Preetha: I'm really
excited to be having this conversation with my dear friend Sujatha Baliga, who
I have every interaction I have had with her, I've learned and grown immensely
from every pearl that comes out of her mouth. She’s someone who leaves me
always wanting more, and I hope you'll have that experience today.
Sujatha is the Director of the Restorative Justice Project at
the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in Oakland, where she helps
communities implement restorative justice alternatives to juvenile detention
and zero tolerance school discipline policies.
She's
also specifically dedicated to advancing restorative justice as a tool to end
child sexual abuse and inter-familial sexualized violence in the US as well as
South Asia.
Her
work is characterized by an equal dedication to victims and persons accused of
crimes. She's a former public defender herself and also a victim advocate, and
she's been a frequent guest lecturer throughout the world at universities and
conferences. She's been a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation and the Today Show,
and her work has been profiled in an extensive article in The New York Times
Magazine. She speaks publicly and inside prisons about her personal experiences
as a survivor of child sexual abuse and her own personal path to forgiveness.
She is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of
Pennsylvania, and she's also had some Federal clerkships. Significantly for our
audience she's a longtime meditator, about 20 years, I think.
I think, Sujatha, where I'd love to start with you is you're
one of the remarkable people whose work and external, your outer life flows so
organically from your inner journey and your inner work. Maybe you could start
with that and tell us how did you come to your work on the justice system and
on helping victims of sexual abuse?
Sujatha: Sure.
Thanks, Preetha, and I'm so pleased you're moderating today. It feels
comfortable to be having a chat with a friend in front of an audience. It's
lovely.
A
little bit about how I ended up doing the work that I do today. I grew up in
rural Pennsylvania in the 1970's and '80's. We were the only immigrant family in
our town, and there was a larger region there. It was not an easy childhood. I
was experience abuse in my home at the hands of my father. My father sexually
abused me for as long as I can remember.
It was challenging to be a religious minority and a cultural
minority in a small rural place, so I was having a lot of bullying experiences
at school as well. Just a lot of struggle personally.
My father passed away when I was 16, which created a whole
other set of struggles. I think all of that suffering catalyzed me to want to
do something about it. Over the years what that looked like was moving towards
victim advocacy. So I became a victim advocate during and after college,
working with battered women's shelters and on crisis hotlines and with sexually
harmed children and women.
What I noticed during those years is that while I was
effective, I didn't like who I was personally. A lot of my work was fueled by …
well, all of my work maybe at that time was fueled by my own unresolved traumas
and wanting to undo my own childhood by quote, unquote, "fixing other
people's lives."
Really the anger was eating at me personally. I had migraines
regularly, several times a week, blinding migraines, and really terrible
stomach problems. I'm sure it was some sort of IBS thing that was never really
diagnosed just by going to countless doctors and going through so many
procedures. Nothing could really solve it. I remember really resenting being
told that it was something psychosomatic. While in retrospect I don’t think it
was psychosomatic, it was all definitely happening, it was definitely what I
realized caused, psychologically caused, caused by my unhappy state of being
and my angry, angry state of being and also wrecking havoc on my friendships
and my boyfriends and many other things at that time.
It was interesting. I had followed the man I was dating at the
time, I had followed him to India for a year and was working, trying to help
him start a program for the children of sex workers in Mumbai. That was the way
I’d conceptualized at the time. When I got there and tried to get involved in
the project, I realized the degree to which these women and their children were
basically slaves. It was just too much trauma for me to handle. I hadn't worked
out my own stuff, and I basically had a breakdown and realized that I needed to
heal myself.
I was just about to start law school. I was 23, 24 years old. I
was just about to start law school, and I realized I had to work out myself
before I could possibly go to law school. I was not going to survive the
emotional and intellectual rigors of law school in the current state I was
in.
I went backpacking. I landed in the Dharamsala by myself and
befriended a number of Tibetan families, who I was so engaged as a crisis
counselor kind of person that I really would dig into stories of people about
how did you escape and what's the landscape of Tibet today for your people. I
really wanted to understand people's trauma, journeys and the suffering that
they'd experienced.
I think that maybe was a rare experience for them, in that a
lot of people I think come to places like Dharmsala, which is where the Tibetan
government in Nigal at that time was and where His Holiness’s offices still
are. People come for more of a spiritual journey I think. I came sort of on my
trauma journey, which I think people appreciated to some degree, where I wasn't
making them prisoners of Shangri-La in a sense.
What I noticed in my conversations with them was that they
would shift from these stories, these heartbreaking stories, where people could
cry and express anger eventually toward some sort of just letting the subject
matter go and then a few minutes later be laughing and sharing happy
stories.
I was never really able to make that transition. I lived in the
anger and the rage. Eventually somebody had the courage to ask me in through my
hard external way of presenting at that time, said, "What are you so angry
about? What's going on with you?" which was a wonderful question.
So I started to share for the first time in my life with people
outside my inner circle. My father had sexually abused me. There was a lot of
horror and shock from the people that I would share this with, and many of them
would say, "You should ask His Holiness how does forgiveness play a role
in this." I would ask them, "How are you so happy? How can you be so
happy given what you've been through?" The answer would often come back,
"We practice forgiveness." Then the dialog would then turn into
what's the role of forgiveness in inter-familial harm. People would say,
"You should ask His Holiness. You should ask His Holiness."
I found this amusing. I said, “He’s busy. How do you ask the
Dalai Lama a question like this?” Somebody said, "Write him a letter and
drop it off at his monastery. You'll get some sort of response." I
followed the procedures, and a week later I went back to see if there was a
letter or something, and I was ushered all the way in to the desk of His
Holiness's private secretary who said His Holiness's schedule had changed. He
was supposed to be in Assam or something. “Would you like to have a private
audience with him on Wednesday or Tuesday” or something, a few days later. I
had this unbelievable opportunity to have an hour with His Holiness.
The conversation started very much from the perspective of
talking about gender-based violence and sexualized violence, and then it
shifted towards His Holiness sharing very deeply about his own path to
forgiveness. I was so moved by his own personal sharing of times earlier in his
life when he had felt anger towards the Chinese and what practices and work
that he had done on himself to do this.
I could see in front of me this living embodiment of someone
who had eschewed anger, let go of anger, but was still working on behalf of
those who suffer without anger as the motivating force. That had been my
question in my letter to him. I was unable to write the words, "I was
sexually abused by my father." What I said was, "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?"
I was seeing this. I was seeing someone clearly far more
effective at achieving positive ends for others without anger, even in the face
of unthinkable mass atrocities against his people and his nation and himself.
So how does he do this?
I said, "I want to forgive my father. I want to follow
this path." The first question that came out of his mouth was, "Do
you feel you have been angry long enough?" I thought this was the most
brilliant question I have been ever asked, especially about forgiveness, when
so many people who would say to you, "Oh, you need to forgive. You need to
forgive and forget." It's very clear that when people are praising
forgiveness as some freedom for you that it's really about them wanting you to
get over what's happening when your natural, normal response is to unthinkable
harm that you suffered.
His Holiness asked me this question, and it was a genuine
question. I could feel how genuine that question was. I actually took a moment
to sit in silence with him and reflect on anger's diminishing returns on my
life, on my personal life, on my relationships, on my boyfriends, on my family,
on my effectiveness in the work, on my happiness. After surveying the landscape
of the graveyards of what anger had left in my life, I said, "Yes, I'm
ready. It's served me to this point. Maybe ... not maybe ... It is a big part
of why I was able to survive to this day, but here I am ready to let it go.
Yes, I want to.”
So His Holiness gave me two very particular pieces of advice.
The first one was to meditate. He said, "This level of rage," and
even in that audience with him I was extremely angry in describing the work
that I did and really raging about it and very angry. He said, “A mind that is
this rageful is just out of your own control and so you need to meditate in
order to reign it back in.” The first piece of advice was to meditate, really
learn to be the master of your own mind. So I was, "Okay, that one I can
do;" right? "I'll sign up for meditation course."
His second piece of advice was to in some way open my heart to
those who have done me harm or do harm. “Open your heart to your enemies or
those you perceive to be your enemies.” I started laughing. I was laughing out
loud at him, saying, "That's crazy. I'm about to go to law school to be a
prosecutor to lock all these abusers and batterers and child molesters up and
put them behind bars." He thought this was hilarious. He pats my knee.
He’s, "Okay, okay, you just meditate."
Immediately after leaving him, within the next few weeks went
and sat a ten-day Vipassana Course, the Goenkaji Style Vippasana Course, and it
was the hardest and best thing I had ever done in my life.
That body-based experience of feeling in my body where my anger
resides, healing when images and memories of the terrible things that had been
done to me came to my mind. That Vipassana scanning, that body scanning, was
incredibly powerful for me to really be able to dissect where in my body those
memories live and what the physical sensations around those memories and what
they lead to in terms of this endless loop of suffering that my mind goes
into.
I think having done that, for the first nine days you're doing
breath observation for three and then six more days of body scanning and really
feeling embodied for the first time in my reaction to the things that had been
done to me so many years ago and also being able to be present with the present
moment realizing my body is reacting to things that aren't currently happening.
It was very powerful for me physically to feel, "Wow, I am having residual
physical reactions to things that are not current in this beautiful meditation
hall in Massachusetts;” right?
What flowed from that was the Metta Bhavana [Dala 00:14:52],
loving kindness practice, that they teach you the last day. I had a spontaneous
sort of vision of one of the times in which my father molested me that usually
brought up experiences of rage and anger. I used to replay that memory as a
fantasy as if I stabbed him to death instead of him being able to achieve what
he was trying to achieve. I would imagine stabbing him to death instead.
I think that when I started doing that with that memory, adding
the stabbing him to death thing was right about when my migraines started in my
late teens.
Instead I just allowed the thing to happen as it happened. That
doesn't mean that I condoned it. It doesn't mean that I thought it was okay,
but rather that … I love this quote about forgiveness I've heard.
"Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past." I just let the
past be what it was. I just observed it for what it was.
In this memory, rather than feeling the rage, I felt my father
dissolve into light. That subtle sensation, that awareness in my own body, sort
of just that lovely molecular flow that you can feel sometimes after a long sit
flowed out of me and into him and he dissolved into light.
From that moment onward I have never felt any anger, rage, any
of the things, feelings, desires for retribution, feelings for getting back at
him, anything. All of these things of course would be impossible now that he's
passed. But I still carried all those desires as if I could bring him back from
the dead so that I could punish him somehow. All of those needs were gone with
regard to him.
I’m not saying that I'm over anger when someone cuts me off in
traffic sometimes or when some atrocity is happening in the world. I'm not
beyond anger but I am beyond anger about that and about many other things.
Probably beyond the feeling of retribution as being useful or even a desire for
that coming up in me anymore.
I started law school a couple weeks later and I had no juice
for being a prosecutor. I thought I should drop out. So I went to my criminal
law professor and I said, "I think I'm dropping out." He said,
"Don't drop out." I didn't tell him why. I said, "I came here to
be a prosecutor. I have no interest in being a prosecutor. I came here to help
battered women, and I don't know how to do this now."
He said, "You should think about being a defense attorney
who defends women who kill their abusers." I was like, "Well, that's
brilliant." He didn't tell me at that time, but one doesn't get to
specialize in that right away; right? So I had to be a public defender for many
years defending even those folks who had done exactly what was done to me as a
child.
I really feel like I gave them excellent representation and had
a wonderful opportunity to be of service to folks who've done things that were
done to me. At the same time the entire criminal legal system always felt not
okay to me. There was a way in which it was so fundamentally binary, like it
was us versus them. It felt divisive and it wasn't a healing way. It wasn't
what I had learned in my own life as my way of moving past terrible things that
have happened. It couldn't be more different really.
I think of a court of law and I think of Susan Herman who wrote,
the author of Trauma and Recovery says you couldn't create a better
circumstance for bringing up traumatic stress than a court of law. We really
re-victimize victims and we really ... It's a damaging process for everyone who
goes through it, almost everyone who goes through it. I kept in touch with His
Holiness’s office and they suggested that I read his book on Tibetan justice
called The Tibetan System of Justice Prior to Chinese Occupation called The
Golden Yoke, Y-O-K-E. It was a wonderful book describing many ideals that were
there in the Tibetan law code about healing and victim-identified needs being
attended to and notions like atonement and reconciliation that I thought,
"My goodness, how could we do some of that here?"
A friend who had been saying these words
for years, "restorative justice." When I was describing this to her,
she said, "I've been telling you about this for years." Susan said,
"It's called 'restorative justice.'" "I'm sorry. I didn't understand."
And I started to go to restorative justice trainings and learned so much about
this model that I work in today as what I think is the better way to address
wrongdoing, even the most terrible forms of wrongdoing, when it's at all
possible.
