This past week, we opened a new space at New Pathways. Not just a physical space, but an attempt to respond to that absence.
We call it the Third Space.
We welcomed it into being with a ceremony—a drum circle led by Veronica Johnny of Indigened. The room was full. Friends, colleagues, and community members gathered together, learning to find rhythm with one another, to listen, to follow, to be part of something shared.
It was simple. And it was profound.
And it made me realize just how much ceremony is missing from the way we approach mental health.
Before I became a social worker, I studied anthropology. It was my first introduction to the importance of ceremony and Indigenous ways of being. But it wasn’t until I lived these practices that they became real.
In my early twenties, I lived in Japan, training in Aikido. I would wake at 5am to go to the dojo. After class, my teacher would take me for coffee—but first, we would stop at a cemetery to honour her ancestors.
One day she asked me what I did to honour mine.
I didn’t have an answer.
Despite all my education, I hadn’t considered what was missing in my own life.
In many ways, Western mental health care has followed a similar path.
We have developed powerful tools:
evidence-based therapies
neuroscience-informed approaches
structured interventions that reduce symptoms and improve functioning
And yet, something essential has been left out.
We are wired for:
community
ritual
shared meaning
Without these, healing can become something we do alone, in contained, clinical spaces—rather than something we experience together.
At our opening ceremony, we honoured our ancestors. We sang for them. We shared where we come from.
It was also an opportunity to acknowledge the land we are on, and the impact of colonization in this country. To recognize that many of the ceremonial practices we are now seeking to reconnect with have been disrupted, marginalized, or lost—and that there is much to learn, with humility and respect.
This is part of what we hope the Third Space can hold.
The same week, we began our first in-person Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy group, led by Dr. Patricia Rockman and myself.
The last time I facilitated this program was over 10 years ago, in a hospital setting at St. Michael’s. It was clinical, structured, effective.
And yet, sitting in the Third Space with this new group, something felt different.
Participants spoke about how meaningful it was simply to be together again—to practice in a shared space, to feel one another’s presence, to learn not just through instruction, but through connection.
This is what I think of as two-eyed seeing—a term shared by Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall—where we hold the strengths of Indigenous ways of knowing and Western clinical approaches side by side, each in their integrity.
In this way, mindfulness becomes more than an intervention.
It becomes a lived, relational practice—grounded not only in evidence, but in community.
What the Third Space is becoming
The Third Space is not just a room.
It is an experiment.
A response to questions like:
What if mental health care included ritual again?
What if healing happened in community, not just in private sessions?
What if we designed spaces intentionally for co-regulation, connection, and presence?
We are just at the beginning.
This spring, we are offering a few initial programs—small ways of exploring what this space can hold:
These are not just “services.”
They are invitations into a different way of being with ourselves and each other.
An open invitation
We don’t fully know yet what the Third Space will become.
That feels important to say.
It is something we are shaping in relationship—with the people who come into it, with the practices we bring in, and with a growing sense that mental health care needs to evolve.
If something in this resonates with you—
whether as a participant, a collaborator, or simply someone asking similar questions—
you are welcome here.
If you’d like to explore further: