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This week I’m bringing back one of my favorite guests, transformative activist, and restorative justice advocate, Kazu Haga. We talk about his new book, Fierce Vulnerability, which draws on one of the most radical and successful political revolutions in history, the mass nonviolent movements of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King. Yet today, Kazu rarely calls what he does nonviolence. He prefers the more nuanced term fierce vulnerability, a modern approach to transformation that may hold the key to finally resolving the world’s endless conflicts by first healing the traumas within ourselves.

The Dalai Lama said we cannot achieve world peace without first achieving peace within ourselves. But do we really have time for that? When the world feels like it’s on fire, politically, socially, even literally like the wildfires that now rage through California each year, Kazu and I explore how binary us-versus-them thinking fuels cycles of violence on both sides of a conflict. He suggests that separateness is the real enemy. Separateness from those we call enemies from our planet, even from ourselves. Only when we see others as separate can we justify harming them, and that separateness is rooted in a deeper disconnection from our own humanity and our longing to connect.

Kazu also questions how separateness shapes the way we organize the world nations themselves, at least as they exist today, an inevitable source of violence and division. Could we reimagine a world that moves beyond borders and toward a humanity? United by mutual respect and shared goals, a world that celebrates differences rather than fears them.

Keep listening if you’ve ever questioned the idea of winning against an enemy, who at their core has the same fundamental needs as you do. Is it really possible to resolve conflict not through force, but through dialogue, understanding, and compassionate action? If you’ve ever wondered whether the way we engage in conflict is keeping us stuck, this conversation is for you.

What happens when we approach resistance with vulnerability instead of force?

Scott Snibbe: Welcome back Kazu. Thanks for taking some of your precious time to talk with me and our How to Train a Happy Mind listeners again.

[00:03:24] Kazu Haga: Thanks so much for having me back.

[00:03:26] Scott Snibbe: You’e here to talk about your new book, Fierce Vulnerability, which I absolutely loved and I had the pleasure to read it relatively slowly in the weeks leading up to its release next week. When people hear this episode, it’s going to be the first day the book is out, so congratulations.

[00:03:43] Kazu Haga: Thank you, I appreciate it. It’s been a book that’s been years and years in the making.

What is fierce vulnerability?

[00:03:49] Scott Snibbe: Can you explain what fierce vulnerability is and why you wrote a whole book about it?

[00:03:57] Kazu Haga: There’s a lot that I can say about it. There’s three main reasons. One is, the longer I do this work, the less I’m seeing injustice as a political issue. I feel like when I hear the word politics, I think about partisan politics and ideological debates and these games that we play about who has more power than the other.

Injustice is not a political thing as much as it is a manifestation of collective trauma. If we can understand injustice as a manifestation of trauma, then maybe we can understand that our response to that should be attempts to try to heal that trauma. If we can understand injustice as less a political issue and more as a response to trauma, then can we build movements that understand that we can’t shut down injustice any more than we can shut down trauma.

Like a lot of our social movements, we move with this energy of we’re here to shut things down, but with trauma, you can’t go to groups of traumatized people and point our fingers and say, Stop doing that. That’s not effective in healing.

What you need to do is slow things down and open things up. Rather than moving with this energy of we’re here to shut things down, even if we might need to continue to utilize tactics that shut down a highway or shut down a government meeting or whatever it might be, can we do so with the spirit of we’re actually here to open things up? That’s the first piece.

The second thing is that, as I’ve gone through a lot of my own healing journeys, I’ve learned so much about what it takes to heal from my own personal traumas, and I’ve learned from that what it might take to heal our collective wounds. So much of fierce vulnerability is about learning from this vast wealth of knowledge that we’ve gained in the last 50 years or so about how to heal individual personal traumas and take those same lessons and apply it to scale for society to heal our own our collective traumas.

The final thing is to figure out what it means to be doing this work in the context of the poly crisis that we live in, with the changes that we are witnessing, not only with, with DOGE and Trump and all of these things, but even bigger issues like the climate crisis and pandemics and these things that are happening that we have no control over. What does it mean for us to accept the fact that the changes that are happening on the planet are so vast right now that we are no longer the drivers of change. the earth is making these changes.

What does it mean for us to let go of our ego and not see ourselves as change makers, but as just beings that have some role to play in being in right relationship with the changes that are happening around us?

Fierce vulnerability vs nonviolence

[00:07:03] Scott Snibbe: My understanding is that fierce vulnerability for you is another term for nonviolence—if I’m not mistaken—because you have some qualms with that word, even though it’s the lineage of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, that word wasn’t quite encapsulating the spirit of what nonviolence meant in Kingian nonviolence training.

Can you talk about that more?

[00:07:34] Kazu Haga: The word fierce vulnerability for me came out of a conversation that my friend Chris Moore Backman and I were having for many, many years about the word nonviolence. Because of the misunderstandings of that word that exists all throughout society, we found that it’s oftentimes a barrier to entry with a lot of the communities that we want to work with.

We were always talking about rebranding nonviolence, we just needed to find a different word. Once people are in the room, we can talk about this thing, but we need to call it something else. In the course of that conversation, this word fierce vulnerability entered our lexicon. We ultimately actually decided to continue to use the word nonviolence because, as you said, it ties us to a really important lineage, but these words, fierce vulnerability kind of took on a life of its own.

We kept playing with it and we kept thinking about it. I don’t know that it replaces nonviolence, but for us, it does add one really important thing that is missing in the lineage of nonviolence, not because nonviolence is limited in any way, but because when Dr. King was around, when Gandhi was around, when all these people were organizing, they didn’t have access to the science of trauma healing. Neuroscience, wasn’t a thing that existed. That’s one of the main things that it tries to add to this ancient lineage of nonviolence is this understanding of how trauma impacts our ability to create long term change.

[00:09:02] Scott Snibbe: Your book brought to mind one of my favorite quotes from His Holiness the Dalai Lama when he says, We cannot achieve world peace without first achieving peace within ourselves. This message comes through again and again in your book, the importance, like you say, of healing trauma of self-growth, self-transformation.

We cannot achieve world peace without first achieving peace within ourselves.

I’m sure you get some pushback when you say, Wait a minute before you go out and protest, you need to do this trauma work—show up and try to meditate. What do you say to the person who says they don’t have time for all this self-growth training, that they need to go out and act, the problems of the world are too urgent?

[00:09:45] Kazu Haga: I appreciate the urgency. There is a lot of urgency. We do need to act today, yesterday. But at the same time, we need to understand that the world is in a state of panic right now. If we respond to that panic from a place of our own panic, then we’re only adding more panic to the world; that’s not a space that is conducive to healing.

If we respond to that panic from a place of our own panic, then we’re only adding more panic to the world; that’s not a space that is conducive to healing.

One of the quotes that I talk about in the book, which is one of my favorite quotes, and ironically comes from the U.S. Navy SEALs, where they say “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” In this fast-paced world, we have to remember how to breathe slowly and actually us doing the work of healing our own traumas and doing the work of learning how to breathe slowly is actually going to support us in moving more efficiently through this crazy world that we live in. It’s not one or the other.

We have to stop doing actions in order to heal, but you also can’t focus so much on your own healing that you forget to act on behalf of others. One of the things that I keep talking about over and over and over in this book is that this book is not a book about self-healing and self-help.

One of the things that I write a lot about is the delusion of individual liberation. In an interdependent world, there’s no such thing as individual healing and individual liberation. As we heal our wounds, as we heal our own traumas, we need to be very mindful that the intention of us doing our own individual healing is so that we have more capacity to be out in the world, working on our collective healing because ultimately, if there isn’t collective healing, I will never be whole. I will never be healed.

In an interdependent world, there’s no such thing as individual healing and individual liberation.

Reconciliation is the ultimate goal of action

[00:11:36] Scott Snibbe: One of the biggest takeaways from your book for me was that you don’t believe it’s possible to have truly effective protests without the ultimate intention of reconciling with the people that we’re in conflict with. That’s the last step of the six steps of nonviolence that I learned from your last book.

What are some of the strongest pushbacks you get from activist colleagues on this message?

[00:12:05] Kazu Haga: These days, I do a lot more work with restorative justice practitioners and therapists and healers. I think there’s a little bit more of an understanding. Even in a lot of the social movements that I’m in, if we’re able to slow down enough and really talk about what it is that we’re trying to do, then I think people really do get it.

I wrote in Healing Resistance that there’s an incarcerated nonviolence trainer that I work with who once taught me that resolving a conflict is about fixing issues, but reconciling a conflict is about repairing relationships and that in our movements today, we oftentimes go only so far as to think about how to fix the issue.

What is the legislation that needs to get passed? But we don’t think about the relationships that need to get healed. If we’re not healing the relationships, then the underlying resentment that created the conflict in the first place is still there. So it’s only a matter of time before another conflict emerges.

One of the things that I think about a lot is when Dr. Martin Luther King said that “I’ve chosen to stick with love because hate is too heavy of a burden to bear.” This idea that the commitment to reconciliation is a commitment to seeing through the delusion of separation at this idea that I can win by beating those people over there and that may be a simple thing to grasp intellectually, but I think in the depths of our hearts, we all know that that is a delusion because again, we live in this deeply interdependent world.

I’ve chosen to stick with love because hate is too heavy of a burden to bear.

A lot of the work that we do around committing to reconciliation is about reminding ourselves that we live in this deeply interdependent world and that there is no victory if we view victory as victory over other groups of people.

[00:14:03] Scott Snibbe: I wish you were running for president.

[00:14:06] Kazu Haga: I don’t. This is a bit of an aside, but I think we should run a campaign to abolish the office of the presidency. It’s no longer about this person or that person. I have real issues with the centralization of power to this extent, so, yeah, no thank you.

Caring for the people you protest against

[00:14:26] Scott Snibbe: Another very beautiful thing you talk about, that just opens my heart, is the importance of sincerely caring about the people that you might be protesting against. You had a great example in your book of an action where people were protesting against the expansion of a military base, while at the same time bringing meals to all the soldiers stationed there and staying in conversation with them.

Can you talk about this or other examples of protests where you stay in a constructive connection with the other side of the conflict? Can you imagine how protesters advocating for Palestinians today or against Donald Trump’s immigration policies, how they stay in connection with the other side?

[00:15:13] Kazu Haga: Yeah, you’re talking about the the Larzac movement in France, which happened in the 1970s and 80s, when a group of peasant farmers organized a 10-year campaign to stop the expansion of a military base that would have taken over a lot of their farmlands. It led to over 100,000 people—at its height—participating in these protests and oftentimes they would protest the expansion of the base, but also provide food for the soldiers that are staying at the base.

This was one way of acknowledging that the enemy is not the people. It is the injustice. Right now it’s important to recognize that Donald Trump is great at creating this delusion, this mirage, that he is so powerful and he is so popular, but the reality is, and these poll numbers are starting to show that he’s actually starting to lose a lot of support, even amongst his voters.

These people who are starting to question the actions that are coming down from his administration. Doing the things that he promised the poor working class people that he would do. These people need somewhere to go. We need to create strategies that welcome them and help them realize that, yes, they made a mistake. Now we can work together to correct that mistake.

I also just want to say that, obviously, there’s a lot of pushback I get about the work that we need to do to develop compassion for people like Donald Trump. One of the really important things to recognize is that I think as this misnomer about nonviolence, that nonviolence believes that if I can just have compassion for Donald Trump, then somehow magically he will change.

It’s really important to remember that if I can be part of movements that honor the dignity and sanctity of Donald Trump, that will probably never impact him. He will probably never know that that is the work that we are doing, but it does change me. The work of cultivating understanding and reminding myself that even Donald Trump has dignity and sanctity as a human being reminds me that I live in an interdependent world where Donald Trump and I will never be outside of this interwoven web of humanity.

The work of cultivating understanding and reminding myself that even Donald Trump has dignity and sanctity as a human being reminds me that I live in an interdependent world where Donald Trump and I will never be outside of this interwoven web of humanity.

That does change the way I move through the world. It’s important when we do the work of developing, cultivating, compassion, curiosity, or a reminder of the dignity of all human beings, that it’s not always about those people over there, but it’s about reminding myself who I want to be and how I want to move through the world. Singing songs and incorporating art and ritual and ceremony into our movements are some of the ways that I think we remind ourselves that we are interdependent with each other.

[00:18:17] Scott Snibbe: It’s very beautiful what you say, because I was walking past a couple of friends the other day, and they were plotting how to kill the billionaires. They were like, if we got them all on the yacht, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos—it’s like, well, what kind of person do you want to be? We need to respect the dignity of everyone else, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, etc.

[00:18:46] Kazu Haga: On the one hand, I do have so much empathy and compassion for that belief. I totally get where it comes from. A lot of it is actually rooted in the love that these people have for the communities that they’re trying to protect. At the same time, we have to understand that that worldview is the same worldview that justifies going to war to create peace. Like if we kill all the terrorists, then we’ll have peace. Or if we lock up all the criminals, then we’ll have peace. It’s this carceral worldview that lives in this delusion that if we just get rid of those people, then we will have peace. I just don’t believe that that is how our universe is structured.

Mass social transformation

[00:19:26] Scott Snibbe: The first time I saw His Holiness the Dalai Lama, that’s what made me become Buddhist, because he said if we kill one Chinese person we make a hundred Chinese enemies. When I became a Tibetan Buddhist 25 years ago, it was also the beginning of the war on terror. I would read, month over month, the headline would be number two an al Qaeda killed, number two an al Qaeda killed, number two—there’s always going to be a number two, even if you get number one.

I love your book because you you talk about the history of human civilization, the history of the whole universe actually, and bearing upon our current civilization, your book got me wondering about how special political nonviolence is, or fierce vulnerability, if we want to add in your modern take on it.

You’re an expert on this area, how effective nonviolent protests are on a scale of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela. Of course we have nonviolence, like Ahimsa, for a couple thousand years as a principle of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, but is it true that these mass scale nonviolent acts that have really been effective at transforming society are relatively new? If so, why do you think that is?

[00:20:37] Kazu Haga: There’s obviously been smaller examples of nonviolent campaigns, whether it’s interpersonal or social throughout society. But Dr. Martin Luther King once said that he used to think that the love ethics of Jesus was only capable of transforming people one at a time. It was when he studied the history of Gandhi in the Indian independence movement that he saw for the first time someone taking that same love ethic of Jesus and using it for mass social transformation.

If you ask Dr. King, Gandhi was actually the first person that was able to utilize this love of all humans, of all people as the foundation for a movement that mobilized hundreds of thousands, millions of people to create social change, and if you read Gandhi’s work you can see that he really understood his life as an experiment in nonviolence.

He almost saw himself as a scientist, trying to grapple with these experiments and hypotheses. Scientific knowledge takes time to develop. I think there were earlier scientists of nonviolence than Gandhi, and each person added a little bit to that scientific knowledge. For whatever reason, Gandhi was able to put all of that knowledge, as well as his own experiments together in a way that created that mobilized millions of people all across India. Thank God for that because at a time when our scientific knowledge has gotten so advanced that we can see injustice and violence happening at such mass scales that we have this technology now that I think can, if mobilized in the right way, counter that.

[00:22:24] Scott Snibbe: In a way, though, this global revolution, the one people are hoping for, it started a hundred years ago with Gandhi and the mass nonviolent movements, this is a really major, substantial alternative to wars between nation states solving, trying to solve problems.

[00:22:43] Kazu Haga: Yeah, absolutely. I want to highlight the work of my friend Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who years ago wrote a book called Why Civil Resistance Works, which showed that statistically nonviolent movements are twice as effective as violent movements, and the gap between that is growing. Nonviolent movements are becoming more and more effective over time, while violent movements are becoming less and less effective.

Nonviolent movements are becoming more and more effective over time, while violent movements are becoming less and less effective.

The importance of grief to a healthy mind

[00:23:04] Scott Snibbe: Even the ones that supposedly failed, if we measure out another few decades from now, maybe they will eventually succeed. Like His Holiness in the Tibetan movement. It’s been 70 years, but it may eventually work, and it’s probably more likely to work than a violent approach. You talk about grieving as an important part of what an activist does, what anyone who wants to transform the world does. Any of us living through the current shakeups to civilization.

Can you talk about the importance of grief to a healthy mind and for changing the world? How do we avoid getting overwhelmed by these feelings or depressed?

[00:23:46] Kazu Haga: Yeah, it is overwhelming. One of the things that I’m really trying to explore in Fierce Vulnerability is to remind ourselves that we are of the earth. That we are beings of the earth. As the earth suffers, we suffer along with it. As human beings, I think we don’t often like to grieve.

We’re told that grieving is scary and it’s “sad” so we do our best to ignore the fact that we are suffering time. Here we ignore as we watch these wildfires in Southern California and whatever the latest climate catastrophe is that we suppress the reality that as we watch the earth suffer, that we are suffering with her and there is a deep spiritual cost to suppressing a truth that our body knows to be true.

I really do believe that every single human being, regardless of our politics or whatever, can feel that something is deeply wrong with the planet today, and to continue to suppress that, you can see the increases in mental illnesses and the deepened sense of isolation that we see throughout society, because I think unprocessed grief completely shuts us down.

It cuts off our ability to be with reality as it is. If we cannot face and accept reality as it is, there is no way that we can face it. Not only for important movements to think about how to do grief work amongst activists, but for activists to think about how can we use our movements to help society grieve.

I have this fantasy in my mind that I’ve been thinking about for years now of doing an action where a group of activists might blockade a major intersection or a highway and a group of artists and dancers and healers and ceremony leaders hold a public grief ritual right in the middle of that highway and then having therapists and healers and restorative justice facilitators there to pull people into to that experience and help people feel something that I feel like we are all holding, but we haven’t been able to process.

I really do think one of the biggest roles that movements can play is to kind of be a bell that pierces through the delusion that keeps telling us we’re okay, everything’s fine, nothing to see here. Everything is going according to plan. To able to say out loud, Oh, this is actually a really scary time and we need to be grieving.

We need to be able to say out loud that we are afraid, that we are confused; that is actually a really important stepping stone to being able to face reality as it is. We can figure out how to most skillfully move forward.

We need to be able to say out loud that we are afraid, that we are confused; that is actually a really important stepping stone to being able to face reality as it is.

[00:26:50] Scott Snibbe: In the book you talk about some protests you’ve seen and also advocate for where people, instead of screaming about a legislative change or something, big signs that share how they’re feeling about the situation, which is, I think, very skillful because it’s hard. It’s just like nonviolent communication, if you’re in an argument with another person, if you tell them how you’re feeling, you can’t disagree with that, and quite often, your compassion wells up.

[00:27:18] Kazu Haga: Yeah, and so often in protests, the kind of messaging that we lead with is either you’re wrong or we demand this. Again, if you’re only trying to fix issues, that might be effective. But if you’re trying to heal relationships and tend to the brokenness and the fractures of our species, then maybe leading with a message of, My heart is breaking, I am scared and trying to see if those messages can sow a seed in the other side or in the people that are watching this action happen, that might invoke some curiosity that might invoke some, some feelings and emotions.

I’ve always been taught as an activist that we use nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience to gain power and to gain leverage so that we can pass legislation. Again, I’m not taking away from that. I think that’s still important. But at the same time, I think an important role that direct action, civil disobedience, protests can play these days is to help us feel something.

The use of rituals

[00:28:21] Scott Snibbe: You were just talking about ritual and in the book you talk a lot about the importance of ritual to healthy human lives and you advocate for protests that become more like rituals. Like you were just saying that somehow integrate spiritual reverential elements.

Can you talk about a protest you participated in that incorporated ritual like this? Can you imagine some of the raging conflicts you see out in our country today that could be transformed somehow into healing rituals?

[00:28:49] Kazu Haga: Yeah, one of the biggest lessons I learned around this is when I was at Standing Rock back in 2016 or whenever that encampment was going on. I remember every time we’d go to town for a demonstration, the elders would remind us that when you go to town, you’re going to a ceremony.

You’re going to a ritual that the direct action itself is ceremony. I really took that to heart. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. How can we design our actions in a way that feel more like it is ritual? Again, instead of leading with this, like F U energy, to lead with, let us grieve together and how can we make this action into a grief ritual?

I’ve had the privilege to do a lot of trauma healing circles with police officers and prison guards and I can tell you that they are hurting deeply. Police officers and prison guards, they have some of the highest suicide rates of any profession, it is a violent institution and working in that environment, and having to be the kind of boots on the ground of systemic violence, is not healthy for their soul.

If you can you slow down enough to create a sense of safe space for them to talk about their experience, so many of these people that I’ve talked to are very open about it. Their jobs are really hard. It’s not to justify the violence that they perpetuate and the system perpetuates, but to acknowledge that they are human beings that are being impacted by the violence of these institutions like anyone else.

If we can create space where they can see that, where they can feel safe to touch into their own grief, then maybe transformation can happen. I really do believe that we can do that while also building movements that have the power to say, No, to say, Stop. One of the best definitions of nonviolence I’ve ever seen is this small piece of writing that comes from a woman named Barbara Demings, who wrote a thing that become known as the two hands of nonviolence, where—I’m paraphrasing—she says, for nonviolence with one hand says, no, to allow you to continue to do what you’re doing. I refuse to pay for your bombs. I refuse to pay for your guns. I will do everything I can to disrupt the easy pattern of your life.

At the same time, with the other hand, we have it outstretched. Maybe with compassion, maybe not, but always outstretched. With this hand we say, “And I will never let go of your dignity as a human being, and I will be here for you when you are ready to do better.” I really want to see more and more movements that have the understanding that we need both of those hands. The power to say no to injustice, and the love necessary to heal that injustice.

[00:31:46] Scott Snibbe: I did like that section of your book that talks about the police and the wisdom and compassion you have for understanding the causes of some of the systemic problems we have with policing today in the training of our. If you or I went through that training, we would start to have some of those same problems, if you get trained to see massive problems and tiny acts, and to instantly pull your gun. If you pull your gun, you have to empty it. These kinds of trainings are not conducive to a healthy society.

[00:32:20] Kazu Haga: No, they’re not. As a volunteer that works in the prisons, I have to take this annual, it’s called a brown card training every year and I sit through the six hour training where for the entire six hours, they would basically tell me over and over and over again how these incarcerated people will lie. They will cheat. They will try to steal from you. Don’t trust them. They’re only participating in your programs because they want the certificate.

That’s just as a volunteer in prison, nevermind as a prison guard. The way that we are training people in society—whether it’s through explicit trainings or implicitly through culture—has a huge impact on how we treat each other.

The way that we are training people in society—whether it’s through explicit trainings or implicitly through culture—has a huge impact on how we treat each other.

How big are the transformations we need in society?

[00:32:59] Scott Snibbe: Your book has this wonderful paradox, like Buddhism has, of being enormously ambitious with aspirations as big as transforming our whole current political and economic systems, “to wake up from our collective delusions,” you write. But at the same time, you’re very humble. You have such a humble view that we have no idea how to do this, admitting that we may only have the power to make very small steps in the direction of wholeness and fairness.

Can you talk about this paradox: how big the transformations are that we need? How big the transformations are coming, whether we like it or not, you also write about. What kind of attitudes, thoughts, actions can we cultivate to weather this change and come through it as a better society in this small way, you talk about?

[00:33:53] Kazu Haga: One of the things fierce vulnerability asks of us is is the vulnerability to accept the reality that we are probably in the biggest moment of transition in the history of our species. I really do believe that and it takes a lot of work, emotional work, spiritual work to fully accept the reality for what it is and to really say, wow, we are in this turning point as a species, that the crises we are facing now are probably the biggest crises we have ever had to face. As 300,000 year history of our species and at the same time, having the fierceness to not freeze in the face of that and to continue to move forward and to continue affirm life and to create beauty and to create community.

I talk about in the book that I’m so grateful that in my early upbringing, I spent a lot of time, from two or three years old, with a lot of indigenous elders who used to talk to me about these prophecies. When I was really young, I spent a lot of time with a Hopi elder named Thomas Banyanka, who was kind of charged with sharing the Hopi prophecy to the broader world. When I was in my early teens, I used to sleep in the basement room of Chief William Kamanda of the Algonquin Nation, who used to be the carrier of The Seven Fire Prophecies Wampum Belt, and both of these processes spoke of this time, these elders were very clear that these prophecies were speaking about this current time, to choose between the material path and the spiritual path.

If we choose the material path that we will go down this road of destruction. But if we can choose the spiritual path, then we can recreate the world. There’s going to be a lot of suffering either way, but if we choose the red road, the spiritual path, that we can create lasting peace. I’m so grateful that I grew up with these prophecies always being told around me when I was a kid.

At the same time, that’s a scary thing to accept. I’m coming to understand that I used to, in my younger activist days, have these fantasies of being part of these like mass worldwide revolutions. I kind of still do think we need that, that we need millions of people mobilized into the streets.

One of the things that has become a really important spiritual practice to me over the last five years or so, is hanging my laundry out to dry in the sun. What started as a small, tiny effort to reduce my carbon footprint, has become this really important way to connect with my ancestors. There’s something about feeling the heaviness of my wet clothes and the sun against my back, knowing that my ancestors have been doing the same exact thing for hundreds and thousands of years. It’s just an opportunity to slow down and be with that moment.

One of the things that has become a really important spiritual practice to me over the last five years or so, is hanging my laundry out to dry in the sun.

Hanging my clothes out to dry is not going to change the world. I know that, but these simple actions to slow myself down at the same time, I am convinced is going to contribute to the decision that we need to make in this moment and our path to change in some way that we cannot understand.

In the same way that a small acorn falling off of a tree might cause an avalanche, these small things that we do to remind ourselves what it means to be human, to remind ourselves what it means to be in right relationship with earth, right relationship with each other. I think will have a massive impact on our ability to create change in ways that we can’t quite comprehend.

Yes to thinking strategically about how to mobilize millions of people, but to also not underestimate the importance of these small practices that remind us what it means to be human in this time.

[00:38:01] Scott Snibbe: There is a way your body just knows. But also there is the analytical element of remembering, I recently read an extraordinary book by Kim Stanley Robinson called, Shaman, about civilization 32,000 years ago in Europe. It awoke my mind to how people lived back then in a way that’s just going to stay with me my whole life.

When I read that section about hanging up your clothes it made me feel that connection back to what was maybe the very first human technology of clothing, we’re talking about 200,000 years even millions of years with earlier hominins. I was thinking, we also dry our clothes out mostly on the line, we’re lucky in California.

But as you do that, having this sense of awe, like this is two hundred thousand years, and how precious was the clothing to people who had to slaughter the animal to to get the skin or to actually weave the fiber, hanging up their couple of clothing items to dry, what had to be a very profound ritual, because that it might have been their only item of clothing that took them many months to make.

[00:39:13] Kazu Haga: One of the things that I love and appreciate about these great teachers like His Holiness the Dalai Lama is the simplicity of their teachings. At the same time, I got to go to India and take in two days of teachings from His Holiness in person once, for thousands of people, and he was teaching about the Heart Sutra, I used to think of as like one of the most beautiful, simplest teachings.

But I listened to his words for two days and understood almost nothing about what he said, because it was so analytical and intellectual, and I was reminded that there’s this side of Buddhist teachings too and that the Dalai Lama is a scholar and the importance of having that scholarly knowledge and that intellectual rigor and being able to take that rigor and translate it in a way that everyone can understand and that simplicity and how important it is to have have both.

[00:40:08] Scott Snibbe: Oh, it’s amazing. His Holiness is the greatest example, because I’ve attended, I don’t even know how many, dozens and dozens of in person teachings with His Holiness during that time he was touring. It would be very amusing to see the public talk was so simple, just like, “Everyone wants to be happy. No one wants to suffer.” Then the next day it’s like, and when Nagarjuna talks about the four levels of emptiness, da da da, and you’re like furiously taking notes.

[00:40:33] Kazu Haga: Both are important right now. We need to understand the data around the climate crisis, and there’s part of it that we don’t need to understand the data because we understand it in our hearts, and both of that is so important.

[00:40:46] Scott Snibbe: You quote our mutual friend sujata baliga on something she and I have also talked about, this polarizing issue of the Israel Palestinian conflict, and she says, “What does freedom for Palestine even mean for someone who believes the very notion of a nation state is an act of violence that perpetuates the delusion of separation.”

What does freedom for Palestine even mean for someone who believes the very notion of a nation state is an act of violence that perpetuates the delusion of separation.

As Buddhists, these thoughts might come somewhat naturally to us once you’ve been thinking of them for a couple decades. But what do you say to someone for whom such thoughts may feel foreign or even harmful? People advocating for the statehood of Palestine, the security of Ukraine’s borders. I love it. It’s a gigantic vision and I agree very strongly that nation states have become a problem when they were once a solution.

[00:41:34] Kazu Haga: Nation states, borders and whatever, they may be stepping stones, but I do think that are so many things in our society that we have just accepted as normal, such as war as a way to create peace and violence as a way to create peace. I think nation states are another one of these things that we don’t even question. That in order for a group of people like the Palestinian people to be free, that we have to rely on this delusion of a nation state of protection through borders and separation.

Again, I have so much empathy and compassion for where that comes from. At the same time, nation states, like sujatha said, just perpetuate this delusion that safety can come from separation, safety can come from border walls, and this delusion that I am somehow separate, and as long as we stay away from each other, that’s how we create safety.

I get that what we’re talking about are long term kind of visions. But we need to be clear about what our long term vision is in order to move in that direction. I remember a while ago I had the privilege to hear two activists, a Palestinian activist and a Jewish Israeli activist who were on tour throughout the United States. The Israeli activist said that Palestine will never be free until Israel is safe and Israel will never be safe until Palestine is free.

Understanding that neither side will be safe, neither side will be free until all people are, I think is the ultimate reality that we live in. The ultimate reality that we need to accept as the foundation from which we strategize about what happens next.

Comfort, growth, and panic

[00:43:16] Scott Snibbe: You talked a little bit about panic before, and this is another one of the most useful parts of your book, you have this nice chapter in which you discuss these three mental states of comfort, growth, and panic. I’m sure people have a very familiar feeling when I say that word panic right now.

Can you talk a little bit about these three states of mind? So many of us get into panic more and more frequently today, how do we learn to calm ourselves and understand those three states that our mind gets into?

[00:43:47] Kazu Haga: Yeah, this is a really helpful teaching that comes from an educator named Karl Rohnke, and it’s actually the comfort stretch panic zones. He says that, most of the time, most of us spend our days in the comfort zone, which is by definition, a comfortable place to be. It’s where our breathing is regulated. It’s when we can take in information and be in deep dialogue with each other.

It’s a good place to be, but it’s not where growth happens. My growth happens in what he calls the stretch zone, where by definition we’re being stretched. It’s a little bit uncomfortable. If you go to the gym and you’re working out and you don’t feel a little uncomfortable, you’re not getting stronger, but one of the important characteristics of being in the stretch zone is that it may be challenging because you’re being challenged with a different perspective, or you’re trying to integrate new information.

But you’re still able to take in new information. You’re still able to be in dialogue with people who may have different opinions than you. But if you stretch yourself too far, you might snap and go into the panic zone, which is when our emotions are completely dysregulated and the amygdala takes over and the ability of our brain to have nuance, to have compassion, to have empathy, to take in different perspectives, is completely cut off. Our prefrontal cortex is disengaged and it’s not a place where growth can happen.

The invitation, if we’re trying to heal, if we’re trying to grow, is to learn, to be in the stretch zone. The stretch zone is like a muscle. The more we work it out, the bigger it can get. The more we can increase our capacity to be in stretch, and as you’ve hinted, we are in such a world of panic, it is so much easier for us to get into a state of panic and we lose our ability to have curiosity.

We lose our ability to think about things like interdependence. We lose our ability to try to understand the new perspective. Everything becomes binary. Things become black and white. We go into our fight and flight mentality, and that’s the state of the world that we live in. One of the things that I talk about in the book is that I think there’s short term, long term, and medium term strategies that we all need to be engaged in our personal lives, in our movement spaces to try to increase our capacity to be in stretch.

In the short term, even in nonviolent direct action trainings, I think we need to be learning how to engage in emotional regulation tools. That might be something as simple as learning to take a deep breath when we notice that we’re in panic, singing songs together, learning to take a sip of water when we feel activated, all of these like immediate, like learning how to hum in your mind, these immeadiate things that you can do when you’re in the upper edges of stretch heading towards panic, where you can bring yourself back a little bit.

In the medium term, incorporating practices like meditation into our lives, doing grief rituals, doing rage rituals, where all of these really strong emotions that is natural for us to be feeling in this day and age, have space to be processed and witnessed and released and integrated. Then the long term for all of us to be committing to our own shadow work and our own trauma healing work and the importance of movements to make that kind of work accessible to everybody, because right now it’s not right.

I think for social movements, when I first got engaged in nonviolent direct action work, I’d go to these direct action trainings and I’d learn how to form blockades and work with the police and work with lawyers and all that. That’s all still important. But in addition to those hard tactics, I really think we need to be emphasizing these things as part of our preparation to be alive in this time and to be agents of change in this time.

[00:47:48] Scott Snibbe: I learned a lot from that section. We have an online community associated with the podcast and the book, How to Train a Happy Mind. And on Sunday, I led a call session about this based on your book with comfort, stretch, panic, because people were asking, how do we deal with these times? People found it very, very beneficial.

Also, you talk about how eating, that when you eat, it’s a natural way, actually, that your body naturally comes down from panic. It made me understand that actually is a natural way that we self soothe: to have a little snack, have a cup of tea. It’s good to remember that can take you right down from panic .

[00:48:26] Kazu Haga: Yeah, part of what happens when our body enters a state of panic is that our digestive system gets shut down as a survival mechanism, because you don’t need your digestive system if you’re running away from a saber tooth tiger and the digestive system is something that takes a lot of energy.

Your body is incredible wisdom in the body channels all of our energy to the things that help with immediate survival. One way to counteract that is by eating something or taking a sip of water to kind of kick start your digestive system, which then kick starts the parasympathetic nervous system that that regulates are slow breathing and things like that.

The power of “it just is”

[00:49:03] Scott Snibbe: You had a pretty funny part of your book, uh, where you talked about this realization you had on LSD 20 years ago, that “it just is.” I’ve never taken LSD actually, but I think for anyone who has, they could probably relate to that. You kind of joke about it, but you also admit that it’s one of the most profound truths That’s infused your life. I was on retreat last January. I did a long retreat and I had a similar realization. Realizations often sound very trite, right? When you try to explain them in words.

But it was a simple thing. I just realized, Wow, there’s no possible way things could be any different from how they are just by default. Like, it’s not like God said it had to be that way or destiny or karma or anything. It’s this is how things are. This is how things are. It came with this nice corollary, though, that from this moment forward, we have limitless power to change the world for the better, accomplish good.

I wonder if you could talk about the power of, “It just is.”

[00:50:03] Kazu Haga: I think we are conditioned to experience whatever we experienced in the world and immediately put it into a category of this is good or this is bad. It’s exhausting to constantly be judging and interpreting in this way. Part of the wisdom, particularly of the school of thought of Taoism has taught me is that everything is what it is. It’s not good or bad. Part of the problem with human beings is that we put everything into these categories of good and bad, and we try to fix what’s bad and hold on to what’s good.

Part of the problem with human beings is that we put everything into these categories of good and bad, and we try to fix what’s bad and hold on to what’s good.

It’s that kind of grasping energy and trying to force something into being other than the thing that just naturally needs to come into being right. I think part of the reality right now is that we as a species in the midst of a crisis. Obviously we need to be engaged in actions to try to mitigate the harm from it. But before we rush into our head and try to figure out what to do about it, can we just sit even for a moment and just be with the reality as it is?

In the book, I also talk about my friend, Chris for years wanting to write an article called Climate Honesty as Spiritual Practice. That in order for us to actually accept the reality of the climate crisis as it is, not just intellectually in our heads, but in our bodies, like when we notice that the world is burning everywhere around us, how does it make us feel to know that this crisis is only going to get worse? What does that mean in our bodies?

To fully accept that actually takes a deep level of spiritual maturity and emotional maturity. I think a lot of the work of fierce vulnerability is finding the inner strength to just accept things as it is so that after that, we can figure out the most skillful next step.

[00:51:58] Scott Snibbe: In our conversation, in the last hour, it’s occurring to me that fierce in many ways for you is a synonym for courage.

[00:52:07] Kazu Haga: Absolutely, and you can’t have courage without being afraid, too.

[00:52:10] Scott Snibbe: No, it’s really beautiful. There’s a bunch of exercises in your book to actually cultivate all these great qualities that we need to be resilient and to end to stay in that stretch zone. And you’ve agreed to lead one of them that will air as the next episode.

Can you talk a little bit about I don’t know if you’ve chosen which one you want to lead? Just to give a little teaser for the next episode, what’s the exercise you think you’ll lead?

[00:52:39] Kazu Haga: Yeah, I think it’s actually a perfect segway from where we were just talking about. I was just gonna lead a short meditation that helps us be in good relationship with the part of us that may be in panic. Because it’s only natural that we are living in a world of panic. And at least some part of us is really on the furthest edges of stretch or panic and to really accept and integrate that part of us as part of who we are in this moment, I think is part of that work of accepting this moment.

[00:53:10] Scott Snibbe: I’m looking forward to that. Well, Kazuhaga, I’m so delighted to talk to you. My daughter asked me a couple days ago. She said, what’s your favorite episode that you’ve done on the podcast? And yours immediately came to mind. I’ve interviewed amazing people, Thubten Jinpa, Robert Thurman, Kim Stanley Robinson, but the ideas in your books and that you speak about, they’ve really changed me in big ways and helped me see the world in a much different, more flexible way. I’m in great awe of what you’re doing in the world and really appreciate everything you do.

So, thank you. Keep doing it. Everybody, please read the book. Some of the ways I read your book was while I was brushing my teeth. You can read like three pages of Fierce Vulnerability while you’re brushing your teeth instead of reading the news. It’ll change your life. Please read this book.

[00:54:07] Kazu Haga: Thank you.

[00:54:16] Scott Snibbe: Thanks for joining me for this conversation with Kazu. His book, Fierce Vulnerability, was just released today, and I highly recommend it. It’s the kind of book you can read in small moments on the train, in a waiting room and the moments before bed, but its ideas stay with you challenging the way we think about activism, healing, and our connection to one another.

In our next episode, Kazu leads us through a powerful meditation designed to help us stay present with the discomfort of the world as it is without shutting down, without falling into despair. This practice is a direct application of fierce vulnerability, helping us to find the balance between action, acceptance, urgency, and presence.

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