Turning 30 years old just a few months ago invited a deeper reflection on what truly calls me to service in this world. Below is a 12-minute video of a talk I gave at my birthday gathering, where I reflect on the profound awakening and initiations that led me on a path of personal and collective transformation.
This reflection feels especially relevant today, as we enter the Season for Nonviolence, a global 64-day educational and grassroots campaign dedicated to the strategic and spiritual legacy of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It begins on the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination (January 30th) and ends on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination (April 4th). Both men were murdered for challenging entrenched systems of power through disciplined and principled nonviolence.
On a personal level, the work of nonviolence changed my life. It helped me recognize, heal, and transform trauma and patterns of violence that had lived within me and my family. It redirected my life’s work toward restorative justice, conflict resolution, and holistic health studies, and now toward building a more mindful and conscious media movement that moves beyond fear, division, and polarization to bring about constructive social and political change.
The Season for Nonviolence (64 days, or nine weeks) is divided into three arenas of practice: I. Self (Mind, Body, Spirit); II. Others (Communication and Relationship); and III. Earth (Eco-Global). Together, these three arenas form an integrated focus on humanity’s movement toward greater personal, social, and environmental health.
Over the next three months, we’ll explore the causes and cures of violence, drawing on real-world examples and stories that heal and remind us of what’s possible.
It hurts to witness violence, it hurts to experience violence, and it hurts to inflict violence. Each causes trauma. Yes, we need to fight. But only so that we can create spaces to heal and to build. Nonviolence requires us to look at the pain that we carry ourselves, and the pain that we inflict on each other within our communities. It is easy to point the finger and say that the violence is "over there." Nonviolence ... is the science of understanding conflict, much like cosmology is the science of understanding the origins of the universe.
— nonviolent activist and restorative justice practitioner Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm
The word “nonviolence” entered the English language in the 1920s as a rough translation of the Sanskrit term ahimsa, meaning the power that comes into effect when the desire to harm, kill, or dehumanize is eliminated. In its original sense, nonviolence does not mean the absence of violence. It was never meant to describe passivity, avoidance, or the tolerance of abuse. Much of the confusion today comes from using “nonviolence” to mean simply not fighting back, even when harm continues, or treating it as a temporary strategy that can be abandoned if it seems ineffective. Neither reflects what Gandhi or King actually practiced.
Gandhi and King called for principled nonviolence, a strategic set of skills, actions, and principles to:
1) understand violence and the systems and conditions that produce it
2) hold systems and people accountable without enemy-making and dehumanization
3) create pathways toward open dialogue, reconciliation, and workable alternatives that benefit all parties
In the video above, I explore the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi in greater depth.
The opposite of a fact is a falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may well be another profound truth.
—theoretical physicist Niels Bohr
The extreme polarization of our time is not simply political. It is a sign that we have lost access to deeper forms of sensemaking. We have become trapped in emotionally charged narratives that flatten complexity and desensitize us to ourselves, to one another, and to the full range of perspectives that must be integrated for meaningful change to occur.
Seen clearly, this moment isn’t a crisis but a turning point. To address our collective problems, we have to make them bigger. What we are witnessing is not the creation of division, but its exposure. Nonviolence offers a framework for engaging that exposure in humanizing and constructive ways.
Violence is not just an act of harm that inflicts pain and fractures relationship with ourselves, others, and all life. It is a way of seeing that makes harm and pain feel justified. Once a society accepts the belief that “the other side” is irredeemable, the remaining tools become force, coercion, domination, and censorship. And in the world of nonviolence, all forms of violence (not just physical) violate the essential interconnectedness of all beings.
Nonviolence sees truth and peace as inseparable. King believed any successful social movement must be rooted in agape, the Greek word for a form of love that recognizes the inherent worth and dignity of every human soul. King called agape “disinterested love,” because it doesn’t matter whether the object of your agape loves you back or not. Agape is the type of love that is capable of building Beloved Community.
Compassion and truth are not zero-sum games, where one person or group’s gain comes only from another’s loss. Having empathy and understanding for one side doesn’t take away from the empathy and understanding I have for the other side. Understanding different views doesn't diminish my view. What if we worked with our differences, not to keep score or assign blame, but to deepen our understanding?
Being nonviolent is also not simply about loving others. It’s about opening up to intellectual humility, nuance, and viewpoint diversity (wholeness). To have the courage to be curious about what we don’t know—moving beyond the unconscious ways we protect our identity and self-image, and to notice where fear of judgment or cancel culture shapes what we are willing to say, question, or explore beyond what we know.
When curiosity is sidelined by fear, false binaries begin to dominate. Social conflict is managed through a dualistic lens where the only choices are win or lose. Nonviolence reveals a third choice: reimagine. We need new tools, skills, ideas, and actions that match the level of complexity in the environment and embody the world we actually want.
Everything we do should build toward reconciliation - the art of repairing relationships. In nonviolence, our commitment to healing relationships requires that we listen to opposing perspectives to develop empathy and understanding. [This] does not mean you condone … or agree with their conclusions. The purpose is to gather more information about the conflict so you can see the full picture. Without understanding how the other side is viewing the conflict, you are responding to the conflict with only 50 percent of the story (yours). When I listen for the perspective from which those opinions are coming, I hear genuine concerns and fears and genuine attempts to understand our world to figure out what’s best for society.
Building Beloved Community is … about cultivating love for those that are difficult to love. The others. The people who voted for that guy. The people who work in the very systems that are destroying our communities. The corrupt corporate CEO. The foreign dictator responsible for countless deaths. Social activist Dorothy Day said, “I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
[This] is when we begin to enter into the shugyo of nonviolence [training the spirit, mind, and body]. Shugyo is not only about learning a tactical skill. It is about engaging in what Gandhi called “self-purification,” which involves purifying our own selves of trauma, hatred, and delusion.
— nonviolent activist and restorative justice practitioner Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm
“The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts; that is where the battle should be fought. My life is my message.” — Mahatma Gandhi
1. Oneness
All life is one/interconnected. Our oneness calls us to work for the well-being of all.
2. Satyagraha (Force of Truth or Soul Force)
Nonviolence is the pursuit of truth, grounded in integrity and the willingness to confront untruth.
3. Ahimsa (Non-Injury)
The practice of nonviolence through love and selfless service to prevent suffering. This principle lies at the heart of many spiritual and religious traditions.
4. Absorbing Suffering
Nonviolence accepts suffering without retaliation when confronting untruth, recognizing that violence cannot be eliminated through violence.
5. Trust and the Release of Fear
NV living is a trust in life and the journey of becoming increasingly free from fear
1. Nonviolence seeks to defeat injustice, not people.
2. Nonviolence chooses love instead of hate.
3. Nonviolence seeks to win friendship and understanding.
4. Nonviolence holds that suffering for a cause can educate and transform.
5. Nonviolence is a way of life for courageous people.
6. Nonviolence holds that the universe is on the side of justice, and that right will eventually prevail.
Everyday, I get to learn from people who have survived so much violence and in many cases have inflicted so much harm, yet have transformed to become some of the greatest peacemakers I’ve ever met. The core of the theory of nonviolence for me has become an unwavering faith in the nature of humanity. That at our core, we are a species that wants to be in service and relationship; that we have the resiliency to heal no matter how hurt we are, and we have the ability to transform no matter how much harm we’ve caused.
— nonviolent activist and restorative justice practitioner Kazu Haga
We can’t shift the chaos we’re in until we name it clearly. When we can recognize what’s really pushing us—in our personal lives and as a society—we already have a degree of freedom from it. We don’t all have to agree on the specifics of a clear path forward, but can’t we agree that another way is possible beyond violence on the streets and a society so polarized that we turn on each other? It seems as though any societal shift begins with a consciousness shift in how we think and relate to ourselves, others, and the world.
May we free ourselves from excessive fear and transform “us” vs. “them” in thought and action as we work for the well-being of all.
With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
WantToKnow.info is a nonprofit news information service founded by White House whistleblower Fred Burks in 2003, after he testified in a high-profile terrorism trial about how U.S. government officials repeatedly lied to the international press during his time as a language interpreter for presidents and top government officials around the world.
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