Indigenous and Western Approaches to Trauma Healing: Gabor Maté, Judy Atkinson, Patricia June Vickers, Diana Kopua & Donald 'Del' Laverdure
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Zaya Benazzo: [00:00:00] Before we begin, we would just briefly introduce our guests Patricia June Vickers Patricia, you many of you already saw in the movie. She's a healer, artist, psychotherapist of health, of Haida and European ancestry who blends trauma healing with ancestral wisdom and expressive arts along with neurofeedback.
Thank you, Patricia, for being with us and for your guidance. Yeah. With this film you've been instrumental in, creating this film and giving birth to it. So deep gratitude for you.
Maurizio Benazzo: Then we have Judy Atkinson, [00:01:00] Jim, a Bunong elder altar of trauma trails. Hi Judy. Hi Judy,
Zaya Benazzo: and
Maurizio Benazzo: co-founder of We Ali Trust, supporting Indigenous healing across Australia and beyond.
It's such a joy to see you, Judy, again, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for all your support in this movie.
Zaya Benazzo: And Dr. Diana UA is a Maori psychiatrist and co-leader of Mahi Atua, revitalizing indigenous knowledge through community based care in ro. Thank you, Diana for being here today and for all you've shared with us.
You mark, you
Maurizio Benazzo: and Mark, and then we have Dell Lavedure is a Crow Nation citizen. And legal advoc advocate working to heal intergenerational trauma through ceremony, kinship, and indigenous governance. We never met in person [00:02:00] Dell, but you touched us profoundly when we had the, our conversation a few days ago.
It is a joy and an honor to have you with us. Thank you, man. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. We leave it to you,
Gabor Maté: Gabor. Thank you, first of all. To acknowledge that I'm speaking from the Unseeded territory of the Musqueam Squamish and tu of people. I have to say that these land acknowledgements that we do and was done also in Australia on a recent visit there, I find them both appropriate and somehow utterly inadequate because we do these land acknowledgements, but here in Canada.
Most, the reality is that 70% of the women in jail in this country are indigenous. They make up 5% of the population, 70% of the jail population. And the statistics are just as dire in Australia and New Zealand. [00:03:00] So we may, we do these acknowledgements, but it's, we're not just talking about the past, we are actually talking about the present.
That's the point I'm trying to make. Thank you all for being here. The funny thing is, of course I am Matérial. I have no recollection of the conversation that you say initiated this project. I believe you that I said that, but I have no recollection of it. But then again, I don't remember much. Never have, let's begin with before we talk about trauma and its healing.
Because that's just a word. And I was struck by some people in the film, including you, Diana, address trauma in ways that I'll have to question you about, not to argue with you about, but to really find out what is it exactly that you meant. But let's just say what Health first. And I'll ask all of you to comment on this.
I'm just reading a book that's probably similar to somebody that's called of Water and Spirit by ma Doma, Patrick Somme, who's a, who was [00:04:00] a African Shama and teacher. And health seems to involve so much more than the Western idea of health, and particularly in this film, eternal Song. And many of you say this, it involves ancestors and the land.
And all of the universe. And in this book, water and the Spirit, the ancestors are so present. I have no, I have historical awareness of ancestry, but I have no connection with ancestors that I'm consciously aware of. And when you guys talk about the ancestors, I know you're speaking about something real, which I can intellectually understand, but I have no emotional relationship with.
And you didn't talk about healing the ancestors. And again, my intellectual mind doesn't get it. What does it mean to heal ancestors? How [00:05:00] can you heal people that are no longer alive? But in your conception, that's not the case. So would you all speak to me about when it comes to health, what your understanding of ancestry is and the relationship to healing?
Would you please do that? And I don't know. Dale, would you start and then all three of you, if you just, all four of you, would please address that issue of Ancestry 'cause it's so prevalent in this movie.
Donald 'Del' Laverdure: Yeah. Thank you for the
question, Dr. Maté, and appreciate your work and think in order to introduce Ancestry, at least where I am from, where my mother's people have been for, since time Immemorial, we say,
and you have in, in our way, you acknowledge that you're in a long line of [00:06:00] people who've been here and it's a, that's Tza bundle clan that was in the materials, but it really means the people who have come together as one. That we come at when we're just by ourself, it's easy to break a branch, but when you have them tied together, we become stronger and you can divert forces for good.
And so when we go in ceremony, sweat Lodge, Sundance native American Church fasting, vision quest, we invoke that line of people who have come before us and walked the earth prior to our existence and before we were cons conceived as the star people in the the pre poetry reading that you had heard earlier from the Lakota people.
We believe that we are sent with a set of instruction, sacred instructions, and that we're reminded [00:07:00] along the way and as we go and we connect to the earth and with our relatives. We invoke that name of the people who have always been here. And so we now come together as a spiritual family and we help those who are still in physical form.
And for those in physical form, the reverse can be true. You can heal forward and backward and vertically and horizontally. And we have songs that are associated with activating each of those spheres. And we would sing those songs in a particular place at a particular time. So that's why I love the movie, the Eternal Song.
'cause these songs have been held for a long time, even when it was banned by the larger nation states. But to hold these songs now and invoke them, that is when we ask the ancestors to become present and that we are all one. And that healing fields are possible in those [00:08:00] moments.
Gabor Maté: Thank you.
And by the way you please do drop the doctor at business, just Goor. Okay. I appreciate it. Judy, if I may call upon you to comment on this issue of the presence of ancestry in our current life in healing,
Judy Atkinson: I am really grateful to be sitting talking with you today. I'm here on Bunong country, which is part of my ancestry.
Also am a Yemen woman from Central West Queensland. And I'm going to open today in the talk that I want to give by telling you, I have just yesterday returned from Brisbane from the ceremonies and the work that we had to do after my son died. So I'm still sitting in that. Area of grief. I had almost forgotten that I had to talk today.
When I wake up [00:09:00] early in the morning, it is eight o'clock in the morning here in Australia. I want to open a conversation around the work I've been doing over many years and how important it is. I think not just for this conversation here, but all of the countries that I've worked in at Aurora, I've been there at different times.
Thank you for those who are listening for your welcome New Zealand as it is called also south Africa the islands of the Pacific. PNG, but my bulk of my work has been across Australia. And I get a call, Judy, I call on the phone. Judy, can you come? We've just had 21 arrests on child sexual assault.
I'm going to be, I'm gonna say some things now that may you to make you think deeply. We just had 21 arrests on sexual assault. Can you come? And I go in there and I'm working with chaos until I start to hear where the [00:10:00] beginning of that sexual assault started. Australia was invaded, settled, whatever you wanna call it, as a penal colony.
And I like to tell the story of the 10-year-old boy on the first fleet that sailed into Sydney Cove. He was on that ship because he had stolen a slice of bread on the streets of London. He was starving. There was no food for him. And then over the generations, things deteriorated. I work in a place called New South Wales.
Part of the history of Maori is the white men on horseback coming in to take over the land from the the people of that place, and I won't name them at this time, they used their guns. But one of the most dominant tools they used in the evasion and the subjugation, or the attempted subjugation of our people was not just the guns, the shotguns the killings, but also the [00:11:00] sexual violence that that was attached to that.
So let me just now talk to you about what I've done. In response to that, recreating the circle of wellbeing from colonial trauma trails, I have worked in every part of Australia. I needed to understand that as the the ships failed past point danger. As Cook went past as Philip went past there were stories in that country.
The stories of the place where I live are of men's places and women's places that hold and upset many different points of view. So we acknowledge those ancestors who've been through things that we can't comprehend. And then in my work, I was given a word, d didi, listening to one another. How do we listen in contemplative, reciprocal relationships?
I went to another part of Australia after there had been some other things happening similar to what I've named, and the word I [00:12:00] was given was Clini listening and the elder woman's growl. And I'm an older woman. I'm 82 now. You listen now. And how do we listen deeply? Then in another part of Australia where I've been called in for the similar things I've just named listening, hearing, learning, understanding, and then knowing from the heart, how do we truly listen?
And then more particularly, how do we respond. In 1987, it, my whole life turned upside down. A request came distressing. Can you come here? Can you help us? And I went in with the idea that we would listen to each other. It was a truth telling, but it had to be followed by cri critical action. So maybe I should just outline that a bit more.
The history of Cape York, September, 1987, that first call under the direction of the elders, we were speaking out against the harm of children. And this was a [00:13:00] product of the frontier. This was a product of the men on horseback coming in and thinking they had the rights to the bodies of our children and our young people.
I was sponsored to go to Canada to talk about some of the things that we were doing, and that itself opened up a, an understanding in Australia we had to do more. So Prime Minister and Cabinet said, let's do something about family violence and say, funded me to develop a documentary called Beyond Violence, finding a Dream, 55 Minutes, finding the Dream.
And that then allowed us to think that we had to get an educational approach. So I did a PhD in 1992, and I was given the words of Miriam Rose Bauman, which was used as a baseline to dear, a special quality, a unique gift of Aboriginal people. It's in a deep listening and quite still awareness, but I found that I had to as I was called into a community, a place I had to move from thinking, what's wrong with this mob here?
What's happening [00:14:00] here? Okay, what is happening here, but what's strong in you and what can we do together to make a change? I found Bruce Perry's words, we are the products of our childhood. The health and creativity of a community is renewed each generation through its children. So I started to focus on children, and I realized that as I sat on the ground wherever I was and I went into prisons to listen to the women, to listen to the men, that the stories they held were the stories that would educate me.
Already had a PhD, but it didn't educate me to work. In the way that I wanted to, I needed to. And I found the words of Louis Mel, Madonna, and I'm going to quote from him if you don't mind. He said, we live storied lives. We organize experience into stories as we share the life interactively with others.
The plot, the character, and the morals of our stories. The stories we hear influence our [00:15:00] atic connections. They change our brains. However, stories live through us. We are born into stories. So that gave me a sense of looking at this oldest living culture. And I started to document the massacre sites and realized that they were flowing down.
It was historic, collective communal trauma. And we put together a package with a young fellow doing the artwork. Who was in prison? Julian, can you hear me?
Gabor Maté: I can, but I have a request. Okay.
Judy Atkinson: Yeah.
Gabor Maté: Thank you for your contribution here, but I really would like to conduct this panel in a somewhat organized fashion with specific questions and giving everybody a chance to respond.
And the specific question I asked had to do with Ancestry and the role of ancestors. I would like to get to your work [00:16:00] and your healing work in time, but I'm gonna request that at this point I move on to the next contributor and let them deal with this issue of ancestors that you briefly mentioned, and then we'll come back to you and your wonderful healing work, if that's okay with you.
Judy Atkinson: That's okay with me. I think I'll just draw a sense of as I sat with the old people who were the ones that held the stories of the ancestors. Who held the stories of the ancestors before them. So I was working with seven generations that they were telling us we had to do something, that we had to develop a healing approach, historic social, cultural, collective, developmental trauma.
And we had to develop a healing approach to what was happening in this country. We now call Australia. Otherwise, if I really wanted to know those stories, I would need to go into the prisons where, [00:17:00] which were full of our young people. Yeah. I'll tell you the people I drew on as I was trying to understand what I could do.
Derek Shaw love's work in more zones the work of Hoff and others in disasters, natural disasters, manmade disasters. And the work we did in Australia was how do we create a sense of safety and security as we listen. How do we rebond to create hope and courage? And then how do we real rebuild the attachment and the belonging that we have with each other and with the country we live on.
Yeah. And we introduced a conversation around justice, fairness and dignity, valuing self and valuing others and understanding what was happening. So just I'm not sure if I'm actually giving you what you really need, but I have a, I remember memory of going into a school who asked for help [00:18:00] and the principal of that school has been trying to ring me actually while I've been sitting here talking to you.
And I remember learning something that I had never learned in a university with my PhD and all the qualifications I had. I watched a young boy in the school yard with a knife. He was in dissociation. I heard the principal's calm voice, reach out to him as she said to him three times. And I'll call him Billy, 'cause that's my dad's name.
Billy, can you give me that knife please? And finally she got into his dissociated state. And on the third request for the knife, I watched this young boy turn around and hand the knife to her, and he handed her the handle of the knife, not the blade. I guess when I talk about that, I'm talking about how do we work in really difficult situations and we start to [00:19:00] regulate.
Gabor Maté: All right. And thank you. Listen, I really do have to move on to the next person now.
Judy Atkinson: Yeah,
Gabor Maté: I must do that for the, to keep this conversation going. Okay.
Judy Atkinson: Alright.
Gabor Maté: So thank you.
Judy Atkinson: Thank you.
Gabor Maté: Thank you very much. Patricia, if I may, can I address the question of, ancestry to you and what you make of it.
And what do, especially people who are non-indigenous who are listening to this, how do they understand when indigenous people talk about their ancestors, not as historical entities, but as present entities?
Patricia June Vickers: I think first of all, we're all indigenous people to land to a specific land. And it's really not that unusual.
And in the line that you come from, or it was Moses, [00:20:00] Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, their ancestors and, I would say mostly from myself that it's it's been so before I was born. And that to me, it's a mystery because we're talking about the natural world and the supernatural world. Yeah.
But I know that they've been with me protecting me from the moment I was conceived. And I would say they're different to those who have a belief a religious belief to angels.
That they are, as Dell mentioned he mentioned one thing and that's invocation, invoking. So addressing and.
I wouldn't say I've woken [00:21:00] up to them until just the last 15, 30 years, and that I see how they've been, how they've been with me protecting me, keeping me and my children. And being able to differentiate now.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. Diana, somewhere you, in the film you talk about the source of the economic wealth, which is not money.
I think it was you, the one that said that it's not money it's the connection to the land and the sky and the water and and the ancestors. Can you address this issue of the, which is so difficult for the western mind of the unity of everything and that the source of everything is beyond the individual self, including it's in the ancestry I.
But the ancestry even includes the rocks and the rivers and the trees. Again, these are concepts that intellectually I can appreciate, but I do [00:22:00] sense that when you speak about it, you come from a deeper place than just intellectual understanding.
Diana Kopua: Oh, yeah. Thank you everyone. Thank you for sharing your stories.
I just wanna talk about the discomfort that I feel when we have such deep stories to share and are restricted within a timeframe. But I understand the importance of getting clear messages out in a short space of time, so everyone matters. I also appreciate Gabor being in a space where you have shared a question in your unknowing given popularity and the knowledge that you hold.
How wonderful. 'cause I was thinking I was coming in with the imposter syndrome thinking, oh no, I have to get academic on it. And you hit a question that just matters so much. I, and I don't wanna talk about the impact of the doctrine of Christian discovery and how colonization Christianity, capitalism, [00:23:00] industrialism has impacted my personal story too much.
I have an example of being on my land that I was disconnected from. I was raised in the city. My yearning to find my place on earth comes from a series of mishaps, unpredictable mishaps that are usually to do with relationships, and they impact our families, our family structure. As a Maori woman, I'm just, I don't if you get a chance right now, at the same time as this wonderful initiative is happening, we have the claims talking about the power and authority of indigenous women, not just here in New Zealand, but across the world and how that's impacted.
The very question you're asking, how we think when we think about the enlightenment period, the idea of [00:24:00] spirituality and our other ways of knowing and believing were taken over by rationale and reason. And so you and I, as medical doctors, we went in and we were fed a whole way of knowing, but it wasn't just from health, it was from what society valued.
When I sat on my meeting house, on my land at my father's funeral. We insisted that Christianity would not flood my father's ceremony. And it upset the villages. It upset the people. But you know what? It created space for Gabo. It created space for two speakers to come out on what we call the art here, where the people speak.
And two of my family members quoted my connection to the sky and earth. They literally named the sky married to the earth. [00:25:00] And then from the youngest child, which I deliberately put up here, this is Ko, the Sky, and the Earth's youngest child, according to our truth, which I understand there are many truths, and I think that's the problem, is that when we are thinking, try and think to understand different people's truths.
There is enough space in our mind to acknowledge when I'm feeling stuck in my thinking and where's that coming from, and is there space for me to listen except that they have a truth? Because I tell you what, when they quoted my ancestry from the sky and the earth down through to my father, it had a meaning.
Beyond intellect. Beyond intellect, not all things that we are connected to have an intellectual reasoning. Is that enough?
Gabor Maté: Yes. Thank you. And the sweat lodge ceremonies actually in the film the Eternal [00:26:00] song, somebody I think in Greenland talks about looking at the rocks, but the rocks are looking at you, you talking about the rocks, started looking at me and, in in sweat light ceremonies here in British Columbia, when they bring in the heated rocks, they say, here come the grandmothers and the grandfathers.
Patricia June Vickers: Wow.
Gabor Maté: And of course I can even get that intellectually because we do come from the earth. But
Diana Kopua: you raised something really important when you said, how do you heal your ancestors?
If you understand from my reasoning that mother is my primal mother, you can understand looking after the earth will in turn look after you.
Gabor Maté: Yes. Yes. I wanna come now to the main subject of this topic, of this conversation. All four of you please. Which is looking at trauma. [00:27:00] And then I'll stay with you for a moment because you said something in the film that I really wanna understand.
Okay. And you said not, no. We can all agree that trauma is the painful events that happened to us, both personally and also historically. And not just events that happened to us, but the impact of it, the wounds that those traumatic events incurred on our bodies and our souls that we still carry.
But Dan, you said in the film that trauma is a neoliberal way of commodifying our hurts. So I'd love for all of you to talk about what you understand by trauma. And Diane, if you'd stay with you for a moment, what do you mean when you say it's a neuro ballistic way of commodifying our hurts?
Diana Kopua: One of the things and I'm a forever learner of my indigenous language.
My husband believes that I'm fluent, but I always doubt myself. A [00:28:00] lot of our indigenous words have been straight translated. So spirituality, but it's not how we function. Words and the meaning of words has to fit within story and stories connect us to that health and what you talked about before, our ancestral connection.
There's no separation, so it has to come with story. But what we have now in terms of systems of power that produce hold and disseminate knowledge all sits within a dominant paradigm. Trauma is one of those words that belongs to my discipline, the side disciplines, and it makes us the expert of your trauma.
Yeah. What I understand is that we were the perpetrators, the violators. Your story [00:29:00] having meaning for you, you're disconnected and there are other reasons and other words that you as the person who's been impacted by violations of the dominant culture. Back to the doctrine of Christian Discovery, all of those things I talked about before.
Now, what we have when we are talking about trauma is we are using it medically as a pathology, right? As an understanding. When you look at trauma inside medicine, which I'm not sure the side discipline should sit in medicine, but when you look at trauma, that concept implies the notion of individuality, right?
And ignores that individuality is not necessarily a construct that everyone agrees to. Our people were a collective, we worked as a people. The smallest unit was people. [00:30:00] And so the idea of assuming individuality as a universal term also means that when we are impacted, when we to by the atrocities, I don't wanna use the word trauma, but I'm going to just in this case, when they've been traumatized, we've also looked at the similarities across the world.
Global similarities at the expense of intercultural differences. And so our stories are denoted and what's promoted is our professional powers and the knowledge system held within that. I think way the, one of the ways that I trip over myself all the time with my words is always izing and being critically aware of the impact of words of perpetuating racism.
And so that when we are looking [00:31:00] at decolonizing and building healing spaces that Judy was talking about and the stories that you talked about Dao, when you talked about the stars that brought my mind to our story of stars being tears that are opportunities for brightness and hope. And what we want to do is bring those stories alive.
Using the word trauma means that inside our indigenous spaces where we are trying to take back our power and our healing spaces, we are westernizing them all over again. [00:32:00] Know what you mean?
Gabor Maté: Yeah. It becomes a diagnosis, which becomes a problem with the individual, whereas behind every diagnosis, there's a whole multi-generational, multicultural, all the
Diana Kopua: political, historical, cultural, social history that has impacted how we think and what we believe.
Gabor Maté: Exactly. Del, if I could move to you then, and could you address the question of, if you use the word trauma, explain what you mean by it, and if you don't use it, explain why you don't use it either way.
Donald 'Del' Laverdure: Yeah. Thank you Gabor and appreciate the conversation. I wanna go back to the sweat lodge that you had mentioned. 'cause there's so many different ways to conduct sweat lodge. In fact, our families all pass it down to one another. And sometimes you're not even directly related, say by blood, but there are people who adopt each other and then they give them the right to conduct it.
And what you [00:33:00] use are those stones, which we call the perfect relatives. 'cause they don't really need anyone. They can listen and travel all over the world and learn the stories over millions of years and then share them again when invoked. And you have the four elements that exist in that lodge. The fire water, you need air for the fire and to breathe when you're in.
And you also have the earth that you're laying on the mother's back. And so that's why healing is possible because the four elements are all combined. I. And then there are prayers or wishes given within, and that's where the, if you have multiple community members, you have multiple ancestries that are all called in, and sometimes a common ancestry that can call in different types of ancestral help.
So I just, I wanted to tie that loose end because it does extend beyond the individual and it does extend even beyond the group that may be in that community-based healing. And it does reach much further back. But going to the word trauma, I [00:34:00] understand that discourse around that. I guess I'm I work more with the impact or the experience.
Of what that description of that word may mean because I have a fundamental belief and I follow a lot of Vine. Delore's work you, if you've ever looked at him, he's a wrote 20 books. He's a indigenous scholar and spirit and Wisdom is one of my all time favorites. 'cause it combines the two spirit and reason and a variety of other subject met.
But if trauma is the injury that happens inside, yeah, that. It's what happens inside you. I think that's a quote I've seen even that you have from your work and Yeah. And even Peter Levine as well. I'm originally an engineer and a lawyer and a law professor, and I was a judge at a certain point in my life.
And when did you recover from all that? I went back into ceremony to become a human being again. Okay. And that was a very important stepping stone [00:35:00] towards returning to the human family and the spiritual family and all our words for ourselves in indigenous communities, which I'm north of, Yellowstone Park and Montana surrounds us that we, all of our terms relate and it means the people and it means the people of a particular place and that we are.
Be connected to that place in ways that others may be disconnected or have had to be disconnected for a variety of reasons. And that's even speaking of the word, trauma, being disconnected either internally or externally. And so I think the, our belief system, spiritual healing that we utilize, really collects it all.
And you can read about something and misinterpret it. But if you experience it, it's real for you. It's your truth. And so we want to deal with the truth of that person or that family or that [00:36:00] community. We want to hear what their truth is. And then we listen very deeply as Judy had mentioned, deep witnessing.
And even in ceremony, you're witnessing what somebody is going through. And there's usually a point of release. That they either through the body, through spirit. Through the elements, all sorts of channels or methods or possibilities or modalities. And we have a saying at home that where we've been, utilizing some Western, we still use a lot of our old ways and we always say, what works for you is what works for you.
If it works, use it. If it doesn't discard it, even our own teachings will say that even though a lot of us believe in them so strongly, we've seen the power of their healing. And so we take the little T trauma, the big T trauma, and start to unpack it and unravel because of all those fractals where they're connected.[00:37:00]
Someone comes in with a small thing and it may be something really big affecting their nervous system from really early on or even before they were born. And so we have to look at that line of those injuries of some type, often emotional. Often spiritual and they result in physical symptoms of what are sometimes incurable or problematic, or you can't find the source of how to solve those.
So we utilize we just go with what the person's system, what they've experienced, and what they describe to us of those impacts. And then we work with those and we can, we tell 'em to call it, whatever you want to call it, whatever the name needs to be. Just tell us what that story of impact and consequence was for you, and let's work together to unpack that, unravel it, and get you back.
The freedom inside to relate to yourself in a good way and the freedom to become a good relative [00:38:00] in the outside world. That if we're a good relation, we're a good relative, that means we're having a good life.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. Judy, if I can go back to you again now Diana mentioned the American part, Lakota psychiatrist, physician Louis Mel Meno, I believe you mentioned Louis.
And he talks about the part of story in healing. And in your first contribution today, Judy, you talked about story and the power of story. Can you say more about the importance of story and narrative in healing?
Judy Atkinson: Thank you gaba. Yesterday I returned home from my youngest son's funeral. He was in a very distressed state when he took his life.
Each morning we talked. Each morning he would ring me just on daybreak and we would talk. And in reflection, I realized that I, what I was doing was creating [00:39:00] safety for him to talk to me, for me to listen to him. I'm talking about my son here to listen to him. As I said, I just returned home from his funeral yesterday.
I wanna take that now to the places where I've worked with youth and every place I've worked in, like out in Western New South Wales surrounded by eight massacre sites. This is the history of this country. Eight massacre sites in the Kimberley where I was called in after 21 arrests on child sexual assault.
And that was the activity that was part of the massacres on those people. So if we can't hear the stories that is creating the pain that may take a person to prison because of their behavior or take a. A person to the sense that they no longer can live. So they take their life and we have both of those things as epidemics in this country.
Then in fact, I believe we're wasting our time. As I was sitting listening [00:40:00] here I looked at three things that I have to do when I'm out in country. The first one, I've gotta regulate myself and then I have to regulate because I get called Judy, can you come? We've just had 21 arrests on child sexual assault.
Can you get over here? I've gotta regulate so that I am safe and the people I'm gonna be working with safe, that I have the capacity to create connection and attachment. So they start to trust me, not with the superficial stories that they had, but the deeper stories of those massacre sites around that site.
The second R that I have to work with is, how do I build a real relationship? A relationship where I'm sitting on the ground somewhere and people start to, we took the women out fishing and they're all fighting with each other because it was a major massacre site, that area, and they're all fighting with each other.
So I walked from one woman to another, sitting with them beside the fishing line as I talked to 'em, until [00:41:00] finally they felt they could come together and talk with each other. So relation relating is very emotional. Yeah. And we used in one place with children. I used rock stick. I asked the child to tell me their story and they went out and got a rock stick and a fishing line, tangled fishing line.
And the rock was how they felt. So ha. Unhappy and bad and sad, but hard inside. That was the rock. And she pushed the rock down hard and said, and I don't like what's happening. The the stick was getting the stick and breaking it in half and telling me that he wanted to stop all that pain that was happening on him.
And the fishing line said that he was all tangled up inside That child. Went out and got those three things to tell me how he was feeling before I could even start to work with him and to listen to him. Before I could start to work with his parents, you'd asked me to work with him. And the third one is for us adults, we have to be able to hold in reason.
The stories we are hearing now, I'm an aboriginal Australian woman. [00:42:00] This country is still dealing with the massacres that happened on this country when we were colonized. I know I came into Sydney Cove and everywhere I go, I hear these stories. People call me Judy when you come. We've just had 21 arrest.
And tell sexually assault here. I said that, Judy, come when you come. We've just had these suicides here. Can you come? And I walk in and I sit on the ground. We make stories in the sand. Ts and things so that they feel that they've gotta think about the story. They wanna tell, I've got my hand up here before they sit down and share the stories.
And it's the first time that they've actually shared their inner stories with each other. Whereas the experts the psychologists and psychiatrists and the social workers who come in just wanted to name what was the problem, not listen to the stories that were creating the distress.
Yeah, that's where I am. And I will tell you now that I am distressed. I just came back from my son's funeral. I got him here this late last night. And I'm just glad that I'm able to talk to you and that you're able to listen. So [00:43:00] thank you.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. And by the way my God, I'm so sorry about your son's demise, and thank you for being here in the aftermath of such a dire event.
Thank you for being here and you have all our hearts with you.
Judy Atkinson: Thank you.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. Patricia, if I may come to you now. And so there's the issue of trauma, but also another aspect of it. You are deeply steeped in your traditions but you've also deeply trained in these western more modern modalities of trauma treatment.
I know that Dell, you've studied and practiced internal family systems. Patricia, I don't know if you studied IFS or not, but you certainly know about it. You studied Compassion inquiry, you studied neurofeedback and other modalities that I'm not even as familiar with as you are. What is your understanding of trauma and[00:44:00]
how do you meld the western More technical, more analytical modalities. With the indigenous understandings that comprises much more wholeness. Do you see a contradiction or is it possible to create a unity there? Just what your relationship to trauma and it's healing. Giving your foot one foot in one camp and one foot in another.
Fucking, I can put it that way.
Patricia June Vickers: Before I before I go into that Judy, I want to say that from where I'm from we say to your son's spirit, may he go safely, gently, carefully.
I wanted to say, th that I think it's a good idea [00:45:00] to not refer to the Western mind. 'cause really what we're talking about is a domination way. We're talking about betrayal and deception. That's what we're talking about. And I grew up with my mother who, whose parents were from England and indigenous father.
So there's that split was constantly happening in my family. And up and down the northwest coast where I've worked we understand that the cause of the behaviors come from. Soul loss. So some, so we're looking at it first as spiritual, some event happened and it hit the person, a [00:46:00] part of their soul broke away and is actually in that geographical place where the incident happened.
And so our work then is to help that person to retrieve their soul, that part of themself so that it can be in them again. And we know when a person has experienced soul loss because you talked about health. And so we talk about spiritual balance. We can see when a person's not well.
So my father's diagnosed as a pedophile after he died, the elders from men. So that's not a man in health. It's a troubled man. Yeah. So when I use deep brain [00:47:00] reorienting or neurofeedback, always compassionate is in inquiry is part of those it's with that understanding that a person has come to me because they've lost a part of their soul and they want it back again.
They want peace. They want to be able to love, they want to be able to respect themself. Respect is the heart of our ancestral law. I think that there's no conflict. There's none at all. Unless I was to approach it as Western.
And have separation and division. But as humans, when we go into the sweat lodge, which I've adopted, it's not our cultural way.
But it's a beautiful cleansing ceremony. That's what we go in, on our hands and knees, and we go into that womb to be as [00:48:00] one. That's what people are looking for because they no longer feel that they're part of their family or their tribe or, and so they're seeking that oneness again.
Gabor Maté: Patricia while I'm with you, on the subject of healing. In the film, you're very forthright. You say that your father was a pedophile and that he abused you, and then you abused your two daughters. And yet you come to a very startling conclusion, which is that you have to embrace both parts. You have to embrace your father as a perpetrator and yourself as victim.
And at some point you seem to come to forgiveness. And
At some point it,
Patricia June Vickers: it never ends. Some arises and I choose forgiveness again and again. Yeah.
Gabor Maté: Okay. So it's not a completed process that not I've forgiven and it's all over
Patricia June Vickers: [00:49:00] like love.
Gabor Maté: Yeah. Okay.
Patricia June Vickers: Yeah.
Gabor Maté: That's true.
Patricia June Vickers: Choosing it again and again. Yeah.
Gabor Maté: Yeah. In the film somebody, and I forget who exactly says that healing is when you find out who you are.
Can each of you address your understanding of that concept of healing? I know that healing comes from the word wholeness, so that's true. But can you address the concept of healing as you each understand it as we go in the circle? Diane, let's come to you again now. And of course, in the psychiatric discipline and mature trained that concept doesn't even come up healing.
It is all about controlling symptoms and managing diseases. So what does healing mean to you?
Diana Kopua: I like the words that came up in [00:50:00] the movie and the way that you've spoken about them. That feeling of wholeness. I'm just listening to some of the questions. Looking at some of the questions and so many people wanting to connect to who they are as a whole person.
I agree with you, Patricia, in part about not naming it Western, but when you look at colonization, when you look at the fact that my, the experts in my world that would be freely able to connect me to my wholeness, they were rid of, they were rid of because of the systems of power that were Western. So I would agree with you in part in healing, but the reality is, and I can see it in the questions so many people want it, but the pipelines from pain to healing.
Dominated by Western systems. And so healing for me is a [00:51:00] journey. I completely agree with it. It's about finding out that time and space was stolen from me and how I understood time is linear, that it was a Gregorian calendar that my life has been driven by. And then returning to like almost like I'm in kindergarten, learning to the moon cycles down in quarters, and learning their names and slowly learning what they look like and the pull they have on the environment, me included.
The impact that they have on my waters. And then trying to stop myself from opening an app to see what the name of the moon phase is today, because that defeats the purpose of connecting to my wholeness in relationship with the environment. That in our eyes is our elder. They are our elders our older siblings, our ancestors.[00:52:00]
Learning to think like that. Even gabo, if it's an academic intellectual exercise is like the beginning. It's like your training, your infant and your toddler to appreciate colors and the environment. It starts there and that's your healing. And you spend your life throughout those moon phases and you add to it and you have to, in your healing, understand the impact.
Of the powers that have dominated our way of thinking to be dehumanized as an indigenous woman who have to, I have to pitch when I'm feeling unworthy, when I'm feeling like I don't matter. Being able to know where that came from, who that benefits, and stop it and be in [00:53:00] control of how I narrate my story, all of that is healing, but not individually as a collective, wanting to conc how we think, how we feel, and how we are with each other and the world that we live in.
That's healing for me.
Gabor Maté: Thank you Dale. And Judy, I'm gonna come back to you one more time and Judy, I see your hand up.
So let's go to you. Do you wanna address the issue of healing and then I'll finally come back to Dell. So Judy what did you wanna say? Now
Judy Atkinson: I'm going to be very brief here. First of all, Australia is a penal institution. Australia was colonized at high levels of violence and part of those high level levels of violence was sexual violence.
Yeah. My experience in every part of Australia, and I've been doing this work for a long time. Can Judy, can you come? We've just had 21 arrest in child sexual assault. The one issue that we have not been able to [00:54:00] grapple with properly is how the colonized Jews, that particular. Behavior to colonize our communities.
I've just come back from a community in Northern New South Wales Western, Northwestern, new South Wales. That's the issue that is so painful and hard for us to deal with. That is why I feel so, I think it is important that we take the courage to speak to the most painful, shameful issues that we may now be perpetrating in the way that was perpetrated or on us through the colonizers.
And as I've done that, I have had 17 and 18-year-old young men see me six months later walking down the street and race over to give me a hug and say, aunt, and thank you for coming and listening to me. I have done that in prisons. I have done that in schools and I have done that in communities when I've been invited.
And I guess this morning I am naming this because I feel it is such a important issue. From the time I was in Canada at the time I [00:55:00] was in the us, the time I was in and across Australia it is such an important issue for us to take the courage to deal with in this country. And I'll finish now. We were established as a penal institution and the best work I've ever done was going into the prison with the young fellas and the young and the women did five years, four weeks, every six months in Alice Springs prison with the women.
All of them had experienced what I've just named. So let's just keep building prisons if we're not gonna be courageous and name those hard things. And I have found that when I take the courage to open that conversation, the people I'm working with take the initiative to name and do something about that truth.
Thank you.
Gabor Maté: [00:56:00] Thank you so much. Which leads me to my next question and to de julie mentioned the penal origins of Australia. And of course to this day in Australia, indigenous young men die at much higher rates in prisons than other people do. And and when I was there recently, and same thing is true in Canada.
There was a poll done in Canada five, six years ago, 70% of Canadians said they knew nothing or little about the residential schools. And most Australians are not thought about the massacres that took place repeatedly during the colonization of the country. And of course, de in your country, United States people grew up on [00:57:00] these Hollywood movies where the Indians were always the bad guys and 'cause they fought back against colonization.
And right now there's a trend in your country to deny that history and to make the. Teaching of the actual history of slavery and the suppression and genocide of indigenous people actually impossible or prohibitive in the schools and universities. And so the question of healing trauma how do you even approach that issue when the stories that Judy tells or Diane can relate to, or Patricia here in Canada are, not only are they not acknowledged, but they're increasingly even denied.
And yet you have to face this task of healing and finding the truth. So how do you find the healing in the midst of an ongoing cultural forgetting?
Donald 'Del' Laverdure: [00:58:00] Yeah, these are obviously very big subjects. I. I used to teach about, federal laws impacting indigenous people for many years and you can almost become numb to it.
You, you teach it so much and you Yeah, and I think you have to contextualize it and give it real life stories. What were the impacts in this community with this family, with that person. And when you give it, you breathe life into it. Just how we began in our origin stories life, there was air breathe into the mud to create the people we need to breathe life into concepts.
'cause when you get too large and macro, you really get disconnected from the impacts that happen, the collective impacts. So I always go to stories of families who had say major land loss, if that's the subject, or that they may have two lost generations [00:59:00] from. Federal boarding or residential schools, and here's what happened to them.
Here's what happened to this family with relocation, when they got taken to urban areas from the reserves or from indigenous lands. And when you give that kind of personal family story to it, it becomes real. And for all of humanity, not just that family, but it becomes real for everyone who's listening.
And I think more than anything, some of us who do know, when you know better, you do better. This collective amnesia is the problem. There is a collective amnesia, and you're talking about maybe even a shift towards denial. One of the things that happened, I know North of the border in the country, year in truth and reconciliation, was people had to speak their truth.
What did happen to them in those schools? What have they, [01:00:00] what has been lost? What was their truth? And it may not be the same truth as anyone. We have this concept in our community that I think really should be bestowed upon the people who have the courage to do it. And we're, they're called contrary warriors, and they're always going against the grain.
They're always going against the majority. They used to be the bellwether for us of when we had to move camp, they were the ones who would come and put the Eagle staff in the ground and say, I'm not moving from this spot. While those who are more vulnerable can get to safety, right? That's the kind of people we need to lead against collective amnesia.
We need markers in the ground, preserve that history. And take into account people's experienced history of what happened to them. And let's get some digital archives. We've got, [01:01:00] if artificial intelligence can do all the things that people say, it can surely it can archive all of these stories so that we keep them forever.
'cause what we don't want to see is a repeat of the past. We don't ever, that's the thing I heard in all the communities that are survivors of those schools. Please, I'll say, I don't want to talk about it, but I will say it to speak my truth so that the next generations don't have to experience that same terrible stuff that happened to us.
We cannot keep passing it down. And just like parallels to the Holocaust where your ancestors had suffered, we have this terrible history of all these failed federal and malicious federal policies. That have pernicious impacts that result in today's behaviors because they've been adopted. And there's collateral oppression that happens in community now because of the communities [01:02:00] who are impacted so severely.
So I, I think the courage, compassion, and we gotta find for others who didn't experience it, we need to find their curiosity. And when they're curious, they're more open-minded and open-hearted. And so if we can get 'em in that safety to speak that truth and preserve it with, by whatever technological means now, then we should do it and it should be archived.
So that's never repeated again. Thank
Gabor Maté: you. As you speak Dell to, two thoughts came to mind. The one is a quote that I'd like to read you 'cause it totally parallels and perhaps helps to eliminate what you just said. This is from Eric from who is a psychologist. He said that I believe that to recognize the truth is not primarily a matter of intelligence, but a matter of character.
The most important element is the courage to say no to disobey the commands of power and of public opinion, to cease being [01:03:00] asleep and to become human, to wake up and to lose that sense of helplessness and futility and that's what we have to keep doing. When you mentioned my own ancestry, I'll just make a personal statement, r right now, in the name of my own people suffering and other people are being subjected to horrible suffering in Gaza and one of, and Palestine and one of the most upsetting aspects of it.
Apart from the physical horror of it is the denial of their particular story and the unwillingness in the west on the part of powerful elements to actually look at what really happened there. What is the actual story, not just what's happening now, what's happened there all along. And it's part of the same denial of indigenous history that's still prevalent here in the west.
Zaya Benazzo: I just wanted [01:04:00] to bring something to Judy and Judy, thank you so much for being here today, and I just can't imagine even what it is to lose a child. So thank you.
Thank you. And you're welcome. I'm holding you, we are holding in your in our hearts. And we were showing the film in Paris last week and a woman came to me in tears weeping. And she was saying, my ancestors were the ones who committed the massacres. And she was shaking and saying. How do I heal my ancestors?
How do I heal the lineage? Where do we even start? And I think one of her uncles was a prime minister of Australia. What would you say to someone that understands where do they begin to heal their lineage?
Judy Atkinson: I never [01:05:00] realized that I did this in all the work. And I've been out for nearly 45 years now on the ground, responding to the violence, trauma of colonization in Australia.
But often I'd be sitting like this and people thought I was being I realized I was reminding myself to shut my mouth and listen. And when I took my hand away, generally with tears in my eyes, I was showing people they could cry too. And then the and I do group work. Even in the prisons, I do group work.
I might take a person away, one-to-one, but generally I prefer to do group work because the group comes together and starts to heal itself. But the final thing I wanna say is this. What I learned 25 years ago is that I had to have the courage to open the unspeakable. The one thing nobody wanted to name.
We would talk about the massacres across Australia, and I would say, yeah, and what else happened? And people would [01:06:00] look at me as though I was mad and I'd say, is the massacre, what else happened? That's when I started to open the stories of the sexual violence that was part of the massacres. And then the community started to ask me to come in to do healing work.
And I learned that healing was also about naming the pain, working at the depth of our pain, because in that we bring up our power, we actually can stand tall and challenge the country in which we live to do better. I choose to go into the prisons and work with the guys. I did five years, four weeks, every six months working with the women in prison.
I never found one person in any of those places who have not experienced what I've just named. That's all I'll say. So it's how I listen and how I respond. And if I cry, they cry with me, and that's good.
Diana Kopua: Yeah.
Gabor Maté: I would like to add something to that, if I may, which is I would say to that person [01:07:00] along everything that Judy's just a.
Don't indulge in the luxury of feeling guilty about something that you didn't do and you weren't even around for. But once you recognize that your ancestors did that, what can you do now? What contribution can you make now?
Zaya Benazzo: Yep.
Gabor Maté: To the culture that you're a part of and to the culture that still denies what your ancestors did.
And that's true in France where the terrible murderous history of French colonialism is just not taken into account. Barely even thought it's true in Belgium too, in the United States through in Canada, Australia, certainly. In other words, okay, have your grief, but what can you do? That's all.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
Yeah. And that's the number one question we hear everywhere we went with the movie. What can I do? What can I do? And. [01:08:00] I, can I answer that? You answered exactly. You did answer.
Judy Atkinson: Yeah. But I have more in this gaba You're actually right. What can we do? In the beginning I was going into communities at the request of government or the communities, and we were talking about the issues that came out of the colonization issue should have come outta the trauma.
And then one day, because I had heard of a little 2-year-old that had been raped, I decided to share my own story of sexual assault by a minister in a church on me. And it broke open the whole community that I was with. There were 45 people in Cape York sitting in that room, and every single one of them started to talk about what was happening in their communities, from people coming, white fellas coming in from outside and thinking they had the right to the bodies of the children to the women.
So I'm saying it took courage to do that. Then I found that I was given back this incredible courage and love, and [01:09:00] it was an explosion because then Judy, can you come here? Judy, can you come there? And each time gently, I would open that one issue more than just the fact that there were, they were surrounded by massacres.
But that one issue and I will tell you now that it was in one part of Australia. It was the disclosure of a senior person in a church dom denomination. I won't name the church deliberately or the religious institution deliberately, who was a serial sexual offender on the kids and was later charged.
But I guess for me, and I'm particularly talking to you, to Gabo, because I just love your work. I would not be here if it wasn't for you, by the way. Got my hands on everything you've ever written, and it gave me courage. But I would not be here upset that people kept bringing me and saying, Judy, can you come?
We just Tad Judy, can you come? And now this thing called we elite burned water, anger, and grief. I found if I can take people out of the [01:10:00] anger into the grief and the stories that accompany the grief, we've got healing actions. That's it.
Gabor Maté: Psychologist friend of mine and a mentor of mine said that we should be saved in a notion of tears.
We have to have our grief. Do the other panelists have anything that you want to contribute at this point before you take another question? Julie Dell. Patricia? No. Okay.
Patricia June Vickers: In the chat that that's what cleansing ceremonies are for.
When you awaken to something and the cleansing ceremony, and then you take that to the supernatural, you take that to the other side. What can I do? You don't ask other people. You ask the divine source what is it I can do?
And you'll get the answer.
Gabor Maté: That's the other thing that struck me about the film is that [01:11:00] in the cultures that you each represent and other cultures presented in the film, there's no separation between the supernatural and the natural.
There's no separation between the Matérial and the spiritual. So it's not like it's a religion that you believe in. And every once in a while you go and take part in it. It is like a, it's a daily, if I understand it it's a daily unity of. The spiritual and the Matérial, which must be such a source of strength, I imagine.
Anything, anybody wants to address that one?
Donald 'Del' Laverdure: Yeah, why don't I jump in there? I guess just to share very personal story a lot of our younger folks go and do vision quests and we, you start with sweat lodge cleanse [01:12:00] first and see guidance, and then you talk to either family members or older relatives on how to prepare, how to get your body ready, how to get mentally ready and emotionally and then as you go up there and you've done all those preparations, there are certain things you do when you're up there and no food or water, for three or four days.
And because of the humility. The sacrifice things start to become more available. And I mentioned that because we still have a lot of people who still practice that and they believe to the, their heart of hearts that this has been a multi-generational process that we've been given. And it doesn't have to be just ours either.
Other people could find places that are special to them or to their families or relatives. If it's by a certain lake, a mountain, by the ocean. [01:13:00] People have different connections and you can go with that same intention. And if you, as we say, if you set an intention and you pay attention, you're gonna, you're gonna grow two wings and you may find the answer to the higher power.
And when we do that, usually good things happen. And so for those who are asking how, and you always start really small. Get a relationship with one plant, with one leaf. Start there and show your, a good relative. And you get to know it. You get to know when's the right time to harvest, what's the right time to be, what's the right time to burn, what's the right time to bury?
And as you do that, you grow it over time and you can have a lot of set of tools or possibilities, and usually start with those that are more local, just like with food, the ones that are more local or healthier and [01:14:00] available. And you start by being a good relative.
Diana Kopua: If, sorry, Dale, would you, were you finished?
Gabor Maté: Yes, I think it was.
Diana Kopua: Okay. I can take two minutes to just talk to that question. From an perspective I don't work in the system. I was the head of department for the hospital psychiatric service. I deliberately stepped outside so that we could focus on healing our communities. We ended up having to target the workforce and we trained the workforce.
Although we like to train everyone and we bring the workforce in, not because they are the professionals doing the healing on their communities, but because if we are going to improve mental health outcomes, we have to understand that the historical threads, the political threads, they don't exist inside health institutions.
They're in our societies and they are global. I don't even have words to talk about the story that [01:15:00] you mentioned, Gabo and Palestine. It just makes me wanna cry and I feel absolutely useless. But our contribution to the wider story, to the indigenous stories across the globe is to start our small start.
Our leal is us in our own lands and we have a ang a relationship, a relational document with non-indigenous people that has been breached time and time again, and they want to rid it. And what we do is inside my work is I have become, we, and we have created space for our indigenous artists to hold all of the stories that they have.
They've spent their lifetime perfecting. These artists are people who have reinstated facial tattoo ko. That was gone. The demise [01:16:00] of it was because of what we talked about earlier. Reinstating it. Everyone that you see in ua reinstating their facial KO is healing as the person who's non-indigenous who feels responsible and accountable.
They being able to hold space so that we can reassert our authority and make this world a better place. We hold five day in stay in we call them and people come in about 80 to a hundred. Workforce, both indigenous and non-indigenous, but mainly indigenous come in and there are about 20 experts in indigenous knowledge, either through the arts or through historians and genealogical understandings.
And they, they hold that space while those workers who are working in six systems heal [01:17:00] through five days of understanding how they, we contribute to the problem. I hear all your jokes about recovering from our, that's it. Being able to awaken the professional identity that's privileged and how we perpetuate racism.
They too, as a reconnection to the environment, the cleansing, going into the water and creating space. Collectively not having to talk to anything but be with each other as we try and have hope for a better tomorrow. Day. Three is reminding us of our personal stories, our personal mum, our pain, things that happened to us when we were young, and can we be vulnerable collectively and remember collectively, or feel collectively and not have to talk about that story but feel and the tears will come.
And all through those five days, it is to arrive at the space of tears. [01:18:00] Tissues are forbidden. We want ter to flood your space. And it brings us back to a story of how the moon and the stars and the sun were created from the pain, from the grief, and they created balance. All of this in those five days brings about a different mental scaffolding.
And we get to start again with a new collective Conti people. And we just start with one group at a time, sitting in it. As a psychiatrist, I feel overwhelmed with how powerful collectives compete. People who are suffering, sitting in the same space together is powerful, magical, in fact.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. I'll finish with the final quick question.
At the end of the movie eternal song, the Point is made that the colonizer needs [01:19:00] to be healed even more than the colonized. And I'll make this rather personal and maybe even, I know I'm not gonna characterize it. I'm listening to you for wonderful people. Now, I'll tell you very honestly, I'm experiencing a, the real envy, and you might call it spiritual envy, which is I have the sense that you connected to something that I can intellectually understand, but I don't have that deep connection with.
It's like you got something that I don't have, and I wish that I have it and for all my intellect and even my emotional commitment I just lack that sense that I sense. You have help me. Would you? Okay. What do you guys got to say to that one? And I think I'm probably speaking for a lot of people on this call.
All of you, if you'd please address this poor little guy who's sitting here wishing to have something over you. [01:20:00] God, what would you say to me? I.
Diana Kopua: I don't if it's okay. A book that we wrote I'd love for to promote it right now with my husband, mark UA and Lisa Cherrington, a recovered clinical psychologist.
She'd like to be as an author, a writer. I just wanna,
Gabor Maté: what's the what's the title of the book?
Diana Kopua: Mahi ua.
You. We were forced to believe that indigenous peoples were primitive and that our way of seeing and narrating the world was irrational. We, that you included Gabo, are powerful beyond reason, and now more than ever, we need to be the author of our own story.
Absolutely value our ancestral stories, but we will be the ancestors of our children's children, and they will value our stories as much as we value our creation stories. Your stories that you've shared with the world, Gabo contribute to that. And it's not about comparing [01:21:00] 'cause it's back to neoliberalism, right?
Gabor Maté: No thank you. Be any comment.
Donald 'Del' Laverdure: I think we start with we are the dreams of our ancestors and we become the prayers of those who follow in our footsteps. And if we know that whatever gifts we offer are going to be accepted for who we are and the path that we walked. And I think sometimes there's a sense of being satiated with, that's enough.
I don't need to be all things to all people and I can just be me and my story and my work has real value to people that I don't know. And when you have that kind of impact, it's a lasting legacy.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. And then Judy. And finally Patricia, Judy Next. Any comment?
Judy Atkinson: I [01:22:00] believe in my 82 years of age and the work I've been doing for over 40 years, that we all need to take the courage to walk into the dark, painful places and sit with people wherever they are, to let them find their power, their light, their joy, their, the stories that hold them down are also the stories that rebuild them up.
And to share my stories with them of how I've recovered from things. I also believe that when I get a call from the community, I need to respond. I have worked and I believe that I need to start very young now with our children, our young people. Otherwise it becomes generational because I'm tired of, not tired, but I find it hard to work with the elders who are in such pain.
They can't talk to their young people their grandchildren. So I think it's all those layers that I need to be responsible for in myself. Thank you.
Gabor Maté: Thank you. And Patricia, finally,[01:23:00]
Patricia June Vickers: I, I think that it's for me it's about being broken open from life and then finding humility and being with humility. And they came
Gabor Maté: all right. Thank you all. Diana Bell.
Zaya Benazzo: I say one thing, Gabor Oh, sorry. That you are doing the healing work for your ancestors with what you're doing today for Palestine. Yes. You, yes. And I wanna just mirror that back for you. I know it might not feel that way, but you are doing that, so you,
Gabor Maté: yeah, I appreciate that.
And thank you Zio, for this wonderful creation that you've gifted the world with. And Judy and Patricia, Dell and Diana for your [01:24:00] participation. I've certainly been honored and touched by my contact with you. Thank you all.
Judy Atkinson: Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Alright. All the best.
[01:25:00]
