Episode Details

Welcome and Introduction to Brad Chapin

Jenny:

Here. Thank you so much. Okay, Alex, why don’t you take us away, please?

Alex:

Hi, my name’s Alex. Welcome to The Gravity. Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle in our work and at play, we seek the wisdom of elders, individuals, and communities that share our knowledge to care for our water, air, land, life, and resource needs. Caring for our homeland will be our guide.

Jenny:

Thank you for that introduction, Alex. Thank you everyone for joining us. Really appreciate you being here. Hi Michele. Thank you so much for being here. I am excited about this conversation today. Just going to take a moment though to reflect on last week. Angie and Merrill, thank you so much for being here. We had a great conversation. We spoke about why we’re doing The Gravity Well. We spoke about our mission statement, then we talked through what we see. Hi Dion. Thank you for joining us. We talked through how we want to handle problems that come up in conversations. We wanted to work through our method, the method that Alex and I took in this complex decision-making course, which helps us work through the six W approach to all of the problems we want to talk about in this room. Both Angie and Melanie helped us talk through building a community agreement, making sure that we have space for people to offer suggestions, and making sure that we’re using the tools in this room.

Brad, for your information, if you hold down on your image, you can do things like add emojis or images or things like that to help kickstart, just show support of a comment or anything like that. Awesome. Great job. We’re just going to use the tools in the room. There is a chat in the bottom left feature as well. Hi Merrill, thank you so much for being such a great supporter. and for being here. We’re going to use those tools to help us work through these conversations. And if we have any challenges, we’re going to look to our community and to our rules to make sure that we stay on course. This particular conversation has been a long time coming, not necessarily for Brad, but certainly for me. I met a woman that is from Calgary and she offered me her story.

Her name is Mary. She’s a mutual friend of Brad and I’s. And Mary grew up in Ontario. She moved to Alberta and had an accident on her bike almost immediately after moving to Alberta. And that accident put her life on a different course. One of the things that it meant for her was that she could no longer afford to drive or ride her bike because she was hurt. She took the bus and while using transit, ended up getting, she had, what ended up being, a stalker for quite some years, or certainly a significant amount of time. And the threats that this person put on her caused her tremendous PTSD. Mary was suffering from PTSD and started to get suicidal thoughts from that experience. And she thankfully wasn’t successful in that, but was because she was struggling with this for so long and she decided that she was going to just research and understand what she was going through.

She researched, and Brad, you can help me expand upon this story if you know it differently. She researched for years, or at least for a significant amount of time, and found Brad and Brad’s work. What Mary described from learning from Brad is that she was able to see what was happening to her in real-time, like physically. She said, that she remembers Brad walking through a diagram, which I’m going to share with you once I stop talking here. I’ll put a link in this chat so you guys can see the images that Brad presented to share for us to walk through today, but that his work changed her life and she feels that this work is vital in terms of helping people work through their fears and helping them shape a healthy life and make sure that we each have the tools to look after ourselves. That’s what Brad’s w