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Our producer, Annie Ngyen recommended a book to me earlier this year called Healing Resistance by Kazu Haga. It has turned out to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. The book’s ideas about the power of nonviolence have stuck with me and many of them come to mind almost every day.

I’ve always been a fan of nonviolence, which after all is the first principle of Buddhist ethics. But Haga’s book is the first I’ve read that demonstrates not only that nonviolence is an ethically superior strategy for resolving conflicts, but one that’s been systematically proven to be far more successful than violence.

Haga’s book explains that nonviolence isn’t just refraining from harm, but a sophisticated six-step strategy that begins with research and dialogue and ends, most importantly, with reconciliation. The purpose of nonviolence is not just to create a change we desire in the world, but to heal relationships and enrich our sense of connectedness, respect, and interdependence with all beings, even those we oppose.

Kazu graciously took time off from raising his five-month-old child to speak with me for a couple hours about why nonviolence works and how to counter the common objections to nonviolence. We also talk about healing from the violence in our own families, and strategies for ending the seemingly intractable wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.

Before the podcast episode: about nonviolent protest

Nonviolent protest has been a powerful tool for social change throughout history. From the civil rights movement in America to the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, nonviolent action has played a crucial role in challenging injustice and oppression. Figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi have inspired countless activists to use nonviolent resistance as a means to achieve their goals. By employing tactics such as civil disobedience, boycotts, and sit-ins, nonviolent protesters have successfully challenged powerful systems and brought about significant political change.

The effectiveness of nonviolent protest has been the subject of much debate. Some argue that only violent resistance can bring about real change, while others maintain that nonviolent campaigns are more effective in the long run. Erica Chenoweth, a leading expert on nonviolent movements, has conducted extensive research on the topic. Her findings suggest that nonviolent resistance is more likely to succeed than violent resistance. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama to the Salt March in India, nonviolent protest has proven to be a powerful force for social change. By harnessing the power of people power and social media, nonviolent protesters can mobilize large numbers of people and pressure governments to enact meaningful reforms.

Does Nonviolent Protest Work? Kazu Haga #173

[00:02:19] Scott Snibbe: Kazu Haga, it is really an honor to have you on the podcast. I read your book, Healing Resistance, earlier this year, and it had a very profound effect on my life. I’ve always believed in nonviolence, but I don’t think I ever had as many arguments and logic to support it until I read your book.

I’m thrilled to talk to you in detail today about nonviolence, welcome to How to Train a Happy Mind.

[00:02:47] Kazu Haga: Thank you so much for having me, Scott. I’m glad to be here.

What drew you to nonviolence?

[00:02:49] Scott Snibbe: To start out, I would just like to know what drew you to nonviolence in your life and what does it mean to you?

[00:02:57] Kazu Haga: My childhood was very turbulent and my household had a lot of violence. I was born in Japan, and when I was seven years old, my family was disowned from our extended family, so we had to move to the United States. That was around the time when this desperate seed of loneliness started to creep into my body.

We moved to a community that was almost all white, so I know much more than I care to what it feels like to not belong. I think so much of nonviolence, as I found out later on in life, is about reminding us of this universal belonging. The seed for the desire for nonviolence was sown in me really early through the pain that I went through.

I think so much of nonviolence, as I found out later on in life, is about reminding us of this universal belonging.

But the catalyst for nonviolence really was when I was 17 years old. I dropped out of high school when I was 15, I was getting high every day. Then I heard about a Japanese Buddhist order called Nipponzan Myōhōji who are Dharma practitioners who are really committed to nonviolence work.

At the time, they were organizing this thing called the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage, where they were going to walk from Massachusetts to New Orleans, and then down the coast of Africa to retrace the slave route, to begin the process of healing from the legacy of the Middle Passage.

I heard about it a week before it started, and I was bored and had nothing better to do. I told my mom I’d check it out for a week and left home for a year and a half, ended up spending six months walking to New Orleans and then a year living in their monasteries in South Asia, studying Dharma and studying nonviolence. I kind of jumped head first into this when I was young.

How nonviolence gets the root of the problem

[00:04:40] Scott Snibbe: Having violence in your childhood will make you want to have a nonviolent adulthood. I had a little bit of that violence in my family, unfortunately, and even more in school. I was getting physically attacked almost every week. But then at the same time, I felt the only way it stopped was to fight back, to be violent.

What would you say to me as a young boy, back in the 70s, who wanted to be nonviolent but felt it was impossible?

[00:05:14] Kazu Haga: I certainly resonate with that. I didn’t grow up in a nonviolent household. I didn’t grow up with these teachings. For most of us from a very young age, even everything from the cartoons that we watch painted things in a very black and white, right and wrong, the bad people are being violent and we need to be strong and stand up to them so that we can beat them.

It’s understandable that we all think that violence is the only solution. It’s the only thing that we see. We don’t see nonviolence modeled in the same way. We don’t study nonviolence in schools the same way that we learn about war in history class. But there was a beautiful teaching that I once heard from Howard Thurman, who was one of the mentors for Dr. Martin Luther King.

He talks about when he was very young and he got into a fight and he “won the fight.” Later on, he went home and he was talking to his grandmother and said that he won this fight. The grandmother says to him, “nobody ever wins a fight.” There’s an incarcerated nonviolence trainer that I work with who says that resolving a conflict is about fixing issues and reconciling a conflict is about repairing relationships. Nonviolence is something that gives us the ability to do both.

Nobody ever wins a fight.

Fixing issues is a very important thing, it’s crucial in the process of healing relationships. But oftentimes, we stop at the realm of fixing issues, passing new legislation, coming up with new agreements. Those are things that you actually can use violence for. You can use violence to get somebody to stop hitting you. You can use violence to change who sits at the throne of a dictatorship. You can use violence for a lot of different things. But ultimately, if we’re not working on also healing relationships and moving towards reconciliation, then there will always be the potential for new conflict to emerge down the line.

I think nonviolence is really an attempt to not only fix issues, but to repair and strengthen relationships so that the circle that we see as our beloved community continues to expand.

[00:07:22] Scott Snibbe: Violence treats the symptoms, but nonviolence treats the cause, in a way. It all it sounds wonderful, like choose nonviolence, get at the root of the problems. But why should people see nonviolence as not only viable, but maybe even the best strategy for resolving our conflicts?

[00:07:42] Kazu Haga: In terms of nonviolent social movements, there’s a lot of evidence these days that suggests that nonviolent movements are more successful than violent movements. The work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, shows that nonviolent movements are actually twice as effective as violent movements in toppling dictatorships and in some of the most violent regimes as well.

We may never live in a world where there’s no violence and there’s no harm. But I love this teaching that I’ve seen credited to Thich Nhat Hanh but it’s one of those quotes that I’ve seen credited to many different wisdom traditions and teachers; it says when slaves were on the Underground Railroad, they were walking towards the North Star as their guide, and they knew that they were never going to get to the North Star. But that wasn’t the point.

They knew that as long as they kept walking towards it, they would get to where they needed to go. I think this idea of a world free of violence, a world free of injustice, we may never get there, but it’s still the direction that we should walk towards every single day.

Facing Injustice

[00:08:46] Scott Snibbe: I love that. The first time I ever saw his Holiness the Dalai Lama, 25 years ago, someone asked a very kind of aggressive question. They asked, Why do you believe in world peace? There’s always going to be fighting on earth. He said exactly what you just quoted. He said, You’re right, there is always going to be fighting. But if your ideal is world peace, then you’re always going to get further toward that direction than people who have a lesser goal or no goal at all, a lot of people have no goal at all. They’ve completely given up.

In that talk, he also said, If we kill one Chinese person, we make a hundred enemies. Our resistance always has to be nonviolent. That’s what made me immediately sign up to become a Tibetan Buddhist. Those two things, the purpose of having an ideal and the tragic failure of violence to solve problems long term.

Our resistance always has to be nonviolent.

You talk practically about a fourth option to responding to violence, like we talk about fight, flee, and freeze. Then you talk about facing your assailant, not backing down, not giving into fear, not reacting, this gets practical. How do we cultivate this fourth way of responding to violence of facing what’s happening?

[00:10:08] Kazu Haga: First of all, I think it’s important to note that there’s a lot of misunderstandings about what nonviolence is that’s out there. One of the biggest misunderstandings is that nonviolence is simply about “turning the other cheek” and letting abuse continue and not doing anything about it, being a bystander to violence.

Nonviolence is not about what not to do; it’s about when you see violence and injustice in your world, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to intervene and try to transform the situation? It’s about facing conflict. It’s about facing violence. It’s about facing injustice. And to acknowledge that is a scary thing.

Whether you’re using nonviolence or violence to face injustice, to face violence is an incredibly courageous act, and it takes practice. I think this is the other thing about nonviolence. When I first started learning about nonviolence, when I was 19 years old, it was a very limited understanding of what nonviolence was. At the time, I only understood nonviolence as, Oh, as long as I’m not throwing a punch, then I’m practicing nonviolence.

To face violence is an incredibly courageous act, and it takes practice.

But I realized later on that if that’s my only understanding of nonviolence, then you could argue that the Ku Klux Klan is practicing nonviolence when they hold their marches, because at least during the time that they’re marching, they’re not utilizing physical violence. Indeed, nonviolence is about aligning everything that we do with our deepest held values around interbeing, interconnectedness, healing, relationship, and to cultivate understanding and compassion, even for those that may be harming us, is an incredibly difficult practice.

I always say that nonviolence is a practice much like martial arts or meditation is a practice, that even if you practice meditation for 20-30 years, you never become meditation. Even if you’re a multiple-time black belt in karate or whatever it is, you never become karate. You never become Kung Fu. These are things that we practice, knowing that we’re never going to become perfect in it.

It takes years and years of dedicated practice even just to get comfortable with something as simple as observe your breath. Pay attention to your breath is such a simple instruction, but anyone who’s ever done meditation knows how just incredibly frustratingly difficult that can be.

Pay attention to your breath is such a simple instruction, but anyone who’s ever done meditation knows how just incredibly frustratingly difficult that can be.

Similarly, it may seem easy to be like, Oh, well just don’t hit back. But the reality is that practicing real nonviolence of having this unwavering faith in interdependence takes an incredible amount of practice. It’s something that we really need to build in practices every day of our lives so that we can be building our muscles and our capacity to practice this so that it can become more effective in the world.

Six steps of nonviolence

[00:13:02] Scott Snibbe: I was struck how over and over again in your book you talk about how much practice and training it takes. Then you dedicate a good section of your book to these six steps. Only one of the late steps is actually action, doing something. Can you talk about that?

[00:13:20] Kazu Haga: Yeah, within the philosophy of Kingian nonviolence, there’s this thing called the six steps of nonviolence and it’s information gathering, education, personal commitment or self-purification, negotiation, direct action, and reconciliation. When I was first learning about Kingian nonviolence, I was blown away when the teacher told me that direct action, which is the fifth step, it is actually the only one that is not a necessary component to a nonviolent campaign.

I always thought that direct action was nonviolence. That’s the only thing that we do in nonviolence is we learn how to protest and build blockades and engage in direct action. I’ve learned this as a restorative justice facilitator as well. Oftentimes, the mistake people make in restorative justice work is to bring the two sides of a conflict together before they’re actually ready to be in genuine dialogue. The preparation that happens before they enter that dialogue is the most important thing.

The mistake people make in restorative justice work is to bring the two sides of a conflict together before they’re actually ready to be in genuine dialogue.

How activism can go awry

[00:14:20] Scott Snibbe: In your book, you write about how when you don’t do that kind of work the cycles of harm that activists oppose are tragically recreated within the activist movements themselves, which I found both seems very true based on some things I’ve observed and also so sad.

What are some examples of how activism can go awry if you’re not properly prepared and how can activists avoid sabotaging their own causes?

[00:14:51] Kazu Haga: We’re our worst enemy. It’s important to acknowledge that this is 2024. Now, as we’re recording this, we’re about a month away from the election, less than a month away from the election. The most recent example of climate catastrophe in North Carolina and in Florida. We’re still experiencing pandemics. Of course, there’s war and genocide happening around the world. All of these things, just witnessing them in the news, being around them, knowing that it’s going on, can be traumatic. We’re living in a time of such fracture throughout society. As individuals who live in society, it’s only natural that those fractures seep into our bodies and seep into our community spaces.

One of the things that happens when our trauma is triggered is that the part of our brain that is capable of thinking about nuance, that is capable of taking in and integrating new information and different perspectives, the part of our brain that is able to think about things like interdependence and have compassion and empathy for other people, that part of the brain literally gets shut down.

If we want to maintain our commitment to nonviolence, even in the face of political violence and war and genocide and climate catastrophe, then we need to both commit to the longterm process of our own trauma healing so that we have less triggers. But also to commit to practices like meditation and mindfulness that keep us grounded, even in the midst of the most escalated situations.

There’s a really intense picture that came out of the civil rights movement during those lunch counter sit ins of several students sitting at those lunch counters while a mob of white men are throwing coffee in their face and throwing pies in their face and getting physically aggressive towards them.

The students are just sitting there and those students didn’t call that mindfulness. They didn’t call that meditation, but that’s exactly what they were doing, trying to stay centered in their breath, in their values, even in the midst of all of these escalated distractions. I think practices like meditation are a really important aspect of the training for nonviolence as well.

Why nonviolence is for everybody

[00:17:24] Scott Snibbe: Yeah, you’ve mentioned meditation a few times. I’m also a Buddhist, and there’s a quote that’s come to mind many times lately with everything in the news, where the Buddha said, “Hatred never ceases hatred, only love ceases hatred. This is an eternal law.”

Can you talk about the roots of nonviolence in Buddhism, and then why nonviolence isn’t just for Buddhists and other pacifists?

[00:17:53] Kazu Haga: Absolutely, there’s so many intersections between the Buddhist Dharma and nonviolence and I also should give a brief shout out to the wisdom tradition of Jainism, which a lot of Buddhist teachings draws its roots from as well. I think one of the most essential teachings of nonviolence is what Dr. King calls “beloved community.” I’ve come to really understand this idea of beloved community as this unwavering faith in interdependence: that we are all deeply connected to each other, that I will never be liberated until all people are liberated.

I will never be liberated until all people are liberated.

Therefore, a commitment to nonviolence isn’t about trying to win. It’s about trying to move towards a world where all beings can be liberated. I think that if I had to choose one essential teaching of nonviolence, I think it’s that, this idea of interdependence is one of the key teachings in the Buddhist Dharma as well. We might relate it to a teaching like Anatta, the doctrine of nonself, this idea that there is no such thing as an individual, independent self, that we all exist in deep interdependence or interbeing with the rest of phenomena, and that what affects one aspect of the universe will ultimately affect all aspects of the universe.

The Buddhist teachings of Metta, of unwavering loving-kindness or universal goodwill. Dr. King oftentimes talked about agape, which is the Greek word for universal love, the love that you have for all beings, not because you’ve been through really intense experiences with them and you have similar values, but you love that person because they exist. Across Buddhism and nonviolence, there’s a lot of similar teachings that I think speak to the same universal truths.

We oftentimes only see the moment that a conflict erupts into violence. We take a snapshot of that moment and we try to understand what’s happening based on that snapshot. We don’t understand that the conflict that may be a day old, 10 days old, a year old, 500 years old, 3000 years old, all of that history is deeply interdependent with the moment that the conflict erupted into violence.

If we don’t understand that, then we’re not understanding the conflict, and you can compare that to the teaching of right view and understanding the laws of karma. That every moment is deeply intertwined with all moments that came before it and all moments that will come after it. I love thinking about all of the intersections.

I remember being at a Buddhist meditation retreat once, and the teacher said, The Buddha didn’t teach Buddhism, the Buddha taught universal truths that emerge in all the great wisdom traditions around the world, and I consider nonviolence to be one of them. If you look at the essential teachings of nonviolence and the essential teachings of Buddhism, and the essential teachings of Christianity, Taoism, Jainism, they all speak to very similar truths.

Nonviolence is the foundation of ethics

[00:21:12] Scott Snibbe: Alan Wallace has summarized Buddhist ethics as three principles: the very first one is nonviolence, the core principle of ethics, the second is kindness, and then the third one is to understand your mind. But a lot of people are pretty floored when I mention that to them, that nonviolence is the very first ethical principle. You come across more people than I do, but if you say nonviolence is the foundation of ethics, they’re surprised. Most people wouldn’t say that’s the foundation of their ethical principles.

[00:21:51] Kazu Haga: Yeah, I think that comes from a misunderstanding of what the word nonviolence means. If we understand nonviolence as, Okay, I’m not going to kill anybody. It’s so simple that it’s like, how can something that simple be the ethical foundation for this large philosophy. But in reality, nonviolence is about so much more than that.

The six principles of Kingian nonviolence do a great job of capturing that. One of them being avoiding internal violence of the spirit, as well as external physical violence and the work that is required to be committed to purifying our own hearts of violence, resentment, and hatred. That is like a lifetime of work. It’s not this easy thing to say, Oh, I’m going to stop punching people. Yeah, it makes sense that it serves as the first ethical foundation because it is a lifetime of work and practice.

[00:22:41] Scott Snibbe: This is the other point that’s a little foreign to many people is that inner transformation comes first. It’s very difficult to transform the outer world if you don’t transform your inner self, too.

It’s very difficult to transform the outer world if you don’t transform your inner self, too.

[00:22:53] Kazu Haga: Definitely, and the inner world and outer world are deeply interdependent. We are not in a place where we can point our fingers and demand change in everything outside of us if we’re not willing to do that deep work ourselves.

Conflict in the Ukraine and Middle East

[00:23:07] Scott Snibbe: Why don’t we ask these really hard questions, zooming out from violence in childhood and our families. What about these big conflicts today? Ukraine, the Middle East, where both sides seem to feel like violence is justified. What nonviolent strategies would you recommend to resolve these conflicts? So many of us see these conflicts as hopeless or escalating and so on.

[00:23:34] Kazu Haga: So much to say about that. I think I want to start by inviting people to have a vision that is big enough to be worthy of these impossibly escalated crises. An immediate ceasefire in Gaza, I think is obviously the first step that needs to happen, the harm needs to stop right now, but that is so far from a vision.

I was actually talking to my friend sujatha, who you know, was saying to me, What is freedom for Palestine even mean for someone that believes that the very idea of a nation state is a violent thing because nation states continue to perpetuate the delusion of separation? How do we have a vision that is bigger than, Oh, these people deserve to have their own nation states and deserve to have their own militaries and deserve to build their own border walls, because those are all delusions that keep us in a worldview of separation.

I think that’s the first thing, how do we aim for beloved community in the midst of such urgency, how can we breathe enough and have enough spaciousness in our bodies to remember that there are visions that are much bigger than just fixing the issue? We need to remember that our ultimate goal is reconciliation and justice and belonging for all beings. In the shorter term, it can be really difficult to see something as big as war and imagine an effective nonviolent response. But I think that’s partly because the metrics that we use for what is successful is so skewed because we live in a world that only justifies violence to respond to violence.

Our ultimate goal is reconciliation and justice and belonging for all beings.

We are very quick to spend billions of dollars to go to war. We are very quick to send tens of thousands of young people to the front lines to risk their lives to kill the other side. I can only imagine what would happen if our society had that same commitment to a nonviolent response to war. If we were willing to spend billions of dollars, if tens of thousands of people were committed to nonviolence and were to risk their lives to intervene in a violent conflict, then what might be possible?

We don’t even allow ourselves to think that. I remember years ago, there was this campaign for the department of peace, which I think is an amazing idea, but it was starting with, Can we get one percent of the budget of the Pentagon to fund the Department of Peace? Why 1%? Why can’t we allow ourselves to imagine what would be possible if we invested at least the same amount, if not more, into nonviolence, than we invest into war?

My friend and teacher, Miki Kashtan, has been talking about this idea of women for peace. If a hundred thousand women committed themselves to go to the Middle East and stand and put their bodies between the two sides in conflict and demand an end to the war, then what might be possible? Nonviolence could never be against these incredibly escalated moments of violence because our understanding of what level of nonviolence is possible is really limited because we’ve only known investments into violence.

[00:27:16] Scott Snibbe: I was really overwhelmed when I first learned about the ideal of the bodhisattva in Buddhism, which is a person who dedicates their life to benefiting others. It really struck me because they do talk about when to use violence in Buddhism and how to use violence. They talk about that’s the appropriate person who could enter a violent situation because they’re so wholly committed to benefiting all beings, loving all beings, resolving situations with as little or no violence as possible.

Then it struck me, if we have these millions of people willing to kill for a cause, what if you flip that around again with the education and the wisdom of interdependence, you could have millions of people willing to die for the cause those other people are willing to die too, but they’re taking an ineffective strategy. It’s the same or even greater courage to go into that situation with the wisdom and the courage that nonviolence is the greater solution.

They say in Buddhism that the way to use violence is like, if your mother was rushing at you with a knife, overcome by some kind of mental illness, and you had a gun, what would you do? Of course you’d put down the gun, you’d grapple with her, you’d be willing to sustain some wounds just to stop the harm and then figure out the solution. That’s how I was taught you have to treat everybody as if it was your mother coming at you.

[00:28:41] Kazu Haga: I think I wrote this about this in my book too but self-defense can keep you alive. It can keep your community alive and there’s value in that. The question to me of nonviolence isn’t about whether self-defense is justified or if violence is ever justified. The question of nonviolence is if you ever get to the point where you feel like violence is the only solution, it’s the only way you can stay alive. The question is what do you do on the other side of that harm to repair the relationship?

What do you say to those who don’t agree with you?

[00:29:17] Scott Snibbe: I’m sure you’re in contact often with people who disagree with you. We see nonviolent protests. We also see protesters that are physically violent or more often verbally violent, very aggressive in the speech toward the other side. What do you say to those people who disagree with you? These are our slogans, this is what we believe in. This is our action. Those nonviolent approaches aren’t going to work, or they’re too weak.

[00:29:47] Kazu Haga: Yeah, there’s a couple of things I’d love to say to that. One is that I’ve learned over the years, not to say much, but to listen, to really ask questions and to really try to understand where they’re coming from, because no matter how wild someone’s belief systems might be, from their perspective, they have a very good reason why they believe what they believe.

No matter how wild someone’s belief systems might be, from their perspective, they have a very good reason why they believe what they believe.

If I can’t invite at least some amount of curiosity as to what the reason is, then I’m kind of left in a place of just disagreeing with them and trying to convince them that I’m right and they’re wrong. Those conversations rarely go well. When was the last time anyone ever actually convinced someone that they were wrong on a political issue based on intellectual debate? What I’ve started to do is to stop trying to convince people and to listen to where they’re coming from as a way to build connection. Maybe something magical can happen out of that connection.

What I’ve started to do is to stop trying to convince people and to listen to where they’re coming from as a way to build connection.

There’s a beautiful organization called Braver Angels, and they suggest that next time you get into a political disagreement with somebody to ask the question, How did you come to believe what you believe? Not, What do you believe? It’s not even about like, why do you believe that? But it’s about what is your story? How did you get to the place where you got to? That question invites genuine curiosity about who they are as a person.

The other thing that I just want to touch on real quick is that a lot of our social movements, particularly ones that are responding to the most escalated harms and engaging in nonviolent direct action and civil resistance move with this energy of shutting things down. We’re here to shut things down. This is something I write a lot about in my new book, Fierce Vulnerability.

I’ve come to believe because of all of the work that I’ve done around trauma healing in my own life and holding space for other people’s healing, that injustice is not a political issue. Injustice is a manifestation of collective trauma. If we can understand violence and injustice as manifestations of collective trauma, then can we also understand that we cannot shut down injustice any more than we can shut down violence.

Injustice is a manifestation of collective trauma.

We can’t go to people who are acting out of a place of trauma and point our fingers and say, Stop doing that. But in a lot of our activist movements, that’s how we go about our work. We mobilize people, we engage in direct actions, we shut down highways, and then we start pointing our fingers and saying, Stop.

That may be effective in fixing issues, but if we’re trying to heal collective trauma, if we’re trying to heal the relationship between people, between humans and the earth, between parts of our own cells, then this idea of shutting things down is never going to be effective in bringing about repair.

Even as we acknowledge the need to use escalated forms of nonviolence, including things like shutting down highways and occupying government buildings, how can we move with the spirit of opening up? I know that these things aren’t going to convince people that are convinced that violence is the best way to go about it. But I know that there’s a lot of people that I don’t need to convince. Maybe if I can just work with those people and model the kinds of change making that I want to see out in the world, then that’s all I need to do.

[00:33:20] Scott Snibbe: Your advice to listen is phenomenal because one of the most tragic things I constantly hear is, I can’t understand. I can’t understand why they voted for that guy. I can’t understand why they support that side of the conflict. I can’t understand why they’re fighting. I can’t understand why they’re not fighting. That’s our job as human beings, is to understand.

[00:33:43] Kazu Haga: When people say things like, Oh, I don’t understand, it’s like, Great, you don’t understand something. Now, are you willing to have the curiosity to actually try? It can’t end at, I don’t understand, therefore, I’m going to try to enforce my opinion over them. Can we say, I don’t understand, and I would like to?

How does nonviolence relate to patience?

[00:34:02] Scott Snibbe: Exactly, that next step. Okay, this quote from your book really struck me. You said, “There have been so many movements I’ve been a part of where I was convinced that we were on the verge of a worldwide revolution.” You even talk about this “one protest” is going to change the world.

It really gave me insight into the idealism, and sorry, also maybe the naivete that I sometimes saw in friends who are activists. Can you describe that idealism, the optimism of the activists? One of my favorite quotes is from Stewart Brand. He said, “Good things happen slowly, bad things happen fast.”

How does nonviolence relate to patience and accepting the time that it takes to change?

[00:34:50] Kazu Haga: I was young once. I’m no longer young. I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to remember what it was like to be young. Because that was back then. I’ve had a lot of movement heartbreaks. There’s been so many times when I’ve been involved in movements or campaigns or organizations where I was convinced that this is the thing that’s going to change the world.

Every time I got attached to that and I started grasping, I was heartbroken. I was disappointed. But I think it’s not all a bad thing, it comes from the inspiration of seeing the possibilities of what’s possible when we engage in change work together in community, at the same time. This is a nondual truth.

At the same time, we have to remember that the work of social change does not happen according to election cycles and grant periods and five year strategic plans. This is an intergenerational, multi-generational struggle that we’re in. We have to not only rely on the wisdom of our ancestors, but the energy of the descendants that have yet to come.

In a lot of indigenous teachings, they say that every decision that we make, we have to make with an eye towards how it’s going to affect the next seven generations. I think a lot of it is letting go of our own ego: that we are the generation that this is the moment that everything is going to happen, to accept that all we need to do is to do our part.

I think when I was younger, if you had told me something like that, it would have been kind of depressing. It’s like, but I want more. I want that worldwide revolution. But as I get older, I realized that accepting the smallness of what I’m capable of doing actually lifts a burden off my shoulder and creates so much more spaciousness in my body for creativity to emerge. The work of letting go of ego to realize that it’s not just up to us. We have so many more generations to come that will support the work that we’re doing now.

[00:37:01] Scott Snibbe: This isn’t a big lesson in our current society, unfortunately of the harm of the ego. I remember when I could first vote when I was 18 having the feeling that I think a lot of people have around voting, like, Oh, what’s the point? It’s going to be the same result with or without my one vote. But then I started thinking like, Wait a minute, what do I want? More votes? What kind of an egomaniac am I? I want to have more effect than everybody else? No, we’re all equal. It’s so beautiful that we all have one vote. That’s a great power. Wanting more power is just a deluded ego.

One of my favorite quotes is a Chinese proverb. It says, “The person who says that it was impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.” That’s the beauty of idealism. Another one of my friends, David Kittay, said his mother always told him “The optimists always win.” Because of course, if you don’t believe it’s possible, you won’t even try.

[00:38:08] Kazu Haga: Absolutely, and a lot of what’s happening in our society today is that we are so debilitated by everything that is happening in the world, the news that we see, social media, our own traumas being triggered, that we don’t have the spaciousness in our bodies to be creative and to have big visions. The importance, the necessity of doing our own work so we have that spaciousness to believe that something is possible.

Finding forgiveness in the most unexpected situations

[00:38:36] Scott Snibbe: Let’s talk about some of the success you’ve seen. You write about the transformations you’ve seen from violence to nonviolence in prisoners, working with prisoners and people who’ve committed crimes and so on. How does that happen?

That’s a striking example, someone who even committed murder and then transformed themselves to a nonviolent approach to life. How have you seen that work and how can we learn from prisoners’ transformations to transform ourselves, to transform violent systems?

[00:39:06] Kazu Haga: Working with incarcerated people has been perhaps the biggest privilege that I’ve had in this work. They have been some of my most important teachers. I didn’t know the depth of healing that was possible until I started working with incarcerated people. I did not understand what words like accountability and forgiveness meant until I witnessed them going through transformation.

Working with incarcerated people has been perhaps the biggest privilege that I’ve had in this work.

One story that I want to share that I also share in my upcoming book is the story of these two people named Cynthia and Richard. Cynthia, about 20 years prior to when I met her, went through the most tragic thing that a parent could go through, which was the violent loss of her son to homicide, her son Mitchell.

Richard was one of the two men convicted of murdering Mitchell. I met Cynthia because at some point she realized that she was ready for healing, so she reached out to an organization called the Ahimsa Collective that I’m a part of. She wanted to go through what’s called a victim offender dialogue, which is an opportunity for survivors of violent crime and the people who caused them to come face to face for a dialogue.

I will never forget the day that that dialogue happened. When we went into the prison with Cynthia, we sat her down in the room that the conversation was going to happen. I went around the corner of the holding tank where Richard was, and he was already shaking and in tears and I sat down next to him. I talked to him and I asked him, Are you ready?

He kind of laughed and he said, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. He got up and he walked around the corner and at the end of the hall, he saw Cynthia. The moment he saw her, he just completely broke down. When Cynthia saw him, she stood up out of her chair and opened her arms and just embraced Richard in a hug that felt like it lasted years.

Then they talked for six hours. I was just blown away by the privilege that I had to just have a seat at this table, witnessing this magic happening between the two of them. There was a moment when Cynthia was holding Richard’s hands and she said, I had a dream that I needed to hold your hands because these are the hands that took my son’s life away and I needed to have a different relationship with them.

Richard and Mitchell grew up in the same town together and they used to play baseball together and Cynthia said, I remember always driving Mitchell to baseball practice and I’d see you on the side of the road walking towards practice and I always felt bad for you because I knew you came from a broken home and you didn’t have anyone that would drive you to practice. In that moment, Richard kind of broke down again and said during those difficult years of childhood he thought that nobody was there for him. He felt like nobody saw him and witnessed him.

Now, 30 years later, to hear from the mother of the person that he killed that she saw him, that she cared about him, helped to unburden him from this pain that he’d been carrying his entire life. I want us to remember that this depth of healing is possible. Richard and Cynthia are amazing people, and again, this nondual truth, there’s a way in which they are not unique. Any human being I believe is capable of the healing that they have gone through.

It took them many, many years. They both credit their indigenous spiritual practices that helped them get there. But I believe that we live in a fractal universe, and that if healing between Cynthia and Richard are possible, then healing is possible at any scale of the fractal. That healing is possible between nations, races, and genders. We just have to be committed to the long term process of healing that Cynthia and Richard were committed to.

Is it possible to have a nonviolent police force?

[00:43:14] Scott Snibbe: And that somehow underlying all humans is this a fundamental need for compassion, connection, love, even with the person who’s harmed you the most. This isn’t an isolated example, hundreds of thousands of people have gone through processes like this recently and many, many millions over the course of human history. South Africa was a very good example that these processes do work and it’s just not quite part of our education and our understanding today.

Going from prisoners, I wanted to talk about the police, police force, militarization of the police, the kind of training of shoot to kill strategies, racial stereotypes. We often hear about police misconduct as a systemic problem and not a matter of individual bad actors, although it’s kind of cast that way sometime.

What’s your vision of a systemic solution to policing problems in the United States? Is it possible to have a nonviolent police force?

[00:44:21] Kazu Haga: I think there will always be a need in our society for people who are trained in responding to escalated conflicts. But the way that we view policing and their role in society to me right now is flawed at the fundamental level. I’ll also say that even if we believe in the system of policing as it currently stands today, which I don’t, it is so broken as a system.

Like you said, we train police officers to be afraid and to be trigger happy. I recently found out that the gold standard to become a police officer in the United States is the training that is required in the state of California to get a badge. In the state of California, you’re required to go through 664 hours of training. In the state of California, you are required to go through 1500 hours of training to become a barber. You have to go through more than twice the amount of training to get certified as a barber in the state of California, then to become certified as a police officer, and in those 664 hours, they have to learn something like 43 different subject matters.

You have to go through more than twice the amount of training to get certified as a barber in the state of California, then to become certified as a police officer.

They are so undertrained and they are put into these incredibly violent situations with no tools that they need to actually deescalate a conflict. I think it’s important to remember that the system of policing is such a violent system that it is unhealthy for the individual police officers that are in them as well.

I know in the left, over the years, we’ve gotten really good at understanding that veterans and soldiers are not the enemy; if we’re trying to end war, it is the military itself that we’re combating. I feel like we’re not always great at making that same transition for police. It’s easy still for us to point our fingers and blame individual police officers and not realize that the police officers themselves are being torn apart from having to play this role in such a violent institution.

Having a kid in today’s world

[00:46:30] Scott Snibbe: Here’s a quick, quite interesting question for you. You just had your first child, right? You have a five-month-old child. How are you thinking and feeling about nonviolence now that you’ve had your first child and how do you plan on sharing nonviolence with them as they grow up?

[00:46:58] Kazu Haga: Yeah, I was just having a conversation with another friend of mine yesterday who’s a nonviolence trainer and a father. Years ago when I was thinking about having a child and thinking about not having a child, I was having a conversation with my friend Morgan Curtis who does a lot of amazing work in the world. I asked her, You’re an activist that cares about climate change and all these things, do you think about having a kid eventually? Morgan actually lives in community with me and also recently had a baby.

At the time she said to me, I make every decision in life with faith that everything is going to be fine, that everything will be beautiful. Why would I make the most important decision of my life with the assumption that things are going to go wrong? That really changed my perspective that having a child, that being a parent, and having this responsibility of raising a loving being actually gives me more faith that it is possible because I see that possibility in my child’s eyes every single day.

As tired and as exhausted as I am when I wake up in the morning, the baby wakes up with this huge smile in the morning. The moment I see that smile, I’m reminded of who we truly are at our essence. Many of us as adults, we’ve come so long from that, but it’s still who we are. We’ve put on so many layers and so many masks of trauma and delusions, but at the essence, at the core of who we are, we are still that child that just wants to love.

At the core of who we are, we are still that child that just wants to love.

Death as a part of life

[00:48:35] Scott Snibbe: It’s really true. I’ve really found this absolute pessimism that’s completely sure the future is going to be terrible. The world’s going to be destroyed. The wars are going to escalate. From the Buddhist perspective, especially, that’s a very egotistic perspective that you know the future, you know the absolute, of course not.

It might be 90 percent probable, like it could be maybe the most likely outcome that things are going to get worse. But still it’s not certain. We have the power, we’re the agents that are moving into the future, we’re still alive and each of us has a power to bend that future a little bit towards a better one.

[00:49:23] Kazu Haga: It’s important to remember that death is not a bad thing either, death is not the end. I recently learned from a hospice care worker named Jean Denny that death is not in opposition to life, that death is a part of life. We’re always taught that there’s life and then there’s death, but that’s actually not the case. Death is an integral part of life.

Death is an integral part of life.

If we can learn to accept that, then maybe we’ll be able to let go a little bit of this fear that we have of death and this grasping to life and letting go of that fear and that grasping actually makes it a little bit easier to accept that no matter what happens in the future, that there can still be beauty.

[00:50:03] Scott Snibbe: It’s funny, from the Buddhist perspective thinking about death constantly actually makes us much more optimistic and engaged in the present. Lama Zopa Rinpoche, one of my teachers who died last year, used to often say, When you go visit a dying person in the hospital, you’re not a living person visiting a dying person. You’re both dying. You’re both on the way to death. We all share this journey.

One of my favorite parts of your book was the very end where you have the quick responses to criticisms about nonviolence. One of the best ones that I’m constantly using now was your objection when people say, Nonviolence could get you killed. You say, Yes, but so could violence. In fact, violence is guaranteed to be violent, but with nonviolence at least you have a chance for peaceful resolution. Any other of these great quick responses you wanted to share?

[00:51:00] Kazu Haga: Nonviolence is often placed against this like impossible double standard where people don’t question the effectiveness of violence, but people are like, Well, if you use nonviolence, it might get you killed, or you might get hurt, or it might not work as if violence always works or as if violence guarantees safety. We have to stop using these impossible double standards and acknowledge the actual impact that violence has had on the world.

[00:51:28] Scott Snibbe: Exactly. Going back to inner transformation, you’ve agreed to lead a meditation that will help us cultivate nonviolence, that will air in our next episode.

Can you talk a little bit about what that meditation is?

[00:51:48] Kazu Haga: I want to invite people into a very brief practice of nonviolence and really working with a person that you may be in conflict with and seeing if we can create enough spaciousness in our bodies to invite a little bit of curiosity about their story and about who they are as a way to connect.

You can still disagree with that person. You can still work to hold that person accountable for harms that they’re committing. But even if you’re trying to hold people accountable, if you don’t understand their story, then it’s actually not possible to figure out what accountability looks like. So can we create enough spaciousness in our body to always be curious, to always have some ability to connect with that person?

[00:52:35] Scott Snibbe: That’s perfect. Well, Kazu Haga, it’s a really an honor to speak with you. I think you’re really one of the most beneficial and practically beneficial people alive today in helping the world become a better place and move towards nonviolence, while not putting your head in the sand, going straight up to the most difficult conflicts in the world, with a solution that’s really going to work, be beneficial, and lead towards interdependent connection.

Thank you so much for taking some of your precious time to speak with me.

[00:53:09] Kazu Haga: Thank you so much for having me. It was really fun.

[00:53:20] Scott Snibbe: Thanks for joining me for my interview with Kazu Haga. His powerful book Healing Resistance is available anywhere you buy books. And his new one that I’m eagerly awaiting called Fierce Vulnerability. Is available for pre-order now.

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