Hi Mind Bod Squad!!
This week we’re hanging with Kazu Haga, a nonviolence trainer, restorative justice practitioner, and author of Healing Resistance and Fierce Vulnerability. Our friend Sebene put us onto his wonderful essays and we went straight down the rabbit hole!
Kazu’s work weaves together spiritual practice, healing, and social change. It’s work that lives between two truths. There is real injustice in the world, and it has to be stopped. And the people causing it still belong to us.
He’s spent over a decade inside prisons, hearing the stories of incarcerated men. He has also run healing circles with prison guards and police officers, and found the guards’ stories often sounded just like those of the men they watched over.
Holding both truths at once takes practice, and in our conversation it becomes a rhythm of oscillation between action and integration. Activist spaces tend to live on the out-breath, all action and no integration. Healing spaces can get stuck on the in-breath, all inward work and no action.
Kazu advocates for both, along with a much wider sense of what counts as action: a movement as varied as an ecosystem, where singing, parenting, and teaching people to breathe all belong.
He lives this out at Canticle Farm, an intentional community in Oakland built around the one thing humans have yet to figure out: how to live in healthy conflict with each other.
We talk about:
The two truths: holding the relative reality of injustice and the ultimate reality of interconnection at the same time, without collapsing into spiritual bypassing
Why activist communities and healing communities tend to get stuck in only half the rhythm
Bayo Akomolafe’s line that “the times are urgent, we must slow down,” and why slowing down is about deepening awareness, not hitting pause
Schools of fish, starling murmurations, and why some things only happen locally
Life inside Canticle Farm: a community that lives, heals, and practices restorative justice together
The Adventure
Kazu leads a grounding practice designed for wherever listeners happen to be: driving, walking, or sitting still.
It starts with the breath, then moves to a place of tension or discomfort in the body. The aim isn’t to fix it but to ask what it’s pointing toward: Grief for the state of the world? Fear for the people we love? Anxiety about what’s ahead? We’re invited to ground into the earth and realize that whatever the body is carrying, it’s being held alongside every ancestor and everything that has ever lived.
So which side of the oscillation do you tend to get stuck on: the in-breath or the out-breath? Let us know in the comments!
Till next time, 🧘🏽♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼♂️
Kazu’s Links
Website: kazuhaga.com
Community: Canticle Farm (Oakland, CA)
