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Kazu - Fierce Vulnerability in a Fractured World · The soulnotskin Podcast with Jen SluMac

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: This was years ago.
• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I was working in a county jail with a young man who was pretrial.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: He was almost in tears, desperate.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was saying, I want to tell you what I did.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk to the family that I hurt.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I want to apologize to the people that I impacted.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: But my lawyer says, I can't.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: We are living in a time in history in our species that there are so many things that are on fire, literally and figuratively.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there's so much division and so much fracture.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And all of those things are true.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I really do believe that we are in the midst of a transition into a much more beautiful world.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Soul Knot Skin Podcast, a virtual living room, a safe, welcoming place to land where you can share and share stories straight from the heart.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your host, Jen Splumack, or as my students like to call me, this Jen.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about the real human experience, the hard stuff, the wonderful stuff, and the messy everyday growth that shapes who we become.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Real stories, real people, real insight, becoming who we are.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Settle in and let's dive into today's episode.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very excited about our guests today.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: We have Kazu Haga, who's a lineage-based nonviolence trainer and a leading voice in Kenyan nonviolence, but he's also an author and he's done all kinds of incredible work.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I met you, Kazu, if I'm not mistaken, uh when we were both yeah, a long time ago.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: We both have a little gray, you and your children on the top of my head.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you're still doing the good work, right?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're both still doing the good work in one way or another.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: So yay us.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, we met doing restorative justice training with uh a gentleman who I've also interviewed before, uh Troy Williams.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Troy lives next door.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just saw him.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Come on.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, I live in community with them.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Troy's amazing, and he was doing the training for Vogue, uh victim offender education group that we were training, restorative justice work.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I know that we have a lot of the same type things on our heart for the world.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: So if you would tell us about who you are and uh why it is that you do what you do, what got you into this work?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's uh actually a big question for me.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So um I am a father, I am a trainer in nonviolence and practitioner and restorative justice and mindfulness, and been in activism and movement building work for 25 years.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a resident of a community here called Canticle Farms, which is a community of 45 people trying to figure out how to build a village in the midst of social collapse, economic collapse.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Troy is a part of that community.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um and my work is really at the intersection of trauma healing, spiritual practice broadly defined, and nonviolent action and trying to understand, you know, like a lot of the restorative justice dialogues that that that we've all been a part of, that the two of us have been a part of, and Troy's been a part of.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: What would it look like to take those kinds of dialogues and the spirit that underpins them and move them up scale and have imagine social movements as a modality of collective trauma healing and as a way to try to bring communities together at larger and larger scales as opposed to just working on individuals.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so love that.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: I can't wait to hear more about that.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask you to go back for a minute and talk to our audience about what restorative justice is when you're doing it with the individuals, because I don't know if folks are gonna be familiar with that.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, restorative justice isn't one thing.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, it's a worldview that suggests that when harm happens, there's a fracture in the relationship and there is an imbalance in the kind of like harmony of the ecosystem of the universe.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And our goal is to restore balance, to restore justice by bringing the two sides together and figuring out together as the person that committed the harm, as the people that that experienced the harm, what is the best way to move forward?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: How can we heal what we can and grieve what we can't?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in the criminal justice system today, when harm happens, the person that committed the harm and the person who experienced the harm actually have very little voice in the process.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the judges and it's the lawyers who get to guide the entire process.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the only question that's asked is is the person guilty?
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And if so, what is the punishment they should they should receive?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And in restorative justice, those questions don't matter as much.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: The questions are what happened, who was impacted, how can we heal as much as we can heal?
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what are the things that we need to do together moving forward to try to bring some sense of balance and order back into our lives and into our community?
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, such a beautiful description.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for laying that out so perfectly.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of my favorite stories that I'll try to keep real brief here that sort of illustrates this whole thing was with a young man who had uh tagged or spray painted on a uh newly painted garage door in his neighborhood.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the long and short of it is the woman called the police, the police came out, uh, somebody in the neighborhood saw who did it, the kid got brought in, and um, you know, he was typically going to go to juvenile hall and he was going to spend his time there and probably age out and end up incarcerated, uh, and all of these things because he had a bit of a record.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: What ended up happening instead is there was a restorative justice intervention, and somebody came together to mediate.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: They brought the woman we found out was a widow, uh, whose garage door was painted on, and the young man who uh was, I don't know, 16, just a knucklehead with his friends, right?
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they sat down with the mediator and had a conversation.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And what they got to do is each tell their side of the story.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Why did they do this and why did it heart hurt me or what motivated me?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: The young man talked about how he's trying to belong with his friends, man.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: He just so badly wanted to be a part of this group, these guys, he doesn't have any brothers, he feels alone.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Da-da-da-da.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: The woman said that she was harmed and hurt, not just because her garage door was painted, but because her husband was sick for like five years and he was in physical and mental decline, and he managed to paint the house so that he would be able to leave her well off.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted the home to be her home.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: So he had painted that garage door not five months earlier.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And when the young man heard that, and and they just sort of saw each other as humans instead of being mad at each other for the harm caused, it was this whole different thing, right?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh suddenly there's no monsters.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now we're looking at people, right?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and the hearts, and we're seeing what's real.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: So what ended up happening was this young man needed work, this woman needed help.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: So he, in sort of a way of making amends, started buying groceries and bringing them to her, helped her do laundry, like became part of her family, and she sort of became a family member to him.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_01: And like, oh my god, that's that's one example of how beautiful this stuff can be.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Can I can I share another short story about what happens when those opportunities aren't there?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: For some reason, when when you were sharing that, it reminded me of a story of when I was this was years ago.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was working in a county jail with a young man who was pre-trial.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was talking to him, he was almost in tears, desperate.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: He was saying, I want to tell you what I did, I want to talk to the family that I hurt, I want to apologize to the people that I impacted, but my lawyer says I can't.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I if I apologize, then I'm admitting guilt and I'll be thrown in prison.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so here was this young man who was ready to be accountable, wanting to apologize.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the system places him in this role of being a defendant, and his job is to say, no, I didn't do that, that wasn't me.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so that just goes to show like what's possible when you actually bring people together without fear of consequence and they can actually share each other's stories versus what happens when we put people into these unjust systems, right?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and it's such beautiful work, it's such beautiful work, and that's an example that just it just uh breaks my heart and it also frustrates the heck out of me because um, you know, we're supposed to have, you know, trial by your peers, and and there's just no room for that anymore.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Michelle Alexander wrote about uh the new Jim Crow, and she said, you know, if we actually had trials for people, the system would break.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no room, like we have to just get people, bring them in there, make a deal, and call it a day, and everybody gets some time.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: So uh, and yeah, and so the fracturing of relationships, and this just goes deeper and deeper and deeper in generational, right?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: So now we've got dads who are incarcerated, or families who have lost a son to homicide, or you've got all of these broken relationships, and it just keeps building further out and it's deeper into the um DNA of our society, yeah, right, and it's it's buried because you don't talk about yeah, yeah, and you don't talk about this stuff, you don't talk about my son who committed this crime because you're ashamed.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: You don't talk about my son got murdered at work because you're supposed to be professional, right?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: So all of these things just get buried, and we're all behaving from them.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, someone at a conference that I was at years ago called it the tyranny of civility, right?
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like we're supposed to be polite, we're supposed to be professional, don't bring up your personal stuff.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: And so we don't have spaces, we don't have the relationships in our communities where we can actually talk about what's actually real in our lives, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um before we get into talking about your your most recent book, um, I also trained with you at your spot in Oakland some time ago when you were doing Kingian nonviolence training.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: King being from um, you know, the the work of Dr.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: King, Martin Luther King Jr., uh, of course, inspired by Gandhi, right?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so the nonviolent um work in the world, can you tell us a little about what that was so that we can leap then into what you're doing now?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so Kingian nonviolence is the philosophy that really like threw me into this work for for like for real, for real.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I what I learned from Dr.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther King is that nonviolence is like it's a word that we use so often and is so misunderstood.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: And people typically think nonviolence is about going to a political demonstration and not throwing a Molotov cocktail.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if that's our understanding of nonviolence, then you could argue that that the Ku Klux Klan uses nonviolence when they hold their marches, right?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because at least while they're marching, they're not throwing Molotov cocktails.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: But through the work of Dr.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: King, I really learned that the word nonviolence, in its essence, at its core, is about this unwavering knowing that we are an interdependent species and we live in an interdependent universe.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And as Dr.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther King said, that whatever affects one person directly affects all indirectly, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: That we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied into a single garment of destiny.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so this idea that we all belong to each other and that our liberation is tied with the liberation of all people, not just the people that we like, but our liberation is actually bound with the liberation of the people that hurt us, and you really see that in restorative justice work.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, to me, that is the essence of what it means to practice nonviolence is to really hold that as the central kind of worldview.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I um Dr.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: King sort of kept me afloat with hope for this crazy world for many years, just uh reading reading his work and uh and not just, I mean, listening to his sermons and and reading about his story and just really uh digging into the stuff that was well beyond and and often hidden uh beneath the uh I have a dream speech, which is sort of the popular two-dimensional Dr.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: King that most folks um are familiar with.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've also heard nonviolence be thought of.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you take if you take the the two big things that were going on at the time, the uh the black power movement and the nonviolent um resistance movements.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have love and appreciation of both because there's a lot going on in both of them.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Again, not as simple as people I think first imagine.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um but in at first glance, a lot of folks have said that uh the resistance, the nonviolent resistance is weak.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I know it's not a weak thing because it is not easy to be kind and not reactive when being assaulted, either physically or economically or politically.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um so break that down for a minute.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say to somebody who calls this work unrealistic or weak?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean, there's so much I could say to that, but I think I want to say two things.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: One is my mentor, Dr.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Bernard Lafayette, who was one of the leaders of the civil rights movement, he recently passed away.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: He's the guy that trained me in King and nonviolence.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he was the first national organizer to go to Selma, Alabama.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he's the one that organized and set the stage for the voting rights movement that happened after that.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the first day he went to Selma, because the white supremacists got word that he was coming to town to organize there, pretty much the moment he got on the bus, he got beaten bloody.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that, you know, after the guys went away, he looked at his this white t-shirt that he was wearing and it was covered in blood.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he said for the next three days, as he started his organizing and knocking on doors and starting to talk to people in Selma about voting rights, he kept that bloody shirt on to show people how committed he was to his struggle.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that was one of like 16 times that he was beaten throughout his life.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: He survived an assassination attempt.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you can't tell me that that is weak, right?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the essence of nonviolence is to be so committed to the work of justice that you're willing to sacrifice yourself.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like Dr.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Lafayette and many of the leaders that went on the freedom rides, they had to sign over their will before they went on those buses because they knew that they were risking their lives, right?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and nonviolence is not just about attending a permitted rally where there's no risk of being injured or arrested or anything.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's part of it, of course, to be uh to make your voice heard in any way that you're able to.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: But a commitment to nonviolence is a fierce commitment to putting yourself in situations of violence and trying to transform that.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one thing that I want to say.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the second thing I want to say is that the the binary that's oftentimes presented to us of the nonviolent civil rights movement and the violent black power movement wasn't as far apart as we like to think.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: The civil rights movement, you know, when Dr.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: King was was assassinated, was organizing a movement that a movement of mass civil disobedience that in Dr.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: King's words would cripple the infrastructure of Washington, D.C.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that we need a movement.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: The the poor people's campaign.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he said he we needed a nonviolent movement that was nonviolent but as disruptive and as dislocative as a riot, right?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the other side, we have to remember that the Black Panther Party weren't just people who took up arms, but they got their power because of the nonviolent work that they were doing in their community, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: Of being in service to their community through the free healthcare programs, the educational programs, the breakfast programs, and being in relationship, deep loving relationship with their people.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, both of those movements showed incredible courage, sometimes with violence and sometimes with nonviolence.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I just want to name that those two movements weren't as far apart as we like to think they are.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, I appreciate that.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you've written two books.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: Three books, two books.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: Two for now.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the most recent and the most recent is called uh Fierce Vulnerability.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about this book.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: So this book is is really exploring the intersection of trauma healing and spiritual practice, again, broadly defined, and nonviolent action.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: Acknowledging that, you know, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther King, all these people who advocated for nonviolence in the past did not have access to the science of trauma healing and understand the science of nervous system dysregulation and all these things.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm trying to infuse our movements with a at least a basic understanding of how violence impacts our nervous system, what trauma does to our brains, and really understand even nonviolent resistance work as a modality of collective trauma healing.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so the intersection of all three of those things, spiritual practice, um, nonviolent action, and trauma healing, within the context of what many people call the poly crisis, what our elder and recent ancestor, Joanna Macy, called the Great Turning, like we are in this moment in human history where there are changes happening to our species, to this earth that is at a scale that is almost unimaginable, partly because of the climate crisis.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so, what does it mean to be human?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: What does it mean to advocate for social change when everything around us seems like it is in a state of collapse and the rules of engagement that we have been trained, many of us as activists and as social change activists, um, may no longer apply.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that those are some of the the um the theories, the hypotheses, the experiments that we're running in fierce vulnerability.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um one of the things that I know about it is that it sort of challenges the polite version of nonviolence and proposes uh the two hands of nonviolence, which uh you may have sort of touched on already, but I'd love for you to go into a little bit more.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the system of trauma and the myth of separation.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: These are all things that we've sort of touched on, but if you could go in and uh sort of paint those out for us.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the two hands of nonviolence comes from a piece of writing by an old feminist activist named Barbara Demings.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: She wrote an essay called Uh Revolution and Equilibrium.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in that essay, there's a short passage that's become known as the two hands of nonviolence.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of my all-time favorite descriptions.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't quote it um, you know, word for word, but the idea is that the practitioner of nonviolence has one hand out, and that hand says no.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And with that hand, we say no to your injustice, no to your violence, no to your weapons.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: We we refuse to pay for your guns, we refuse to pay for your wars.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: With this hand, we will even interrupt the easy pattern of your life, right?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: I will disrupt everything that you are doing that is causing violence.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: But then the practitioner of nonviolence has the other hand open and outstretched, sometimes with love and compassion, sometimes not, but always outstretched.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: And with this hand, we say we will never let go of your dignity, we will never let go of your um position as a member of beloved community.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: We know you can make better choices than you're making now, and we will be here for you when you are ready.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, the the balance of both of those two hands is what practicing nonviolence is about.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: When someone is being abusive, when they are practicing uh power over in ways that is causing harm, we need to do everything we can to stop that person from continuing to cause harm.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to remember that one of the reasons we are doing that is because we know that they are a sacred human being and that when they are causing harm, they are not at their best.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: And part of what we are doing is to try to remind them that they are better than this, right?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: That they can be more than this violent person.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And the the uh the myth of separation speaks to that too.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: That, you know, I've come to believe, as I was sharing before, I think, that the essence of nonviolence is about this unwavering belief that we are an interdependent species.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, practicing violence requires one to live in the delusion of separation.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: It requires us to live in this worldview that says, I can hurt you and somehow benefit from that.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: I can hurt somebody else, and somehow I will get closer to liberation because of the Harm that I'm committing to you.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I can do that because you and I are not interdependent in any way, right?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like my liberation is mine, your liberation is yours.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a delusional worldview that I think belies the universal law of interdependence.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: I believe interdependence to be a universal law in the same way that gravity is a universal law, right?
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: It just is the way that our universe is structured.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think part of the work of nonviolence is helping ourselves, helping us as a species, as a culture, to try to get out of that delusion that says I can cause harm to somebody else and somehow benefit from that.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's so much.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you just made me think of one of my favorite quotes by uh I believe it was Mother Teresa, and she said, if we are um if there is no peace, it's because we've forgotten that we belong to each other.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I just really feel that.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: So uh so I appreciate that.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm really interested to ask you a few questions.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um some of the things that I've seen and some of the things that I experience, whether it's working in the jails or being with my family or um living where I live now versus living where I used to live, is uh there is this sort of um mindset that this work is an overreaction, that it doesn't, you know, it's it's not as bad as people think.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it's often uh, you know, when you're looking at sort of the the possibility for this being like um sure it's nonviolent, but but I but I but I do view the oppressor as the evil one, right?
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sure it's non-violent, but it's these systems that are built by the oppressor.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so whether it's like brown people and and white people or whether it's gay people and straight people or trans people, and whatever the case is, there is a there is two sides to this.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so many people don't see their side.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: How do you navigate that?
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: How do you do you understand what I'm sort of what what do you see, first of all, with um the work that you're doing?
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: Do you feel like you're working against or working with?
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think I know the answer to that.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um secondly, um for the people who don't see the harm that they're causing and they just think people are whining, how do you navigate that?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I mean, I I I think that in terms of the the the first question we live in a universe that is so nuanced and so complex, and there is something comforting and stabilizing about the binary black, white us versus them worldview.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have a lot of empathy for us wanting to believe that things are as simple as those people are the bad people, especially in such a destabilizing world with so many unknowns.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_00: We our nervous systems are comforted by the simplistic black-white analysis, right?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: But as you know from doing restorative justice work, like the more we unpack somebody's story, the more we begin to see that the simplistic black-white analysis almost never applies, especially when it comes to conflict and harm and oppression and injustice and all these things, right?
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think the importance of hearing each other's stories and recognizing that, you know, as Dr.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: King and many advocates of nonviolence before me have said, that our battle is not a battle between black people and white people or those people and these people.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's a battle between justice and injustice, right?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: That people are never the enemy, that it is fracture, it is division, it is violence itself the thing that we are trying to transform.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's really important.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then to your second question about you know, people who think we're just complaining and don't see the harm that they may be participating in.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the most important things about nonviolence is, and you know, like this isn't a uh a cookie-cutter approach, it doesn't always have to be this way, but too often when you think of a political demonstration, the messaging looks like you people are wrong, or the messaging looks like we demand this piece of legislation.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And there may be times when that's necessary, but oftentimes when we lead with those messages, the people on the other side receiving those messages get like defensive and they shut down.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Shut down.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, shut down.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the most powerful ways that we can pierce through the walls that people build up is when we are able to speak from a place of our own pain and our own impact.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: And when we can speak from a place of we are mobilizing around this issue because we are heartbroken about seeing our communities getting destroyed, right?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: And if we can lead with that kind of story, then it's a lot easier for people on the other side to connect with that and feel less defensive.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think one of the things that we need to do a better job of in nonviolent movements is really learning to access our the places where our hearts are broken and to heal those places enough.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: One of my favorite quotes comes from Reverend Nadia Bowles Weber who says, preach from your scars, not from your wounds.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Wow, and I can say that, and I didn't know who said it originally.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Reverend Nadia Bowles Weber, it's one of my favorite quotes, right?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so, like, I thought I made it out.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Our own wounds enough that we can build scars over them so that we can leave with those scars so that we can talk from a we can we can share our our needs and our perspectives from a place not of you're wrong and we demand this, but can you see that I am hurting?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I think that's a a much that that messaging creates a lot more opportunities and openings for dialogue and connection than simply pointing our fingers and making demands.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I love how you explain that, and I agree a hundred percent.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think the challenge is, as you pointed out, people's ability to become that vulnerable.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've got so much invested in uh being a part of this group or that group, or uh whatever the case may be, the binary, as you suggested, or as you uh pointed out, that uh it can be really hard to have the real conversations, the conversations from the heart for uh me who might have had uh some horrific experiences, be able to see that somebody who has something which might be considered far less uh traumatizing, but to them was very hurtful.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um to be able to hold space for that, you know, is really important.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: And um God, I love to think that we might get there one day.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: But in the butt, yeah.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Dr.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: King said that he saw it.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_01: He said I'm not gonna get there with you, but I saw it.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've been at the mountaintop, and we as a people will get to the promised land.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a lot of people don't know he he he said those words the night before he was assassinated.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I'm not afraid of what any man might do to me because I've seen the promised land, you know.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, yeah.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Any anyone would like to live a long life, longevity has its place, yeah, yeah.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so where do we go from here?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I am interested in seeing what kind of work you're doing with the book.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm also interested in, I know that you said that you got involved in this work and really drawn into it through Dr.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: King and um nonviolent resistance.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm curious about your own background in terms of um growing up and did you experience trauma?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Were you drawn into Dr.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: King through navigating your own trauma, or is it something that you haven't experienced but you've witnessed in the world and just have a heart for?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, so it actually does date back further than Dr.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: King, of course.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I was born in Japan into a relatively comfortable family life.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was seven years old, I experienced a pretty significant fracture in my family home.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, my mother was disowned from her family, and because of that, it's a long story, but that's we had to leave Japan.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's why we ended up in the United States, and then we moved to an almost all-white part of Massachusetts where we were the only immigrant household, we were the only Asian family in the entire school district.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: So all of those experiences were deeply, deeply traumatizing.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then my father passed away when I was 11.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: We were in the United States without any papers, without documentation, because we were here on my father's business visa and that died with him.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: And my mother ended up involved in a green car marriage with a person who ended up being really abusive and brought a lot of violence to our home.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that, like that relationship, was the the kind of like the straw that broke the camel's back for me after my family fracture and having to leave Japan and losing access to all of our family and living in this all-white community and experiencing a lot of racism and white supremacy and all these things.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: When the violence started happening in my own family home, it just broke me.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I dropped out of high school and I started getting involved in drinking and drugs.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: I dropped out of high school when I was 15.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was 17 years old, I heard about this thing called the interfaith pilgrimage of the Middle Passage.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it was a walking pilgrimage that a group of Japanese Buddhist monastics were organizing.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_00: They were going to walk from Massachusetts to New Orleans and then down the coast of Africa to retrace the slave route and to talk about the legacy of the enslavement of African peoples and how it still impacts this country today.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I was just in a place in my life where I was bored and I had nothing going for me.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Heard about it, the side of Africa, because I'm I heard the walk was a drug and alcohol-free walk.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I was like, oh, it'll be good for me to sober up for a little while.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so I told my mom I would check it out for a week.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then I ended up leaving home for a year and a half, and I walked all the way to New Orleans and then ended up living in their monasteries in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, for a year.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was my real introduction to this work.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was finding the teachings of Dr.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_00: Martin Luther King 10 years after that I really, really deepened my commitment to nonviolence specifically.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: But it was that pilgrimage and those monks and nuns that put me on the path of nonviolence and social justice and Buddhism and healing and all of that.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it was kind of a head-first uh, you know, experience for me.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's the kind of guy you are, though.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you do, you really do dive in and you and you put all of yourself into it.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: You don't leave in, you don't even leave your socks on the on the couch.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: You take it all with you.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's one of the things that I love and admire about you.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I want to be like you when I grow up, type of thing.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, it really is that and you know, Troy Williams is another one of those people.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, I really um I have a huge uh place in my heart for both of you, and and you've both helped me in uh ways undiscussed, that um that really helped me sort of move into a new chapter of my own life by spending that time with you guys that I was able to, that I was blessed to to spend with you.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um you keep using the word fracture instead of uh you know, broken or divorce, or maybe because divorce didn't happen, but the fracture, and that just keeps reminding me about the the source of all of the pain is the broken relationship.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: The source of all of the pain is the broken community, is the broken family home.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um I am really uh found myself digging deeply into ACE's at first childhood experiences and the whole movement about um, you know, what has happened to you before you turn 18 and uh finding a score, not to sort of diagnose you with the problems that are inevitable, but to give you a sense of um it's it's almost like it takes the work that we were doing in uh the prisons with the Vogue, it's almost like it takes it back a step, or at least it it sort of like um uh makes the beginnings of that work richer with vocabulary for sort of looking at uh the work that we did was like what happened to me instead of what's wrong with me.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to me and and beginning to recognize that, as you said, the nervous system dysregulated uh is very it it has a big impact on us, right?
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: It really can change so many things.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and also the the impact of realizing that if our home environment is safe, we have a manageable situation.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but if if your home had been safe before the green card marriage uh individual moved in and became abusive, you may have been able to move through that a little more smoothly.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the environment outside your home was toxic.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and what we know through the ACES studies too uh is just um if you have one space that's safe, then it's manageable.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard, but it's manageable.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: But if your home and your community and the larger world are all toxic and creating that toxic stress level, then I mean good luck to you, really.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because you just your your um nervous system is so absolutely constantly on fight, flight, fawn, freeze that you just you aren't working from your resources, you're working from a survival place which changes everything about how you move through the world.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you you mentioned the word fracture, like the the fractures in our family relationship, the instability in our family relationship ends up fracturing who we are in our own bodies, like it there's fracture in our own body, and that's how trauma works.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like I remember when I first started going to therapy as an adult, I had the story in my head that a lot of my childhood wounds like I had healed from and moved on just because time had passed.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_00: And my therapist kind of like stopped me and she's like, that is a delusion.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like all of your childhood wounds are still with you, but when you moved into that monastery, you just hit pause and you left that old life behind and you started a completely new life, but you never actually healed and integrated that part of who you are, though those experiences, right?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so I realized that part of the way my trauma worked is that it fragmented and fractured a part of me, where there was like the me before 17 when I moved into monastery, and then there was the me after I moved into monastery.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: And those were two separate beings, not realizing that all of the painful experiences that I went through before I turned 17 was still hiding somewhere in my body, right?
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I lived in this delusion and this fracture that said that, oh, that that's a separate part of who I am that no longer applies.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that, you know, when we look at because so much of my interest is taking these lessons from personal and interpersonal healing and trying to apply them to larger and larger scales.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: The same way that I used to say to myself, oh, time has has healed all wounds, those experiences that I went through 20 years ago, those were really scary, and I'm really glad I'm not there anymore.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_00: I moved on.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: At scale, this nation that we live in, the United States, does the same exact thing where we say, Oh, slavery that happened 200 years ago, then we're so glad that it's not the case anymore.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: We're a post-racial society, we've moved on.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: We've had a black president, everything is good.
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't realize that the trauma from enslavement of African peoples, the genocide of indigenous peoples, like all of that is still with us.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the work of healing is about taking all of those old traumatic wounds and actually having the courage to look at them and integrating them as part of who we are today.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that is so big and so important and so overlooked and so not talked about.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I absolutely agree with you.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in the spirit of the restorative justice that we were talking about earlier with the young man that's sort of spray painted on the garage, you know, you've got this young man and then you've got this older woman, and maybe from the outside looking in, you could uh make all sort of assumptions about the both of them or each of them.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Pazu, I think about the days of slavery.
• 40:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I think about myself being a white woman, I think about how much was alcoholism a part of the problem.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: How much did uh I mean, how fractured was a white home when the mother is not the caretaker, the child is loved by, nurtured by, and feels safe with the black woman.
• 40:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the mother has to deal with that.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: And in some instances, not all, but they became in relation, the the man and the and maybe the slave woman, and or the the woman that this young kid loves, they witness them being hit or beat by their parents that they're supposed to love and respect.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there is so much fracture there.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's like sitting down with both sides of this story and recognizing, as you said, this nuance is is so much um that there is healing that has to take place.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Who did the um what was it?
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: The uh oh the truth and reconciliation project?
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: You mean in South Africa?
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Who did that?
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, the truth and reconciliation reconciliation commissions in South Africa.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was bold and powerful.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: Was that um Tutu, Desmond Tutu?
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: He was he was involved, yeah, yeah.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of a lot of people involved, African National Congress, and yeah.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know the details of that, but yeah, it's really powerful stories.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, powerful just in the sense that they decided uh as the government, yeah, as the leadership, yeah, uh, that they were going to allow these conversations, these very difficult conversations and accountability uh moments to take place.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, part of the nuance that you're naming is the acknowledgement that when there is oppression, nobody is free from the violence of it.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not suggesting in any way that white people had it as as bad as black people during that time, right?
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And at the same time, to acknowledge that nobody is free from the violence of oppression when you are in a system of oppression, whether you're in the role of oppressor or oppressed, that damages your soul.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I love, I don't know if you read, did you read um Rezma Mannequin's My Grandmother's Hands?
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, I have it though.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: I have it, I haven't read it yet.
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: I love it because one of the things that he says in that book is that white people before they came to this land lived through the Middle Ages of Europe, which was one of the most violent periods in human history where things like torture were considered entertainment, right?
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so a lot of the people who, the Europeans who colonized this land, brought the trauma of those middle ages with them and then enacted that trauma first on the indigenous peoples of this land and then on African peoples.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: And without their own trauma, without their own fracture, without their own sense that they are not part of the interwoven web of humanity, they would not have been able to then inflict that level of violence on other people, right?
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it's the one of my favorite quotes comes from a transformative justice activist named Daniel Sarid who says, Nobody enters violence for the first time by committing it.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like anytime someone uh enacts a form of violence, it's you, it's almost always because they were harmed in some way first.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe it's not them, maybe it's their ancestors, but they're holding some trauma that they've been in, they haven't been able to release in healthy ways.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: So they release it onto somebody else.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the dynamic of violence, right?
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: So to try to slow down enough to understand that things are never as black and white as they seem.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if we look back far enough into the history, we will see a much more Complex picture, I think, is really important.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think that uh translates really nicely into one of the things that I'm trying to do in my work is showing people how to recognize these things just on a pretty surface level.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm bringing this to the communities, just uh, you know, in the churches and stuff, just to like give people a little bit of vocabulary and then hopefully allowing them to go deeper if they uh see fit.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: But um the oh, what was I gonna say?
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: I lost track of my own thought.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh oh, um that the wounds that we have, the fractures that we've experienced, that as you said, sometimes we look to the parent in our home and blame.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they didn't give me, I didn't get, they were cruel, they were mean, they weren't there, they were drunk, whatever the case, they were incarcerated, they you know, and blame our problems on them.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: But as you just said, I want to encourage people to get come to the table to do this work for themselves and see it as an opportunity to, I think you said, integrate your whole story without having to blame others.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: But in the, you know, when when you want to blame, to sort of halt and say, wow, I'm kind of overwhelmed by how rich I'm finding out my story is, I can at least provide the grace and and the space for somebody else to have had enough of an experience and just tell myself that I can't possibly understand, but that maybe sometime I'll be able to listen and learn who they are and what's happened to them, you know.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um the level of connection.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's not to invalidate your experience of perhaps feeling lonely or perhaps feeling like your needs weren't met by your parents.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, like I I'm a parent now, and uh, one of the things that I've noticed is you know, I'm Japanese, and if you talk to any Asian person, there's a 99% chance that their father wasn't there for them, that they were emotionally completely unavailable.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a wound that so many of us in our culture, especially as Asian people, carry.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I notice as a father now, like it is so fun and so natural to just nurture my child in in like in with every bit of my being.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I look back at my father and I realize how much patriarchy, and particularly like the Asian brand of patriarchy, ripped away his capacity to show me love, right?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: To hold me, to sing songs to me.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_00: And now that like I've I've moved through enough of my own healing, I still have so far to go, but I've moved through enough of it to know that when I when I see that gap between how I'm able to love my daughter and how my father was unable to show his love for us, even though I know he loved us, it's not anger and blame at him.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_00: I actually feel sorrow.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like I feel sad for him that the system of patriarchy ripped away his capacity to show and express his love to his own children, right?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so I feel like me pouring my love into my daughter is actually a way to almost help him heal his wounds in a way that he wasn't able to in his lifetime, too.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, like if once we're able to do enough of our own healing, I think it is easier to let go of the blame and see that, oh, I can now see that these people were hurting, also.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, and it's so important, I think, like you said, that we're able to experience our own story and our own truth about what we didn't get, or uh maybe why we didn't get it, but also like you just said, and um so critical to also have compassion for um the folks that maybe we didn't get it from.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Just, you know, realizing so, and another thing as I listen to you speak, I realize um the deeper we get into this way of living, this way of sort of moving through the world and understanding the nuances of trauma and healing and post-traumatic growth and uh toxic stress and all these things.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: We have all of this jargon for it, right?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and a lot of times we'll say things like uh it's the system, the system is broken.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_01: We need to, you know, um rever, we need to just break it down and build it, rebuild it kind of thing.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: And folks will be like, What there's no what system?
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: They just say, Well, that was the generation at that time.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: Guys didn't show their feelings, or in this culture, it was a cultural thing, right?
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: But when we speak with this jargon, we're we're sort of we're diving into those simple comments, yeah.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it was generational or it's a cultural thing.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's the machismo, these kinds of things.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the systems, that's right.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about the patriarchy, we're talking about the things that gave folks the idea that they could only be a piece of themselves and be appropriate in this world.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's all true, right?
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was generational, it was cultural.
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_00: Those things are true.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like my father did come in a come up in a generation where fathers were never supposed to change diapers, that was just not a thing that they did, and that doesn't make it right.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think sometimes we say, Oh, it's a cultural thing, so it's okay.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: No, there are toxic cultures, right?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_00: And there are things that need to shift, and it is through oftentimes through those cultures and those traditions and the generational ways of being that these systems come into being, right?
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, and I think our job now is to continue to sort of evolve, right?
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, just sort of just recognize what um, you know, my mom just died in February, and it has been quite the journey.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: I was able to be with her, thank God, for the last um over the last couple of years, several times, but over the last month and a half of her life.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I have to tell you, um, you know, you know, it was cancer, it was cancer and it was uh dementia.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: And um I can't tell you the amount of times that I wish I could have brought some of the healing that I've been able to do to her.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what her story was.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: She didn't talk about a lot of things.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_03: That's right.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she just loved and she hurt.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you could see it when she was hurting, and you could see how she was trying to medicate the hurting.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and she loved at her own expense a lot of times.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I sat there and I sat with her, and one of the things that came to me is I said, you know, as she dies, I'm realizing that I want to do the things that my mom wasn't able to.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_01: That the world didn't make room for her to do, or her generation, you know.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I hear you saying with your dad, too, and your children.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think you'd be the coolest dad.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: I try.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I oftentimes think about like, oh, what are the things that she's gonna be speaking to her therapist about when she's older, too, you know?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I really try, and and it's just like I'm so blessed that I live in a generation and a culture now where I'm allowed to be the kind of father I am because it it's just it's so good, it feels so good to love.
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, man, me too, bro.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: Me too.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: I gotta tell you two things real quick, and then we'll we'll wrap this up.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: But one is if I was one of your kids, I would pull on your beard.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: Do they?
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I used to have a longer beard that I would keep in a braid, and even before I had a kid, like dogs would like bite it thinking it was a chew toy.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I chopped it off before before I became a father.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's awesome.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I forgot what the other thing was.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the gifts that I have is a brain that just forgets like like that.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um anything else you want to say before we before we depart?
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I just feel like we are living in a time in history in our species that there are so many things that are on fire, literally and figuratively, and there's so much division and so much fracture, and all of those things are true.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I really do believe that we are in the midst of a transition into a much more beautiful world.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if we look at the news, if we look up at all these large systems, all we see is war and genocide and collapse.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: But if we look around, not up, but look around and look down to the earth, I think I have noticed in my 25 years of doing this work in the last 10, 15 years, the emergence of so many beautiful, life-affirming communities and movements and mutual aid networks and restorative justice, um, you know, getting more and more popular everywhere.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there are so many things that are happening that I think is already starting to create a new world.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so, yeah, to you know, sometimes when we get down by looking at the news, just like stop looking at the news and look down, look around us, and you will see so much beauty happening in our lives.
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: I am with you a hundred percent on that.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not unaware of what's happening in the world, but I cannot live it and breathe it and eat it because it makes me ill.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I have to focus on loving the people that I am around and uh caring for those who need a hand and just doing what's in front of me.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_01: And if we all would learn to do that a little bit more, right?
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I agree with you, Kazu.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're on our way to a big and beautiful world.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think that we're in the midst of a big transformation.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for doing this with me.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you so much for your time.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate you, man.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much and keep doing the good work, huh?
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: You too.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: Take care.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: If this conversation sparked something for you, or if you want to dive deeper, head over to soulnotskin.com and take a look around.
• 55:05
  SPEAKER_01: Grab a copy of the book, Soul Knot Skin, free resources, or get on the wait list for our next workshop.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: I hope you'll pull up a chair next time to hang out with us again.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're figuring out this world and ourselves at the same exact time, growing as we listen to the stories of others.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Let's keep getting to know each other.
• 55:25
  SPEAKER_01: After all, we are in this together.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: See you next time.