.

00:09:40 J’aime
Yeah, let’s get right in there. And what I would actually love to do is offer you something that I came across preparing for this conversation that really just hit me in the gut hard. And that was actually just on the Compassionate Prison Projects website. They have a pie because they’ve done so much with the Aces, right? The adverse childhood experience questionnaire study. And, on their pages, they show a pie chart and they talk about how 64% of the US population has at least one ACE. And we’re going to go ahead and link in the show notes so everybody who needs a little more deeper referencing can very easily access what this means. 

They went ahead and they compared that 98% of the population in prison has at least one ACE. But that’s not really what I want to underscore right here. And I’ll actually, in the show notes, you’ll see these pies. We’ll go ahead and place them because it’s so startling. And that is that people who have scores of 4 or more ACEs, 15.8% of our general population in the US has four or more ACEs that have been studied. Compare that to the prison population. We have 78.1% of the prison population with four or more ACEs. And so if I were to show you the pie and people will be able to see in the show notes, it’s like more than 3/4 of that is red, whereas it’s less than 1/4 of the US population. So that’s really showing us, you said the perpetrator is first a victim. And let’s just really let that sink in for people for a moment.

00:11:18 Brooke
With the chart, so that’s just the people who agreed to take the test, right? So I think that it’s probably a lot higher and certainly in the work that I’ve done in the populations, I’m thinking now the play on juvenile legal system facility where there isn’t one child that I met that wasn’t abused in some way. So I think that’s just looking at it from who took this test, it’s likely higher. And also what is their understanding of what an ACE is? Because our perception or our beliefs about our experience would also inform how we take that test. The answers may be unwilling to look at it, perhaps not being able to recall or disassociation that happens in order to cope with those memories. And so all the things that we know that happen within, say, a Compassionate Inquiry session, a person might not even be aware of what qualifies as a trauma because we talk so much in society about trauma as being what happened to you. And Gabor says it’s not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside of you because of what happens to you. And that constriction, it’s about, do people have a deeper understanding of how what happens to them affects them so deeply? 

00:12:37 J’aime
Yeah. Thank you bringing those points forward. We do know that in almost every sort of victim category, there’s rampant underreporting.

00:12:46 Brooke
Yes.

00:12:46 J’aime
So that’s such a great point. And then I love even more what you say about how in a Compassionate Inquiry session, any of us who’ve been in one, we know how much we, to survive, under represent what happened inside of us.

00:12:59 Brooke
Absolutely and that missed the myth of the happy childhood, right, and how often it’s everything was fine, or was it? It’s really startling. It’s an onion. You just peel away these layers. And I think it’s also really, I’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that in these settings, how dangerous it can be to reveal certain things and be vulnerable. So often being sad or just open how that is a risk and that carries risk.

00:13:30 J’aime
Let’s zoom in on your experience working with juveniles right now, because that’s something I’ve never even considered is they’re not in a safe space in an institution like that. That’s a whole other ecosystem of survival. Please tell us more about your experience there.

00:13:48 Brooke
Yeah, absolutely. So we know that children of colour are disproportionately represented in the juvenile legal system. That’s just a fact. We also know that children of colour are also disproportionately diagnosed with things like oppositional defiance conduct disorder, all this, these pathologies that don’t explain and are just labels. So we’re pathologizing this childhood experience and ultimately this childhood experience that is often one of abuse and neglect, being in the foster care system that is also just the neglect and the abuse that is within that system. So there’s just essentially all of these things that this child has experienced that and is impacting the cause of their behavioral issues, but they’re just labeled because of these behaviors and given these pathologies without understanding the why. And so that is something that is really, I just have to acknowledge, I’m getting a tight chest here, just it hurts me in my core on how much these children are vilified at such a young age due to behaviors that are ultimately society letting them down, culture letting them down, systemic racism. So all of these things, and I don’t think we’re doing our best, not even close. These systems don’t work. In fact, it’s just perpetuating and exacerbating these issues because kids then have to perform. They have to their ears, see this orientation to each other, to other kids like them, gang involvement, all the things that happen as a result of putting kids with this extensive amount of trauma together in a facility. And all of it is just a means of survival, to survive the system, just as they’re survive society, and to survive a culture that is intent on criminalizing them.

00:15:51 J’aime
And what does it take? Because we’re acknowledging in this conversation that we’re not doing our best at all. We’re not. Could you paint a picture for us of one of these conversations you’ve had with one of these kids where they have felt safe enough to talk to your?

00:16:08 Brooke
Yeah, there’s been so many. And I often I’ll probably think about them my entire life is to be honest, because it’s so heartbreaking and profound and their insight and just how sensitive they are. And so I think of one particular person, who divulged that they had been abused since the age of 4 physically, sexually. also suffered extreme neglect. I believe this child, though, had never received like a proper neuropsychological evaluation. But I believe that this child was likely on the spectrum. I can’t say for sure, there was never an evaluation done. So I’m just talking about direct practice in the session divulged these things, was acutely aware how these things have impacted them such that they gravitated toward drugs and developed an opiate addiction at an extremely young age, had trouble forming relationships, had trouble in school, attention difficulty, all of the things. So all of the things that then this child was also labeled ADHD. Sure, that could be a whole other episode. So the environmental stressors, also living in a really dangerous neighborhood  in South Central LA. So all of the things that would make this person extremely vulnerable.

And they were. Such that they got into trouble with the law, oriented to peers that weren’t supportive or mutually supportive. And also it became a matter of how do I survive in this neighborhood? I have to orient, or I’m a target. And I think everyone should read Hold on to Your Kids it really gives such a rich understanding of the notion of orientation and how it happens. And to that end, gang involvement also human trafficking or could be seen as human trafficking as you will. So this individual, many overdoses, the constant involvement with the juvenile legal system, all because he could not cope with the trauma that he experienced and just needing the drugs to forget and to disassociate.

00:18:18 J’aime
How old was this person when you reached them? Were sitting in front of them.

00:18:22 Brooke
17 I don’t know what happened to this individual. I had heard that he had a drug overdose and survived. I’m not sure what happened, but this is a common, sadly, it’s a common occurrence with everyone obviously and that substance use connection and how often in these facilities substances are often easy to acquire or bring in. But again, he was aware of what had happened to him, but unable to not maybe not unable, but reticent to explore certain things because being that vulnerable wasn’t an option in the environment. It was actually dangerous outside of the therapeutic space, let’s say.

00:19:07 J’aime
In a therapeutic space sounds really challenging. I just keep thinking about also the space to process sounds very challenging in such an environment.

00:19:19 Brooke
Yeah, for sure. And I think about even how doing the ACE inventories and things like that, and really it may be seemingly like trivial, not trivial, but just, oh, it’s facts, right? Like programmatically speaking, going in and doing these inventories and these people take these tests and here’s our ACSs today. You have this many ACEs forgetting that these are human beings and these ACEs, there’s a story, There’s so many narratives underneath all of these ACEs and what that means for the person that’s left behind in their cell.

00:19:52 J’aime
Absolutely. There’s a real responsibility to this sort of awareness. If you’re gonna open up awareness, what is next? What is available? It’s like ethical journalism.

00:20:05 Brooke
True rehabilitation isn’t happening. These are just holding pens for human beings that are traumatized. And again, like you said, it’s like ethical journalism in a way where almost bringing awareness, that person might not have thought of those things as traumatic, is elucidated, and then, what now?

00:20:29 J’aime
As you were sharing about the overrepresentation of minorities within the system of incarceration, I wanted to share. Just drop this in for our audience, this one sentence. Take a deep breath and hear this one out. “While 14% of all youth under 18 in the US are Black, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile facilities are black.” And I think it’s also important to point out that this is when we exclude youth held in Indian County facilities. American Indians make up 3% of the girls and 1.5% of boys in juvenile facilities, despite comprising less than 1% of all youth nationally. I wanted to get back a little bit into a couple of things we’ve touched today. One of the things that’s really important in this conversation is dispelling myths, misconceptions that people have.

00:21:28 Brooke
Well. 

00:21:28 J’aime
Are there any myths or misconceptions that you would like to address in this space about people who pass through?

00:21:35 Brooke
I think, that they’re inherently bad, but they’re just bad people who’ve made bad decisions. I think it’s really important to dispel that myth. These are bad people or evil people, and the labeling that happens, because I think again, so much of it is systems and there’s so many racist systems and institutions and how that has really perpetuated this. So I think to ignore that aspect of things and the systems and there’s this facade of there’s justice being done. There isn’t, maybe arguably compartmentally. It’s just our systems are so broken. Justice isn’t being done for anyone because the rates of recidivism are so high. We’re not looking at that, and all of the things we talked about, like school to prison pipeline and foster care to prison pipeline and, and just intergenerational trauma, right? Because again, people who are incarcerated and then perhaps their children and all of the things. So I think the most important thing and we’re we need to stop looking at it like, this black and white thinking over bad/good, people will do things to survive their experience or to survive in general, to support their families. It’s about survival and poverty in society that we’re looking at and all the social issues, and how they don’t have viable solutions. So what else are people supposed to do?

00:22:58 J’aime
And we talk about how disproportionate racially the system is and how much higher of a frequency minorities are going through the system and their families are being affected in their whole ripple of the community that you’re talking about. And then it’s creating this whole non virtual loop within the community with people getting released back in and the perceptions of this idea of bad. If we want to get back into this philosophical idea of bad, if the idea that someone’s bad means they’re inherently not you, they’re separate. And something that I appreciated you earlier is that you look at all of your clients, you see the experiences, and you’re relating to them through the experiences of their life, and you’re holding space for them to heal themselves. And it’s not like you’re separating your clients who’ve been through the system from your clients who have not. You’re meeting them in neutrality and you’re seeing your sameness with them. That was what brought you to it. Your own family members brought you through this work. And when we talk about this theme of disconnection, this is another great place where we can look at our system, our criminal non justice system and see that this separation, it’s not helping.

The statistics that I have for the annual cost, we send in the US more than $80 billion on prisons, jail systems. This is wild, because the studies vary so much, because how much does it cost per inmate depends on what we look at. Are we looking at a cost per inmate per state? Are we looking at how much we’re employing all of the people who work within the system, all of the officers? But I just wanted to drop in, that spending can vary from just under $23,000 per prisoner (Arkansas) to $307,000 per inmate (Massachusetts). So we’re investing so much resource that maybe people are not aware of, into something that just simply is perpetuating trauma.

00:25:03 Brooke
Absolutely. And to you, there’s documentaries out there. I’m sure you’ll drop them and I’ll give you resource list. I think of Angela Davis’s work. I think everyone should read Are Prisons Obsolete, an incredible book, but they’re also generating revenue. So they’re making money off of these people and it’s unconscionable. And so to actually be generating profit on the backs of traumatized individuals who are further traumatized and victimized within these systems, again, it’s egregious. So again, I like to think that if people were more knowledgeable and society really knew what was going on, there would be more compassion. And I like to think that. I think I have to think that because I want to believe that humans would ultimately do the right thing when they actually have that deeper understanding for people who’ve experienced these things.

00:26:01 J’aime
And what do you think is the first step towards that?

00:26:03 Brooke
I’m going to sound like such a Pollyanna here, but ultimately, I really do believe it’s compassion. So it’s so seemingly trivial, but it is. It’s really just genuine compassion and a willingness to be open to possibility that there are other ways, better ways to address these issues, to treat trauma that’s complex, to address and reform systems in a way that are compassionate, that are centred, and again, looking at trauma as opposed to behavior, and a narrative or pathologies, so much of it is also like education. And so looking at how this stuff is even marketed to us.

00:26:47 J’aime
The goodness and the baldness, how we’re marketed, that’s largely done through politics. That’s largely today. It’s done by these tough on crime politicians and I’d really challenge anyone listening to really get out of the fear for a moment and get out of the separation space of getting the bad stuff taken out of society and corralled away somewhere.

00:27:12 Brooke
And then the ostracization. So people are ostracized, and the shame, they rely on that shame. And we just accept it. So I think looking, being direct and questioning the narratives and stopping the narrative to say no, OK, I understand this is a narrative that is being fed to us and has been for years and years. Is it true? Let’s stop it and let’s look at what is actually going on. What is this system doing? We know what it’s doing, but it’s really the layers. And I think also everyone involved in it, who abets it because I think people are also attracted to professions sometimes without having done the work of why. Why do you want to be a prison guard and be brutal and brutalized people? Not saying they all do, but there are people like that who are saying they’re bad. Right? But again, I think it all stems from everyone needs to do their personal work before we can really affect change on that level.

00:28:20 J’aime
What I’m really feeling into as you’re talking is, there’s a couple things. The first one that I’m feeling into is the audacity to look and to see that’s the window into compassion. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to the Compassionate Prison project Step into a circle. It was used in the Wisdom of Trauma film for people just I dare you to watch this and not be deeply moved by these people who are in prison. Referencing the ACE study being asked, have you ever been hit so hard that it left a bruise when you were growing up? These kinds of questions step into the circle. So that’s the willingness to look and to see because A, it’s not working and B, it’s utterly inhumane and it’s keeping us in separation. And when you talk about the prison guards and the people who are enmeshed in the system, we’re pointing to this non virtuous cycle of who benefits from this system, who benefits from prisons continuing as they are. And so I am now thinking, Brooke, about – I’m back at that 17 year old, the story you told us earlier about how you’ll remember this for the rest of your life. And I’m thinking about all the people and all the secondary trauma that happens from hearing these stories. And I was wondering if you would speak a little bit on how you must continue to take care of yourself and like what you’ve seen in your work of holding space and witnessing.

00:29:54 Brooke
I think feeling the sadness that comes up when it comes out and being with the sadness. So really again, almost performing like an inquiry on myself, and being in my body and noticing what’s happening when holding space. But then afterwards, so acknowledging what’s coming up, the feelings that are coming up, the physical responses, the emotional responses. So that, in that caring for myself also, I think it’s beneficial for everyone to have their own therapists and especially a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner. So I think this notion of compassion fatigue isn’t real, to me because I’ve never felt it. I don’t believe in it because I think we just have to be in our bodies, feeling our emotions and knowing there’s no bad emotions, and being open to what comes up. Also acknowledging perceptions and beliefs. Just this constant process of examining, exploring what’s happening within ourselves, within myself and how that’s crucial to to doing great work, but also taking care of myself, oneself. I can’t speak for other people’s experience, of course, but I know for myself, it’s something that I think I’ve since becoming a certified practitioner be since going through that, and really championing it independently, like with my selves and being constantly in that state of reflection and processing has been exceedingly helpful. Just really and no matter what client because we hear things from, certainly I do. I’m sure you could relate to this is sometimes or somewhere comes into recession and brings something to a session and you just would never have never guessed that’s what would come out. Just what has happened to them and just being in that with somebody.

00:31:59 J’aime
Yeah, thank you for bringing up this idea of compassion fatigue, which for someone listening who doesn’t know what that means, it’s this idea that you can get burnt out from all of the compassion that you’re giving out into the world. And I think that one of the ways that we can protect ourselves from this notion of burnout is really crucial of acknowledging when you’re triggered, and understanding that if you’re triggered, you can’t actually be of service and you’ve got to, you’ve got to pause, you’ve got to take a break. I don’t think that is alive and well in the industry here of helping people. You just keep pushing through it and not feeling it. So Compassionate Inquiry is truly a disruptive paradigm. Would you agree?

00:32:44 Brooke
Yeah. And I think, yeah, for sure, because I think to be triggered then, means there’s always things I think we can be working on our tour or exploring because we’re moving through life and it ebbs and flows and situationally things happen. So it’s just being able to engage with what comes up and go, oh, I may have thought I worked on that 11 years ago, but there it is again. And it’s just, it’s evolved. It’s maybe it’s taken a different form or… And sometimes I think in our work with clients if we’re triggered or sometimes there’s hints like maybe a memory comes up and well, I haven’t thought of that for so many years. There’s a reason it came up. So are we willing to drop in and explore it? And I love those moments, invite those, I think they’re gifts and some of the gifts that we  get through being a practitioner too, because it’s not a coincidence. And I think when we’re acquiring trauma relationally, we need to heal it relationally. And so again, it’s that gift of the person in front of us is likely going to reflect something in us that is potentially unhealed or even just something that we might want to explore and go deeper. Maybe it’s “healed” but there’s a nuance that maybe we didn’t understand.

00:34:02 J’aime
Where your landing me, Brooke, is back in this. What is the one step we all need to take as a collective to start to heal our system, our criminal non justice system? And it’s compassion. But there’s nuance that starts to break down, right? And there’s looking at when we’re triggered, when our fear is triggered by this idea that there’s bad people out there. That in itself is an opportunity to be with our fear. It’s an invitation for a wider Compassionate Inquiry societally. Right?

00:34:38 Brooke
Yeah. And to say, OK, so I’m fearful. What am I fearful of? What is my belief right now about this person or about this issue or about whatever it is, and being able to look at that and understand, OK, this is a belief. It doesn’t mean I’m right. This is a belief and this is a fear I have. And just knowing that’s relative to my experience, not necessarily the collective. So I think again, not abetting these systems by not saying anything. I think it’s important to be direct and to speak up like if you hear someone talking negatively about anything, whether it’s the juvenile legal system, kids who gang youth or I don’t know, anything to say. It’s interesting that you say that. What do you believe about that? What do you make it mean? And to really question things. I think to have that inquiry piece and that curiosity and not in a judgmental way, but just in a genuine, compassionate, genuine way where it’s like, why do you believe that? What do you believe and why? Because I think part of the culture that we’ve created that is so toxic is that in these hashtags or whatever, we’re shutting down the conversation and we’re limiting it. We need to do better and we need to have more conversation around these things, and then that will foster a greater compassion because we’ll be informing each other, educating each other, inviting possibility and openness.

00:36:01 J’aime
Yeah, I feel like curiosity is the word of the decade. It’s the most paradigm shifting word away from judgment and into curiosity, openness, questioning. My wish for everybody listening does so much as dip a toe into working and within the carceral system and people who are have come out of it that they can connect with this modality of Compassionate Inquiry because it will bring you back in touch with your own humanity of why you did this in the first place. It will kindle that spark, it will rekindle the fire in the belly that Brooke was talking about that I felt all the way through this conversation. 

And it’s the path of humanizing all of us. And I’m thinking just as much about the people who work within the system. By virtue of working in the system, you have been a part of the system and you’ve experienced the traumas of the system. And I do believe as Sat Dharam said in the conversation we shared on the show that Compassionate Inquiry represents a paradigm shift. There are a few places I can imagine this potential is greater than within our carceral system. Yeah, Brooke, I thank you for this time. I see you as a sister. I’m just so grateful that you’re there. And I thank you for taking care of yourself so that you can continue. And I just have one more question for you. That is what keeps you there. When this work is so challenging and you do still find yourself in the minority with this gift of Compassionate Inquiry and of offering it, what keeps you there?

00:37:38 Brooke
Possibility – truly is just knowing, like you said, with this exists and the potential for paradigm shift and bearing witness to what the approach does and truly like the effects. And so I think that believing in something so deeply, I believe in the possibility of change and that things can be better.

00:38:00 J’aime
What I know is that your presence, there is no doubt casting that ripple of possibility wherever you go.

00:38:08 Brooke
Yeah, I believe in it.

00:38:10 J’aime
And so I’m just again, so grateful you’re here.

00:38:12 Brooke
There, thanks for what you do and for what everyone does that’s involved and compassion inquiry. I think it’s just important for neutrality and like you said before, it helps everyone. It’s really a communal thing.

00:38:25 J’aime
Yeah. Thank you for being here today.