Bearing Witness: The Work Inside the Work

Don’t Clock Out is a grassroots community founded by healthcare workers for healthcare workers, creating spaces where clinicians can support one another outside the hierarchies and silos of the medical system. In partnership with Introspective Spaces, they are reimagining what care looks like when we turn toward each other in moments of exhaustion, grief, and burnout. In this essay, they explore how small communities of presence, gathered weekly across the country, can help restore dignity, renew agency, and remind us that humanizing healthcare begins with humanizing each other.

We are deeply inspired by Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who taught that while we live and work in old and crumbling systems, we can build the “new” in the shell of the old. While the healthcare system may have turned its back on clinician well-being, we can turn toward one another. We can take care of each other, right here, right now. We don’t have to wait for permission any longer.

We have found that by stepping outside the rigid medical hierarchy and the silos that separate us, and into communities of healthcare workers caring for one another, we discover that we have more in common than we knew. We have been stuck behind the illusion of separateness. Through forming relationships across professions, we have been confronted by a surprising question: What if humanizing healthcare begins by humanizing each other?

In the face of the enormity of healthcare, can communities of care move the needle? We think yes. There are around a hundred healthcare workers participating in Introspective Spaces and Don’t Clock Out, meeting weekly, virtually and in person, across disciplines and geographic communities throughout the country.

Although small, we often repeat adrienne maree brown’s adage: “Small is good, small is all.” After all, larger systems are reflections of smaller, foundational elements.

What’s the magical agent? Or, as we would say in healthcare, what’s the mechanism of action?

Presence, baby.

In our communities of care, we have witnessed firsthand healthcare workers stepping back into their powerful ability to heal and help as they turn their human presence toward one another in what we call bearing witness.

We can be the wounded healers we were always meant to be. Henri Nouwen’s sentiment that presence is our most powerful gift is no longer theoretical. We see our fellow healthcare workers healing before our eyes, and our agency, our belief in our own ability to heal, trickles back to life.

When systems fail us, we take inspiration from the activists, spiritual communities, and communities of resistance who came before us. Navigating grief, distress, isolation, and powerlessness in groups is nothing new. It is ancient as time itself.

But if this is where healthcare innovation has brought us, maybe there’s something to be said for turning back.

Meditative Listening

This exercise, offered by Introspective Spaces, invites us to slow down and rediscover the healing power of listening.

Drawing on ancient contemplative traditions and adapted for the realities of modern caregiving, it reminds us that presence itself can be restorative, for those we care for and for ourselves. Listening, when we offer it with presence and intention, can itself be a form of healing.

As caregivers, colleagues, friends, and family members, many of us spend our days listening. We know it can be both a profound gift and, at times, a heavy responsibility.

Listening deeply requires us to pause, to set aside the urge to fix or solve, and instead to simply be with what is here, without judgment and without agenda.

This practice has roots in ancient traditions like Lectio Divina, a contemplative way of reading sacred texts that emerged in early monastic communities. The purpose was not analysis or achievement, but openness: letting words land where they would and listening for what stirred in the heart and mind.

Today, we can bring this same spirit to the voices of our patients, loved ones, and colleagues, or to poetry, story, or art. In doing so, we open space for awareness, reflection, and empathy.

Listen

For this exercise, we’ll listen to a reading of the poem “Breathing” by Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. You’ll hear it three times, each with a different invitation.

LISTEN

First Listen: Listen

Let the words wash over you. Notice the images, sounds, and impressions that arise. Simply receive.

What word or phrase catches your attention?

Second Listen: Reflect

Now consider meaning. Why might this image, phrase, or word speak to you?

What insights or connections emerge?

Third Listen: Feel

Notice what stirs emotionally. How does the poem touch your life, your work, or your sense of self?

When you’re ready, consider: What word or phrase stayed with you? How does this poem meet you in this moment?