Ep. 5 - Spiritually Grounded Activism (w/ Kazu Haga)

Transcript

Kazu Haga: And so I think so much of the work that we need to do starts within our own movement spaces of like, how do we create that culture where even if I do or say the worst possible thing, I know that I still belong because it's the way that the universe is structured, right? There's nothing outside of belonging. And so how do we give people that felt sense?

Jeremy Blanchard: Welcome to the Wider Roots podcast. A show about how we can use the power of coaching and personal transformation to help create the world we most want to live in.

I'm your host, Jeremy Blanchard. I'm a coach for social movement leaders. And today's episode is with Kazu Haga.

Kazu is a Kingian non-violence trainer based in Oakland. Who's been involved in social change movements since he was 17. He leads trainings for youth incarcerated populations and activists. He's the author of Healing Resistance: or radically different response to harm. And he has another book coming out next year, titled Fierce Vulnerability, Direct Action that Heals and Transforms.

In this conversation Kazu you and I explore how to bring more spiritually grounded practice into our social change movements. I appreciated his invitation for us to think about how we can bring an energy of opening things up, even if outwardly we're doing direct actions that are shutting things down. He also shares his perspective, that much of the injustice we witness is actually a manifestation of unhealed wounds, both at the individual level and the societal level.

And I particularly loved the part of this conversation where we talked about leading from heartbreak and vulnerability as a way to create connection, especially during conflict.

I love getting ready for these conversations with my guests, because I get to read some of the books that have been on my list for a really long time. And Kazu his book, Healing Resistance left me feeling consistently inspired and just really spoke to my heart. And so did this whole conversation that you're about to hear. So I hope you find it as nourishing as I did.

A quick invitation as you have probably heard on every podcast you've listened to. Uh, It makes a big difference if you leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. So, if you have a minute to do that, I'd be very grateful to hear your thoughts on the show.

All right. Let's dive in.

Jeremy Blanchard: Hey Kazu, welcome to the show.

Kazu Haga: Thank you so much for having me. What's going on?

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, so glad you're here. I took the Kingian Nonviolence training from you back in 2017, the two day weekend workshop, which I know you've led probably of at this point

Kazu Haga: of times. Yeah.

Jeremy Blanchard: lot of times. Yeah. So we're both in Oakland activist spaces.

I know you've been really involved in Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Gaza, and everything that's going on right now there. And I just really admire and appreciate the way that you bring what I would describe as a spiritually grounded to social change, that I long to see more of in the world that this podcast is really dedicated to.

So just glad to have you here. Thanks for making the time.

Kazu Haga: I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

[00:03:24] Kazu's spiritual lineage and politicization through nonviolence

Jeremy Blanchard: I would love to hear some of your roots and what got you into this particular intersection that I see you operating in of personal transformation and systemic transformation. Like how did those two come together?

Kazu Haga: Yeah. I appreciate it. I think that the story really starts in some ways with someone I never met who was my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather in Japan actually was the founder of a women's university, which at the time that the school started was this radical concept that like, oh wait, women should be educated and they should take part in civil society. he was largely influenced by the philosophies of Leo Tolstoy and the German poet Goethe. And I didn't know anything about this until years and decades later into my own life because my family actually had a fracture when I was seven years old. And my whole family was disowned from that part of the family.

So I didn't have a connection to that lineage at all. And until years and years later, I found myself active in movements for nonviolence that were largely influenced by Tolstoy and Goethe and all these other people. come to find out as an adult decades after my kind of introduction to social change work that my great-grandfather was also influenced by the same people. So I feel like there was something in my body that was seated many, many years before I was born.

And then I was growing up. My mother, who was never political in that sense, more like new age hippie kind of spiritual.

talking to me about, her, what she's learned from the Dalai Lama. And she had a lot of relationships with indigenous elders on this land talking about meditation and forgiveness. And I always the time thought of it as this like embarrassing hippie thing that my mom does. And again full circle 30 years later, I'm doing so much of the same work that, that I think she seeded something in me.

So I think there were things that happened to me even before I was born and things that happened to me before I had a so-called political consciousness that seeded so much.

But I think a lot of my introduction to this work came through my participation in the interfaith pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, which was a year long journey initiated by a Japanese Buddhist order they were going to walk from Massachusetts to New Orleans and then down the coast of Africa to retrace the slave route. And so it was this thing where was a clear, political aspiration of talking about the real legacy and impact of enslavement in this country and talking about how it still impacts us today, also a spiritual component of, you know, this was an interfaith pilgrimage initiated by a Japanese Buddhist order.

it was very clear to them that it was a prayer walk, a prayer walk that happened to happen that needed to happen in a public space. Right. we were up a conversation that I think a lot of people were uncomfortable to have. And so I think my initiation into this work was always at that intersection of prayer and spirituality as well as recognizing that we actually have to step outside the monastery and have these conversations in public spaces. So I think that was always a strong focus of mine.

Jeremy Blanchard: Cool. And so that planted some seeds it seems like it's from the very inception in a lot of ways. Like both your lineage and like the very first times you're encountering social justice work was already with that focus, which I think is not common experience, not the dominant experience. I think at least in US activist circles, there's often you're politicized, maybe in your youth with a good analysis, and then other folks come at it from maybe a spiritual direction and that they aren't politicized at all. And you got what I think of as a very special experience where both are just like right on top of each other.

Cool.

Kazu Haga: Feel grateful. I mean, you're seeing that intersection more and more these days, I think with the movement of Black Lives and Standing Rock and all these movements that really see the necessity of that intersection.

But certainly you know, when I came back from spending time in monastery, this was in the late 1990s, and getting involved in movements around, issues of globalization and freeing political prisoners like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal, closing the School of Americas, were not spiritual spaces.

weren't even songs in the way that freedom movements today do. It was very much divorced from this idea of spiritual practice. So, Yeah, I'm grateful to see a lot of that beginning to shift today.

[00:07:51] Opening things up spiritually while shutting them down tactically

Jeremy Blanchard: I'm curious to talk a little bit about, this longing for a more grounded way of going about our activism that I see in your writing and in your work and what you've been dedicated to. You wrote this article in 2020 that I wanna share a quote from. You wrote,

" And yet these escalated times require an escalated response. how do we escalate our tactics while remaining grounded enough to double down on healing, beauty, and reconciliation? How do we use tactics of shutting it down while leading with a spirit of opening things up? As the elders at Standing Rock remind us, how do we make direct action ceremony?"

And that quote really resonates with me. I, as you're saying, I think this has becoming more prominent in our movement spaces, this kind of activism. I'm curious, just hear you talk about like how does that longing live in you for us to have a new way of being together while we work for change?

Kazu Haga: Yeah. You know, over the last 10 years or so, I've been grateful to be in a lot of spaces that, has really focused on trauma healing at the individual and interpersonal level. Both my own journey through healing my own wounds, but also holding space for other people to move through theirs. And as I started to understand how trauma impacts our individual bodies, started to notice more and more how trauma impacts our collective bodies, and it impacts us in the same exact way.

And so I've really started to see social injustice, whether we're talking about climate or racial injustice or economic injustice as manifestations of collective trauma, right? And if we understand injustice as signs and manifestations of collective trauma, I've also come to understand that you can't shut down injustice any more than you can shut down trauma. you can't go to someone who is experiencing a traumatic response and point the finger and say, stop it. Stop doing that. And I think that's oftentimes how we move in our social justice spaces is to go to sites of injustice and go to systems that are acting out of a collective trauma response and point our finger and say, stop. You need to stop the injustice. And so I think, tactically we're living in such urgent times that we may need to use tactics that require us to shut down a city council meeting, shut down a highway, whatever it might be. But how do we move with a spirit of, we are here to tactically shut this thing down, but spiritually we're actually here to open up conversations and open up possibilities for healing. And I don't have any answers, but those are the questions that I'm grappling with of like, what does it look like to really use nonviolent resistance as a modality of collective trauma healing?

Jeremy Blanchard: Those are the questions that this whole show is about. Those are the questions that deeply call me as well. I don't have the answers either, but I wonder if you have an example of like what are some places where you have experienced a shut it down and spiritually let's open it up, coming together.

Kazu Haga: Yeah, totally. The first thing I wanna say is I think it's actually good that we don't have the answers. I think a species, we're experiencing a transition moment, unlike any that we have ever experienced as a species. So of course we don't have the answers, of course, we don't know what to do in this moment to create the depth and level of transformation that is necessary.

'Cause we've never done it. And I think part of what it means to be alive and to be doing social change work in this time to actually accept that we don't have the answers. to understand that the worldview and the way of thinking that tells us that if we think hard enough that we can create a strategy to address all of the challenges that we're facing is part of the problem, is part of the worldview that got us into this mess. Right?

And so how do we move with an appreciation and a beauty that like we are at a time when we have to ask such large questions that there aren't answers to. And actually asking these questions and grappling with them is enough. It's all that we need to do. We don't have to have the answers.

Right. And the moments in my life where I've actually touched on that are moments where we've been able to like even. When facing a role of riot police officers to remember and to somehow communicate to them, not F you, we're here to overpower you, but to, lead from a place of our own heartbreak to say, we're not here because we hate you. We're here because the way that we are living out our lives in this society is breaking our hearts. It is destroying our communities.

And can we actually lead with fierceness and the vulnerability of saying, I'm not here because I hate you. I'm actually here because I love you. I'm here because I love the sanctity of life and beauty, and those things are being destroyed all over our ecosystem.

In more of the interpersonal healing spaces I've been in, I know that. Anytime someone has the courage to lead with and to model vulnerability, possibility of transformation in that moment increases exponentially. And so can we create direct action movements and resistance movements that have the fierceness to stand face-to-face with riot police or corporate power or whatever it might be, to actually lead with vulnerability and say, I'm here because my heart is breaking at what is happening in the world and what I'm witnessing.

And I think those are the moments where I feel like real transformation and alchemy that we can't quite understand intellectually is possible.

Jeremy Blanchard: Amen. You referenced in the book the documentary, A Force More Powerful about a bunch of different non-violence movements from South Africa to the Civil Rights Movement in the US to India and beyond. And hear you talking, I just feel, 'cause I watched that recently, I just feel the footage and the energy of those movements where you know, I don't think anyone said it that way in the documentary, but you can feel that we are here because our heart is breaking

power. So if anyone listening hasn't watched that, I highly recommend as heart opening experience. Yeah.

[00:14:38] Exploring trauma healing as a modality for social change

Jeremy Blanchard: I'm curious to hear a little bit about your entry into more focus on trauma healing.

'cause I sense, and tell me if I've got this right, but I sense that that has been like a evolution of your theory of change and your perspective. I think it's maybe always been there in some way, but it sounds like it's something you're focusing on more lately. And I'm curious what you're, what you've witnessed or what you've learned that's caused you to focus more on individual and collective trauma healing as the leverage point or the place where you wanna invest your energy.

Kazu Haga: Yeah, definitely. I acknowledge that a lot of my work is grounded in the kingian lineage, right? And learning from the lessons of Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. And, those movements, they didn't have the science and the awareness around trauma that we do now.

Right. And so I think in some ways they were trying to do that work of collective healing and using language of beloved community and reconciliation, but they just didn't have the science and all of the trauma healing modalities that are available to us now.

And one story that I share a lot is how I have a family member who has experienced a lot of trauma in their lives has never had a space to heal from that trauma. And so they're constantly in crisis. And every once in a while we'd spend several months supporting them through a conflict that they're having with their children. And that'll get resolved. And then a few months later, they have a crisis at work and that'll get resolved. And it just felt like we're playing this endless game of whack-a-mole.

And I realized that some point that we were playing an endless game of whack-a-mole, because this person has a much deeper core wounding from their childhood. that all of these issues around their relationship with their children, their relationship with their career, all these things were just surface level manifestations of a much deeper wound and un until we could support this person in healing that deep wound, we will always be playing a game of whack-a-mole.

And over time, I've really come to understand that trauma works in a fractal way, that the entire universe is built on fractals. when we look at a nation state like the United States, there's never a shortage of issues and a shortage of crises. And it hit me that at some point we're always gonna be playing a game of whack-a-mole because the United States as a collective experienced early childhood wounds that we have never healed from. For a nation to be founded in lineages and legacies of enslavement and genocide, and to have never had the conversation of, wow, what did we just experience together and how did it impact us, and how does it continue to impact us?

My childhood trauma impacts my relationship with my family today. And that's, as someone who has done a lot of my own trauma healing work and have invited my family into circles, and we still have so much work we need to do, as a collective, as a nation state, like our early childhood was filled with violence and we've never even started to talk about what we experienced collectively and how to heal from that. And so I think all of these issues that we're facing now are just surface level manifestations of something much deeper.

And so I think as I've understood more and more what it takes to heal individuals, I'm starting to see the pathway forward for us to heal collectively as a species and as nation states. And so I think that's a lot of the thinking that I'm trying to bring into my work of systemic change.

Jeremy Blanchard: it makes me think about South Africa calling the US on charges of genocide

Jeremy Blanchard: there's a certain amount of healing. That we can admire that South Africa did after apartheid to be able to say, learned some things and we're gonna actually be a force for, and a stand for what we we know is right.

Kazu Haga: yeah.

Like I said, a lot more to do in South Africa and everywhere in the world, but at least they've at least tried to have that conversation, right, of like. Hey, we just lived through apartheid. How did people experience that?

And as a country, the United States has never even gotten close to having that conversation. And so we're still like holding that in our collective bodies, right? And hurt people, hurt people. So we continue to perpetuate hurt out of that place of collective pain.

Jeremy Blanchard: Maybe to just extend on that, what's, how is that informing your theory of change and where you're investing your political and healing efforts now? If trauma healing is part of the base, Kingian Nonviolence is part of the base, that shaping your work currently?

Kazu Haga: Yeah, so I'm trying to be in a place of constant questioning and experimentation about, what does it look like if we viewed nonviolent direct action and civil resistance movements as a modality of collective trauma healing? What have I learned from being in small group spaces where we're working around trauma and how do we extrapolate that to scale? And how do we do it in a public space?

I think a lot of it is, like I shared, how do we create movements that have the fierceness to engage in public spaces and come face to face with systems of injustice while leading with our vulnerability leading with our heartbreak? And if we're gonna lead with our heartbreak, we're going to these escalated tense places with our hearts wide open. And what is the work that we need to do to prepare ourselves so that we don't get re-traumatized? And we don't get re-triggered.

a beautiful quote from Reverend Nadia Bolz Weber who says, preach from your scars, not from your wounds.

And so what is the work that we need to do internally in our movement spaces so that we can talk about the fact that we are potentially living through the next mass extinction? Right? And how is our body holding that? What are the things that we are scared to voice out loud? How does that affect our hearts? What does it feel like in our bodies to know that we are experiencing times of incredible crises unlike anything we have ever witnessed as a species? And to metabolize all of that so we can go into these frontline spaces and lead with that vulnerability and have some layer of protection.

And when we're operating from a place of trauma response or just a place of survival, the part of our brain that is capable of thinking about nuance, the part of our brain that is capable of empathy, part of our brain that is responsible for connection, the part of our brain that is responsible for healing and reconciliation and nonviolence on a physiological level, is actually not accessible to us. Right? so again, what do we need to do in our movement spaces to continue to engage in spiritual practice so that we can be in the most escalated spaces and still maintain a connection to the part of our brain that is responsible for healing and empathy and reconciliation.

Right? So I think, you know, historically I used to go to nonviolence. I used to lead nonviolence trainings where we would learn how to yelp shame at the police and how to work with law enforcement and how to get arrested and how to work with the media and how to build blockades. Some of that is still necessary, but I think in addition to that, need to learn how to sing together, just as a pastime, but because we know that singing actually creates neural pathways to that part of our brain that is responsible for acknowledging the unity, right? That is in the field.

How do we learn to breathe together? How do we learn to hold compassion, understanding that ultimately, there's nothing in this world outside of belonging. There's nothing in this world outside of interdependence. And that includes the people that we see as being on the other side of any issue. Right. And so I think there's like a level of spiritual practice that we need to incorporate as part of our preparation to go into political fields.

[00:22:43] The necessity of deep practice in movements

Jeremy Blanchard: Yes, yes, yes, yes. What you're talking about really is training.

Kazu Haga: Exactly. That's right?

Jeremy Blanchard: And that's the part of your book, in Healing Resistance, you're talking about... In Gandhi's Ashrams, they were training and training and training for years to be able to do what they did

confront colonization in India.

And same thing with the civil rights movement, the lunch counter sit-ins, right? They didn't just get two hours of training right before they went into an action and say, oh, it's good you're gonna be able to keep yourself grounded and regulated in the midst of violence.

So something that resonates so deeply. Like I can, when you talk about this rigor and depth of practice and depth of training, there's something that just lights up in me where I'm

like, yes, I want that. I want to be in spaces where we have commitments that extend beyond this one action that we did and where we have practices and where we have the spiritual training to go with the logistical

Kazu Haga: right.

Jeremy Blanchard: activism training.

And I find myself curious like. Where do people get that? If someone's listening to this and they're like, I resonate with that too. I want to go get that training, I wanna see that in my spaces.

I'm trying to think of like, what are the threads, the traditions, the practices to start getting acquainted with, to build in training, to build in spiritually grounded practice into our work?

Kazu Haga: Yeah. I think the reality is that those spaces already exist. They're just oftentimes not in relationship with movements that are on the ground in frontline spaces. I think organizations like the Ayni Institute has done a lot of great work in what they call the movement ecology and mapping out. We need a movement ecology that is as diverse as natural ecosystems, right? If we're going to heal society.

And so I think traditionally when we think about social change movements, we think of like activist quote unquote spaces. We already have so many spaces that are practicing deep spiritual practices, practicing trauma healing modalities, helping people move through pain. But I think oftentimes that's not seen as like frontline social change work. And so a lot of the excitement that I have in a lot of the work that I'm doing is like there are so many therapists and healers who are becoming more and more engaged in social change, like frontline social justice spaces. And so I think they're bringing a lot of those skills into movement spaces.

I really would love to see spiritual communities mobilize more because they already have so much of that grounding. And the, like the decades of practice that, the people that lived in the Ghanaian shrams had, like a lot of the spiritual communities, they've been practicing those skills for decades. They just need to practice it on the front lines. Right?

And so I think a lot of it isn't about looking for tools that don't exist or having to come up with new practices. I think it's about building relationships with the right communities and building a healthy ecosystem so we can understand that, oh, okay, if we're gonna be doing front lines work, we might need support from healing communities and be in relationship with spiritual communities and just like find and building those bridges, you know?

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. I love that as a pathway in is activism is here, the spiritual spaces are there and relationships is part of the invitation.

[00:26:07] Allowing messiness as we learn to hold conflict

Jeremy Blanchard: I'm curious on this thread of training, you mentioned earlier that if we go into spaces without enough skill, it can be re-traumatizing,

You use this analogy of like, you wanna go to a skilled doctor who's can do surgery and can open a wound in the proper way and help seal it in the proper way so that it will heal.

I'm holding that tension in myself of and just going for it and needing to just everyone to be trying these things out. I'm curious how you hold that when you're thinking about repair, when you're thinking about trauma healing, when you're thinking about reconciliation.

Kazu Haga: Yeah, I think it's definitely the both-and, right? is no way for healing to not be messy.

And I know I sometimes have this thing in my own life where like I'm, I always try to wait for every circumstance to be perfect before engaging in a conflict or engaging in training. And of course, there's never a perfect time to engage in healing work, right? It's always gonna be messy.

And so I think a lot of that work is letting go of that part of ourselves that is waiting for the perfect moment, that is waiting for all the skills. 'Cause we don't know what's gonna be necessary. And I think there has to be a lot of spaces and appreciation for that rigor and acknowledging that healing does require a lot of skill. It does not require schooling. I have almost no formal schooling to speak of.

And so I think there's a lot of recognition that we need to give to community healers and community mental health models and things like that. And it actually doesn't require a lot, or like years and years of going to university for people to learn how to just be with each other. I think so much of this work is we stay grounded enough to just be with people? And that's something that takes some amount of practice, but it doesn't require a lot of training, right? It just requires like constant reinforcement because it's easy for us to get activated.

But I think, yeah, as long as we're holding the intention of healing, I think we can't be afraid to just try it and mess up and even potentially cause harm as long as the commitment to healing that harm is there. I think that the commitment to healing the harm is more important than trying to do everything we can to not cause harm.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Yeah. There's a couple things in there where you're inviting this, like more expansive than white supremacy culture view, right? White supremacy culture says, okay, there's a certain definition of expert and it looks like, years in university, and now you're allowed to dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

Right? And inviting us beyond perfectionism, right? okay, you're gonna cause harm like that. The, even just hearing you say those words, I'm like, okay, let's pause for a second. I think for many folks that can land as a very radical idea, like, wait, you're telling me I don't have to avoid causing harm at all costs, even if it means I never like, take action and just wait, and wait and wait.

Kazu Haga: Yeah. One quick thing is the white supremacist culture. I have a little pet peeve on that because I actually experience a lot of the characteristics of white supremacist culture to be patterns of domination culture, and not necessarily just of white supremacist culture.

I found a lot of these characteristics show up in me, not as a white person, but as someone who's been socialized as male. It also shows up in me as someone who is of Japanese ancestry, right? And my people dominated and colonized, large swaths of Asia. And so I always wanna bring a little bit more nuance into these conversation. It's not about any one identity, but it's about the dynamic of domination that does something to us, that puts us in these boxes and needs us to create more boxes.

But yeah, I think that's true that, one of the things that we really need to get over is this need to be perfect.

And the first noble truth in, in, according to the Buddhist teachings is the truth of duka, which is the truth of, unsatisfactoriness the truth that things will never be always the way we want them to be. And that seems like such a simple thing to understand. Like, of course things will never be exactly the way we want them to be. But it actually took me about 20 years of practice to really, for the first time the depth of that teaching to hit me and it broke my heart.

the moment I realized it was when I was facilitating a nonviolence workshop and I was unskillful in a moment and it caused harm. And as someone who tries to practice the principles of nonviolence and not causing harm, it hit me that as long as I'm engaged in this work, there is nothing that I can do to guarantee that I won't cause harm.

fact, as long as I'm in this work, it is guaranteed that at some point I will cause harm. And for me to accept that as someone who's trying to practice nonviolence to accept the reality that I will always cause harm was heartbreaking. And it took me 20 years of reading the noble truth to be like, oh, that's what this means.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. I feel like it's a message that resonates deeply with me, and I think it's something that so many of us need to hear in this era of cancel culture. I have so many coaching conversations with clients where the conversation is, okay, so I want to do a thing, but I don't want to cause harm, so can we talk about how I do this so I don't cause harm? Or like, maybe I'm just not gonna do it at all because I don't wanna risk causing harm. Which just a in general, the intention is beautiful, right? It's like, okay, of course you don't want, none of us want to cause harm, but it becomes such a real strong, like, I can't let this occur.

Yeah, I just see that so much how that causes so many inspiring ideas and possibilities that could come forward, get squashed under the weight of, I'm worried I'm going to cause harm. I'm worried I'm gonna get canceled.

I know that's something that's part of your thinking and work is like, how do we move beyond this cancel culture? So I'm curious, how are you holding that these days?

How are thinking that?

Kazu Haga: So much say. One thing that my partner recently said that I really appreciate is they said, creating safety and safe containers is not about creating a space where people won't experience harm. It's actually about creating spaces where people feel safe enough to be re harmed because healing hurts. There is no way that I can talk about my childhood trauma or that we can collectively talk about the legacies of enslavement and genocide or colonization or whatever, and have that not be a really hurtful discussion because that was, those were really hurtful experiences, right?

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.

Kazu Haga: And to create containers where we can feel safe enough to have conversations that we know are gonna hurt. That's actually what real safety means.

when I'm in spaces with incarcerated people and we can create a container that they feel safe enough to talk about the most shameful moment of their lives, the scariest moment of their lives, the moments that they have not talked about for 30, 40 years, and know and trust that on the other side of that conversation is even deeper belonging. That is a transformational moment, right? And so I think there's dangers in this idea of we need to create spaces where people aren't gonna be harmed. I think it's actually about building up our capacity so we can have more conversations that we know are gonna hurt, right?

And how do we hold that in a way that actually leads us to healing?

[00:33:56] Breaking up with "cancel culture" and creating deep belonging

Kazu Haga: And I'll also share, and we can go in so many directions with this, but you mentioned cancel culture. I was part of a small group of people that organized a gathering of movement leaders back in May in upstate New York called, Because We Need Each Other. it was, as far as I know, the first attempt to bring movement leaders from around the country working on a variety of issues to talk specifically about this dynamic.

And a lot of wisdom flew outta that gathering. And one of the things, shout out to Prentice Hemphill was there says, we need to break up with the term cancel culture because it is a nice like catchall where we immediately have some sense of what we're talking about. But I think it's very limiting because what I want to talk about are dynamics that have to do with the way we hold conflict in our movement spaces that go beyond what our understanding of what cancel culture is. It's not always just about cancel culture, there's other dynamics. to acknowledge that a lot of the national conversation, the public discourse around the term cancel culture is actually being framed by the right or by people who aren't in movement spaces.

so, we've started at least in that gathering, I don't know if it'll stick, but we've started talking about "fractures to belonging." I. there are so many things happening within movement spaces, within all over, not just movement spaces that create fractures to belonging. And what is that about?

Why is it that so many times in movement and progressive spaces, these spaces where we are trying to create belonging for all people, for all life, are so quick to throw people out of belonging.

I know one of the things that we're talking about in, in, in my work a lot is,

I think one of the biggest contributions we can do is to create movement spaces where people would never even question their sense of belonging.

Because I know that if I am deeply grounded in my universal belonging, then I feel less of a need to, to threaten another person's belonging. Right.

And so I think so much of the work that we need to do starts within our own movement spaces of like, how do we create that culture where even if I do or say the worst possible thing, I know that I still belong because there's, it's the way that the universe is structured, right? There's nothing outside of belonging. And so how do we give people that felt sense?

Jeremy Blanchard: Mm. Thank you. I know you're saying the words I need to hear.

To hear you say how can we create spaces of such, deep belonging that we can not have to question it, is just it so opens my heart in this way that I don't know what the answer to that question is, as has been our theme, this whole conversation. But what a generative and meaningful question to, for us all to sit with live into and explore and experiment with. Like, ugh.

Kazu Haga: Yeah. And I think, for me so much of it is just learning from natural ecosystems and a hummingbird never questions its sense of belonging in the ecosystem, right? And even when a lion is eating a gazelle, it never says to the gazelle, you don't belong. Right there, there's some felt sense that we are all part of this ecosystem and there's nothing outside of that. I'm blessed to be working with an organization right now called Building Belonging that is really trying to, use this frame of universal belonging as like the central theory of change. I'm grateful to be working with Building Belonging and exploring.

if we're really gonna take belonging that word seriously, what are the implications of that in terms of how we go about doing systems change work?

[00:37:51] We need skills to not only name harm, but repair it

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. The energy of what you're talking about makes me think about something else you write in your book. Another quote I'll share is, you say,

"When people talk about holding someone accountable, the keyword should not be accountable, but holding. What does it mean to hold someone? Does that person feel held or do they feel attacked and judged?"

And there's something so connective about just emphasizing the word held there.

Kazu Haga: Yeah, and I think a lot of the, whether we wanna call it cancel culture or fractures to belonging, a lot of those dynamics, I really honor the intention. 'cause I think a lot of the intention is we're trying to figure out what accountability looks like outside of the system, outside of the state, right.

And so communities are exploring how to do accountability without relying on outside external systems. I think it's beautiful

and I think sometimes underestimate how deeply entrenched we are in these dominant worldviews. And

all of us grew up knowing nothing but a carceral response to harm and to conflict.

Jeremy Blanchard: That's right

Kazu Haga: so even though we're committed to not calling the state, our bodies don't know how to do things differently.

And I think I am so grateful for all of the wisdom that I've learned from the incarcerated people that I've worked with who have shown me and modeled in front of me accountability at a depth that I have never seen before.

Like I did not know what the word accountability meant until I witnessed a dialogue between a mother and the incarcerated person who took her son's life. And to healing happen between those two.

Kazu Haga: I've worked with a lot of survivors of violence and the most common question they have is, why?

Right?

Jeremy Blanchard: Hmm.

Kazu Haga: Why did you do this? And I feel like sometimes that question of why did you do this is actually not a real question. It's actually an accusation of like, why are

you such a terrible person?

But when mother of someone who lost her child to violence can actually sit down and ask the real why, in the sense of like. was going on in your life in that moment? Like what were your pain points that led you to that moment? Right? And to hold that kind of space for someone to, to, for that person to really able to have enough spaciousness to explore, like what did happen to me led up to the, to that moment in time, I think is a gift to that person, right?

For that person to really be able to hold themselves to account and explain what happened. Oh, I did this not because I was a terrible person, but because of my own unprocessed trauma. And I think giving space for that conversation to happen is a gift that we are giving because we know that is part of the process of healing for the person who caused harm.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. It also makes me think about.

I think about it as and I'm curious your take on this. I think of it as like in movement spaces in particular, I've been in so many rooms, especially rooms with like mixed identities and privileges, where there's an intersection of politicized folks and folks who are doing some healing or transformation and something happens in the room where there's a rupture.

And my observation is that over the last. 10, 20 years, there's been this increasing, skillset around naming harms in public spaces. especially in these like personal internal work focus spaces, there's like more capacity to name things that in the past, especially if it were like mixed race or like a white dominant space, it might be everything's just gonna be kept under the rug.

We don't talk about this. It's not polite. Right? Before it used to be more like it wouldn't get talked about across lines of identity, maybe.

Now we're at this stage where it gets talked about, it gets named, and then what I've seen happen, and I'm sure you've seen happen, this happen in lots of spaces. All right, it got named! Great! Suddenly we encounter our lack of skill in coming back together. So we have the skill to now name something that really desperately needs to be named, we don't yet have the skill To, and it's a much higher order skill, in my opinion, to do the repair and coming back and reconciliation work and come back together.

I'm curious if that resonates or if you'd like your perspective as different or something you'd add to that.

Kazu Haga: No, unfortunately it resonates more than you know, you know, um, first, I want to shout out my friend, Sonya Shah, who coined the term fractures to belonging and is someone who has taught me so much about how to do this relational healing work. And the

depth of healing that we are capable of, as a species.

I think it's a beautiful thing, right? That we've gone from not naming things at all. I was at a conference once when someone named it as the tyranny of civility. it's not civil,

it's not polite bring up these tensions. I think it's great that we're one step above that.

it's great that we are seeing that, oh, we actually don't have the skills necessary to actually heal all of these conversations all the time. I think we do need to get a little bit better at discernment about when is a skillful place to bring up what conflicts.

I think this is also why I love the martial arts analogy. I was like, when if you're practicing, karate kung fu or whatever, you don't get better at these skills by constantly getting into street fights, get better at them by practicing these skills over and over and over in the safe container of a dojo.

I think we really need to more credence to that when it comes to conflict. That we can't wait until we get into a conflict to practice all these frameworks that we learn in the three hour workshop. Right.

I'm blessed to live in a community in Oakland where there's 35 of us across every kind of spectrum of diversity you can possibly imagine. And so there's always conflict going on, but it's not just that there's always conflict, it's that we are actually getting together every week to practice conflict, to practice conflict engagement, so that when we get into actual conflict, we've already been working out those muscles.

Right. And so I think that's another place that I'd love to see movements engage more in is the practice of healthy conflict engagement before those conflicts emerge so that we're building up those muscles before things blow up.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Yeah. I'd be curious to hear a little snippet of when you were doing that weekly practice. What does weekly practice run conflict engagement look like for

Kazu Haga: Yeah. So I guess I should give a shout out to, I live in a community called Canticle Farm. Which is what, like 12 or 14 homes. And it includes a transitional home for formerly incarcerated men and a home that houses a sanctuary program and people who live across, a pretty wide spectrum of wealth and class and all sorts of differences.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. If folks listening, wanna look up, an example of part of the world we're trying to build, Canticle Farm has got a lot of experiments going in

Kazu Haga: a a and I'll say

the world that we want to build apparently is really messy. 'cause it

a beautiful mess to live at Canticle. I mean, I'm this probably one of the greatest honors of my entire life, is being able to live in this community. And it's a lot of work, you know?

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah.

Kazu Haga: And we get together every Monday and sometimes it's as simple as talking around a talking piece and doing deep check-ins. I've noticed the question of how are you doing? It's a rhetorical question. Most of the times you're supposed to respond by saying, oh, I'm great. How are you? But actually slowing down enough to say, how are you actually doing?

We also practice giving each other feedback. We practice receiving feedback. We practice concrete skills that come in the form of like nonviolent communication, restorative circles. We've done workshops internally within the community on, a practice called Internal Family Systems, which is really cool. And so we're constantly trying to utilize or , skill up in these frameworks.

And one other thing I'll name about Canal is we have a restorative justice room in our community at the middle of our community that is dedicated only for conflict restorative conflict

You're not allowed to walk in that room unless you're working on conflict with somebody.

and the room has a big, huge window. that when people are in there engaged in conflict, people from the outside can see it. To normalize the fact that conflict is just part of our community life and not to romanticize, again, living in this community, 'cause it's a hot mess at times. And we're trying to normalize conflict. We're trying to practice conflict every week. And so it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful process.

Jeremy Blanchard: Hmm. you. I love that.

[00:46:45] Embracing complexity over black-and-white thinking

Jeremy Blanchard: I am curious on this thread of.

We're skillful at naming harms, and we can get into when we're naming harms, because we all grew up in, at least in this country, in this culture of a punitive system. We just know punishment as our primary way of addressing conflict and harm. One of the things that I see happen is that we get into this all or nothing.

Jeremy Blanchard: You wrote in the book: "The black white analysis of perpetrator and victim belies the complexities harm and violence,"

That there's like a lot of complexity in here, and I think that word complexity has a lot of power. it's what gets erased when our trauma responses come up

right.

We're not capable of seeing beyond wrong. You're against me. I need to protect myself. And there's a lot of, evolutionary reasons

have that response. Yeah. Curious to hear you talk a little bit about that.

Kazu Haga: Yeah. We live in such a complex world. Part of what's supported me in this is in Mahayana Buddhism, there's a distinction made between what's. Sometimes called, a mundane reality or conventional reality with what's sometimes called ultimate reality. And our great teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, used to say that even though we call them things like mundane and ultimate, one truth isn't more true than the other.

We're constantly swimming in these two realities. And the conventional reality, the mundane reality, is the reality that's much more linear. And it's the things that we can see and touch and hear. And there's an ultimate reality where things are much more complex.

And so I think when harm happens, there is oftentimes not always, oftentimes in the conventional realm, there's a clear person who caused the harm and person who experienced the harm. And again, I've had the privilege to hear deep stories from people who have experienced and perpetuated great harms. And I've heard their backstories digging back their entire lives and even longer. And once you slow down enough to hear the full story, you realize things are not as simple as this person caused harm and this person received it.

Even with oppression, this is maybe a controversial thing, but Yeah. Like in on one reality, in one reality, there is the oppressor, there is the privilege, and then there's the oppressed.

And there's also a reality that I want to continue to live into that says there's no such thing as perpetrator of harm, receiver of harm, oppressor, oppressed. There's oppression. And everyone is being impacted by that dynamic of oppression.

There's only harm and everyone is impacted by it. every time someone commits harm, it's most likely because there is some unprocessed harm that they are holding that they need to lash out and harm somebody else.

And so I think, the more Grounded we can be, the more we've done our own trauma healing work, so that we're less likely to have our own traumas get triggered, the more we can sit in the complexity of the world in which there sometimes things seem black and white, and at the same time there's a much more complex reality happening.

And to practice holding both of those realities at the same time requires a lot of work and hence the practice that is necessary.

[00:50:08] Anekāntavāda: Holding multiple truths

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I would love to hear a little bit about the principle from Jainism that you've

of that inspired me when I heard that it helps, it's something I come back to a lot.

Kazu Haga: Yeah. I love that. When I first learned it. Jainism for folks that don't know, is an ancient religion from present day India that predated Buddhism. So a lot of the ideas in Buddhism around non harm is really rooted in Jain traditions, probably the most nonviolent religion out there that exists.

they have this principle called anekāntavāda that, as far as I understand is oftentimes translated as not-one-sidedness or many sidedness.

And within this concept they have at least seven different understandings of truth. And I don't know if I can remember all of them, but it's something along the lines of: in some ways it is. In some ways it is not. In some ways it is and it is not. In some ways it is, and it is indiscernible in some ways it is not and it is indiscernible in some ways. It is not, and it is indiscernible.

and all seven of those truths are happening at the same time. Right. And so I do think because we live in such a polarized society, such a black and white binary worldview, we sometimes think that someone has to be wrong and someone has to be right. And that truth and right and wrong are, like zero sum games. But I think there's a deeper reality in which there are so many truths happening at the same time that are all a hundred percent true. Like truth doesn't have to all add up mathematically to a hundred percent. Truth can be 900% true, right?

There can be so many perspectives that are contradictory and each both a hundred percent true at the same time. And so I think, yeah, the more grounded we are, the more regulated we are, the more we can accept the complex realities that our intellect alone can always grasp.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I feel like that's one of my hopes, my prayers for us in our movement work, in our healing work. I think that's one of the things that healing opens up is the capacity to, oh, I can actually access this with some nuance. I can see that there can actually be multiple truths here I can get out of I need to make you wrong so that I am right so that we can, that is the way that this conversation or this interaction needs to conclude. So I find a lot of inspiration since I first heard you talk about that. I was like, oh, right. Like I'll be in conversations with people and catch myself getting into like, no, but I'm right about the, I'd be like,

right, well, I'm also wrong. And it's also indiscernible and

Kazu Haga: you know? that's right.

Jeremy Blanchard: realities at once. Yeah.

Kazu Haga: Yeah. And times when I've experienced harm, like if I can heal from that own, that my own sense of hurt, oftentimes ways in which I also contributed to the harm, to the conflict. It might hurt someone else, and it's like it's all true.

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

[00:53:06] Finding beauty in challenging times

Jeremy Blanchard: As we draw to a close here, I'm curious, is there anything else you wanna leave our listeners with that we maybe didn't get to or that feels important to, to offer here?

Kazu Haga: Yeah. You know, Movement Generation has a saying that says, change is inevitable, justice is not. And I really do believe that we're in this moment where over the next, however long, 10, 20, 50 years, we're gonna be going through a level of change that is, it's like nothing is up to us as human, human beings anymore.

Right. The earth is going through some changes, largely because of decisions that we, as human beings made, but at this point, so much is out of our hands. And I think oftentimes the best thing we can do is even with all of the war and destruction and ecological collapse and climate crisis.

To remind ourselves that even in the midst of that, creating beauty is possible, that affirming life is possible. And, I used to have these grand visions of being part of these massive movements that like transforms and saves the world, but these days I'm just appreciating the beauty of knowing that it's enough to continue to walk towards beauty and towards life. And maybe at this point, that's all we can do. And to like, to accept the beauty of that.

And the challenge of continuing to walk towards beauty in a time when there's so much destruction. It's really difficult practice to do. But really inviting people to honor and appreciate the little things that we can do to continue to show people that even in a world as violent as today, it's possible to affirm life and to continue to build relationships and community, and yeah, just to, to keep that in mind.

Jeremy Blanchard: Amen. it be so.

Oh, well, I'm feeling so nourished this conversation that we've had.

[00:54:55] Nourishment: Hospicing Modernity & unplugged time

Jeremy Blanchard: As we move towards wrapping up here, one of the questions I like to ask all my guests, is about where your roots and your nourishment comes from. The title of the podcast being Wider Roots.

Maybe it's things you can recommend to our guests, like books or, maybe it's practices that you're doing or maybe it's, just places you go, but where are you getting your nourishment to do the work that you do?

Kazu Haga: Yeah. So many things.

One is I'm currently in a book club of a book called Hospicing Modernity, and I actually have some amount of mourning because, as I mentioned, I don't have a lot of formal education and the book is like, it's a little dense. It's a little hard to read, which is why I joined a book club 'cause I need some support around that. it is one of the few books that, to me, is talking about transformation at the depth that I need to be having this conversation. Like I have zero interest in waging year long battles for a piece of legislation.

think we are experiencing a moment in humanity where whether we like it or not, whether we're ready or not, we're gonna be witness a transformation at a scale that we have never experienced before. And I think Hospicing Modernity is one of the few books that's talking about at that scale. So folks aren't familiar with that. Definitely recommend that.

And I also don't practice this as much as I should, but I get the deepest inspiration from the moments in my life where I can slow down. I used to have a practice where once a week would turn off all electricity and spend an entire evening just under candlelight. So it's not like I don't watch tv. I don't have tv. I don't watch anything on Netflix. It's that I don't even use electrical lights. And there's something about the way that practice slows me down, that I feel like I'm reconnecting with an ancestral way of being on this planet.

And when I'm able to slow down enough to sit outside and notice a hummingbird, suckling from a flower right in front of me and just these like small moments of like, oh, this is how my ancestors have lived for hundreds of thousands of years before email, before social media.

so I think that's one of the most important things that we can learn to do in this in unsustainable pace that capitalism demands of us today to take moments to breathe and to slow down. And even for one moment to step outside of modernity and remember who we are.

[00:57:35] Closing

Jeremy Blanchard: Yeah, I love that. So we'll link to that in the show notes, the book recommendation. And, I'm curious if folks wanna stay connected with you, how can they do that?

Kazu Haga: Yeah. So I have a website, it's KazuHaga.com. K-A-Z-U-H-A-G-A. I have so many thoughts on social media, but as of right now, I sometimes use Facebook and it's just at Kazu Haga. Yeah, we'll see where I go with social media ultimately, but right now, I'm on Facebook and still every once in a while use it.

Jeremy Blanchard: That's cool. And you've got a newsletter on your website that folks can sign up for.

Kazu Haga: Yeah, definitely.

Jeremy Blanchard: Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for the work you're doing in the world for the, decades of practice that you have put in to be able to see things the way you do and embody them the way you do. Very

Kazu Haga: Yeah. Likewise. Thanks so much for, having this conversation with me. It's a lot of, it's always a, a joy and I get to learn a lot from having these conversations too. So really grateful for you.

Jeremy Blanchard: Thank you so much for listening and a big thanks to Kazu for sharing his wisdom with us.

I want to try something new today. As I've said, this podcast is partially a research project. And so today I want to share my top takeaways from this conversation with Kazu as a way to help me integrate what I got from this, and hopefully help you have a chance to reflect as well.

First, I was really impacted by causes invitation to lead from a place of heartbreak and vulnerability in our activism. The idea of communicating to those who we see as opposition. As he said. I'm here because I love the sanctity of life and beauty. And those things are being destroyed. That idea just feels really potent to me.

Second. Causes whole perspective on collective trauma and viewing social injustice as manifestations of unhealed wounds. Resonates deeply with me. I can feel the way that that perspective ties together, personal and systemic transformation in really rich and thought provoking ways.

And finally I'm sitting with Kazu is reminder that there's no way for healing to not be messy. I know, I really needed to hear that invitation, to focus more on our commitment to healing the harm. Rather than trying to do everything we can not to cause harm. As someone who personally can get really paralyzed by perfectionism. It feels like a very freeing and liberating idea.

If you find this takeaway section at the end of episodes, helpful, please shoot me an email at podcast@widerroots.com and I will try to include it in future episodes.

Check out the show notes for links to the resources Kazu mentioned and other ways to connect with him.

Episode six comes out in two weeks with climate coach, Charlie Cox.

Charly Cox: My start point is less agitating for change and more empowering people to believe that they can be actors in their own lives. We fundamentally believe that everyone has a stake in climate change, that everyone can affect change around it.

Jeremy Blanchard: So as always make sure you subscribe in your podcast app of choice so that you can catch that episode and all the future ones.

And please head over to wider roots.com to subscribe to the free newsletter where I'm sharing resources that go beyond what fit into the episodes and fit into the show notes. I would love to invite you into that growing community of folks. And you can also find the podcast over on Instagram at wider roots pod.

And a shout out to Tim and Lindley and Meg who all helped review this episode.

Thanks as always to Wild choir for the theme music for the show, you're currently listening to their song, remember Me, which will play us out.

See you next time.