Fierce Vulnerability: Direct Action that Heals and Transforms: Healing from Trauma, Emerging from Collapse - Softcover

Haga, Kazu

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1946764981 ISBN 13: 9781946764980

Publisher: Parallax Press, 2025

Synopsis

Move beyond tactics of shaming and blaming in call-outs and cancel culture with a powerful new approach to difficult political conversations from Healing Resistance author Kazu Haga. <p/>Seasoned campaigner and political organizer Kazu Haga reveals an unexpected yet effective way to defuse potentially explosive situations, whether at a protest or at an uncomfortable family dinner: to act courageously with fierce vulnerability. Activists and concerned citizens on the frontlines of change will learn to engage in social movements with a different spirit, one that aligns with our deepest values around the healing and dignity of all people. <p/>Escalated forms of harm require an equally escalated response. Yet social justice activists often have a tendency to fall into an "us vs. them," "right vs. wrong" worldview as their tactics escalate, which can derail true social transformation and healing. In Fierce Vulnerability, author Kazu Haga argues that this binary worldview is at the heart of what is destroying our relationships and our planet, and offers a new way to create healing at all levels of society by combining the time-honored lineage of nonviolent action with the sciences of trauma healing. In answering the question, How do I engage in efforts for change that match the intensity of the destruction of all I love--my family, my community, the planet? Fierce Vulnerability helps us meet today's challenges with the transformational power of taking a stand without demonizing our opponents and causing further harm.

About this title

About the Author

Kazu Haga is the founder of the East Point Peace Academy and the recipient of the Martin Luther King Jr. Award from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Gil Lopez Award for Peacemaking. He trains groups in nonviolence, conflict reconciliation, restorative justice, political organizing, and mindfulness in prisons and jails, high schools and youth groups, with activist communities around the country. He is the founding board chair of Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice (CURYJ), serves on the board of PeaceWorkers, and is a member of the Ahimsa Collective and The Evolutionary Leaders. He lives in Oakland, California.<br/> <br/> <br/> <br/>

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 systems and laws and policies. What we yearn for is a fundamental transformation of our hearts, our values and our relationships – to ourselves, to each other, and to the earth.

Fierce Vulnerability is an attempt to build such a movement. A movement that understands the assertiveness that is needed to address the crises of our times. A movement that sees social change as a radical act of healing. A movement that knows that each of us needs to heal as much as those we may feel compelled to blame. A movement that knows that violence hurts all parties. A movement that will never see any individual as disposable, undeserving of dignity, or incapable of transformation.

Fierce Vulnerability is born of the conviction that our vulnerability is our greatest strength. Vulnerability makes us whole, and that wholeness is the only thing that can undo generations of investment in plunder and exploitation.

Join us and let us explore together what it might look like to enter into movement spaces with the courage to be our whole selves, sometimes courageous, sometimes fearful, sometimes clear, sometimes confused, sometimes joyous, sometimes grieving, often a mixture of all of these. We seek to bring ourselves as we are, in service to life, growing in our capacity to be fierce in our vulnerability and vulnerable in our ferocity.

How do we stop injustice in its tracks while acknowledging the interconnectedness of all people?
How do we protect ourselves while nurturing a relationship with our broken-heartednness?
How do we build a movement that can shut down a highway while creating a culture of opening up?
How do we build a movement with the militancy to occupy a government building and the sensitivity to see it as an act of healing?
How can we come to experience vulnerability as a strength, not a weakness?
_____________________

THE NEED FOR HEALING

Social change work at its best is about healing. If we are not working towards healing ourselves and our relationships, I am not sure what it is we are doing. If we are not working towards healing and reconciliation, there will be endless conflict, endless forms of violence, and endless systems of oppression.

For me, a commitment to nonviolence is a commitment to healing ourselves and healing our relationships. And in order to heal, we need to be vulnerable.

When I was young, I was deeply lonely. Years before my stepfather came into our lives, there was a major rift in my family and my mother was disowned from hers, resulting in us having to leave Japan. Because I was so young, my parents tried to shield me from the reality of what was happening. They simply told me that we were coming to the United States on a vacation and never explained to me what was going on. While their intention was pure, I believe that it ultimately led to more confusion for my young mind.

We constantly underestimate children. Even at a young age, with our parents doing their best to hide the pain of separation from us, I could feel that something was deeply wrong. One day, I was in Japan living a “normal” life filled with loving memories of large family gatherings. Then suddenly, we were living in a foreign country, not allowed to see or talk to any of our grandparents, aunts, uncles or cousins. While my parents never uttered a bad word about any of them, I implicitly received the message that they were suddenly “bad” people who I was not allowed to love. There was an “us,” and they were now a “them.” We no longer belonged to each other.

Each year on our birthdays and on Christmas, an aunt and uncle would send me and my sisters presents. Every year without fail, even through all those years that our families were separated. Whatever happened between them and my parents, they still loved us as children.

However, I was absorbing the pain and anger that my parents felt towards them and so receiving those presents became a very confusing thing for me. I was a kid, and I loved presents. At the same time, my confused child-body told me that these presents were coming from “them.” Bad people. People who no longer loved us. So why would they send me presents? Were they trying to buy my love and turn me against my parents? My aunt and uncle’s act of love was misinterpreted by me as something with a hidden agenda.

I now see in retrospect that this was one of the places when a seed of desperate loneliness was planted in my young body. Underneath all the toys, I was scared and confused. Looking back, I could feel in my body that something was deeply wrong, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Everyone was pretending that everything was normal, but my body told me something different. It was deeply confusing and disassociating.

On top of that, we moved to an almost all-white area of Massachusetts where we were the only Asian family and the only immigrant family in the entire school district.

I was too young to understand my own emotions, so I didn’t realize how lonely I was. But I was completely frozen, drowning myself first into music and Japanese comic books, and later into drugs and alcohol. By the time I was fourteen-years old, I would only come out of my room to eat meals and lock myself back into my room - if I was even home at all. As I sat in my room frozen, my emotions froze with me. Throughout most of my adult life, I had been carrying around years of loneliness like a heavy bag of bricks in the middle of my gut.

If I am trying to contribute to the healing of society, there is no better place to look for lessons on how to do that than in my own healing journey. Because I believe that the process of healing looks the same, no matter the scale.

In the same way that my personal healing work involves retroactively embodying the feelings of loneliness and shame I could not feel when I was younger, I believe that every community and nation collectively has deep feelings of pain that it has not acknowledged. That it is carrying around hundreds of years of frozen emotions, rooted in the legacy of violence that it experienced and perpetrated. And that we need to learn - collectively - how to retroactively embody those frozen emotions so that they can be acknowledged, released and integrated.

In the same way that I needed to have that scary and courageous conversation with my family about my childhood trauma, this nation needs to have a scary and courageous conversation with itself about its childhood trauma.
_____________________

I do not own the trademarks to the term Fierce Vulnerability, I did not invent the concept, and while I am technically writing the book on it, I am far from the only person who gets to define it.
I don’t even claim to be an expert in Fierce Vulnerability. This book just lays out what I have learned about it from my own experiments and conversations.

Like the word “nonviolence,” there can be many different ways to speak about and understand Fierce Vulnerability. And I believe that all of the different ways that we understand it will all contribute to where we need to go.

Edition details

• Publisher: Parallax Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1946764981
• ISBN 13: 9781946764980
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224