Dr. Juan Rios Jr. (he/him) is a Psychotherapist, Mindfulness research-practitioner, futurist and activist. Juan is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and the Director of the Master of Social Work Program at Seton Hall University . He has a passion for integrating contemplative practices into academia and inner-city communities. He has spent many years researching the psychological effects of mindfulness-based interventions with migrant children in China. Most recently, he has joined the City of Newark as a Senior Medical Social Worker to implement innovative trauma treatment approaches, as well as research comprehensive community collaborative best practices to empower marginalized communities to heal from inter/intra personal trauma, systemic oppressive trauma, economic trauma, intergenerational trauma and collective trauma. He has a deep love for cultivating healing spaces, his family, wife, daughter and newborn son, deconstructing oppressive spaces, mentoring, all things Sci-fi, exploring the world, and sadly being the last openly proud Knicks fan.
Parts of the interview have been edited for clarity and length.
What are some of the initiatives that you are working on at Seton Hall?
As the Director of the Masters of Social Work program at Seton Hall University my goal is to bring more of the contemplative work. A bit of my history and research goes back to working in China implementing mindfulness-based practices in migrant schools. Due to this work and research, I saw the wider potential impact of mindfulness for the mind and body for those who have lived through trauma as a result of migration.
Most recently, I’ve been partnering with the City of Newark as a Senior Medical Social Worker consultant. Within this role, I have been collaborating with the city in designing and executing various therapeutic programs and models of interventions to address violent crimes in the city. Newark has a beautiful and rich history but also one that is historically entangled in socio- economic disparity and collective trauma. It’s been a city that has been over policed and under resourced. It’s the largest city in New Jersey and is well-known for its rich African American culture, community, and social activism. I say that because it informs the work that I’m doing with mindfulness, healing trauma, social justice, and caring justice.
The work that I do comes from the Violence on Crime Act federal grant out of the Office of Health and Wellness. This work has extended to various projects throughout the City. Recently, as a response to the global rebellion against police racial injustice, Mayor Ras Baraka issued a decree divesting the 1st Police Precinct, which was the epicenter of the 1967 Newark Rebellion. In that rebellion, 23 people lost their lives in response to the police unlawfully targeting and brutalizing an unarmed Black taxi driver who was beaten without cause. This indignation sparked an awakening. People wanted justice!
Ras Baraka’s decree initiated both the fiscal and physical resources from the 1st Police Precinct to be divested to create a space of healing for the community. This center is going to be called the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery and it’s going to become a branch of city government. What’s special about this is that this is a direct response to the George Floyd murder and the racial injustice awakening that’s been happening in our country for the past six months. Now we have a city official taking an innovative and proactive stance saying we can invest this money into the healing portion of our community and put it into a grassroots organization.
Our team of clinicians, administrators and outreach workers are designing what this space will look like. This office is repurposing the 1st Precinct to host various initiatives. The first floor is going to be a dedicated museum space for social justice, celebrating the history of activism in Newark and commemoration of the 1967 Newark Uprising. The second floor is going to be a dedicated space for community based organizations that are leading city wide grassroots efforts, such as West Ward Victims Outreach, violence interrupters and Newark street team, and the Brick City peace coalitions. These groups that have been historically underfunded to serve our community are now going to have a piece of that $12 million divestment. This will endow them with the resources to effectively provide preventative and community-first respondent programs to the most marginalized in the City.
The third floor is a training space for community members, credible messengers, and public safety. The basement is dedicated entirely for holistic work- this is where the mindfulness piece comes into action. This space is for mindfulness-based interventions, whether movement work, indigenous work, meditation, and practices that connect our hearts, minds, and souls. Nothing happens in that space except for the healing arts. In the parking lot, we’re dedicating space to the community garden to address food insecurities in the community and engage the community in this holistic work that connects folks with nature. What’s most important is the philosophy. This space really embodies mindfulness-based work and is inspired by Rhonda Magee and her work on racial justice. This work modernizes mindfulness and puts it in a language everyday folks can understand and integrate as a part of their practice that makes sense for them.
How do you see mindfulness as a tool for advancing equity and social justice?
In this space, we are serving marginalized communities that are racialized as primarily Black and Brown. These individuals are typically below the poverty line and have had some sort of trauma experience, whether it’s intrapersonal, interpersonal, or intergenerational- that’s our focus. As we know through mindfulness-based intervention research, some of the benefits are for helping folks who are living in dysregulated states. These marginalized communities are living in dysregulation as a result of unaddressed and intergenerational trauma, whether it be due to economic trauma, food insecurity, racialized trauma, or prolonged trauma due to abuse. These communities live in trauma states that, for one thing, make everyone else appear as a threat.
Specifically, what mindfulness can bring into the community is presence: recognizing one’s own space and being fully present in every moment with one another. Moving away from perceiving everything and everyone as a threat. Presence allows us to regulate these hyperarousal states when in these healing environments. This slowly builds trust and creates space for collective healing. It’s using the tenets of mindfulness-based practices, whether it’s creating presence, inviting a nonjudgmental stance, or just embracing the ‘us’ as we are.
The ‘we’- the healing that occurs in the collective work is transformation. When there is a brother or a sister in the community hurting, we are hurting. Whether you call it liberation, theology, transformative justice, mindfulness- we cannot separate those components of practice, all of those things are integrated. Integration brings peace, and peace within is key to embracing the other. As Daniel Segal mentions, this is the ‘Mwe’ in our collective consciousness. As I heal, I now make room to embrace my brother, my sister, my community. That is the beauty of mindfulness.
“That’s why we are here, it’s academia in action. It’s about using research and science put into action for social good.”
What is the intended impact of this model?
This is a model that we have not yet seen; there are a bunch of independent lines of research that exist, such as what happens when resources are dedicated to grassroots organizations, trauma recovery, training police officers on implicit racial bias, or the effects of introducing mindfulness into communities. This proposed center ties all of that together: economic justice, legal justice, social justice, trauma recovery, and contemplative communal spaces. This puts tax money not just into violence prevention but also into healing. We have to work toward healing the community by increasing our emotional intelligence and groundedness as well as meeting their immediate needs. Some people have never had the privilege or exposure to these grounding techniques. Even recognizing our breath, something that appears so basic, some individuals don’t know that they’re becoming agitated and have dysregulated breathing. Total body disconnectedness. We hope to instill skills that have real impact in people’s daily experience.
‘Defunding police’ is a big topic but there aren’t many practical suggestions, heavily researched practice models, nor a clear definition of what that means. We have to give the Mayor and the City of Newark credit for this reallocation of resources for a new center for violence prevention and trauma recovery. The city government has not only taken that leap of faith, but action and the decision that if we want to change, we have to do something different. We can’t continue 50 years of trying to ‘reform the police’; let’s engage in a different model that encompasses the police, the community, government and mindful orientation. This increases our emotional intelligence through deep insight, compassion, and holistic healing as we create healthier communities. The way I envision it working, we have to work with individuals to effect change outwards, and this in turn reflects back inwards. The City of Newark can serve as a model that works. The fact that the Mayor and the government are investing their fiscal and physical resources toward this work shows true commitment to progress.
Do you feel that these mindfulness skills are for members of the community or for other groups, like police officers?
I want to be clear that I believe in working with both members of the community and the police. Some people don’t take that stance. My stance is that we need to put more money into people who are on the streets. Credible messengers, as we call them, are individuals who are community stakeholders and have respect in the communities. These need to be our first responders for non-violent public safety responses, rather than calling the police when someone is in distress either due to homelessness or a mental health crisis. Re-structuring and re-conceptualizing what we in our community see as public safety. Credible messengers can be anyone who has buy-in and can hopefully unite communities with police in this work. This is just one example of many.
We’re partnering with community members, government, grass roots organizations and violence disruptors with police officers and universities to teach social justice and contemplative practices. Imagine within these transformative spaces, we have cohorts of police, ex-gang members, community leaders, and government officials. The goal is to create healing spaces that address the multiple dimensions of oppression and collective trauma. Community healing takes a comprehensive intervention, not just moving money, creating programs, and investing in training. Together they can begin truly seeing one another as human beings, learning new skills to build compassion, and applying these new approaches. This one small component can save lives and help reduce the automatic responses from the hip that causes dehumanization and results in excessive force.
If I’m engaged in these cohorts, I see you as a community partner, a brother locked in arms. That is the essence of using contemplative practices in caring justice. It’s ‘this and,’ not ‘this or.’ It’s engaging the community and putting the resources in the hands of grassroot organizations and cultivating a new culture in public safety and adopting these models. This entails being grounded in the present, reducing implicit biases, becoming more aware, and meeting each other as we are with heart-centeredness. Imagine the communities that we can build.
How do you see virtual reality (VR) as an asset in these efforts to this center and your larger goals?
One of my areas of interest is VR to teach social justice. This came about as work as a futurist. How do we envision and design the world we want to live in? Emergent technology is a way in which folks can deepen the immersive experience using mindfulness and VR technologies. We want to take it a step further using mindfulness to teach social justice by building empathy. This practice is inspired by the work of Courtney Cogburn of Columbia University and well as the work being done at the Virtual Reality Human Interactions lab. Stanford is conducting research on empathy-building using VR technology. I learned about that work last summer. I asked if anyone is using this in practice, like clinicians. I took it upon myself to pursue this work since what’s missing is a model that can help people connect with these immersive experiences in practice.
One of my colleagues, Anthony Nicotera, came up with a model of learning using mindfulness called the Circle of Insight. It takes you through the cycle of being fully aware: noticing, reflecting, then acting. In my work, I took his model slightly further by adding ‘feeling’ and ‘de-roling’. These two areas in the circle of insight, while engaging in virtual reality, reinforces the importance of being connected to the body by noticing physical sensations, then when completing the virtual experience, to de-role from the avatar.
We are planning to add this work at the Center of Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma recovery. The goal for the first floor at the proposed center will be a VR room where people can immerse themselves in a program that takes people through the immersive experience of social activism in the City of Newark. What was it like to be in the 1967 uprising and to then see the effects of gentrification? Cultivating questions like: What type of future are we committed to designing? How do we reflect on the past mistakes in a visceral way as well as taking personal conviction to being a part of the change to ensure healthier communities. It’s taking them through a journey in the past and a journey into the future using immersive technology.
Before using VR, we teach them the VR-Circle of Insight and set an intention. People can find it entertaining or even triggering. That’s why mindfulness is so important. We have to set the intention. What are you doing this for? What is happening within me? What are the physiological and emotional reactions? We need to put it in a perspective toward action.
“If we can use common language regarding this collective dysregulated state then we are practicing mindfulness. It doesn’t matter if you’re practicing business or law, everyone can have a visceral awakening regarding self and their position in the world. This sense of awakening has allowed mindfulness-based practices to be an approach that is universal and available in any discipline.”
Are you doing any research around this to capture any changes and linking this back to larger statistics or indices of community wellness?
Absolutely. We’re pursuing a grant to research the effects of trauma informed spaces as well as developing a curriculum specifically to develop transformative spaces. We plan to explore these models to capture the outcomes of the interventions such as Empathy Quotient (EQ) scales and community quality of life. We’ll be able to measure these outcomes for those who participate in the center, and also we’ll compare this to data on police prosecution and the reduction of violent crimes and examining if that changes over time.
As an educator, how do you see these partnerships as being mutually enhancing to the city and Seton Hall University?
I’m fortunate to be with Seton Hall. The university has a long history of servant leadership and philanthropy, as well as a complex history due to its geographic positioning. We’re in a cultural and economic divide due to our location. It’s located between South Orange, which is primarily suburban and economically affluent, and Newark, which is urban and socioeconomically impoverished. It’s very different.
What I love about the university is that they focus on public service. One of the models that we adopted is ‘Take heart. Take action.’ In a heart-centered way, we engage our community to form these valuable collaborations. Right now, we have folks at the law school, public policy, Africana studies, museum studies, public policy social work, environmental studies, and the social justice certificate program. When communities, higher education, and the government partner together, we see positive changes happen. You have to have commitment from the universities and the faculty. Unfortunately, that service component is often minimized by faculty and programs, but not at Seton Hall. That’s why we are here, it’s academia in action. It’s about using research and science put into action for social good.
Your work appears naturally interdisciplinary as a clinical social worker. Are we also seeing an interdisciplinary conceptualization of mindfulness? Do you think that for those disciplines that have yet to accommodate mindfulness into the core of their work, do you think it might become an ideal to be pursued?
Over the last 7 months, our world has been in a state of social isolation. This global phenomenon of being forced into this unnatural setting, sitting with ourselves, tests what it is to be social or to live in fear. Whether you practice mindfulness or not, you are awakened to the reality that this is challenging. You might begin to question how to put this feeling in context. If we can use common language regarding this collective dysregulated state then we are practicing mindfulness. It doesn’t matter if you’re practicing business or law, everyone can have a visceral awakening regarding self and their position in the world. This sense of awakening has allowed mindfulness-based practices to be an approach that is universal and available in any discipline.
Why this is important is that normally we approach a person in business and we’re asking them how to create social economic mobility in marginalized communities. There is a point of mindfulness as we must become curious about what our relationship is to money, self, and self-efficacy. This is all tied into mindfulness: how is my state of awareness, how do I regulate myself when I sense an impulse, how can we integrate that with the effects of Covid-19 and the racial injustice awareness that is happening globally? Economic justice is about liberation and liberation is rooted in first letting go of toxic states that we were conditioned to develop. Mindfulness in action helps us move past our ‘stuckness’ and be here now, letting go of what does not serve us. That applies to internal and external systems.
We’re adding two different layers of context that mindfulness-based practices can beautifully integrate. So much is needed with regard to how we can heal. To use Bronfenbrenner’s work, when we want to heal society, we have to work from the individual level outwards, then again inwards. Critically, because of what’s happening throughout this year, introducing mindfulness-based work is a form of radical acceptance. People are hungry trying to find approaches that integrate emotional intelligence, individual and collective well-being, transformative work, and even truth and reconciliation. James Baldwin said it best, “you can’t change everything you face, but nothing can be changed if you don’t face it.” That’s quintessential mindfulness. If we want to change what’s happening in our society, we might not be able to change it all, but we can’t change it unless we have an honest truth and perspective into what we’re dealing with.
“That’s why mindfulness is so important. We have to set the intention. What are you doing this for? What is happening within me? What are the physiological and emotional reactions? We need to put it in a perspective toward action.”
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