Author and nonviolence practitioner Kazu Haga explores why fierce vulnerability is a vital practice for inner and outer transformation.
Read an excerpt of Kazu’s book, Fierce Vulnerability, and purchase your own copy HERE.
This time on Mindrolling, Raghu and Kazu Haga chat about:
- Kazu’s difficult upbringing and how meeting Japanese Buddhist monastics transformed his life
- Combining social action and spirituality
- The legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and addressing both inner violence of the spirit and outer systemic violence
- How an “us vs. them” worldview fuels division, suffering, and ecological destruction
- Healing childhood trauma and collective trauma by integrating the fractured parts of ourselves
- How getting vulnerable opens up our capacity to heal
- The Seven Fires Prophecies from the Anishinaabe people
- Rebuilding the world through spiritual practice rather than material accumulation
- Remembering that personal healing is inseparable from collective healing in an interdependent world
- Listening deeply and being comfortable with uncertainty
“The work that I do for me to be healthy, grounded, and to be able to integrate my individual traumas is only so that I can be in a better position to contribute to collective healing” –Kazu Haga
Check out the book Hospicing Modernity for more powerful insights on social action
About Kazu Haga:
Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Ahimsa Collective and the Fierce Vulnerability Network. He is a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging from Collapse. He works with incarcerated people, youth, and activists from around the country. He has over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work. He is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA, where he lives with his family. You can find out more about his work at www.kazuhaga.com.
“The work of nonviolence has to start by looking at the ways in which we hold internal violence of the spirit, that unhealed anger, hatred, resentment, delusion, as well as our unhealed traumas, and understanding how all of that is the source of external violence in the world. Yes we need the social movements, but if we’re not grounded in some sort of inner work and introspection a lot of the violence we want to change out there gets replicated in our own work, in our own communities.” –Kazu Haga