 Hello everyone and welcome to the 10 a.m. to 10 30 a.m. session of the 2023 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are proud to introduce the presentation, Kintsugi Contemplative Pathways for the Wounded Healer. Our panel is not really a panel, it's my wonderful cohorts in crime, Andy Stricker, Spinoza Quinnell, myself Cynthia Colloine, Leer Lobo, Francisca Yanukura, who is Frankie Antonelli and JJ Jacobson, whose JJ Drinkwater was not able to be with us today. Andy Stricker is our mastermind and visionary behind virtual harmony. He's an innovation leader with Air University. Me, I'm a professor at CTU Doctoral Studies. I also teach at five universities and I'm co-chair of the OSCC organizing committee. Frankie leads a visionary team of innovators at the University of Central Florida and she specializes in emerging technologies for education. And JJ is our science fiction librarian and also a professional librarian and his research is an interactive immersive and improvisatory narrative in virtual environments. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of the sessions, and the full schedule of events. This session is being live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments you may send tweets to atopensimcc with the hashtag pound OSCC23. Welcome everyone! Let's begin the session. Andy, it's over to you. Oh, great. Thanks, Lear. Always an honor to be here and participate in this wonderful conference so thank you so very much. About a year ago, maybe a little bit longer perhaps, we wanted to create a region called Sacro Gema and actually it's a location off the south western part of Japan and it was an independent island but it eruption of the actual Sacro Gema volcano connected the main island Japan with the peninsula and so we wanted to sort of in a whimsical way recreate Sacro Gema as a place for reflection, contemplation and renewal as part of our work with virtual harmony and so we landed upon this really cool Japanese kind of artistic way of taking pottery that had unfortunately fell and broke various pieces and sometimes these were family heirlooms they've been in you know in families for generations and there is this form where called Kansuki where they take broken pottery and they use this liqueur that's mixed with powder gold and basically put the pieces back together again and we we just thought it was a wonderful metaphor for the issues that we try to pay attention to in virtual harmony where you know we encourage people who you've been through you know hard experiences in life to come to virtual harmony and through community and shared activities go through you know a shared healing process next slide please and so one of the things that you know we're as we live the longer we live and we're starting to get up there I'll speak for myself is that you know when you have painful experiences and wounds in life what you know you refer to as cracks and scars and so forth no one ever really wants to have those experiences and but the mystery of life is that when you have gone through some of these hardships and you encounter others who have been through similar hardships you're able to have empathy you're able to you know connect with them and it's a really kind of a cool thing to experience in your life when you think you know you've been really severely damaged but then you find out that those those you know hurtful damaging experiences can actually be turned for use in helping others next slide please so so this is where we get to this you know this insight that and we didn't come up with this by the way I'm going to speak about an individual has had an impact in our lives in very special ways here in a minute but we get to this place where we you know have these stories in our in our in our life experiences and oftentimes maybe it's at a coffee shop that's why we have a kintsuki tea cup here the display is you know when you're sitting and visiting with someone who's been through hard times and you start sharing the things and experiences you've been through that's been difficult there is a special connection that can take place and so part of what we try to do is we try to you know emphasize that you know there is a kind of like a maybe a shared healing process that occurs and what there is helping me with with keeping up the pace here is she's moved on to the next slide and this this particular slide shows one of the people that's influenced us and it's Henry now and and he's a scholar he has passed on now but he made a big impact in our lives but he's the author of the wounded healer and his interesting enough in his work over the years he talks about kintsuki as a metaphor for you know the brokenness that we can go through so he we've taken a lot of his writings and some of his reflections I've taken a lot of notes I happen to be at Yale when he was there and so you know we've taken a lot of the thoughts that he had to share from his own life experiences of being a so-called wounded healer and how important it was as you know in particularly in the professions you know whether you're in the counseling profession or other professions in medical practice a lot of your effectiveness can come from your sharing that you have similar concerns or fears or experiences that you've been through and Frankie I thought I open this up if you have some thoughts because Frankie inspires us with the cross-cultural connections and that's what we try to do with sacrogeema true to kind and the yeah I think as we go through life you know and especially that societal pandemic thing that we just went through really you know help us shape every day our lives in the in a so thoughtful but yet challenging but that happy and all these things and when we were talking about Henry and I had to watch this the BBC no segment short segment on Kim Sugi it just kind of clicked for me how these two the Western and the Eastern world the concepts for each came together so beautiful the way you you just explain and you know it's think going forward whenever we are together in sacrogeema and just outside in the physical world I find these very helpful concepts and principles to abide by and in celebrate you know every moment the moment that we're together the moments that we are out here in the physical world in our own spaces just I just found you know our concept here today that we're sharing very like my compass compass as I grow older and I'm there with you yeah I'm starting to feel it you know Frankie you brought up an important point I don't think any of us were not affected by COVID right the pandemic had such an impact on everyone's lives it's not any individuals at all and for us we spent a lot of time in the research we've been together for 15 years researching and designing and he didn't tell you but we have probably over 18 grids of content of research games and simulations and ways of thinking and of course many of you know we've been involved with the space program and thinking about how life on Mars how will we live how will we tackle complex problems what's very hard to redirect our energies to those very purposeful investigations when our spirits are down right and so we took a little time and we built simulations Andy in particular I I say we right he does all the heavy lifting and I go around testing everything and say Andy that doesn't work or Andy that doesn't support human computer and behavior I don't have permissions I got to change things and so we think about collaboration we think about the triumph of the spirit we think and Clifford asks us the question what's the expectation of this and it's an interesting little simulation you go around and you touch the different stations you interact with the pottery you break it and then you have to figure out how to put it back together and and what kind of triumph of the spirit is that you know how do you feel about these these interactions we are going to lead a tour on this next Friday I scheduled it for Friday at 1 p.m. Pacific time for anyone who wants to join us in zoom first so we can talk about the design and how it works right the the craft that we put into it and then of course we'll go over to virtual harmony which is our research grid and we'll go to Sakurajima the grid that has this simulation on it and we'll experience it and on this current slide you'll notice there's five key points and we've been anchoring with them we took the Sakurajima grid and last year Andy created a VR implementation of it and if you've ever taken your virtual world content and transformed it into a unity based VR application and hosted it on meta for beta testing you haven't lived until you've done that because that's not a trivial thing to do and Andy spent a lot of hours working through the tech and of course the rest of us for testing it for making recommendations for supporting persons in in wheelchairs and people people who want to be seated while in VR so they're not taking a dive you know take I call it taking a header because I was playing ping-pong one day in 11 and I dived for the ball because I used to be a table tennis champion with 49 tournament wins and next thing you know I'm in the air and there's nothing underneath me no table and that's the problem with VR whereas in the virtual world I don't have to worry about breaking my body or or the living room you know and of course can enjoy these spaces in such a tremendous way Andy back to you on the yeah on these five principles yeah well you know the icky guy is a wonderful set of principles for contemplative lifestyle and figuring out how to live in better harmonious ways with nature and with others and and like Lear highlighted we did a an Oculus app that helps to instruct on the what these principles involved and we wanted to represent them and in the open sim environment so a lot of the models the 3d models are across both of those applications next slide please sin so here's a here's a kind of a overview of the of the region when it comes in the focus you'll see it but we we basically have a feudal Japanese village and there's a lot of little highlights the Shin Haga studio is worth a visit to see about the Japanese art artistic form of painting we have a biota temple and we have several really interesting places to visit to highlight the the Japanese culture at different historical points and there's so a shrine area that between the village and the activity the kintsuki activity and what we've done is we've put it into three pathways we won't go to the next slide there that'd be great so here's a view of an aerial view of the pathway so you start off at the first station and and so what we've done is we we have the activity is Lear highlighted where the particular Japanese pottery shatters and then you have you engage in a contemplative activity and when you finish that then the shattered pottery pieces come back together again and form its beautiful kintsuki version of what has been broken and it's given into your inventory so as going through the inventory you actually collect five pieces of Japanese pottery part part of nice thing about doing it too so you can go in its upper terrace pathway and what's nice is it's designed so that you can explore through these various pathways and in the background is the Sakurajima volcano is actually a 3d model of the actual real volcano from Japan and so you get a very scenic view of the areas you're doing this activity and then we have a waterfall pathway and you can you know go along and and see a couple of waterfalls are very contemplative environments to pause and and think about what you're learning about Henry Nowan's work about wounded healers and you work your way up basically through the five stations and then you end up at the well springs on send where if you're doing this as a group or with others you can have some time to sit there and talk about your insights and thoughts as you went through the various stations next slide please and and here's a depiction but what a typical station looks like and so you got activities in this Frankie highlighted you can actually see this really wonderful Japanese video about what is involved with Kanzuki it's and you can then you know record your responses to the reflection activity and there's an example of one of the Potter pieces of Japanese pottery that gets shattered and then reassembled next slide please and so here's some quick snapshots in a minute or two that we have you sort of get a sense of what it looks like if you would come out we'd love to have you come out and visit yeah there's there's quite a few effects with butterflies and so forth so you know it's worth experimenting setting the different you know environmental settings that you prefer I prefer to do it at night there's a lot of nice lighting effects so that as you go along the different pathways there's a really wonderful garden that you start out with and from this garden scene in the lower left snapshot you can go to any pathway and and work your way around until you get to the the wellsprings next slide please and this is another set of snapshots and you know what we did with the bridges we we followed the Japanese architecture for bridges so we were trying to be as authentic as we knew to be in the recreation of the structures so you get a sense of these very beautiful places that you can actually go to in Japan and see and we want to wrap up with this quote from Henry now and he says I am a wounded healer when we dismiss people out of hand because of their apparent woundedness we stunt their lives by ignoring their gifts which are often buried in their wounds the compassionate life is the life in which we believe that strength is hidden in weakness and the true community is a fellowship of the week and this is a very key wisdom insight that I have sort of backed up into my life at this point I started out in my thinking that it was all about strength as I as I live longer I realize it's more about weakness and sharing your weakness with others actually build strength in community so Frankie and lady have thoughts before we open up for questions say that again Frankie I couldn't quite hear you what was that I know that he you know summarized that so very beautifully I did it any better now he created this region originally to help you get in touch with your roots didn't he did you want to talk about that well you know that's that's what we were doing with you know trying to and we have a lot of this represented across almost all of our grids you know where we you know we teach the STEM areas in our learning activities but a lot of our focus is on this trans transidential viewpoint about life that we we can transcend our difficulties our hardships in ways that help us to be better in with ourselves and with others in lives in our in our community so questions did you see there were two questions almost from Clifford on our expectation from this and from Julieta surreal dreaming she says do you work with Sharon the the wounded healer no I don't I love to learn more about that there's there's several expressions of the of the practice of being a wounded healer and I'm just beginning to learn about some of them you know from my explorations of this that the only person I've had direct ways of helping to shape my early thoughts about wounded healing is from Henry now and but but I know that it cross many cultures actually there's expressions of wounded healers that offer very distinctive and unique perspectives well thank you Andy and thank you Frankie for such a fantastic session as a reminder to our audience you will want to check out the conference open similar org to see what is coming up next on the conference schedule our next session is the word at 10 30 a.m. in this keynote region we also encourage you to visit the OSCC 23 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hypergrid resources in OSCC Expo 2 region along with our sponsor and our crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC regions thank you again team virtual harmony and to you the audience