Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse - Softcover

Haga, Kazu

 
9781946764980: Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1946764981 ISBN 13: 9781946764980
Verlag: Parallax Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Mobilizing the Power to Stop Harm, Cultivating the Love to Heal


In times of collapse, we need a movement that recognizes injustice as a reflection of collective trauma and embraces its role as a catalyst for collective healing through transformative action.

We are living in a world where the depths of division, violence, and destruction can no longer be ignored. From political polarization leading to the erosion of the democratic process to the climate crisis continuing to perpetuate racial inequity, we need changes that heal harms at the personal and systemic levels.

Escalated forms of harm require an equally escalated response. Yet social movements often use tactics that have a tendency to escalate an  “us vs. them,” “right vs. wrong” worldview not conducive to healing. 

In Fierce Vulnerability, activist and author Kazu Haga argues this binary worldview is at the heart of what is destroying our relationships and our planet and offers a new way to create healing by combining the time-honored lineage of nonviolent action with the sciences of trauma healing and the promises of spiritual practice. Fierce Vulnerability realizes we can’t “shut down” injustice any more than we can “shut down” trauma; if healing is our goal, we need social movements that center relationships and promote healing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of Building Belonging, the Ahimsa Collective and the Fierce Vulnerability Network, is a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm. 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 and is the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Award from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Gil Lopez Award for Peacemaking. 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.

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Introduction

I don’t know what Fierce Vulnerability is.

This book is me thinking out loud. It’s my musings about how I am understanding how to create change and bring more healing to our world. By the time you read this, I’ll probably have more to say, and some of it may be contradictory to what you read here as this will continue to evolve as I live into it.

This book is not about personal healing. In fact, I have come to believe that the idea of personal healing and individual liberation is a delusion. There is no such thing as personal healing in an interdependent world. In order for any of us to be free, we must work for the liberation of all beings.

This means that this book is also about systemic change. Call it social justice, call it activism, call it movement building, call it whatever you’d like, but I don’t want anyone to mistake this for some sort of self-help book. It is not that.

The things that we might call “personal healing” work - spirituality, healthy living, trauma healing - must be an integral part of the work of systemic change. We must embody the changes that we want to see in the world, and if we are asking the world to heal, we have to be willing to do the hard work ourselves.

When you read “trauma healing,” your mind might go in any number of directions. In my understanding (and experience), trauma is the lingering impact of experiencing or witnessing something so distressing or disturbing that it overwhelms your body’s ability to cope. While the impact of stress goes away relatively quickly, the impact of trauma can linger for years and lifetimes.

When we experience something so scary that we become paralyzed and feel like fight or flight is not an option, or when we are so scared that the emotions associated with that fear are not possible to feel in the moment, we shut down. We take all of that incredibly powerful energy of fear and trap it inside of our bodies. And when we are not able to properly discharge that energy, it can become frozen in our bodies as trauma.

In an era of escalating climate catastrophe, in a time when the impact of a 500-year legacy of racial oppression is bubbling to the surface, when we are living with the largest wealth disparity the world has ever seen, when mass shootings are a daily occurrence and our political system is in complete upheaval, it is not enough for us to heal our own wounds and call it a day. We need to understand that the intention of our individual healing is to remember that we are interdependent. We are at our strongest when we realize that we actually depend on each other, not when we buy into the myth of independence.


The legacy of nonviolence has always had space for people who work on personal and systemic change. There are people who are deeply embedded in personal healing spaces that are dedicated practitioners of nonviolence. For me, meditation, yoga, healing workshops, conflict circles and therapy have been some of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life, and I consider them to be part of my nonviolence practice. I am purifying my own mind, body and spirit of the violence I hold in my heart.

At the same time, we are living at a particular juncture in human history; if we don’t make changes at the largest, systemic levels, we may not survive much longer.

The paradox is that if we don’t root that change in a commitment to personal transformation, I am afraid that the changes we need at the largest levels will not be possible.

The thoughts in this book have been the result of the experiments and experiences of my life. I began my life as an activist in a Buddhist monastery. I then threw myself into movement spaces that were deeply disembodied, disconnected from the heart and had little commitment to spirit or reconciliation. Then, as I wrote about in Healing Resistance, through Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I found nonviolence. And that changed everything.

Exploring nonviolence for myself led me to my own healing journey, and into contact with people like Shilpa Jain and spaces like Jams. They kicked my ass, and made me realize how much I needed to heal.

Facilitating nonviolence workshops brought me into working in prisons, which led me to the work of restorative justice and meeting people like Sonya Shah and joining the Ahimsa Collective. These spaces shattered my mind and showed me the depth of healing that we are capable of as a species.

As I healed my own wounds, and as I sat in circles witnessing others heal theirs, I started to understand that healing is what we need as a collective. That injustice is not a political thing. They are manifestations of collective pain. And if we want to bring healing to the world, then we need to learn from the spaces that have been helping people heal through their personal traumas and bring those lessons to scale.

What that looks like is one of the key questions Fierce Vulnerability is exploring.

Almost 20-years ago I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. To this day, it was amongst the most powerful places I have ever visited. Walking around the house, knowing what happened up in that attic and what happened to her after… I was in tears by the time I got to the end of the tour.
And there at the end, on a large wall, was a written statement. It said that the museum sometimes receives criticism for doing so much to tell the story of just one person when so many millions of people suffered and lost their lives. They respond by sharing that for them, the true scale of the Holocaust is almost too much to take in at once. It’s simply too overwhelming. But through deeply understanding the story of just one person, we begin to be able to touch the collective suffering of all.

Sometimes, the global, intergenerational violence of the world is too overwhelming. Thinking about the climate collapse alone can shut someone down or put them in a state of panic. And while I’ve been learning about systemic violence for years, it wasn’t until I started going through my own healing journey that I was able to truly let the grief of these “political” issues sink into my body and become more personal. It was through understanding my own story and my own pain that I was able to develop a deeper understanding of our collective story and our collective pain.
And in that depth and sometimes despair, I started to see glimmers of hope. You can’t see the light of a candle until it’s dark, and similarly I didn’t see the light of hope until I was able to sink into my own despair.

Fierce Vulnerability has been about trying to understand that dynamic, and learning to extrapolate the lessons from it to larger and larger scales. It is about reimagining activism as healing work and organizing as a spiritual practice. Trying to imagine a social justice movement that is led not only by “activists” who are experts in shutting down a highway, but also by healers, artists, grief tenders, farmers and ceremony leaders who are experts at opening up our hearts. Where we are working not only on strategies and campaigns that lead to a political revolution, but also on connections and healing that lead to liberation.

This is way bigger than direct action. It is about transformation.

Our world is in crisis. Our social systems are being torn apart, our economic systems have created historic levels of wealth disparity, and earth’s life support systems are on the brink of collapse. The need for a powerful direct action movement that nurtures a radical, fundamental transformation has never been greater. Despair seems to be in the air we breathe and can be felt in the depth of our hearts.

Yet our need is not only a transformation of...

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Verlag
Parallax Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1946764981
ISBN 13 
9781946764980
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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gpsr@libri.de

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