My maternal grandparent’s wedding in March of 1942

I was born in Tokyo, Japan to a family of educators. My great grandfather was a poet and the founder of a women’s university in Tokyo, where I grew up in its campus.

When I was seven-years-old, I learned my first lesson about conflict, heartbreak and impermanence when my parents were disowned by my grandfather and we ran off to the US.

My family struggled after our migration. My father passed away shortly after our move and our family life was thrown into turmoil.

Despite coming from a line of educators, I dropped out of high school at age 15. By the time I was 17, I was drinking and getting high regularly, trying to escape the pain of my life.

When I was 17, I heard about the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage.

Initiated by Ingrid Askew, an African American artist/activist and Sister Claire Carter, a white Buddhist nun and supported by the Japanese Buddhist order Nipponzan Myohoji, the Pilgrimage committed to walking down the eastern seaboard of the United States and down the coast of Africa to reverse the middle passage and begin to heal from the legacy of the enslavement.

I spent the next six-months on the Pilgrimage, followed by a year living in Nipponzan’s monasteries across South Asia, receiving an education unlike anything I would have been able to receive in college.

Photo courtesy of Dan Brown

After studying Buddhism and nonviolence with Nipponzan, I jumped into organizing. I became a nonviolence trainer in various movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s, including the globalization movement where I first cut my teeth.

I also spent 10 years working for a radical foundation, the Peace Development Fund, which allowed me to work with and learn from hundreds of grassroots organizations around the country.

But it wasn’t until I took my first workshop in Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation (based on the teachings of Dr. King) that I began to understand the power of the word “nonviolence.” I was hooked immediately and met Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr., who was on Dr. King’s senior staff and co-authored the Kingian curriculum. Under his mentorship, I became a trainer in Kingian Nonviolence, and dedicated my life to pursuing its teachings.

This work eventually led me to working with incarcerated people, and they are the ones who taught me the power and importance of healing. Through their courage, I realized that our unprocessed traumas were too often turned inward within movement spaces, which limited our ability to create lasting change.

In an ongoing effort to better understand what it means to be a person committed to healing and liberation, I have also gratefully received trainings in restorative justice and mindfulness, Nonviolent Communication (NVC), The Work That Reconnects (WTR), Internal Family Systems (IFS) and a variety of other modalities in conflict transformation and healing.

My work tries to bridge personal healing with spiritual practice and movement building for systemic change.

I see the heightened levels of violence in our world and the urgency of the compounding crises we are living with. I believe that this moment calls for powerful movements with the courage to put their hearts and bodies on the line.

And… too many movements move through the world with a “shut it down” spirit that I am afraid is not what the world needs. I believe that social injustice is a manifestation of collective trauma, and you cannot “shut down” injustice anymore than you can “shut down” trauma.

And… working on personal healing alone does not address the reality that unjust systems create so much of the trauma in the first place.

From conflict transformation and restorative justice at the personal level to reimagining direct action as a modality to heal collective trauma at the systemic level, I try to work on every level of the fractal, bringing healing and the possibility of reconciliation to each scale.

Despite me not having a connection to my family in Japan for most of my upbringing, it’s funny how life comes full circle.

Years after beginning a path committed to nonviolence, I found out as an adult that my great-grandfather Hitomi Enkichi Tomei, pictured above, was inspired to start his school by the writings of Leo Tolstoy, who was also a major influence on Mahatma Gandhi, who was a major influence on Dr. King, who was perhaps the biggest influence of my life.

In fact, a large statue of Tolstoy sits at the center of Campus - a statue that I must have walked past countless times in my youth.

Despite our relationships being broken for so many years, I suppose the lineages that carry ancestral wisdom can’t help but continue.