You’re invited to a series of book club discussions on Kazu Haga’s new book Fierce Vulnerability. In times of collapse, we need a movement that recognizes injustice as a reflection of collective trauma and embraces its role as a catalyst for collective healing through transformative action. If you want to explore what this could look like, please join us!
Please register to attend and be sure to pick up your copy of Fierce Vulnerability. To receive 10% off, order directly from Parallax and use code: JUNE2025FV
About the book
-
Fierce Vulnerability
Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse
View this bookIn times of collapse, we need a movement that recognizes injustice as a reflection of collective trauma and embraces its role as a catalyst for collective healing through transformative action.
We are living in a world where the depths of division, violence, and destruction can no longer be ignored. From political polarization leading to the erosion of the democratic process to the climate crisis continuing to perpetuate racial inequity, we need changes that heal harms at the personal and systemic levels.
Escalated forms of harm require an equally escalated response. Yet social movements often use tactics that have a tendency to escalate an “us vs. them,” “right vs. wrong” worldview not conducive to healing.
In Fierce Vulnerability, activist and author Kazu Haga argues this binary worldview is at the heart of what is destroying our relationships and our planet and offers a new way to create healing by combining the time-honored lineage of nonviolent action with the sciences of trauma healing and the promises of spiritual practice. Fierce Vulnerability realizes we can’t “shut down” injustice any more than we can “shut down” trauma; if healing is our goal, we need social movements that center relationship.
Discount for book club
Use code JUNE2025FV to receive 10% off your copy of Fierce Vulnerability.
Discussion dates
These free, virtual, one-hour book club discussions are open to all. Please register on Zoom once and you will be able to join all of the sessions. Our discussions will not be recorded.
We will have three sessions on different days of the week to accommodate different schedules and time zones. We’ll focus on particular sections of the book during each session, so you’re welcome to attend any/all of the meetings.
For all of our friends across the world with various schedules and times zones who are unable to attend our discussions, we encourage you to self-organize your own book clubs and read along with us on following schedule! (Find a local sangha) Downloadable discussion questions will be added before each meeting.
Thursday, June 12, from 10:30 to 11:30 am CT. Find your local time here.
- Foreword, Prelude, up to page 89
- Chapters discussed:
The Power of Vulnerability
The Compassion of Fierceness
Panic and Trauma
Friday, June 20, from 10:30 to 11:30 am CT. Find your local time here.
- pages 91-167
- Chapters discussed:
The Fractal Nature of Trauma and Healing
Healing in a Fractal World
Matching Escalation
A Crack in the Matrix
We Are Okay
The Delusion of Individualism
Saturday, June 28, from 10:30 to 11:30 am CT. Find your local time here.
- pages 169-247
- Chapters discussed:
The Delusion of Knowing
Healing is Not Enough
Resistance as a Spiritual Practice
A New Generation of Training
CODA: Remembering
From the foreword by Kaira Jewel Lingo
This is not hyperbole: the world has been waiting for this book, and its wisdom is desperately needed. Kazu Haga is a gifted surgeon-healer, skillfully addressing a core wound of our time: the delusion of separation. For too long, the realms of personal healing and systemic change have pulled in opposite directions, like a two-headed snake. Kazu tenderly stitches these realms together, offering a new vision for liberation that integrates our inner transformation with our work for justice.
Drawing from the legacies of nonviolence and direct action, Kazu shows us what a truly liberatory movement can look like—one that includes not only activists but also healers, artists, and grief tenders. He reminds us that vulnerability is not a weakness but a fierce, transformative force capable of dismantling the walls built by trauma and oppression.
Kazu powerfully articulates the need for collective healing of trauma to stop perpetuating harm, including the destruction of the Earth that sustains us. I experienced a glimpse of what such collective healing might look like in 2007, traveling to Vietnam with my teacher, Thích Nhất Hạnh and the Plum Village community. Together, we organized three Grand Requiem Masses to honor those who died in the Vietnam War. These ceremonies—held publicly for the first time since the war ended—created space for grief, without discrimination.
In one ceremony, hundreds of us chanted through the night in a Buddha Hall as tens of thousands prayed and practiced alongside us. I was profoundly aware of the collective healing happening, as decades of unacknowledged loss were finally grieved and released through the power of our prayers. In that sacred space, my prayers extended beyond Vietnam to include the ungrieved losses of the Indigenous genocide in North America, those who perished in the Middle Passage and during centuries of slavery, and the women of wisdom burned in the witch hunts. I longed for such intentional ceremonies to be held in the United States, where systemic injustices remain stuck in our psyches, unhealed in a culture of historical amnesia.
Kazu’s work points to the possibility of this deeper collective healing. He shows us that until we face and transform our trauma, we cannot create the liberated world we long for. This healing is not just a personal endeavor but a political necessity.
In a world teetering on the brink of ecological and social collapse, Fierce Vulnerability offers a vision grounded in courage, humility, and the radical power of healing. Kazu reminds us that healing personal and intergenerational trauma is inseparable from healing systemic injustice. This book is an essential guide for how we can embody this work together, whoever we are.
Discussion questions
Check back here for discussion questions as they are posted each week!
Please email jess@parallax.org if you have any questions about this book club, or suggestions on how to support those interested in self-organizing book clubs in different time zones.