Please join us for a timely conversation exploring insights, tools and practices to support ourselves, our families, our work and our communities during this season of confinement and constant, confusing, uncertain change.

For most of us, our worlds came to a screeching pause in March and many of us remain under constraints on our movement and interactions -- turning our homes into seeming prisons at times.  In addition to this once-in-a-century pandemic, many parts of the globe are currently plagued with fires, hurricanes and other outstanding circumstances that force people into even greater lockdown in homes that may no longer feel safe.

In conversation with an expert in prison rehabilitation and a Buddhist lama, we’ll explore questions such as:  How do we remain sane through all of this?  How can we remain positive and lifted up when everything around us seems to push us down?  How does this season actually serve us?  How do we regain our freedom and liberation?

Jacques Verduin is the Founding Director and Minister of Transformation of Insight-Out as well as the Founder of its GRIP (Guiding Rage into Power) Program, a best-practices, comprehensive offender accountability program.  He has a 22-year history as a subject matter expert on prison rehabilitation programming, a record of successful pioneering and sustaining programs, and has cultivated a sizable network in the field. Currently Director of Insight-Out, Mr. Verduin founded the Insight Prison Project, which under his leadership produced the Victim Offender Education program. His efforts helped birth the Prison Mindfulness Initiative, the Prison Yoga Project, the Insight Garden Project, Veterans Healing Veterans, among others. All of these organizations are actively replicating. In addition to California, he is a consultant to the US State Department, and he and his staff has traveled abroad to train professionals in Guatemala, El Salvador, Bosnia and the Netherlands.

Lama Tsomo is an American lama, author, and co-founder of the Namchak Foundation and Namchak Retreat Ranch.  Born Linda Pritzker, Lama Tsomo followed a path of spiritual inquiry and study that ultimately led to her ordination as one of the few American lamas in Tibetan Buddhism.

Under the tutelage of Tulku Sangak Rinpoche, international holder of the Namchak lineage, Lama Tsomo has done extensive spiritual retreats in the U.S. and abroad, and is fluent in Tibetan. Today, she is dedicated to sharing the teachings of the Namchak lineage with Western students, bringing greater happiness and meaning to life through meditation practice, community and retreat. She is especially passionate about reaching young people and supporting those working for positive social change. Her teaching has inspired American and international students, who appreciate her informal, and often humorous, style.

Lama Tsomo holds an M.A. in Counseling Psychology with an emphasis in Jungian studies. She is the author of three books: Why Is The Dalai Lama Always Smiling? A Westerner’s Introduction and Guide to Tibetan Buddhist Practice, The Lotus & The Rose, and The Dharma of Dogs.

This conversation will be moderated by Mariette Fourmeaux, Founder and Executive Director of Brilliance Inside, a nonprofit with the mission of healing society’s cycle of violence by transforming prison from being strictly a container of violence to a creator of peace.