Kazu Haga: On Fierce Vulnerability

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Deanna Jimenez: Hello.

Kazu Haga: Hi. Here we are.

Deanna: Good to see you.

Kazu: Yeah, so good to be here.

Deanna: We spoke about how interesting it is being in the Bay, yet meeting for the first time and knowing all of these connections where we could have met. But it's really an honor to be having this talk with you and really deepening into your work and your book.

Kazu: Likewise, likewise. Thank you so much. I'm really excited for this.

Deanna: So I'm trusting that online and in person that folks are coming in from different angles of the conversation, some may be wanting to be in dialogue, others may be looking for guideposts for how to be in action. And so I'm wondering if we can begin with first contextualizing. What are some definitions maybe specifically around the title of your book, Fierce Vulnerability, Beloved Community, Collective Liberation, whatever things that you feel important to define and contextualize to begin.

Kazu: Sure. You know, it's funny that I've been doing non-violence trainings in some capacity since I was 19 years old. I’m 44 now. So however long that is, and I still don't really have a clear definition for non-violence, but I feel like we should start there because that's so much of the lens through which I view the world. For me, when I talk about non-violence, you know, I oftentimes talk about how I think the biggest misunderstanding of the idea of non-violence is that as long as I'm not throwing a Molotov cocktail when I'm at a demonstration, then I'm practicing non-violence. And I think that's a really dangerous misunderstanding because if that's our understanding of non-violence, then you could make the argument that a Ku Klux Klan member is practicing non-violence when they are at a Ku Klux Klan march because at least in the moment that they're at the march, they're not throwing Molotov cocktails. They're not engaged in physical acts of violence. But to me, non-violence means something entirely different. To me, non-violence is this unwavering belief in our interdependence. You know, I oftentimes hear in a lot of activist communities, like, you know, talk about beloved community. Beloved community is this term that's become more and more popularized over the years. And you hear it a lot in progressive movement spaces. And when I talk to people about what they mean by beloved community, oftentimes I hear things like, oh, well, beloved community is my faith community. It is my activist community, my friends, my family. And I always want to challenge people to think a little bit more because to me, building beloved community is not about loving the people that are easy to love. It's not about loving the people that are already in your community. The work of building beloved community is about us doing our own work so that we can expand our idea of who is part of our community and to really realize that, you know, the universe doesn't weave separate webs of interdependence based on political affiliation. Like if we are like in an interdependent world, then we are interdependent with all life. There is no outside of beloved community. And especially in a world like today where there's so much polarization, there's so much violence happening, that's a really tough pill to swallow. To know that my liberation is bound with the liberation of all people. But I think that is the work of nonviolence. I think it is the work of building beloved community. I think it is the work of collective liberation to do the healing work that we need so that we can at least remember even as we might be angry at someone, even as we might be challenging that person with the actions that they're doing, that we are holding them as a member of beloved community, as a member of that collective liberation, that I won't be liberated until all people are. So I think that's like the central theme of nonviolence, of beloved community, of fierce vulnerability, of collective liberation, is really reminding ourselves that we belong to each other.

Deanna: And even as you say that, I begin to, my heart beats faster because there is this question that I hold and I'm often grappling with, how to hold this nonviolence while also feeling the threat.

Kazu: Yeah.

Deanna: What do you say? Yeah, how do you answer that?

Kazu: Yeah, no, there's a lot of threats right now. One of my most important teachers in my life, his name is Bilge, he's an incarcerated nonviolence trainer in Soledad State Prison. He said this thing to me once, he said, resolving issues is about, resolving conflict is about fixing issues and reconciling conflict is about repairing relationships. And so often in our society, in our social movements and whatever, we only think so far as to how to fix the issue. So what is the legislation that we need to pass? What is the CEO that we need to kick out of office? What is the new politician that we need to elect? And that's important because fixing issues is the realm where we can like stop the immediate harm that is happening. That matters. That is really important. We need legislative change. We need to, you know, abolish all these different institutions, whatever it might be. But at some point, if we're not also working on healing the relationships between the communities that are at odds, that give rise to all of these injustices, that give rise to this conflict, then we're always going to be spinning our wheels. It's going to be, you know, it's just a matter of time before a new conflict, a new injustice erupts. And so I think it's really like so much of nonviolence is the, there's an old activist named Barbara Demings who wrote about the two hands of nonviolence, which I write about in the book. And she says nonviolence is about learning to balance the power of the no hand. And she says with this hand, we say no to injustice. We will refuse to pay for your bonds. We refuse to pay for the walls. We refuse to cooperate with you. With this hand, we will even disrupt the easy pattern of your life. But at the same time, the practitioner raises the other hand and it's always outstretched sometimes with loving compassion, sometimes not, but it's always outstretched. And with this hand, we say that we will never give up on your dignity. We recognize your humanity and we know that you can make better choices than you're making now. And I will be here for you when you are ready. And so I think so much of the work of nonviolence is balancing the fierceness that we need to stop the violence, to stop the injustice that is happening right now, but to not let go of the vulnerability and the potential for loving connection that the yes hand offers.

Deanna: I'm soaking that in. A few things that you said that stick out to me is one relationship being the center and these two hands. And I was really holding that in your in the title of your book, Fierce Vulnerability, this paradox and how to be, you use the word balance, how to be in balance. You do a really phenomenal job at in all that you write about to find that balance between theory and action. Theory and personal examples. There's a bringing yourself into the book and also into the work. And I wonder if you could speak a little to that.

Kazu: Yeah, so. So much of this work is it's like lessons that I've learned or like questions that have emerged for me around social change that I've come out of my own healing journey. Right. I talk about this experience that I had when I was. I don't know, was 2012 I think. It was early on in my own personal healing journey. And around that time I started to realize and I came from a household that had a lot of violence and abuse when I was growing up. And I realized as an adult that I had a little bit of shame for not being there more for my mom and my sisters when they were experiencing so much harm in my family. I was 12 years old when a lot of the violence started and I just like I shut down and I stopped coming home. I started getting high, started drinking and I just stopped coming home. And so like looking back at it, even when I started to explore it as a young adult intellectually, I knew that I was just 12 years old. I was just doing the best that I can to survive. I could give myself a lot of compassion. But I also started to feel like oh, I actually have some shame for not having been able to do more to protect my family. And I was at this gathering called a jam, which is a these like week long transformative experiences that I write throughout, that I write about throughout the book. And you know, people were sharing vulnerable stories from their lives because it's, jams are one of the most transformative spaces I've ever been to. So there's a lot of vulnerability that was shared. So I was like, I'll share a vulnerable thing. Oh, you know, I've been thinking about the shame that I have. But at the time most of how I was holding that story was oh, this is something that happened 20 years ago. It was really difficult then but I'm over it now. I'm so glad I've healed from it. I spent a year living in monastery. Like I'm doing all this activist work. I moved on. I'm good, but it's still a little vulnerable. So let me tell the story. So I spoke about the story for the first time out loud and my body went into complete panic and I could barely breathe. And I was just crying and crying and crying and you know, that moment taught me so many things amongst them was how big of a delusion I was living in saying that oh this happened 20 years ago. Enough time had passed. I've gotten over it. I'm healed. And the reason I'm sharing the story is because I realized at some point that there's a similar dynamic that is happening with like racial injustice in this country where we have this tendency to say oh slavery that happened hundreds of years ago, genocide of indigenous people that was hundreds, like centuries ago. That we’re so glad that that's over now. It was a really difficult time, but we don't need to talk about it anymore because it's over. And I think you know, we tell ourselves the story collectively that because it happened hundreds of years ago, we've healed from those wounds, but that's not how trauma works, right? Like it's not how trauma works at the individual level and it's not how trauma works at the collective level. And so through these experiences, you know, one of the key kind of theses is in my book is this idea that the universe is built on fractals. So the same way that trauma impacts my body as an individual it impacts our collective body as cultures as families as nation states as a species. And so, you know, there's a lot of things that we've learned over the last couple decades about how to heal trauma at the personal and interpersonal level. And I'm trying to apply those lessons to scale to look at our collective traumas and looking at injustice as a collective wound that we can heal.

Deanna: Powerful. Yeah. You've said so many things in there. One was the delusions and I want to get to that because you also write about that and that felt really powerful. But since you brought in fractals, let's go for it. Let's go for fractals because well, maybe I just opened it up to well, I'll say what I wrote. What I wrote, I wrote a lot. Can you say more about your connection that you're making around fractals, trauma, and healing?

Kazu: Yeah. So, you know, I think we all know at this point that fractals are these geometric patterns that repeats itself over and over and over again. And you see them throughout nature, right? You see them in nodular seashells. You see them in succulent plants. You also see them in what are called dust devils. There's like little tiny tornadoes almost that we see when you're driving down the side of a particular dry area. There's a certain dynamic that creates a dust devil and when you zoom out of the fractal, you look at a tornado and it's the same thing that's happening at a larger scale. And then if you look at the picture of an eye of a hurricane, it's actually the same shape that it's creating. And then if you think about how planets rotate around its sun, it creates the same pattern. And then if you look at a picture of the galaxy, you see that it like the way that a galaxy rotates around the center of its axis, it creates the same pattern. And it's that no matter how small or how large the scale. Because I believe that fractals are just a universal law of nature. It is the very nature of how this universe is structured. The same pattern repeats itself. And so why would that not be the case with the way that our bodies react to harm and violence and injustice and healing? One of the things that we know from, you know, like, you know, I've been a lot of activist movements, which is about creating systemic change and a lot of the one of the like the million dollar questions in my book is activist movements oftentimes move with this energy of we are here to shut things down. And especially in a world like we are living in today with so much harm and violence, like there are things systems that we need to shut down. And at the same time, we know that shutting things down is not an effective response to healing trauma. Like you would never go to a traumatized person and point your fingers and say you need to stop what you're doing. It might be effective in fixing issues, right? Like might temporarily get that person to stop doing what they're doing. But if your goal is healing, that is never going to work. And yet in our social change movements, we move with this energy of we're here to shut things down because we don't realize that when we're engaged in social change work, we're trying to do the same work that we are doing with interpersonal healing just at a larger scale. And so we think it's effective to like shut people down. But one of the things that I want to see in social movements is a movement that understands that injustice is not a political issue. It is a manifestation of our collective trauma. And so if we can see injustice as a manifestation of collective trauma, then can we build movements that understand that we can't shut down injustice any more than we can shut down trauma? And if we can understand systemic violence and injustice as manifestations of our collective wounding, then how would we build our movements differently? How would we respond to them in a way that has the power to stop the immediate harm, but is also working towards healing?

Deanna: Right, right. The image that I get was like, yes, you can stop something immediately by shutting it down. But if we're speaking of fractals, it also has its ripple effects. So how are then these, the after effects being perpetuated and going to resemble that initial shut down? So the question. Maybe backing up is if this is our action of shut down, trusting that that will be the ripple effect action.

Kazu: Yeah.

Deanna: I picture like in a speedboat, if we're in a speedboat, there is the motor underwater and this is probably. I'm paralleling it in psychology of like the core wound. That underwater the motor is the one guiding the boat. But if we are just addressing the wake, well, how effective is that? We actually need to be tuning to and shifting the motor which is actually driving the boat. Is that?

Kazu: Yeah. No, I love that. Like shutting things down is like it's much easier and it has this like immediate impact, right? Like if someone, if a person is acting out of their trauma to shut them down and to lock them up or whatever is immediately effective in stopping that behavior, but it does nothing to heal the wound that gave rise to that action those choices that this person is making, right? And so again, like if our only goal is to fix issues, then shutting down might be effective. But if our intention is the healing of trauma, the healing of relationships, then we need to be utilizing other strategies and tactics. And what does that look like at scale in a world that is falling apart? Right? That is I make it very clear and fierce vulnerability. Like I don't have I don't know like I don't have any of those answers, but it's a lot of the questions and experiments that we're running.

Deanna: Those questions are important though. And yeah, I want to go to what you began the chapter Living in a Fractal World with a quote from bell hooks that kind of brings it all together. You said bell hooks said, “I have seen that we cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working toward that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change, our collective struggle is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally.”

Kazu: Yeah, there's a lot there.

Deanna: There's a accountability and ownness of how we shift the train that. Yes, stop the train, shift the change, shift the trajectory and coming back to wow.

Kazu: Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, there's there's so much to that in so many ways in which our unhealed traumas impact our ability or lack thereof to create long-term systemic change. There's the obvious like if I have unhealed trauma then I'm bringing that unhealed trauma into my movement spaces and our movements are less effective because we're always fighting with each other. But also, you know, like when I when I had that moment at that first jam that I went to, one of the things that I realized in that moment was like, oh, I need to have a conversation with my family about our early childhood trauma. And if I'm going to heal my wounds, if I'm going to heal the wounds that still exist in my family, we need to have that conversation. And that was the scariest conversation I could think to have in that moment and it took me eight years of therapy and meditation retreats and going to more jams and all this work to build up the courage and the capacity to have to initiate that conversation with my family. And it was the scariest thing of my life. And if we are going out into the world pointing our fingers and demanding racial justice and racial healing what we are essentially asking is that our collective body begins to unpack and have conversations about some of the earliest wounds as that we have collectively. And so like.

Deanna: That have not been discussed.

Kazu: That have not been discussed.

Deanna: Or acknowledged.

Kazu: And so if I have not done my own shadow work and be willing to look at my own core wounds, then I am in no position to point my fingers and say I am demanding that we collectively do this. And so I think the more and I've experienced that I'm so far from healed. Healed is not like a destination, right? But as I've continued to go deeper in my own healing journey, I have this like embodied understanding of what healing takes and what it looks like and if we don't understand what healing means in our own bodies, then we are not going to be able to be effective agents of change and trying to bring healing out into the world. And so yeah, I mean, I think bell hooks and the Buddha and Jesus and all these people have always said that, right? That like if we don't understand what change looks like in our own bodies, then then good luck trying to build a movement that is trying to demand that of the outside world.

Deanna: Which also speaks to what you're saying around that core wound. There is a book, The Body Keeps the Score. So we can know we can know but there is a knowing to develop and that is the journey not a destination of really being able to develop that. Beautiful. One thing that was really heartwarming in the same chapter around fractals was also you said the same way that this trauma perpetuates so or you know shows up in fractals so does healing and that feels important to continue like titrating between what feels egregious and harmful while also knowing what we're seeing the polar opposite also exists. I wonder if you can speak more to that because that felt like important to hold again as we're holding paradox.

Kazu: Yeah, a lot that I could say to that. Yeah, you know, like if the universe is built on fractals, then it means that the the changes that are possible at the smallest scale are also possible at the larger scales is one of the things that Adrian Marie Brown talked about right, but the same kind of principles and the strategies that guide personal healing at the smallest scale also has to apply at the largest scale and it's one of the main theories of fierce vulnerability. You know one example, it's not in the book because it's an insight that I had just recently that I've been thinking a lot about is I have an aunt. She was my favorite aunt when I was a kid. She was like my hippie aunt, you know, my cool hippie aunt and over the last 10 years or so she's become like a climate change denying Trump supporter and it's this weird like there's this whole world of like mostly like spiritual progressive folks that have gone in the far right over the last decade or so and she's one of these people and when I talked to my mom and my other aunts about it, they're all basically like forget about her like she's gone. There's no use talking to her definitely do not engage with her about anything political and it's hard because she's always sending me links to these like YouTube videos that I should watch about how climate change is a hoax and all these things and I think about my commitment to nonviolence and nonviolence is about learning to engage with conflict, right? And it's about learning to speak truth to conflict. And so when I think about how I engage with her and the truth that I want to communicate with her, the first truth that comes to my mind is going I imagine myself like going to her and being like your understanding of climate data is wrong. That is true, I believe. And it would be like this like fierce like you are wrong conversation and at the same time I can imagine how that conversation would go and when I ask myself like is there a deeper truth a more vulnerable truth that I could express to her, what emerges is something that sounds a little bit more like you used to be my favorite aunt, and I grieve the relationship that we don't have anymore, and I'm worried about you that all of our family members are deserting you, and you are becoming more and more isolated, and I don't know what's going on in your life that you are valuing these things more than your family relationships, and like what happened? That is a much more vulnerable truth. It's a much harder truth for me to express to her, and it requires me to do some work on my end so that I can have that conversation with her but it's a conversation that I feel like is much more likely to not shut things down but open things up right? It has a much larger possibility for for connection and transformation and healing while also not allowing her to continue to spew all these delusions that I think are hurting people and so that to me is what fierce vulnerability looks like at the interpersonal level. And so again like how do we scale that up when we're organizing a political demonstration or an organizing campaign, instead of moving with this we are here to shut things down because you're wrong and we're demanding this piece of legislation are there deeper more vulnerable truths that we can lead with because in my experience the moment that one person models vulnerability, it just opens up possibilities for transformation and healing and connection that weren't there before. And so what would it look like to lead a demonstration instead of saying we're here to demand this, to lead with something that sounds more like I am here because I'm scared. I'm here because I'm scared for the welfare of my child. I'm scared because of the impact that all these issues are having on my community. You know, obviously there's a long lineage of movements that have always led with that kind of message, but I guess I'm curious what are the possibilities that opens up when we lead with vulnerability more than we leading with this message of like you are wrong and I am right.

Deanna: As you're saying that there's also one thing I appreciated. What settled my nervous system in the book was that you often come back to there are layers like. One is the vulnerability. Another is a hard stop and you know shutting down. So there's something around giving a sense of freedom. As I was reading I was really trying to find like what are these qualities of that? What are these qualities are speaking to when you speak to vulnerability? You keep speaking to relationship and I wonder if you can also bring in this curiosity that you keep bringing in here and that you have in the book like I don't have the answers. I have a lot of questions.

Kazu: Yeah, I think you know the subtitle of the book is what is it healing from trauma emerging through collapse?

Deanna: Let's see. Yes.

Kazu: Yeah, we went through multiple edits of that. But so part of it is, part of the book is like acknowledging the moment that we are in as a species and that we are in this moment where are facing social ecological economic political collapse. The, all these systems are in a state of collapse and what does it mean to be doing healing work in the context of that? What does it mean to have, be able to cultivate curiosity in the midst of that? And I think one of the things that got us as a species into this mess into this like place that we are in where all these systems are in a state of collapse is the worldview that if I think long and hard enough, then I will be able to figure out like all of the steps between here and liberation, right? And I love this this this idea that I read from this book Reinventing Organizations years ago where the author was talking about the difference between something that is complicated and something that is complex and he says that the engine of like a 747 jet plane is a complicated piece of machinery. There's thousands of pieces and gears that go into it. And if you remove one gear you can use logic to map out all of the impacts that that change is going to have on the system. Whereas a bowl of spaghetti might only have three ingredients, but if you start pulling on one strand you have no idea how it's going to impact the system and he says that the world that we live in is not a complicated place. It is a complex place and there's no way for us to understand all of the impacts that our actions are going to have and therefore no way to understand how we build this like work plan towards liberation. And I think so much of the work that we need to do is to remind ourselves that we live inside of a complex living organism, and we have very little control over the large changes that are happening on this planet and to just accept the vulnerability and the humility of saying we have no idea what it takes, what it's going to take to turn this ship around. In fact, there's probably nothing we can do to turn the ship around but that's not going to stop us from doing something to try to continue to create community, to create beauty, to affirm life. And so I think that's a lot of what fierce vulnerability is trying to tap into as well. Of the humility to say we don't have any of the answers. We actually don't know what to do, but we're going to try to do something anyways as a way to try to move towards beauty and life and connection and relationships.

Deanna: You, coming back to what you said earlier around delusions and that is one of the delusions you name around knowing.

Kazu: The delusion of knowing.

Deanna: The delusion of knowing because what you're saying is not only is it crazy making to think that we will map this entire path out, but there's something around we are creating from the level of consciousness of where we at. So that's also assuming that we're not going to grow in some way along the path.

Kazu: And it's important to have like the long-term vision. But there's there's another thing that I read once that says like a farmer has a vision of what they want their farm to look like 20 years from now, and they know the thing that they need to do tomorrow and everything else is about like sensing and responding, right? So I think a lot of fierce vulnerability is about like my intuition is saying that we need to do this next step and then the step after that will emerge once we do that step.

Deanna: Right. The word that comes up for me, which is also a thread in your book is, trust. How do we trust this process? And with fractals if we're doing like your description of the farmer 20 years out while also trusting there is a. The map is not the territory. So I have this map, but the territory is like if I'm driving to LA, it's not a squiggly line. I'm going to go up a hill, downhill. That's not all mapped out, and how could I ever know that and I really miss a lot.

Kazu: Yeah, totally.

Deanna: I tried to know it and miss the opportunities in my knowing.

Kazu: Howard Zerr once said that restorative justice is a compass, not a map. I think it's a similar concept.

Deanna: I love it. Love it. I'm still holding this thread of qualities of being engaged because I guess that's what I really hold is like how do we move from the knowing or a lot of folks are using the word decolonize or collective, you know, beloved community. How does that look individually? And another word that comes up for me is forgiveness. I was really struck by the story you shared in that chapter.

Kazu: Cynthia and Richard.

Deanna: Yes. And I wonder if you could speak to that.

Kazu: Yeah. So, you know, one of the greatest privileges I've ever had is the opportunity to work with incarcerated people and survivors of significant harm and many, many years ago I had an opportunity to work with this woman named Cynthia. Actually, there's a woman that works at CIIS Sonya who got me involved in doing a lot of restorative justice work and through her organization, the Ahimsa Collective, this woman Cynthia reached out to us because she wanted to have a dialogue with the man who is responsible for taking her son's life. And so me and my co-facilitator Bonnie drove up three hours from Oakland to meet with this woman for the first time and she was amazing. Like I don't know what spiritual work you need to do to have that amount of compassion and clarity after losing your son to violence. But we met with her and then we met with Richard who is one of the men convicted of murdering her son. He's currently serving a life sentence in Old Folsom State Prison, and we worked with both of them individually for about six months to prepare to bring them together. And I will never remember the day that that dialogue happened where we brought Cynthia into the prison and we sat her down and we kind of settled her into the room that the dialogue was going to happen. And I went around the corner to the holding tank where Richard was being held and he was already shaking, you know, and so I sat down. I put my hand on his shoulder and I was talking to him and at some point I was like, I'm as ready as I'll ever be. He stood up and went around the corner and when he turned the corner he saw Cynthia in the room at the end of the hall and he just completely broke, like he just collapsed and he was crying and crying and Cynthia saw that and from the end of the hall she stood up and just like opened her arms and embraced Richard in this hug that felt like it lasted for hours. And then they just talked for six hours straight. The only thing that Bonnie or I said throughout the entire six hour journey is about four hours in Bonnie said, “Do y’all need a break or anything? Like you need water? Bathroom?” And they just talked and there was this moment where Cynthia was holding Richard's hands and she said, “I had a dream that I needed to hold your hands because these are the hands that took my son's life away and I need to have a different relationship with them.” And then there was another moment when she was talking to him. They're both indigenous and grew up in the small Rancheria in Northern California, and Mitch Cynthia's son used to play baseball, and Richard played baseball on the same team. And so Cynthia said, you know, I remember when I used to drive Mitch to baseball practice. I'd always every time I'd see you walking to practice and I felt bad for you because I knew you came from this broken home and there was no one there that could drive you to practice, and I always cared for you. I always thought about you, and Richard said in that moment that back then when he was a young kid walking to baseball practice growing up in this broken home, he felt like nobody saw him. That nobody cared for him. And now 30 years later to hear from the mother of the person that he murdered that she cared for him, that she saw him and witnessed him in that moment just lifted this burden. And not only like, and I and I share the story with with both of their permission, like not only is that such an important story to remind us of what we are capable of as a species. Like we are capable of that depth of healing. It's a lot of work. I'm sure that both of them had to do to get there, but we as a species are capable of that. Like we can bounce back from that. And one of my favorite quotes of all time is a paraphrase of Sobonfu Somé who said, “Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.” Like through that extremely escalated conflict, they were actually able to deepen in relationship. Like that is possible. Right. So that's important, but it's also important because you know when like the ultimate truth when you go out into the universe when you go out into space there is no up or down. There is no right or wrong. There is no left or right or back or forward. In this incident, it's like Richard is the quote unquote perpetrator and Cynthia is the quote unquote victim or survivor and in some ways he was Cynthia holding space for Richards healing, and like if you look at healing in this linear way, and we oftentimes look at harm as this like binary linear way in this black and white way you could say wait that's not how that's supposed to happen like Richard is supposed to be accountable to help Cynthia heal. But a lot of what I'm also offering in this book is are these questions about does the simple binary worldview of perpetrator and victim, right and wrong, actually create this delusion that harm is this simplistic black and white thing? And I you know I write a lot about how like the binary worldview I think in so many ways is actually a violent worldview that is not true that is not real, right? And so I think it's another a powerful story that reminds us that healing is not a linear process, and it can happen in all directions and when an incident of violence happens, it's never as clear as like one person did the violence and the other person experienced it. We're all hurt by the dynamics of violence and we're all trying to heal from it. And I think that's an important thing to remember when we think about things like collective healing.

Deanna: I've been finding that in spaces there's more opportunity for that to be uplifted. That everyone like, there is, everyone has been harmed in different ways.

Kazu: I’m glad to hear that.

Deanna: I'm curious with you sharing that what Cynthia said. “I wanted to be in different relationship with the hands that killed my son.” For you, what, what have you needed to in your journey be in different relationship with in order to engage in non-violence while in the midst of these systems?

Kazu: The first thing that comes to mind is a few years ago, I was in a really really escalated conflict. The hardest thing I've ever been through my entire life since I was a child. And at the time the people that I was in conflict with it was very clear that they had like shut the doors. They were not interested in having a real dialogue, and I felt like my body's need for relational healing just like hit up like, come up against the wall and at the same time I realized that like this this this need for relational healing needed to happen somewhere. And so, I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who are restorative justice facilitators and had them go looking for my old stepfather who was like the source of a lot of our childhood violence at home that I was just mentioning earlier and I hadn't seen him in 20 years or something. I was like I need this like relational healing energy to move in some direction. So I'm going to move it in that direction just to move the energy and to try to change my relationship with him because I know that you know, I've done a lot of healing with my family still have a lot I need to do, but at least I started some of those conversations with them. I've never talked to him right. I still remember the last time I talked to him was a couple years after my mom got divorced, and I bumped into him in some, in some shopping mall and he came right up to me. I was like 19 or 20. He came right up to me, and I could see the tears in his eyes, and he said I never meant to hurt your family. Which at the time was a little difficult to hear because I was like I don't know what that means because you clearly made decisions that did for many years. And so at the time as a 19, 20 year old kid, I didn't know what to say. So I just turned around didn't say anything to him and walked away. And I, looking back on it, I regret that and I want to redo that relationship. And so sadly we found him and I think it was in Arkansas or something like that and as soon as we found him he passed away. So I didn't. I wasn't able to have that conversation with him. But even just the attempt to try to move in that direction meant that I had to have even deeper conversations with my own family and get their consent for me to reach out to him and the internal journey that I had to have to explain to my my facilitators why I wanted to have this conversation with them began to shift my relationship with him and I could now see him not just as the person who caused so much harm but I like I see his face the last time I saw him at that mall and like the tears welling up in his eyes and I'm like you were such a broken man that had so much hurt and didn't know what to do with it and you needed to release it in some way and you didn't have healthy avenues to release it and it got released on us. Doesn't change any of what happened and I feel like just the process of me trying to change my relationship with them even without that dialogue taking place really did you know? And and and that has helped me understand again like in the law of fractals. What does that mean for my relationship with somebody like a Donald Trump, who is so easy for me to be like F this person. And at the same time, in the same way that I saw that trauma from my stepfather like someone that works with trauma like it is so obvious to me that Trump is such a deeply traumatized person operating from a place of fear and insecurity and isolation. And while I will do everything I can to challenge everything he does, a part of me can begin to have more compassion for the place of emptiness that he is so clearly operating from. So yeah. Like what can I do in my own personal life to change my relationship with even people like him.

Deanna: Thank you for sharing that story, your stepfather, my heart feels tender.

Kazu: Thank you. Tom Dostoe was his name.

Deanna: And it also leads me to think around. Ripples. We don't, that I guess that how do we continue because I don't think that you're alone in wanting to heal a relationship and it's not possible in the human realm and so less of a it's it's a curiosity of how do we engage in this healing in many forms? Yeah.

Kazu: I remember my my first therapist once told me that sometimes our bodies have these like deeply felt emotions that are really confusing because they're not clearly attached to a story. Like if I like, I can feel the shame that I still you know have little bits and pieces of from not being there for my family more. Like it makes sense to me that feeling because I can tie it to a story, right? But there's oftentimes these feelings that we have that we can't immediately tie to a story and oftentimes we don't know the story because it's not our harm it's our ancestors harm that we've that we've kind of adopted. And so we don't know what to do with that and and that doesn't mean that we don't have opportunities to work with that and to heal those wounds, right? And so I think you know similar to my stepfather like I may not be able to have the actual like in person human conversation with them but there's a lot that we can do to heal wounds with people that we don't have opportunities to talk to with people ancestors that we've never known. You know I just came out of one of the most one of the more powerful kind of rituals that I've been to in a long time was. You know I'm Japanese. I was born in Japan and we had a healing ritual between several Japanese people and people of mostly Korean descent around the violence that my ancestors committed during WWII. And you know I wasn't around then I don't I don't know anyone that was directly impacted and it was one of the most healing rituals I've ever been to and so I think it's important to remember that you don't need the in-person dialogue to create healing.

Deanna: Mm-hmm. I'm feeling our time coming to us so unless we have a nonviolent approach to protesting.

Kazu: Oh we could definitely just stay here.

Deanna: Yeah. There is a train that I jumped off. I've lost my train of thought.

Kazu: There's other trains that we can hop on.

Deanna: There are a lot of trains we could hop on. I think it's connected to what you're saying around the oh that's what I was going to say just to name that the research epigenetics that's what I was going to say the research of epigenetics that and to plug somatic psychology and somatic practitioners because that is a big part of the traumas being preverbal. Yeah. In the lineage. And how do we even without a story still touch in on the felt sense and the energy because we know energy doesn't die it moves. So how do we and shame is lives and breathe breathes off of the silence. So how do we either in our bodies or through words or movement all of the ways just begin moving the energy and creating the ripples?

Kazu: And Brene Brown says, “Shame derives its power from being unspoken.”

Deanna: Oh yeah.

Kazu: We when we don't speak to our shame then it actually has more and more power over us. Actually, I also just share that my the first therapist session I ever went to with my first therapist that I was just talking about after the sessions goes you don't need therapy. You just need to learn to be in your body more. And so somatics has been a big journey for me as well.

Deanna: Right, right. I guess I just want to, we've journeyed and so much so so many places in this hour. So I do want to see what what hasn't been said that feels important to name in our time together today.

Kazu: Yeah, there's a lot but just given the time I'll just share this that you know, I started doing nonviolent trainings when I was 19 years old and at the time those trainings were just like nonviolent civil disobedience trainings. I was preparing masses of people to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience risk arrest all those things. So we would learn how to form blockades and work with the police and work with the media and lawyers and all that. And I think all of that is still important. But in doing this work of healing at scale, I think the importance of like if we are going to go out into the world into demonstrations and lead with our vulnerability, then it is very possible that things might happen. Like we might lead with our vulnerability in our open hearts and we might get tear gassed and arrested and that could be retraumatizing. And so, you know, one of the things that we're experimenting in fierce vulnerability is to lead demonstrations with our hearts wide open, but there's a beautiful quote from Reverend Nadia Bolz Weber who says, “Preach from your scars not from your wounds.” And so the importance of doing healing work in our movement spaces not so that we can feel like we are personally liberated. I think I talked about how like individual liberation is a delusion. There's no such thing as individual liberation in an interdependent world. And so we do the work of personal healing so that we can be more grounded in these movement spaces so that we can offer more healing to the world. And so I like so much of the important the work that we're talking about in fierce vulnerability is the the undeniable connection between personal training and systemic a personal transformation and systemic transformation. And to not think that like I can just do my therapy over here just for my own benefit or I can do social change work and not look at my own shadows because if we're not doing one or the other, we're always going to be spinning our wheels.

Deanna: Well, this concludes our time. Thank you so much for your contribution for your work past present and future and I'm calling in that dream too.

Kazu: Thank you so much and thank you all for being here. 

Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live.

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