There needs to be the support and help around you, even when you may have an unhealthy home environment.

There is a wonderful documentary called 'A Room to Breathe,' where a school brought in a TM instructor, to try and establish a better classroom environment, and the results and transformations were profound. It's impossible to ignore, and we make some passing references in my film, but 'A Room to Breathe' is a closer look at just how powerful meditation can be.

Resilience is not just a complimentary individual quality, but something that is built. And you build it through a number of things in your life, part of it being social fabric.

In documentary films, being able to be a storytelling and embrace film as an art form - while being very clearly connected in trying to help make the world a better place - is really important to me.

There needs to be the support and help around you, even when you may have an unhealthy home environment.

When you introduce these tools into the community, they can be adopted and implemented at the local level - and the results have been powerful. We have to ask the questions, how do people survive in poverty and other challenges of traumatic childhoods? And, until we fix this underlying problems, how do we help people in the meantime?

The interesting thing about the ACE study, as it began in the 1990s, is that it was based on a very strict set of ten questions. But what is evolving from that is a better understanding what kind of experiences are beyond the ten questions, and what kind of stressors it generates, there are so many ways that children can be exposed to ongoing stress.