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Leaving prison before you get out

Nancy Yamahiro: Good morning, everybody. My name is Nancy Yamahiro. I was your check-in person today, and I'm also a board member here at IMC. A warm welcome to all of you. Thank you for your practice, thank you for being here, and a warm welcome to our guests today.

For those of you who don't know, they're all from a group called GRIP, an acronym for Guiding Rage Into Power, which is an intensive year-long trauma healing and accountability program serving about 500 incarcerated people each year in California state prisons. Many folks are serving life sentences for serious or violent crimes. It is a model for restorative justice in the state, and I would argue, around the country. In the last 10 years, more than 1,200 students have graduated from GRIP. Of those, 528 have been released and come home to their communities. Their recidivism rate is less than one percent. In other words, a success rate of 99 percent.

I'd like to introduce Kim Gross Moore, who is a student of IMC and the Sati Center Chaplaincy Program. She subsequently trained as a GRIP facilitator and then became the Executive Director in 2019. With the support of IMC, she led the expansion of GRIP to the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad, where she continues to facilitate today. A strong believer in the principle, "the first revolution is internal," she considers meditation and the Dharma as the foundation of her work for justice in the community. I'll turn it over to Kim and let her introduce our other guests and welcome.

Introduction

Kim Moore: It's okay to take off my mask to speak, is that right? Okay, thank you. Thank you, Nancy, for the introduction, and good morning.

I'm going to introduce my colleagues briefly and then say a few words. I'm so happy to be here with a team of folks from GRIP. My boss, PJ [unintelligible], is on the board of directors of GRIP, and he's here with us today; he's been here before. Bernard Moss is a senior facilitator with GRIP on our staff. Chewie Cortes is a facilitator as well; he facilitated for several years inside Avenal State Prison and now lives in San Francisco. They'll have a chance to share more of their stories in a minute.

I'm just so happy to be back here. As I was driving up this morning, my daughter just started high school and last night was the homecoming dance. In all the anticipation, flurry, and nervous excitement of that, as I was driving up here, I realized this feels like a homecoming for me. It's been about three, maybe four years since GRIP was here at IMC, and we really do feel like this is a home for us. So I first just really want to thank you all and express the gratitude that is in my heart and that we feel when we come here. Gil and the IMC community—so many of you who have come up to visit GRIP at San Quentin or down at Soledad or elsewhere, or have just been supporters over the years—are really just wonderful. I don't think GRIP would be where it is today without the support of this community. So much gratitude, and thank you.

I feel that nervous energy and excitement of homecoming as well, just being here. I actually first met GRIP and learned about the program when Jacques Verduin, the founder, brought some folks to sit up here. I was sitting there, and that was my first introduction to GRIP. It was a transformative experience for me. I was in the chaplaincy training program and got the chance to go up and visit the program in San Quentin, then train as a facilitator, and then help to bring GRIP into CTF Soledad, where I still facilitate.

As Nancy said, she covered everything that I was going to say about what we are and the statistics. If you're interested in the data of impact, we have been quite successful in supporting folks inside the state prisons to turn their lives around and then become peacemakers in the community. We're going to share some stories today; that's what we do best, sharing stories, because that's the real impact that we have. I'm going to turn it over in a minute to my colleagues to really take it from here. Then we're hoping that we'll have a little bit of time after some story sharing to actually share an activity that we do inside the prisons that builds a sense of common humanity and empathy. It's called "Struggles in a Hat." We might ask for a few volunteers to participate with us to do a little activity.

One other thing I'll say before inviting my colleagues to speak is that our curriculum is grounded in a course book that Jacques Verduin wrote, called Leaving Prison Before You Get Out. I think that's really the common cause we have here with IMC, that there's an understanding that we're on a common journey. We're engaged in a common practice of freeing ourselves from whatever that prison is between our ears. Whether you're incarcerated or whether you're ostensibly free geographically and able to come to a place like IMC, there is still the kind of practice that we all are doing to learn how to free ourselves from suffering and be able to be of service, open our hearts, and experience true compassion, love, and connection in the world.

So much of what I do as a facilitator in GRIP is really about that shared journey—my own practice, my own healing work, and the accountability work that I do in a tribe, in a community inside the prison with others who are engaged in that same practice. So we consider it very much a shared and common journey. It is a program that's mindfulness-based; we bring tools and practices into the prisons. But really, what I hope today will be about is an understanding and an experience of how much of the Dharma is coming out from the prisons as well—the wisdom, the experience, and the living examples of transformation that we can learn from folks that have been incarcerated.

With that, I'm going to invite Chewie to start and then make our way this way.

Chewie Cortes

Chewie Cortes: Good morning. I want to share with you guys how GRIP has impacted me. But before that, I'll briefly share where I was before GRIP. Before GRIP, I was 15 years incarcerated at the time, and I was in the SHU^[1], what is known as isolation in prison, not knowing why I was angry, not knowing why I was so prone to be reactive.

When I got introduced to GRIP, I did so by a commissioner of the parole board. She said, "You might want to look into some programs," and directed me on where to find these resources. The first program I participated in, in 2016, I learned about anger, but it was still leaving a lot of gray areas with educating myself about myself. In 2017, I came across GRIP.

I remember getting interviewed by the founder, Jacques, and he asked me, "Why do you want to be part of GRIP?" I said, "Well, I've done some work, but there are still gray areas, and I don't understand why I'm so angry all the time, why I'm so reactive. I spent 10 years in isolation. You don't spend 10 years in isolation because you're a good person, right?"

What GRIP allowed me, through the curriculum—and it's not just a curriculum, it's a guide in helping us educate ourselves about ourselves—was the ability to learn about the trauma and understand how the trauma was manifesting itself in my life through a dysfunctional expression. Through the exercises I was able to do, I learned how powerful this trauma was. Just learning about the amygdala, a part of the brain that is always on alert and acts like a vigilant, paranoid security guard. When I started learning about that, I started seeing myself, acknowledging that that's me; I'm very reactive.

When I started understanding where these triggers were coming from and what trauma was connected to them, it allowed me to actually acknowledge it, make peace with it, heal, and have compassion for myself. Then it opened up the door for me to have compassion for my father and my mother. It replaced the anger and resentment that I had for them with empathy and compassion, because I was able to have empathy and compassion for myself.

The work that I've been able to do in GRIP alongside other men has been very rewarding; it's been life-changing. It's not only for me; I'm witnessing these men in there have those realization moments. It's like a light turning on. And when that light turns on, there's accountability, there's complete ownership, and there's transformation. I'm an example of that. So I'm just so grateful and honored to be here. Thank you guys. I know I have to share the mic here, otherwise I'd like to be speaking the full time, but I can't. So with that, I thank you guys.

Bernard Moss

Bernard Moss: Hello everybody. My name is Bernard Moss. This is my third time here, so thank you for welcoming me back.

My journey: I spent 28 years in California State Prison. I was convicted in 1988 of the crime of attempted murder. In 2002, I arrived at San Quentin and met Jacques Verduin, and I participated in his first program called Katargeo^[2] at San Quentin. I just thought it was the most silly thing in the world to sit in a room and to meditate and to just talk about your feelings and emotions. I would not buy in, but I stuck with it because he stuck with me.

Some years later, in 2011, we transformed over to GRIP, and I was chosen to be one of the first participants to go through the GRIP program. I sat in, went through the program, and graduated. After graduation, they came to me and asked me to come back and facilitate. I said, "Me? Like really?" And they were like, "Yeah." So I said, "Yeah, sure, I'll try it." I came back and started facilitating GRIP, and the tools that I learned from the program are invaluable.

We talk about one of our tools called SETA^[3], practicing our Sensations, Emotions, Thoughts, and Actions, and being able to connect and recognize those things. It was something I never was able to do before. I was sitting here this morning, and when I was asked to guide the meditation, I immediately realized how nervous I was. I thought, "I'm going to guide a meditation with people who meditate all the time, and I'm nervous." Once I got into meditation and we got silent, I thought, "Oh, I forgot so many things." I sat there and thought, "Well, this is a silent meditation, but I really want to say some more things. I'm not going to say anything, I'm just going to sit here and go with it." So thank you all for just bearing with me on that.

This has taught me how to reconnect with myself and be my true authentic self. We sit in a room and meet once a week for two hours for 52 weeks, and we really get to cover four areas: stopping our violence, developing emotional intelligence, cultivating mindfulness, and really understanding how our violence affects our community, our victims, and the survivors of our violence. It's so powerful. Just meditating and sitting is one of the main tools that helps us connect with our inner self and our inner being, and it brings so much peace and harmony to people who are inside of a violent environment. You have people from different gangs, different cultures, and different races who sit in this room, but it's a room full of peace and harmony.

Some of my classes I facilitate here on the outside now. One of my classes is two hours long, and then I do a weekend class that's eight hours long, and there is just peace and harmony throughout that day with each and every person that sits in that room. It's powerful. I can't stop doing this work because I sit in that room, and at the end of the course, I have men who have sat on death row for 20 years and are now on the main line of the prisons who tell me, "After doing this work, I feel again. I honestly have feelings and emotions again, and I can never hurt another human being." That is so powerful. I can never see myself not doing this work, and I can never see myself ever doing harm or hurting anyone ever again. I just attribute that to GRIP and being a part of this program. It's life-changing.

People like Kim and Jacques come into the institutions and provide programs like this, and IMC supports people like myself, PJ, and Chewie, who made bad decisions in our lives when we were young. Now we have an opportunity to participate in a program like this to help us go back to being our true authentic selves, the people we were truly intended to be before our lives in prison. It's just something to be so grateful for.

Now I get an opportunity to be a grandfather, a husband, a father, and an uncle, something that I never imagined. I get to make all these new friends—people that we used to sit on the yard and look at and want to kill, and now we get to be best friends. Today, Chewie and I met each other personally for the first time. We've been on Zoom calls before, but today we first met each other personally. We drove over today from San Francisco, and we were just talking, and our stories are just so similar. We wouldn't have realized that on a prison yard before GRIP, because we probably would have been pitted against one another. We wouldn't have had that opportunity to just sit down, get to know each other on a one-on-one basis, and realize, "We're both human." Programs like GRIP help unite people into realizing their humanity before they're released from the belly of the beast. So I just want to thank all of you who support efforts like this and programs like this. It's just powerful, and I appreciate you all. With that, I'm going to shut up also, and pass the mic over to PJ.

PJ

PJ: Thank you, Bernard. I'm not sure what I'm going to talk about. Actually, now that I think about it, I guess I have a lot of stuff that just flies through my mind during a meditation.

I want to say thank you all, with a lot of gratitude to be back here again. I was here four years ago; I think it was my first few months out. After serving 19 years in prison, I was detained by ICE. I was there fighting my case as they were trying to deport me to a country I've never been to before, where I have no relatives, where I have no ties. It was a very scary time, and I think I found a lot of comfort and support when I got here and found balance. So my life has changed a lot since then, and COVID happened, and the world has changed and brought me in a different direction. I'm so happy that I'm at least at this point to be able to do this work again. I have to actually live it, right?

One thing I want to share is this concept that's in the GRIP curriculum that I've always been part of my life, and I was born into it: this idea called amor fati^[4], which means "love your fate." As a Buddhist practitioner, I grew up into Buddhism. My mom is Buddhist, my dad is Buddhist, our whole culture is Buddhist. I'm Cambodian, and so Buddhism is not just a practice that we do, but it's a way of our life. I was born into it. It's in the culture, it's in the language, it's in the mannerisms, even in some of the food that we eat.

My mom always shared stories about how she survived the genocide with the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. She shared about the hardship she grew up with, what it was like for her as a farmer's daughter, and then crawling through landmines for hundreds of miles, getting to the border of Thailand so that I could live, and so my brother could live, and so she could live. I was born in Thailand, so I wasn't born yet at the time.

Coming to the United States, resettling, feeling the hardship of living in an impoverished community, there was a lot of violence and a lot of gangs. I experienced school shootings and school bullying that led me to joining gangs myself, and then getting into incarceration as one of the youngest juvenile lifers in the correctional system. I was 14 at the time. I've gone through all this hardship, and I've always had this thing in my heart. My mom always said—when I say amor fati, I mean love your fate—she always said, "You can always make things worse for yourself, or you could make things better for yourself now. Make the best of what you got, no matter what it is, or you can make it worse." And I think about her. I think about her in the refugee camp, working from sunup to sundown starving, getting beaten at the same time, and having to witness the people you love get tortured and killed in front of you. I'm like, "How do I love that kind of fate?" It's a really hard thing to swallow until you actually live through it.

I remember sitting in prison. I was in the SHU at one point, and it was really hot, and I felt like I was dying because there's no air conditioning. It was summertime, and I was in four concrete walls, and it was so miserable I couldn't sleep. I was too sleep-deprived. My cellmate, my best friend, was in the top bunk, and he was like, "Dude, just stay on the floor." We tried to flood the cell. One of the things we used to do when it gets so hot is you flood the cell and it cools down. But some people would flood the cell and make a mess, so they would shut the water off so you couldn't really get cool.

I remember that was in my head, and when I went to ICE, I had the exact same experience, after 19 years of incarceration. My journey with GRIP was that I was a young man trying to prove myself. I was really afraid in prison because I was one of the youngest people there. I knew it. I knew I was young, I knew people looked at me in a certain way, and I didn't have the same kind of status that anyone else had. So I would always try to assert myself more than the next person in front of me, and I'd try to make myself bigger, scarier. That was my mentality, because ideally I thought that if people were afraid of me and people thought that I wasn't an easy person to victimize, they were going to leave me alone, right? And they're going to show me some respect.

I lived that lifestyle for many years in prison. One of the elders actually told me, "Man, that's not you. We can see it. It's not even you." I think it shows in my upbringing that being with my mom had early made me a good person, but I never saw that. I never thought of myself as a good person until I went to a program called the Red Road^[5] program. Actually, I was talking to the chaplain at the time, and one of the Native American practitioners invited me to a ceremony. He said, "Man, your indigenous way is similar to ours. I really want you to come to a ceremony."

It changed my life forever because I sat in the ceremony, and it was dark. I was in an inipi^[6], it's called the lodge, and you can't really see anything, right? It's between you and the Creator, between you and Mother Earth, between you and yourself. No one dares to judge you, no one dares to see you, and they sing these really cultural, spiritual songs that just echo through your whole body. You can feel yourself, and the hot rocks, and the steam. It's almost like a sauna, but the steam really represents the breath of Grandfather, which is supposed to cleanse you. I felt cleansed. I felt the hardship of the heat, it was easily over 140 degrees. Coming out of the lodge after maybe a couple of hours of being in there, I was supposed to have felt tired, I was supposed to have felt drained and exhausted, but I came out of there like a new person. I felt I was reborn. Everything in my life that didn't make any sense all started crashing in on me, and all the teachings my mom had taught me, all the stories she told me about her experience, about where our people come from, and our struggle, all came back to me. I had forgotten all those years because I was so deep in my own pain that I never really looked at anyone else.

So when I came out from this renewal, this moment of my life, I was really open now. I was really open to anything, because before then I was so closed. I had a big wall in front of me. I was hurt so many times, I was abandoned so many times, that I didn't accept any opportunity. I didn't really love my experience; I never made it better, I made it worse the whole time.

When I was invited to do this program through the sweat lodge, they were like, "Hey, we have a Red Road program we want you to attend with us, and we'll just do some healing." So I joined the program, and it was strange because I was the youngest. I sat there in a circle with eight men who had been in prison for more than three decades, and who had done everything unimaginable in their lives, and they were so vulnerable. They were sharing so deeply about their experience, and everything that they said, I had lived through. I felt like it was accumulating in so many ways. It's almost like a cycle, you know? Like, how can you be so much older than me and still live the same cycle I have gone through? I think what I connected with at that time was not the experience, but our emotions, our feelings. I felt what you felt, and I could relate to you.

I remember my facilitator in just a moment that totally changed my life forever and made me who I am today. My facilitator shared how he lost his daughters to crime. He lost both of his daughters, and he was crying. He was shaking, he was reliving the moment, and I connected with his pain. I connected with his pain because I was so open, and I started connecting with other people's pain in my life. I connected to the person of harm and his family, and I was ashamed. It was the first time I felt what kind of pain I caused to someone else. I did that to my facilitator, my friend Martin at the time, who was sharing this. It rocked me to the core, and I was so guilty, I was so ashamed. At that moment, I think I pledged my life to never allow anyone in my life to ever experience that again. So I dedicated my life at that moment to change, and I walked away from the prison yard. I almost started a full-scale riot because people were like, "You're not playing prison politics, you can't go by yourself, you can't do what you want to do." But I had a lot of elders who thought that I was sincere, and they cared for me enough to give me a chance. They told me, "We'll give you a chance, and if anyone wants to try to harm you in this yard, we will respond accordingly."

I was allowed to continue practicing in the Native American spiritual circle, and their ways were so related to mine that it allowed me to find my core again, who I am as a person. I started to see myself. I remembered I'm a good person; what happened? That journey led me to restorative justice. I went back to school, became a counselor, and started doing a lot of work in the prison. Then my counselor was like, "Man, you should go to San Quentin because there's so much opportunity, you could grow more." At the time they were doing a prison realignment, changing the facility, changing the process of how things were working. I ended up going to San Quentin.

That's when I met Jacques, in my first month. I was in the program because I just got off the bus running, and I had a desire to learn, to grow, because I found myself for the first time. I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted to do, I knew where I wanted to go, and I just wanted to do it. I wanted to get involved in everything so I could learn. I felt like if I have more knowledge, I have more tools, I can provide more services, and I can do more.

One of the facilitators, Kevin Penn at the time—he was the violence prevention facilitator working with Jacques before we called it GRIP—was like, "Dude, you have a great spirit, man. I can feel it when I'm around you. You should come to class with me to sit with me." I said, "Why would I want to do that?" He said, "Because we're teaching people how to be peacemakers. We're teaching people about domestic violence, but we also want to teach people how not to do violence, and how to prevent violence. I think you would be good as one of the facilitators, so I invite you to come and just sit with me and find out."

So I came to class and I saw Jacques with his hat. I kind of laughed inside my mind because he reminded me of Crocodile Dundee. I was like, "What does this guy have to offer? This white guy coming over to offer me some knowledge about being a peacemaker." It was so strange because he talked to me, and it was like the first time I met a dude who was so calming. I was nervous, but I was excited and curious. Just talking to me, he calmed my nerves right away. He was so welcoming. I sat in the circle, and I was really quiet, and I just watched Jacques the whole time, and the way he taught the classes. At that moment I realized this is what I want to do, and that's the person I need to follow, that I need to take notes from.

Jacques started talking about the curriculum, about GRIP, and about a lot of the stuff that, when I think about GRIP, I think about as a way of life. A lot of stuff came back to me about amor fati. I remember sitting there and meditating, and just thinking, "Man, I can't believe my life has gone from a kid who was bullied, who was spit on, who was pushed around, who was shot at on multiple occasions—first for being Asian and then for being different—to a prison yard, and now I'm in a class and I'm teaching." It was just so surreal. I thought, "This can't be right." Then I started to really think about that more in depth, and I started to meditate on it, and I just realized it was my energy; I willed it to happen.

Like my mom said, "Love your fate, make the best of what you got, and put that out in the world, because you can always make it worse or you can make it better." I think my energy was creating this environment for me, and I was able to do the work. I'm able to touch people's hearts and able to make so many friends. Naturally, minus the harm I've created, if someone asked me, "Would you go back to prison and live your life all over again?" I would say yes. The reason why is because I've met so many beautiful people through that journey. I would not be here with Bernard, or with Kim, and I would not have met Chewie. I would not have met Jacques, and I would not have met a lot of people that I love today that I call my friends and my brothers, who have gone through this. I think my life was forged through the fire and hardship, and I think it was forged before me by my mom, my people.

So I became very proud of who I am, of where I come from, and I'm proud that I could sit with you all, be vulnerable, share deeply, and just appreciate the moment. I could never do that before in my life. So when I look back at my life and I think about my journey, I mean, I'm still stuck in immigration, I'm still dealing with the court process, but despite all that, I think there's beauty. There's beauty and growth. They say that the lotus flower grows very beautifully, but it grows from a very dark, muddy place.

So a big part of our work is beautiful, I think. We build leaders and teachers. So far, everyone I know who graduated from GRIP who's out now is doing great things in the world. I think they're doing great things not just because of the tools that they got from GRIP, but because of the growth, of the transformation. They have changed and transformed their own journey, their own life. So just love your fate. I think that's kind of my teaching today, amor fati. Thank you.

Reflections

Kim Moore: Maybe we can just take a minute. One of the things we do in GRIP is we put one hand on the heart and one hand on the belly. It's a way that we hold the emotion in the room together, because we know when one person is doing the work, we all are doing the work. So thank you, PJ, for sharing your journey that we all are holding with you. And thank you, Bernard and Chewie, also for sharing your stories.

Do we have time to do... how much more time do we have? Seven minutes? Bernard, can we do a very quick version?

Struggles in a Hat

Bernard Moss: Yes. Can I ask for maybe four volunteers?

This exercise is called "Struggles in a Hat." Anybody else need a pen? What we do is we get people together in the room, and they don't know each other, they don't trust each other, but we have to find a common bond. So we do an exercise called "Struggles in a Hat." We ask people to write down something that they're struggling with currently, and they write it on a piece of paper.

If you can write down something in your life that you're struggling with, it can be anything. Just think for a second and write it on the piece of paper, and then just ball up that piece of paper. My pen's under your chair, alright. Okay, thank you. And please don't put your name on it or anything.

What we're going to do is we're going to drop them in the hat, and we're going to go back around and you're going to pull it out and read it. We're going to ask you, if you ever struggled with that, how you dealt with it. If you've never dealt with that situation, how would you personally deal with it? By not giving advice, but just talking about how you as an individual would deal with that situation, just using "I" statements: "If I was encountered with this situation, I would..."

As simple as that, this exercise is: you're going to put your struggle in the hat, and then you're going to pick out somebody else's, and speak as if it's yours. Just ball it up or fold it and drop it in. Then we'll come back around and you'll pull somebody else's out. If you pull your own out, drop it back in.

This is a way that we build a bond in our circles, to let people know that we're alike. We're not so much different than we think we are. We've been sitting on this prison yard looking at each other, pitting each other against one another, wanting to harm each other, kill each other, stab each other... but you're just like me. You go through the same things I go through. Oh, I can trust you, right? Our cultures are somewhat the same, we come from the same place. We're all human. This is a real way of building a bond within our tribes. This is what we call our circles, we call our circles "tribes," and this is one of the first steps to building that tribe and building that bond within that tribe.

Okay, thank you, yes. [Laughter] And that's how much I appreciate you all, I'm missing the Raider game right now. So whoever would like to go first, you can read the struggle that you pulled out of the hat.

Participant 1 (Alan): I'll go first. My name's Alan, and the card says: "Worrying about my health conditions."

I'm getting older, so there seems to be a lot of little things that come up, and I can imagine that they're a lot worse than they might be. It's not only worrisome that they will affect the way I live and be painful, but also financially. I often really get afraid that, you know, if something's really bad enough, it could ruin me, because it's very difficult to pay for medical care. So I actually avoid going to the doctor's, and I try to manage most of what I can on my own and not worry about it too much, but it's not always easy.

Bernard Moss: Thank you. And I also struggle with that. Thank you. Someone would like to read the next one?

Participant 2: Mine says: "Saying goodbye to someone I love."

When I saw it, I wasn't really sure what it meant. Does it mean that someone broke up with you and you're ending your relationship with them, or someone you love is dying or moving away? I guess my response would be different for whatever the situation is, but if someone I loved was dying, I would just want to let them know how much they meant to me, and make sure that I told them how much I loved them and what they've added to my life, because I think it's really important to be real with people.

If it was someone that was dumping me, I guess it would be done internally. I might tell them the truth, depending on how safe it felt. But otherwise, I would just appreciate them in my head. I'm taking this course called A Year to Live, and one of the things you do is, people that you have unfinished business with, you meet them in your head. They may not be alive, or you may not be able to talk to them, and you tell them what they meant to you. To me, that was a really amazing process because you're able to do the healing around it without actually having to talk to the person if they're not available for you. So I guess that's what I would do.

Bernard Moss: Thank you, beautiful. I will read the next one, yeah, right behind you.

Participant 3: "I just retired. I'm struggling how to live the rest of my life in a way that is true to my beliefs, to make peace."

If this was something that I am facing, I would drop the question to my mind and wait for it to come to me. I would say to myself, "How can I live a life that reflects truth and integrity about my beliefs? How can I make peace?"

Participant 4: "A yearning for a mother to have a voice, to make herself known to people who care about her..." And there's one word I couldn't read, but I think that's the gist of it.

I think for me, the key to helping people have a voice is to listen, which I've learned over the years is not as easy as it seems to become a good listener. But I think that if you can listen deeply to somebody and respond in a way that makes them feel heard, that will give them voice and strength. So that's my thought.

Bernard Moss: Thank you, and I appreciate that. Yeah, just being heard and appreciated is so powerful. Thank you all for participating. I know we're running short on time and I want to let everyone get to where they need to go. Thank you for participating in that. That's just one of the ways that we build community in our tribes, and show how we all go through some of the same struggles in life, and hopefully some of you all can relate to those struggles and see how it relates to our lives. Thank you.

Conclusion

Nancy Yamahiro: I just wanted to thank you all for being here today and for sharing and being so open with us. We really appreciate it.

Abraham runs a group here that supports GRIP, and so I wanted to give him a chance to just see you after all of this if you want to do some volunteer work around the GRIP program.

We'll also be having tea out in the parking lot. We can set up some chairs if you'd like to sit around, I don't know what your timeframe is, if you're available, but we can get hot tea and take it outside. There are chairs out here in the hall that we can take out and put in the parking lot.

So thank you, everybody. Thank you for your practice.