In this five-minute video, Jenée Johnson explains how healing trauma and mindfulness are closely linked.
In this video from the 2019 Wisdom 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Gene Johnson shares her own journey of working trauma-based in a traumatization system, explaining how mindful leaders can heal trauma. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
San Francisco is probably in the midst of the worst housing crisis in the country, with the San Francisco Department of Public Health being tasked with managing the health of the population of cities and counties, within which we recognize that the way we function is often elicited by workers, not just the communities we serve.
We are often bureaucratic and silent, people are losing morale, we cannot trust, and that it can become a very mean job. And so we have carried on our mission to transition from trauma-inducing to trauma-based information and ultimately healing organizations, and thoughtful organizations in terms of how to provide services that are trustworthy, with its central compassion and empathy.
We ask an important question – “What’s wrong with you?” But “What happened?”
We ask an important question – “What’s wrong with you?” But “What happened?” and then asking “What happened?” and what happened will induce compassion and lead to seeing strengths in the face of adversity.
I am an trauma trainer embedded in the maternal adolescent health ward and provided trauma training, so I am interested in the principles of trauma, but it didn’t look like the strength and bandwidth that really holds the important work that precedes us. And I thought all we had to do was become a mindful organisation, in order to be a trauma-based organisation. That traumatic information and healing had to exist in the nest of mindfulness.
I went to the trauma leader and said I knew the Inside Yourself Reassive Institute, an organization that curated workforce mindfulness. I went searching for myself and therefore began my journey to become a teacher trained to provide programs, then acquired the role of a program innovation leader in mindfulness, trauma and racial equity.
I thought all I had to do was become a mindful organisation, in order to be a trauma-based organisation.
Mindfulness, trauma and racial equity are woven together. Because some of the trauma-inducing things in our organization can be a place where we are extremely moraleless. And it tells us that we’re not really, honestly, working on racial equity. And part of the challenge of addressing racial equity is that we need people who are strong at their core.
To move the conversation forward, we all need to be able to be resilient, and mindfulness is the pathway.
