Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 565: A Radical Alternative to Revenge | sujatha baliga

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Very often, when somebody pisses us off, our first instinct might be to plan some sort of revenge even if we rarely, if ever, actually follow through with it. Obviously, the trait of revenge seeking is counterproductive and it happens to also feel terrible. All the great wisdom traditions tell us that we should be forgiving instead and this isn’t just some sort of finger wagging from the morality police; it’s just straight up good advice. It’s in your best interest not to be coiled up inside endless revenge fantasies. Of course, this is all easier said than done.Today, though, our guest, sujatha baliga, both says it, and does it. She has an extraordinary story: she was horribly abused by a family member, and then, after an encounter with his Holiness the Dalai Lama, learned how to forgive the seemingly unforgivable. What’s more, she now helps other people do that. Perhaps, starting now, even you.sujatha baliga is a long time Buddhist practitioner and internationally recognized leader in the field of restorative justice. She was named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and is working on her first book. Content Warning: This episode includes multiple references to violent and traumatic experiences, including homicide and incest.In this episode we talk about:Her personal story, including her early experience with sexual assault within her familyHer life-changing encounter with his Holiness the Dalai Lama, and her experience with learning to forgive with the help of meditationHer experience working in the criminal justice system Her definition of restorative justice, why she believes we need it, and the three key questions it asks in each caseWhether there is evidence that restorative justice worksThe limits of restorative justiceWhat happens if someone who is the victim of a crime does want traditional punishment or even revengeHow you can apply what she’s learned in her life — including her time in the field of restorative justice — to our own livesAnd a specific meditation practice that can help you do itFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/sujatha-baliga-565See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, how we doing? Alright, here we go. I, not proud of what I'm about to admit, but very often, when somebody pisses me off, my first instinct is to plan some sort of revenge. I rarely have ever actually followed through on this, but still it is genuinely one of my least favorite parts of my own personality. Obviously, it's super counterproductive and speaking from abundant personal experience, this state of revenge seeking also happens to feel like shit. All the great wisdom traditions tell us we should be forgiving instead. And this isn't just some sort of, you know, finger wagging move from the morality police.

It's straight up good advice. It is in your best interest not to be coiled up inside of endless revenge fantasies. Of course, this is all easier said than done. Today, though, you're going to meet somebody who both says it and does it. She has an extraordinary personal story. She was horribly abused as a child by a family member. And then after a faithful encounter with his holiness, the Dalai Lama, she learned how to forgive the seemingly unforgivable. What's more, she now helps other people do this. Perhaps now even you. So Jata Baliga is a long time Buddhist practitioner and internationally recognized leader in the field of restorative justice. I'll let her define restorative justice in detail,

but it's basically a less punitive alternative to the traditional criminal justice system. So Jatha was named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow and is now working on her first book. In this conversation, we talked about her personal story, including her early experience with sexual assault with interfamily, her life changing encounter with the Dalai Lama, and her experience with learning how to forgive with the help of meditation. We also talk about her experience working in the

criminal justice system, her definition of restorative justice, why she believes we need it, and three key questions it asks in each case, Whether there's evidence that restorative justice works, the limits of restorative justice, what happens if somebody who is the victim of a crime does want traditional punishment or even revenge, how you can apply what she has learned in her own life, including her time in the field of restorative justice, and a specific meditation practice that can help you do that. Heads up, this episode includes multiple references to violent and traumatic experiences,

including homicide and incest. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you wanna do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier

instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey, y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, baby, this is Kiki farmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts,

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to, baby, this is a ski geek farmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. So, Jatha Baliga, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me down.

Am I in the neighborhood of correct pronunciation there? You are incredibly close. This close is one might be without being a native speaker, I think. Pretty much there. All right, thank you. It's important to have your name pronounced correctly. It's also important to tell your story. And I would love to start this if you're up for it with your story.

It's an incredible yarn. It starts with some pretty serious abuses of child and runs all the way to a momentous meeting with the Dalai Lama and then to your incredible career. Are you comfortable starting with that story? Sure, yeah, we could start there. That's fine. I guess that's how all of this work started.

So it feels good to start and give credit where credit is due. So yeah, a little bit about my personal history, I grew up primarily in rural Pennsylvania, with really formative chunks of my childhood also spent in rural South India. But the years in rural Pennsylvania were really challenging, challenging as an understatement. I was experiencing a lot of pain and trauma on the daily in my home and out in the world in school, living with a lot of pain and trauma on the daily in my home and out in the world in school, living with a lot of what today we would understand as racist bullying. And in my home, my father was sexually abusing me. And so he passed away when I was 16.

And while the abuse primarily stopped a few years before he passed away, there were just a lot of lingering effects that went into my young adulthood, and I didn't really have an avenue or an outlet or any treatment or care. So my approach to healing was to try to make it that this never happened to anybody else, and I sort of hurled myself headlong into a life of service, domestic violence shelters, rape crisis, anti-trafficking work for a little bit. I really sort of sublimated my own healing journey. I wasn't really putting myself at the center. I sort of felt like he's gone. It's over. And while I was experiencing this or quotidian sexual harm, harassment,

sort of things that people live with on the regular that was really pushing some really deep and old buttons, I wasn't giving myself any space to really kill my past. So at the time I was living in Mumbai with my then partner who was doing this incredible project working with trafficking survivors and I was supposed to be helping him and I had these grandiose plans. While I was applying to law school thinking I'd go back to the states and become a lawyer, become a prosecutor who was dedicated in a lawyer, become a prosecutor, who was dedicated in my mind, this future prosecutor that was going to be to locking up the bad guys, to locking up folks who caused harm. And in the process of all of this, I had a total breakdown.

Just couldn't get out of bed a lot of days, couldn't function. I had severe blinding migraines all day, every day. Gastrointestinal problems or probably IBS, some people thought I had Crohn's disease, like I was an unmitigated disaster for many, many months. And I could not imagine how it was that I would be starting law school. And so I went on a vacation with my partner and we ended up in Kerala where on the beach, we met this man who was this like spiritual seeker guy who was wearing a thong and nothing else. Like all seekers do, yeah. Yeah, it's only thongs. Only thongs exactly.

That's going to be my new website. Forget only fans. It's only thongs. Only thongs exactly. So here's this guy is a Swiss and very Canadian. He was going on and on about what a spiritual person he was. He was coming off of this acid trip by the light of the full moon, and he was telling us about these Vipassana courses that he kept sitting and all of his backpacking around Dharmshalla,

which is, as you know, having recently returned from there, the home for the Tibetan government in exile and where his holiness of Dalai Lama lives. And so while I was both completely repulsed by everything this guy was saying, like, I go to Vapasana courses so I can center myself and become so I'm more effective at the jumpsmuggling that I do, that fun soul of my international travel. It was interesting.

I stayed and I listened. He etched these two words in my mind, Vapasana and Darumshala. And those were the two next things that happened. So I tried really hard to get into a Vapasana course. There was a center right outside of Mumbai and every class was full, every waitlist was full for months and months out and well into

when I was supposed to start law school. And so I moved on to plan B. Getting on the next local train to Delhi and finding my way onto a bus that was winding up those roads and roll into the armshilf the next night. And I end up trying to find a place to stay. And there was this one guest house that was open. And I knocked on the door.

They let me into their basement. And I slept there. And the next morning I woke up and it was full of monks from Ladakh. And they were so kind to me. And some piece of me, just every part of me knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be. So the next night I had dinner with the guest house owner

and their family, they were quite curious about this American accented Indian girl wandering around India by themselves. It was a little concern concern, was 1996. And during the course of getting to know them better, I think I was a rare traveler who really wanted to know about them and their lives. And I had spent so many years at this point

working with severe trauma and people who were traumatized. And I myself obviously was seriously traumatized. And instead of asking them the questions that I think people usually ask them, like, can the Dalai Lama levitate and blah blah blah, I asked them about their trauma. I asked them about what happened, like, why did you leave? What were the conditions under which you left? And how did you get here? How did you survive? And how are you happy? And not in a constant state of rage. And through the course of that conversation,

they were sort of like, you kind of have everything. Like you are an American passported person with the spiritual interest like, why are you unhappy? And it was the first time I really started talking with people from my own cultural universe about the abuse. And it was a really powerful conversation. And they suggested that I asked the Dalai Lama about it. So I was like, what do you mean, ask the Dalai Lama? They're like, yeah, well, we practice forgiveness,

but it's kind of confusing what you're saying in the context of inter-fermalial sexual violence. So like, what would the Dalai Lama say about that? And I'm like, well, yeah, but isn't he like busy? How do you ask the battle on my question? And so they told me, you know, you write him a letter, you just drop it off at the second door, the green building behind the monastery is actually his compound. And so I wrote him a note, I said,

anger is killing me, but it motivates my work. How do you work on behalf of abused and oppressed people without anger as the motivating force? They told me to come back in a week and I came back a week later and they granted me a private audience with this willingness which, you know, that was a pretty spectacular experience. The first half of my audience with this holiness

was me like kind of going off on the... Oh my God. I really was, I was really, an extremely dysregulated person in general back then. Like, he asked me a question at one point about what can religious leaders like him do about gender-based oppression. And I was like, well, you've been here 14 times. You think you might come back as a woman every once in a while? Like, I was really, and it was not that polite when I did it. It was pretty bad, but also really good,

because we had a really real conversation. And in the course of that conversation, I was really grilling him for advice about how to forgive, right? What does that even look like? How does that feel? How do you do it? Like what's the one, two, three?

And he refused to give me that advice. He kept giving me what at that time I really received as platitudes and not really specific advice. He kept telling me about observing the downside of anger in my life and analyzing whether it has any benefit to the work I'm trying to do in the world and all of that. And at a certain point, I just really lost my temper. I was like, I feel like I'm dying.

Like I need the forgiveness pill basically prescribe it to me. And he still didn't. Instead, he asked me what today I still feel as the most powerful question anyone's ever asked me, which is, do you feel like you've been angry long enough? To have this holiness give me permission to be angry was maybe the greatest gift I had ever received. And I was just like that point. I was like, a bald tears and what I've been crying for some time at this point. I've been sobbing through like half the audience. And we sat there together and just sort of surveyed

anger's diminishing returns. His holiness gave me two pieces of advice. And unsurprisingly, you will find that the first piece of advice was to meditate. He said, at a very bright mind, but it was completely out of my own control. a very bright mind, but it was completely out of my own control, and that I needed to rein it in. And then the second piece of advice he gave me was he said, you'll want to learn to align yourself with your enemies without excusing their behavior,

consider their humanity, understand their position and their needs. At that point, I spiraled into another explosion of rage, being like, what are you talking about? I'm about to go to law school to lock those people up. No, I will not align myself with anybody. And I was like, again, completely out of control. This holiness has got such a kick out of me. Like, it means over, he's like patting me on the knee and he's like, okay, okay, then you just meditate. So yeah, so I left

that audience and pretty shortly thereafter had to go back to the US. And the next thing I did when I got back to the States was I sat at 10 day, the abussian, of course. And it was the hardest thing I'd ever done. And I thought I was a failure in the first 10 minutes because I couldn't observe even a single in an outbreath. And I won the movie, even like day five, day six. I'm gonna go. And day seven, things turned around.

And on the last day, they teach metha-bhavana, which is loving kindness meditation. This was the Goenka G-style, you know, repulsion international Academy, kind of course. And an image of my father arose. It was actually a flashback that I had repeatedly had of him molesting me. And rather than pushing that image away,

I incorporated him into the loving kindness. I had replayed that experience so many times in my young adulthood where I would be like, oh, instead of what happened at the time I was stunned, I never physically fought back. And so I would replay it being like, I fought back, I stabbed him to death, I would like recreate this memory in these horrific ways. And interestingly, that's when my migraine started, when I started to try to make a different ending to this already horrible story. And so what happened instead was, I didn't try to change the past, Dan.

I just let it be what it was. And I included my father in this incredible, loving kindness piece, serenity that I arrived at by the end of day nine. And he sort of dissolved into light. And what was really interesting is in the weeks and months that followed, I suddenly realized I'd never have another migraine. And all my stomach problems went away. And so

I have to take to tell the story sometimes because I feel like it sounds like, go sit a 10 day course, you'll cure your migraines. And I really don't want people to feel like, well, this lady did it. And I went in there with my migraines and I walked out with my migraines, right? And that that somehow makes people a failure. Like, these things are doing what they're doing. They're running their course in our lives. For me, that's what happened.

They were significant changes in my capacity to be intimate with people. And then another powerful thing that happened was a few weeks later, I started law school and realized I had to drop out, like in the first two weeks because my entire plan was to be a prosecutor and I didn't want to be a prosecutor anymore. Suddenly all the rage and hatred and lock-em-upness that was fueling this whole thing didn't exist anymore. And I was wisely counseled by the person who became my longtime mentor in the work to stick it out. And ultimately, he introduced me to some folks who defend women who were charged with crimes for having either harmed or killed their abusers, or got charged with the crimes

of the person that was abusing them, right? Like they were having to carry the drugs of their boyfriend or whatever. At the time, it was called the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. And I ended up, through sort of my interest in that kind of thing, and becoming a criminal defense attorney and ultimately even working on capital defense cases and even working on cases of folks who had sexually harmed kids.

And so over the next 10 years really deepened what initially happened through that myth above in a practice, right? That opened your heart to your enemies without excusing their behavior, considered their humanity. And that's what I did with my father in metabhavena. And then that's what I did for 10 years as a criminal defense lawyer. I just want to jump in on this. You're doing love and kindness meditation for your dad and this, you know,

dissolves into light. You said before that you don't want people to think, hey, go on a 10 day meditation retreat and your migraines will be cured, but I suspect you also may not want people to think, go on a 10 day meditation retreat and you're gonna be able to forgive the person who did the worst thing imaginable to you.

So I wonder if you could just say more about the mechanism for that forgiveness and whether that's available to the rest of us, whether we're going to do a retreat or not. Yeah, so thank you for saying that, Dan. I really appreciate that. Yes, definitely, you know, I didn't go thinking that I would forgive my Anu. I didn't think I'd forgive my Anu during the first sit. I thought that think I'd forgive my Anu during the first sit. I thought that what I was doing was following his holiness's advice, that if I wanted to work my way towards forgiveness, that I needed to reign in my mind. And so

if anyone goes on any retreat and learns to reign in their mind a little bit, that is wonderful. And that is a step towards your own freedom from your suffering. It's nice that I happen to forgive my father. I haven't forgiven anybody else at the end of any other ten days, it. And there are quite a few people that I would like to forgive, right? And I'm working on it. So I think it's really important to not go in with these, you know, like there's going to be some focus-pocus thing at the end that makes it happen. And it isn't a focus focus, right? There were a lot of steps along the way. There was the first three days of just breath observation and then there was five and a half days, six days of body scanning, deepening my understanding of the impermanent nature of the physiological phenomenon happening inside my body, right?

And outside and then on the surface and then inside, like looking at the functioning of all of it as impermanent, changing, changing, changing, changing. And then only then did this feeling, the subtle sensations of that impermanence started to be experienced as bliss. And then that was something I wanted other people to experience. And it was easy with the loved ones. And it was easy with the loved ones. And it was fuzzy with the neutral people. And I know there were people who I can't stand who it actually was easier for to do after having done

these, you know, nine days of raining in my mind. The image of my father arising was entirely spontaneous. Like it literally felt not unlike the flashbacks that I had had in the past. I wonder in terms of the mechanism here, I'm going to take a stab at putting some words to it and then you'll fact check me or tell me I'm a complete moron. But no, I won't. Sorry, I live in a year.

Well fact check you though. I live in a year old boy who likes to call him the moron. He for Christmas, he gave me a hat that just read, I am an imbusole on it. So that's that's I live in the insults. He will, however, as soon as he does something like that, come over and kiss me on the cheek and say, I love you. That's important. He balances it.

Anyway, in meditation, one of the things be so caught up in your stories, whatever the ego is barfing up on a moment-to-moment basis, and you're actually just paying attention to the raw data of your senses, you can see that everything's changing from a slight tension in the knee to an itch right next to your nose, which is really uncomfortable to random thoughts about what's for dinner, things are changing all the time and it doesn't end. And that can really be in an interesting way, a gateway to a kind of compassion because you can see, oh, any mood I'm feeling right now, it's not Sujata's mood.

I can't find some cord nugget of Sujata in there. I can see it like coming together of atmospheric conditions. It's a tornado. It's a hurricane. There is no core nugget of tornado or a hurricane. It's just because the right conditions come together, you get a meteorological phenomenon. Same is true for my anger, same is true for me in this body, and the same is true for my dad, and for everybody. For everybody I might find difficult. We're just this crest of a wave of incomprehensibly deep and beginningless causes and conditions. And if you can see yourself that way

and you can see other people that way, that is perhaps the mechanism for a deep forgiveness. So am I close? Well, you know, that's interesting, Dan. I think that that's something that came to me later. I don't think that that's what happened in the Pashina course. So, and I think there are many different ways to forgiveness.

What you're describing as a beautiful one, it's one that I think of a lot with this phrase that a friend of mine who was also sexually abused by a family member, he told me that he developed a curiosity that caused him to ask his brother at some point in their adult life, what happened to you that you did that to me, what happened to you that you did that to me? What happened to you that you did that to me? What were the causes and conditions that gave rise to this thing that flowed through our family? Right? And that there was a concern and care. Like this is probably something that happened to you, right?

Like, where did this start? It's a beautiful thing to look at causes and conditions and to not like sort of reify it as My father this terrible person did this evil act, but rather There were a whole lot of causes and conditions that gave rise to him being a pretty miserable human being and one Expression of that misery was to harm some of the people around them But that came later that's more of an understanding that grew through my public defender years when every single person I represented had a childhood that made mine not to diminish my suffering, but kind of made mine look like a cakewalk, right, comparatively. In the Vipush and of course itself, I was simply freed from my own categorizing and grasping. At that moment, I was so deeply immersed in the

experience of this subtle sensation, they call it bonga, you know, free form, beautiful, just the sensation, this physical, physiological experience of change, just happening in every part of my being and sending that outwards towards everyone who suffers. And it just felt so huge and it felt safe. It felt safe to send it out sort of indiscriminately to the everything, miss of the everything. And so my father was in there. And that was that experience. For me, the steps towards forgiveness didn't all happen in that sit. I really think it started when I wrote the letter to his holiness saying, help. And then sitting with his holiness, the experience of being in the presence of his holiness, in the column, Kundun, which means presence, right?

And he's the most present to human being I've ever experienced. And he listened with infinite compassion to the totality of my story. I told him everything about my father. And in particular, about when I was 16, and he passed away, I was doing CPR on him when he died. Or he didn't die at that moment. He died three days later and I, you know, kept him alive a little bit longer. And so it's interesting. I had so many therapists told me that I had like Stockholm syndrome. One therapist

said it was a sign of my failure to individuate based on my over-identification with my Indian culture. Like, wow, wow. But his loneliness really made me feel like that was the finest moment of my life that I was trying to save this person whose death I had at times wished for. And so, we've been able to share the totality of all the horror, being able to inventory how horrible it had all been for me. Right? And also confess my conflicted feelings about his death, like missing him and being confused. I could say all of it to his holiness. And so before I think we can forgive, we have to really do that deep inventory of how we've been harmed and what we need.

And to have someone witness it with infinite compassion and invaluable first step. So that's step one. And then step two is I think doing the cost-benefit analysis, like has the anger served you long enough. And so I did that with his onlyness, right? And being given the permission to still be angry about things about which we have every right to be angry, every right.

And rights are ultimately very Western individualistic things So okay, and I may have the right to all kinds of stuff, but do I want to be happy? So and so that's when I came to the conclusion for myself and so I talked to a lot of people who in my work who have experienced irreparable harm and yet I meet so many who aren't saying yes, yes, I have been angry long enough. So now how, right? How? And I think meditation is one excellent way to reign in the mind, but your mind is out of your own control when you are raging against the past. You can't undo it. You can't. So now what? I could see that anger was harming my personal relationships, my friends, my boyfriend, my everything. I was just, oh, and I was harming me, I was harming my body.

I was miserable. And I was sharing my misery with everybody. And I was also very kind of person. I was like, you know, when I was in moments of service, I could put all that aside and just be 100% for other people. But then I reached the point where I couldn't even do that. I couldn't get out the door to go help. And so how was my anger serving anything at that point? And so I am super, super grateful for my rock bottom. I always identify with every time I see that video of you, Dan, you know, not able to continue in your news broadcast. I always brings tears to my eyes and just gratitude for you for being so transparent about the worst moment ever in your career, right?

Because some of those moments are the reasons that we are where we are today. Coming up, Sujatha Baliga talks about her experience working in the criminal justice system. We define restorative justice, why she believes we need it, and what the three questions are that this process asks in each case, whether there's evidence that restorative justice actually works, the limits of restorative justice, and what happens when somebody who's the victim of a crime does want traditional punishment and even revenge. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable.

I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares of our freshly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong.

What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. I cut you off when you were telling the story of your career. You went to law school, thought about quitting, gutted it out, and became somebody who defended the accused.

And sometimes people accused of crimes that were similar to the ones perpetrated against you. And then you moved into, if memory serves, and again, fact check me, something called restorative justice. So what is restorative justice? Yeah, I think ultimately I wasn't able, Dan, to stomach the criminal legal system as it currently operates. Right, I had been a victim advocate, and I saw that the criminal legal system did not do anything to benefit survivors really. Like, its primary focus was on punishing the folks who had caused harm, right? It centered the state's interest in punishing folks who'd caused harm. And I didn't really see anyone benefited. Orders of protection were violated all the time. Jud judges refused to enforce them.

Like, I just, when I was doing my victim advocacy work, it wasn't, I didn't see myself truly helping. So when I became a criminal defense lawyer, mostly I did a pellet work and I got to see the aftermath of so much injustice, it was astounding how many people got railroaded into pleas that were unfair or they were completely innocent of crimes. The system doesn't operate very well even to its own stated goals. So we say that the goals of the criminal legal system are incapacitation, for example. We want to keep bad guys away from us, but that doesn't acknowledge the fact that you're putting all these people together who are super traumatized and are causing harm, just to harm each other. So we haven't really incapacitated people from harming anybody, prisons are not safe places

to be, or we say rehabilitation. Well, if you look at our recidivism rates, a disaster. There's this word that I hate, it's called criminogenic, and it means that things that cause people to commit crimes. I think of the thing that is the most criminogenic thing out there is the criminal legal system itself, incarceration in particular. So the system is an object failure, right? It's not creating public safety,

it's just not working, and it costs billions and billions and billions of dollars a year. And it doesn't center crime survivors in their needs. So I went back and I had another audience with his holiness. And while I was there, I also started to research the Tibetan system of justice prior to Chinese occupation. And I was deeply moved by notions in there of repairing harm and bringing all the parties together. You know, those silk scarves that you got when you're in the arms, all of them, the katas. Like, in certain processes, you know, they want to see the parties at the end be able to offer each

other katas. Like that is how a legal case should truly close. You know, it's like, that's not what we're doing in the US. So like, what is that system about? And I started reading about that system and then about other, you know, Buddhist notions of justice. And I was telling my friend about it. And she was like, oh, you're talking about restorative justice. She can say my friend Susan Marcus, a long time criminal defense lawyer, a death penalty lawyer. She was like, honey, that's restorative justice. I've been telling you about that for years

as restorative justice. So I started going with her, to trainings and workshops and primarily initially learned from men and night folks who sort of came up with this term, particularly Howard Zair. The bottom line is that it's about bringing people together after things have gone wrong and having a conversation with family and community present in order to come up with a plan

to repair the harm. And this can happen even after really, really horrific crimes and harms. And my work has been about trying to figure out how to do that in lieu of the criminal legal system. So how do we do this instead of the abject disaster that is mass criminalization in the United States? Anywhere in the world, really. I really hope that the rest of the world does not follow in our footsteps. I hope that they will look at our data and see that our systems don't do a good job and that they have insane racial and ethnic disparities and do not produce any good outcomes. I did that for 15 years. I helped start some programs across the country where young people who commit pretty serious

offenses, things that could be labeled felonies, are diverted out of the system before those kids are charged with crimes, and they get an opportunity to work with restorative justice facilitators, to sit face to face with a person who harmed them, who they harmed rather, and with their family and their community, both of them having supporters, and through a facilitated dialogue that we model that after a Māori process comes from Aotearoa, also known as New Zealand, it's called Family Group Conferencing. And so we modified that to make it work in the Western context. And we hope we'd done it in a way that does not feel like a preparation, feels like appreciation,

and beneficial application of these incredible techniques and ways of being wise together, where we get to the root of what happened and how can we make things right. And we start with a person who experienced the harm, right? We ask, how are you harmed? What do you need and whose obligation is it to meet those needs? And the conversation and the plan comes out of that. People get real. People tell us everything about what happened and how they experienced things and what they did. And so that's like a very high level overview

of the restorative justice process work that I've done. And so now my hope is to actually start to bring it into intimate partner and sexual violence. I've been doing that for the past few years. And also looking at Buddhist roots of where this might come from, coming back to that. So there's so much reliance on indigenous wisdom around these things. And men and night folks too. So, Dine, Navajo peacemaking, and like I mentioned, Mali, a family group conferencing, et cetera, and I've been thinking a lot about

what does a Buddhist restorative justice look like? What are the roots from within my own lineage that could help me become a better restorative justice facilitator, so. Let me ask a typical journalist question. Is there evidence that restorative justice works and perhaps even works better than the traditional criminal justice system in the world.

I'm going to have to tell listeners that I didn't pay Dan to ask that question. My previous organization impact justice, where I worked for a long time as the director of the restorative justice project. We have done and worked with other people to do multiple studies of the many places across the country where we are helping community-based non-profits facilitate these cases and we have shown repeatedly 44% reduction in recidivism

Let's say that again like we call success like a 5% better 6% better. This is a 44% reduction in recidivism So if a kid gets sent to restorative justice where they get an opportunity to meet with a person they harmed and complete a plan to make it right, 44 percent less likely to be re-arrested, recharged with a crime all that, right? And the satisfaction rate for participating crime survivors is 91% and this is with felonies. So it's a pretty big deal. So to my mind, there's this question of, we say that these quote unquote alternatives

are, you know, the too risky, or there's not enough big enough evidence-based. I mean, at this point, we've done both a comparative match sample and a randomized control trial on the stuff. So when are we gonna say that instead of spending the billions of dollars that we spend on locking children and adults up that we might do this instead? Because it's actually in the public interest.

It's actually in the public interest to do restorative justice. What would your most reasonable critics say about what the limits of restorative justice are? I think I'm my most reasonable critic, right? And so in some ways I would say what I think the limits of restorative justice are is it's an imagination thing right now. I don't think we can imagine emptying all the prisons, right? So I think we have a real deficit of a necessary resource in order to do this work well. And it is belief that good things can happen, that we could live in a world where there could be a feelings of safety and accountability without punishment. So that's a piece of it.

Another piece of it is that it's not going to work in every case. There will be a handful of people, a handful of people, a handful of people who even the most skilled facilitator and the most compelling crime survivor and the most resourced family in terms of offering the person who's caused harm, like unconditional love and support to complete a plan to repair the harm. And they're still not going to do it.

There's going to be a couple of people like that. I think that the response to that is always, whoo, how's the system we got now working? there's gonna be a couple people like that. I think that the response to that is always, well, how's the system we got now working? Are we catching everybody? Is everybody, we're catching, never doing it again? Is everybody we're catching, taking responsibility in a way that's really satisfying

to the person that they harmed, is that what court looks like in America every day? No, it's not. So how about we try this other thing, right? So I feel very confident in saying that a world of all restorative justice instead of what we're doing now would be a much, much, much better world. I feel very clear about that, like data wise, in terms of what our objectives are and what outcomes we're going to get. So yeah, I'm not saying it's perfect. And therefore, I don't know if I fall into the true believer category, you know, but I do think that it would be an incredible improvement

over what we do. One limit that just comes to mind for me, possibly, is on the victim side. I know that may not be the right terminology. But if somebody deliberately harmed my child or my wife or my brother or my mom, whatever, I might want revenge, whatever that looks like, either something I did on my own or something that could be needed out by the state. And I might not want. I literally personally might not want restoration of the flavor that you're offering up. There's two things I would say to that and I really appreciate your canter about that. I think that there are a lot of people who feel that way. I don't think we can know until a thing happens. That's one of the things I find really interesting is when crime survivors contact me

and they say, I've lost a family member to this homicide. And I don't want to go through the regular criminal legal system. Will you help us find a restorative justice facilitator to do this? And usually the answer is, we can't because the state doesn't allow it or whatever. But they often say, I would have never dreamed in a million years that I'd be a person trying to hunt this process down. So we don't know how punitive we're going to feel when the thing is what until the thing actually happens. And I give myself permission to say, I don't know how punitive I might feel if somebody harmed my child or my spouse, right? I aspire to the things that I aspire to and

that I'm trying to help the world create, but I don't know what my initial reaction is going to be. So there's two things. One is time, Dan, like asking people to do things immediately is not giving people the time that like to honor the trajectory that their own healing journey might take. And the timelines that we run everything on these days is the timeline of the state, right? So it's like you got to get this done before that preliminary hearing and this and that and the other. And so I'm just curious about what it would look like to build an entire system based on the timeline that is required for the healing of the people who are most directly impacted by the harm.

And so that's just like one piece that I would interject. The other thing that I'm thinking about with regard to that is something that my friend Danielle Sarah talks about, she says, imagine that you're in a desert and everyone is starving and walking across this desert and, you know, it's been days and they're running out of water and they haven't eaten in days. And all of a sudden there's a hamburger truck in the middle of the desert. Everybody lines up at the hamburger truck. Can you say that it's the most popular hamburger truck in the desert? Can you even say there are no vegetarians in this group?

Like, I'm a vegetarian. I'd be lined up for my burger, right? And so I think when we think about a punitive response, we've been steeped in it for so long. We've been told that justice is punishment. For so long, and we again, haven't been given any space for imagination of other ways things can be done.

So we can't imagine what would happen if God forbid anything like this ever happened to anyone close to us. We just don't know what our immediate response would be. We don't know a couple of weeks or months or whatever into a process that we might actually not like what the state has on offer and look for something else. We don't know unless we've been through that situation. So that's a couple of the things that I would say. Another thing is that in working today with the system as it currently operates, I never shame people who don't want to do this process. If you want to do this other thing that is on offer,

I'm not the person to guide you through that. Thank you so much for being honest about what your needs are and what approach you want to take. But I am really invested in trying to make the opportunity available for every single person who asks for it today. Particularly crime survivors like, I've got a father right now whose child had a psychotic break and killed his other child and almost killed him. And he is begging for a restorative justice resolution. Instead, they have taken his 16 and a half 17-year-old child and charged him as an adult and locked him in an adult facility. That's what's happening today. So, not so different situation because it's a man being concerned with his own kid, you know, but I do hear from crime survivors

who didn't even know the person who took their loved ones life. And they say, I'm not interested in the system on offer. Can you help me? And the answer is, unfortunately, usually no. We shake every dream. We try to find an amenable district attorney or a police department that would be willing to do it. And it's hard.

It's hard to get people to make a massive paradigm shift. And that's the thing that restorative justice is in the end. It's a massive paradigm shift. And that's the thing that restorative justice is in the end. It's like a massive paradigm shift. Instead of asking, you know, these are Howard Zerr's questions, he says, instead of asking what law was broken, who broke it, and how should we punish them? restorative justice asks, who was harmed, and what do they need, and whose obligation is it

to meet those needs? So, I mean, that is a big shift in the way in which we approach all of this stuff, right? To how they need's based inquiry, right? What is everyone here need? And then to also ask a question about the person who caused the harm, what do they need in order to never do this again?

What do they need to begin with so that they wouldn't have gone down this road in the first place? What do they need now in order to help make things right? Coming up, Sujatha talks about some practical takeaways from her meditation and restorative justice practices and a specific meditation practice that you can bring to bear if you've got some forgiveness you might want to do. You stand at this really interesting crossroads of meditation and restorative justice. And I'm curious, for the rest of us in our day to day lives, what have you learned that

we can apply? It may not be related to crime, per se, but it could be to our annoying uncle or our child who won't listen to us or spouse against whom we've been carrying a grudge or whatever. So how can we take this extraordinary set of experiences you've had and apply them to our day-to-day lives? Hmm, thank you for that beautiful question, Dan. Yeah, so a few things I would say developing a little bit more sort of introspection around what it is that we need. So the first question, how are you harmed and what do you need, those two first questions in restorative justice, I think they could be applied to little things too, you know, they know how to uncle. And instead of just habitually reacting to

the annoying uncle that might ratchet up the annoying uncle's annoy-ness, we can pause and say, what's my real need here? And what's my need underneath that need? And what's my need underneath that need? And to take time after the fact, to go back and journal, write, breathe, meditate on, what is happening with you? That is so irritating. What's your need at that moment? And then before the next time you get together with the annoying uncle, can you get some of those needs met? Maybe that uncle is not so annoying that you couldn't actually tell him, like, does bothers me that you'd say this or do this or whatever.

And this is how this lands on me. This doesn't work for me. I really care about you and I want to be in a good relationship with you. And this part of our relationship is really hard for me. But maybe that uncle isn't going to be amenable to that, right? Maybe you need to tell some other people. So when asking how you're harmed and what you need, all those needs don't always have to get met by the person who caused the harm. They can get met by other people, right? So for example, you know, I used to have this circle for South Asian survivors of child sexual abuse. None of us ended up necessarily confronting anybody

who harmed us from our childhoods, but we had needs to voice what happened within a culturally specific space. We had a need to tell our whole truths. We had a need to have that be witnessed. We had a need to inventory the shame and secrecy that surrounds child sexual abuse. One way to erode that is to talk to people about what happened,

and to get vulnerable in safe places. So there are a whole bunch of other needs that you have that can get met. So one of the biggest things I've learned from restorative justice is to be very clear about needs and where they can get met. That third question that makes it justice, that whose obligation is it to meet those needs,

that's what makes it a justice paradigm to my mind. That may or may not happen in all our lives But we can still be happy when it doesn't we can still be Supported by other people so there's that and then yeah What do I need to take into these things? What are what do I have in my toolbox for emotional management? So that's a big that's a big piece that I think like relying on my breath is something that I do all the time, you know, in dialogue, I am relying on my meditation practices all the time. When I am holding

a restorative justice space, there are many ways in which the teachings from both the Buddha Dharma and meditation, even more secular meditation, come in handy, right? At the deepest level, I would say these notions of interdependence, what Tick-Nat-Hon talks about. We inter-ar really aligns with this notion of a boon-to. A person is a person through other people, or I am because we are, right? These deepest notions of interdependence are happening with everyone we are encountering, including the people we can't stand. I interar with you, even when you are really offending me, like we interar all the time. And so that is just to start to open our minds to these ideas and to try them on when you're in the space of people who are bugging you. For me, there's also these four measurables,

right? Equanimity, love, compassion, and joy that I really bring into my restorative justice practice. That's sort of the basis of how I facilitate, right? Like, I want us all to not hold some close and others distant. I want us to erode the notion of enemy. That is my work in it. It's really freeing for us to not have an enemy. So starting to see someone that we perceive to be our enemy and trying to think of ways in which they're not, like how does this person not my enemy, right? Where is our shared humanity?

So digging into some of these concepts, I think can be beneficial. But primarily, I would say on the daily, finding your anchor in the conflict zone, what is your way of being your best self? What are the values that you hold to? And what will you use to tether yourself to them when you are in these sticky situations?

Those are some of the questions that I try to work with, not just in restorative processes. We always start with like, what are the shared values that we have in this room? And how are we gonna communicate with one another is we're working through this really difficult situation. But then it's a question that you could just ask yourself out there in the world. How do I want to walk around in the world today?

And what is going to tether me to that? How am I going to be my best self? My spouse thinks of sometimes he says he visualizes like the Bal and Lama on his shoulder when things are getting really heated in a situation. So he come up with all kinds of techniques like that. And after he told me that, I started using that in my restorative justice processes. I asked people to think,

who's the person who helps you be your best self? Helps you be the most wise and kind and honest communicator that you can be. Okay, that person's sitting on your shoulder through this whole circle. So, I don't know, maybe listeners can think of who they're putting on there. When they go into that meeting that they hate every week with that person.

Who are they going to put on their shoulder for that week? I like that. I know who I'm putting on my shoulder. Joseph Goldstein, incredible meditation teacher. Oh, wonderful. So, but I do want to go back to this inter-R stuff you talked about before that we're interconnected even with our annoying uncle, even with somebody who's really hurt us,

way beyond mere annoyance. I know in that one, at least I understand, and you'll tell me if I'm wrong, that one of the tools, the meditative tools that you've used to boost this muscle, and it really is a muscle, this molecular understanding of interdependence, is a meditation that uses the phrase just like me?

I love it. I learned that from Geshe-Thupin Jimpa, his Holiness' principle translator into English, the just like me meditation. I lead meditation on Monday nights at my temple, the Gytto Foundation enrichment, and we do that one a lot. This one afterwards, the people who are meditating there often come up to me and be like, can we do that one more often? And you know, there's some repeated phrases that I use and I change them from time to time, but just like me, this person wishes to be happy. Just like me, this person doesn't want suffering. Just like me, this person wishes to be at ease.

Just like me, this person wishes to be at ease, just like me, this person wishes to be at peace. So for me, anger no longer arises about the very worst things and what you could maybe call quote unquote the very worst people. A few years ago, my son came home in the middle of a burglary and was held at gunpoint and he's fine and has had an amazing powerful healing trajectory out of that disaster. And you know, all of our stuff was taken and it's just, and more than anything, just really helping my son. This was a month before we ended up in lockdown.

It's the pandemic. So now we're stuck in the house. Where the thing happened, right? Not once did anger arise. The people who, who did that to my son. And never had any anger. And I've been like thinking and thinking and I can only think about what desperation, what they might have been feeling when they're holding this poor kid up.

Like what my son told me that the guy's voice was shaking. Like I feel I want to know everything about that guy. I would love to have a restaurant just as dialogue with him. I would have never known this to be true before this thing happened about myself. Meanwhile, people who don't use their turn signals at a time when we could have all like turned at the last second and just made it through that yellow light, those people didn't, not a fan of those people. I think ugly things about them, ugly things, about the turn signal people.

But for me, it's really important to be gentle with yourself when you do this practice, right? So just like me, how are we just like these folks? At a minimum, every being everywhere, his holiness says this all the time, none of us want to suffer, all of us want to be happy. And can we suspend our judgment at that moment where we go, well, then why are they doing that? Okay, well, there's a reason. What happened to you that you did that? Another thing that I think is really gorgeous, another practice that I'm learning in restorative justice that I've learned from

so many indigenous people is a matter of language. So I don't use labels like rapist and murderer. I say the person who raped somebody, and I know it's a mouthful. And it's a lot of words, but what I love about it is that, I learned from one of my teachers, Justice Yabbert Rossi, Robert Yassi, was the former Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation, and he is a peacemaker now.

He said that in his language, there's no word for offender. A lot of indigenous languages have verb-based languages, right? Even like a word like woman, according to another indigenous teacher, Eduardo Durán said, there's no word woman. You wouldn't say a woman is standing over there. You say, womaning is happening over there. So identities are in flux and flow, which totally meets my brother's sensibilities, right? I'm like, yeah, thank goodness we're all changing. And so, Justice Yazhi says, there's no word for

fender. It's acting as if you have no relations. Acting out of concert with the notion of all my relations. And when I think about my father, he literally was acting as if I wasn't his family. Acting as if he was not held in this beautiful met of our collective existence. So for me, I try to see everybody that way, you know? And when am I acting as if something, right? I love, you know, Robin Wall-Kimmer wrote

this brilliant book, Braiding Sweetgrass, that like everybody should read, everybody does read it, and everybody should read it. And there's a huge section in there in this chapter that I think is called, learning the grammar of animacy, I think is what it's called, and it's, she's trying to learn her mother tongue, relearn it, and she, like everything is a verb. Basically, like instead of calling something a bay, you'd say to be a bay, wikwe gama. I remember the word wikwe gama to be a bay because she said it could be a river and it'll be a stream and it'll be rain and it'll be mist. Oh, that's all of us, right? How gorgeous. And so that is also true of my father. And that is true of people I have represented that have killed people. They are a person who at one point in their lives

the causes and conditions arose. And then they made a choice within those causes and conditions and they killed someone. And that's not who they have to be. Yeah, that's not who they have to continue to be. People who had served time for taking people's lives were amongst the people who cleaned my glass and my house after that burglary with my son. People who had served decades for terrible crimes were amongst the first at my doorstep to clean up that scene. So we are all in a constant state of change, thank goodness. And for me, my teacher, Gishi Kuntrik Tenzin, he said something the other day.

On Sunday's teachings, he said something about, you know, if you ask a Bolli Sethva where they're going, the answer is, boo the hood. So what I've been thinking about is like, where am I going? Like, what's my destination? And I've met so many people who unbeknownst to them maybe even after having done horrific things in this lifetime. They are clearly on their way to Buddhahood. And so I want to travel with those people, whoever's going in that direction. One of the Buddha's converts was a serial killer who used to wear like a necklace of fingers.

He took... Yeah, Anguli Mala. Yeah, so Anguli Mala, right. I thought about naming one of our cats that... Oh, I hope that's not too accurate. Ouch. Oh, yeah. As he walked into...

I was just chilling watching TV at a night, homie walked right into the room and dropped a dying mouse on the floor, like blood coming out of his mouth. Maybe there's a word in Sanskrit for mouse and you call him like mouse mala. Yeah, exactly. I had a million questions for you. I got to like a fraction of them, which I say that as a compliment before I let you go. If people want to learn more about you, are there resources you've put out into the world that we can access?

Yeah, there's two places. One is my website. There's lots of talks and all the upcoming things I can access. Yeah, there's two places. One is my website. There's lots of talks and all the upcoming things I'm doing with my and life institute the summer. So you can find that on my website, which is just sujathabalega.com. For more of the restorative justice specific stuff that is around youth diversion and like how do we circumvent the criminal legal system?

I'm no longer with impact justice. There's an amazing team of folks there who are carrying that work forward without me for the most part, pop my head in sometimes. And that you can learn more about at the website is impactjustice.org. And you can look for the Restort of Justice Project in there and there's an incredible toolkit actually, RJD, which stands for Restort of Justice Diversion,

RJDToolkit.org. And anything you want to know about starting your own restorative justice youth diversion program, or I think they're working beyond youth now at this point, I would look there and see more about that. So Jatabalaga, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thank you for your work and thank you for coming on the show. You bet. Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. coming on the show. You bet.

Thank you, Dan. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks again, too, Sujat the Baliga. Thank you as well to everybody who worked so hard on the show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine David Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. Our supervising producer is Merce Schneiderman.

And Kimmy Regler is our managing producer. We get scoring and mixing from the great Peter Bonaventure over at Ultraviolet Audio and Nick Thorburn of the band, Islands, wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts.

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