War's Long Shadow
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, wherever you are in the world. Such a joy and an honor to have you with us. Thank you. My name is Maurizio Benazzo.
Zaya Benazzo: My name is Zaya Benazzo. And welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for this. I would say very timely conversation. Yes. I think we all feel what's happening in our world.
There is agitation, there is a lot of old wounds for many of us that are surfacing many of us scary wounds from our lineages that have experienced war and colonialism and genocides and. It feels like they're very much in our collective field, very potent and very present. So the conversation today feels very timely war, worse, long shadow, generational grief, and narrative justice.
Today we have two very special guests with us trauma therapist and educator, Linda Thai, and writer and cultural. Worker and an activist Jungwon Kim. They will help us explore today this vast topic from their life experience, from their work, and help us grapple and face and be with what's happening today in our world.
So share their wisdom and experience. So welcome both. Thank you so much for being thank you here with us today, and we'll be both in the background and if you need us for anything just call us. But we are passing this conversation to you now. Welcome.
Linda Thai: Thank you, Zaya. Thank you Maurizio. I'm just gonna take a moment to place my hand on my heart.
I have been told that when your heartbeat's very fast, it's your inner applause cheering you on. Yeah, and I also recognize that there's a collective heartbeat at the moment, and we can choose to call it anxiety. We can choose to call it distress, or we can choose to call it our inner applause that is cheering us collectively together and onwards.
And so I'll spend a couple of minutes introducing myself and then Jungwon will do the same. And then we'll move into context setting for the rest of today. So I'm a trauma therapist.
I greet you and your ancestors with respect. I'm a trauma therapist and educator. I specialize in brain and body-based modalities for addressing complex developmental trauma. And my work centers on healing the intergenerational impacts of historical trauma, centering adult children of refugees and immigrants, and those who have experienced forced displacement.
And so this includes descendants of residential school survivors as well as those who have fled abuse and neglect within their families of origin. And I come to you today from the Dene Athabasca Land of the Middle Tenana Valley, also known as Fairbanks, Alaska, this April 30, 20, 25. Is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and it has taken me my entire lifetime to make sense of myself and my life and the impact of war upon myself and my family.
Throughout my teens, my adult years, I really struggled. I was expelled from high school due to truancy drug abuse. My twenties was a relational mess. I was looking for love in all the wrong places. I've struggled to hold a job for most of my life, and yet I tell people that I have been successfully self-employed since the age of 24, and yet somewhere in am amidst all of that messiness, I still sought to find the origin story that would help me to make sense of myself and my life.
I was born two years after the end of the Vietnam War. I was born in southern Vietnam to two parents whose lives were backdrop by war. By the US Vietnam War and by the French Vietnam War. Before that, I am a former child refugee. My family sought refuge, and in 19 79, 4 years after the fall of Saigon and four years into communism, my 26-year-old father, my 19-year-old mother, who was six months pregnant with my little sister and my 2-year-old self-led Vietnam in search of refuge.
The journey was treacherous. It was trauma filled across land and sea, and we made it to a refugee camp in Malaysia where we lived for six months. My little sister was born there. We were then sponsored out to Australia under a pilot rural resettlement scheme, and arrived in late 1979 into tume, a town of 7,000 people, and one set of traffic lights with three other Vietnamese families.
And after two years, my family then made the decision to move to the big city of Melbourne in search of community. Despite the struggles in my adolescent years, I still made it to college. And I studied modern Vietnamese history and modern Chinese history Vietnamese language, Mandarin Chinese, because I was in search of that origin story that would help me to make sense of myself and my life.
And my college professors, both Anglo-Saxon and Vietnamese and Chinese, they knew why I wanted to know, and they knew why I didn't know, and they didn't need to ask why.
I'm gonna hand it over to you now.
Jungwon Kim: Thank you, Linda. So much came up for me just even listening to your introduction and I'm so honored to be in conversation with you. My name is Jungwon Kim, and I am currently a guest on Unseated Lenape land, otherwise known as Brooklyn, New York City. I am a mother, I am a writer, a cultural worker, um, an organizer and sangha builder.
And I have worked in the field of human rights and environmental advocacy for more than 20 years now. I'm also a second generation Korean American. So that means I was born in the United States. And I I am the first citizen in our family. Actually. I'm a birthright citizen.
And both of my parents were born under Japanese occupation. In Korea. And then when they were school age children, they experienced that brief five year window after the end of Japanese occupation and the official beginning of the Korean War or as we often call it, the US War in Korea.
And I should note that those five years were not a period of peace, but instead were a period of intense chaos and a kind of struggle among many different groups who had really different ideas about what self-determination would look like for chorea. I. My mother's family is from Chin Ju, which is a big city right on the border of China in what is now the DPRK, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, right across the Yalo River from China.
And they fled South at some point before, just before the outbreak of the Korean War, and went all the way down to Pusan, which is the only city that never saw the war firsthand. But they were never able to return home to their to my great grandparents, to their family back home.
And my father's family is from Seoul. And they unfortunately were in a region that saw the Battlefront Pass. Over them several times. So they saw a lot of death and violence dodged shelling and were displaced multiple times. The family was actually separated and got lost for, several months at a time.
And my father also experienced the loss of two siblings in that conflict as well as extreme poverty and malnutrition. So I think what's really interesting about this opportunity for me to be in conversation with Linda is Linda's almost like a bridge between this first and second generation of the survivors and the children of survivors.
As someone who came. When she was young and has some of that experience of the first generation. And also a lot of the experience of the second generation. And I think for me as a second generation child of war survivors, there are a lot of aspects of their war trauma that I have felt kind of my whole life, but I actually didn't know what it was.
Now looking back on my childhood, I can understand a little bit more about how it manifested big family secrets that I think are still, being revealed and exposed even, at my advanced age, um, lots of emphasis on material care and physical safety and security. And, many other things that we'll hopefully get into later.
So anyway, that's enough about me for now. But I wanna maybe hand it back to Linda to help us begin to build a frame for our conversation.
Linda Thai: Thank you Jungwon. I'm gonna pause and take a breath and just acknowledge how much work we've each done to be able to share our stories with you all.
Service of creating a framework and an intellectual container with within which we can begin to unpack some of our experiences together, I firstly wanna name that we don't talk about war. We don't talk about war as a society. I have been to thousands of 12 step meetings, alcoholics Anonymous, narcotics Anonymous codependence Anonymous, sex and Love, addicts Anonymous.
And I believe I have owned close to nearly el every 12 step daily meditation and daily reader that currently exists. And in many of our meetings, we take a reading from that 12 step reader as a topic for the day. And we talk about a lot of things. And yet we do not talk about all in the places that we go to, to talk about the things that we can't otherwise talk about.
And so the day that I recognized that, I went to my home group, my 12 step home group, and I said, Hey, can we talk about war? And I. Every single person in that room. And this is a all a's are welcome home group. Every single person in that room either had direct experience with war, or it was in the parents' generation or the grandparents' generation.
And that had a direct impact in terms of in terms of traumatization within the lineage that then impacted the ways in which parents were and were not able to turn up for their children, which then impacted nervous system development, which then impacted the uptake of coping mechanisms and coping skills.
And so today we're gonna funnel in into talking about collective mass generational trauma within the context of war survivors. Refugees and their children and grandchildren. And yet I wanna also name that we can lateralize this, the key aspects of this out, the key aspects of mass, historical generational traumas to include the descendants of, in, of, in abducted and enslaved Africans to the descendants of the genocided indigenous peoples, all over the worlds.
And also to include the descendants of Holocaust survivors, the descendants of adult children of veterans with PTSD, as well as veterans with PTSD. There is so much to the aftermath of war and being raised by survivors of war, and I can cite you the research around, and this research was so helpful for me because back when I was trying to unpack myself in my life, there was no research about Vietnamese poor people.
So it was actually looking into the research around adult children of veterans adult children of Holocaust survivors and adult children of veterans with PTSD and adult children of alcoholics. That helped me to piece together and make sense of my, and so I'll just share with you some of the research for adult children or veterans with PTSD, because for some of us as former child refugees, our parents fled because they actually served, right?
They served in the conflict back there. Back then. So there's a secondary traumatization. So when we, when you live with a traumatized individual, they are recounting or reliving horrific events. Yeah. And so we experience vicarious trauma as children, and then we also experience hyoid storytelling.
Meaning that the parent tells the same trauma narrative over and over again. And when we ask questions into that narrative, we're either shut down, the parent shuts down, or the parent explodes.
We also may get met with a narrative silence from our parents when we ask questions, not in relation to their auto moid story, their dissociated storytelling, but when we just ask questions in general about their lives. Yeah, we get that narrative silence. We know from the research around adult children of Holocaust survivors that there's a pervasive loneliness and emptiness in the inner landscape as a result of not having parents who met the children emotionally in developmentally appropriate ways, because for Holocaust survivors.
Being able to take care of the basic needs of children was considered more than enough. Yeah. Adult children of Holocaust survivors as well as grandchildren experience compensatory fantasies, right? This is where survivors progeny unconsciously try to repair the world for their parents, their grandparents, and for themselves.
I also see this in descendants of indigenous genocide as well as including the descendants of residential school survivors. And I just want to name that I saw a response in your body and nervous system right then, right? Just these compensatory fantasies. Like we, we are trying to help our parents by making the world a better place for them and therefore for us.
We also experienced over identification with our parents and a fused identity with our parents because our parents' development got truncated, so they never got to individuate from a place of love and safety from their peoples, from their families. And so we then individuate from a place of fear, from a place of survival, imperative from our own families of origin a as a result of trying to experience our own identity separate to that of our parents.
And then there's also impaired self-esteem stemming from a minimization of my own experiences, my own life experiences compared to my parents' trauma. My, my dad would say to me in response to a kid taking my lunch or me hurting myself at school, right? Elementary school, he would say, at least we're not getting bombs dropped on us anymore.
Would say things like. Our dog eats better than our relatives back home. Yeah. And so there's the, my own self-esteem and self-worth gets impaired because my own experiences get minimized. There's a tendency towards catastrophizing, there's a worry that parental traumas will be repeated. I actually see this under the current administration that for many of us we're, we are living in the reverberations of the return of authoritarianism.
Yeah. And yet, even prior to that, there's that underlying hyper vigilance towards the fear that our parents or grandparents' trauma would be re-experienced or repeated in our own lifetimes. And then behavioral challenges right at the nervous system. Anxiety, guilt, hypervigilance, difficulties with interpersonal functioning.
The literature around adult children of alcoholics shows that parents who have their own unmet developmental dependency needs develop. Sorry. That when you are raised by parents who are alcoholic or preoccupied, we develop our own adaptive survival strategies, all or nothing thinking control, perfectionism, a harsh inner critic denial.
Yeah. And the inability to be in relationship with others is equals. And then in terms of the family dynamics themselves, there's homeostasis, collusion, and impaired mourning, which we can unpack later. Just offering you a framework that you can pursue yourselves. Yeah. Your parents who are frightened and or frightening.
That has impact on child development. And what happens for us as children is we start to take on the roles of the adults or the caregivers in the family system. We become adultified or parentified. We experience the burden of being a burden because we don't experience our parents taking delight in us, taking joy in us, being happy around us,
and then we learn to take care of our attachment figures, our parents, in order to ensure household function. So I'm just gonna take a big deep breath with you all because that is the research literature. And yet in amongst that, there are the themes of displacement, of the loss of home, of psychological homelessness due to a disruption in a relationship to land, ancestors to culture, their survivor guilt, vicarious survivor guilt traumatic homesickness.
Songlines and storylines are broken. And then we overlay on top of that the challenges with racialized identity, the model minority myth, the grateful refugee who's now the model minority or the grateful refugee who's now gratefully invisibleized labor because we dare not be the criminal element. And then we collude with the model minority trope within this racialized landscape because it gives us more proximity to whiteness and separates us and distinguishes us from other black and brown bodies.
And so navigating invisibility versus hyper indiv, hyper visibility is challenging, especially across generations, especially when trauma says exposure equals death.
I'm gonna pause and take a breath with your, because in amongst all of this, especially intergenerationally, is how we don't realize that war survival strategies can be mistaken for our parents' country of origin culture, right? Don't rock the boat. Be quiet. Yeah. Maintain one story outside the home to protect your family.
Watch every penny in graduate school. I learned that. Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel with the dysfunctional dynamics of an alcoholic family, and I was furious because, and I didn't have the words back then, but with what I know now, these are survival strategies under communism, fascism, or any sort of authoritarian regime.
Don't talk, don't trust, don't feel is how you manage to make plans to flee a country. And so this then begs the question, what is closure, especially amongst western archetypal narrative structures of the hero's journey? How can we actually queer up the idea or the notion of closure where there's multiple layers of multiple narratives with, a lot of variety when it comes to closure?
And what can healing look like from one generation to the next? And this is where I invite us to pause into, traditional psychology asks, what's what's wrong with you? And trauma informed psychology asks what happened to you? And culturally informed psychology asks what happened to your peoples?
And liberation psychology asks, and what continues to happen? You and to your people.
And this is where I'd love to bring Jungwon into this conversation because your work is so imperative and impactful and delightful in terms of bringing to life
Linda Thai: the narratives around grief and justice and war.
Jungwon Kim: Thank you for sharing. Openly and vulnerably about your experience I'm just so moved by your journey and the spiritual, philosophical and clinical framework that you've developed. Which is so de deeply informed by your own journey. It's really something to behold. I wish I had met you in my twenties.
So I wanna go back to this question that is posed by what you've called liberation psychology, which is how do we respond as a society to mass trauma caused by war genocide the middle passage extreme racial persecution like Jim Crow in the United States, or what the Rohingya have experienced in Myanmar.
And of course, holding very close in my heart what the people of Palestine are going through right now. And I can't help but think about the generational implications of what we're witnessing. This kind of brings me to a question that I've been preoccupied with, I think really for decades, which is in the absence of conventional legal mechanisms for accountability and repair and justice, right?
How might we arrive at some feeling of resolution, if not closure, some feeling of release or how might we change our relationship to the historical trauma? And I think these are questions that have really. Immeasurable stakes for humanity and for our planet. Just the day before yesterday, for example, there was an accident during some US and South Korea war drills.
And I guess due to an error in punching in the coordinates, a an American bomber plane dropped a big bomb 500 pound bomb on a residential village just near the DMZ, which is the most heavily militarized border in the world. And everybody's already on a hair trigger on the Korean peninsula. There are nuclear bombs pointing north, pointing south.
It's just a very tense situation. And 15 people were seriously injured. Homes were destroyed, and, this is just a regular occurrence, and all of these munitions, all of these explosions cause, irreparable harm also to our planet. I think the bombing of Gaza alone caused a climate emission greenhouse gas emission that was greater than, dozens of countries combined for the entire year.
So even if you are not someone who's directly impacted by historical war trauma, I think this is a question we absolutely have to address collectively, because the impacts actually will come for us all. And I want to take a moment here and highlight a fascinating two-part conversation on science and non-duality that just happened between Naomi Klein and Gabor Mate.
And I think they did a really fantastic job about fantastic job of discussing what happens when a people ritualize unprocessed trauma and how dangerous that becomes the talk. The conversation, I believe is called Minds Under Siege, and it's about the weaponization of trauma. When people are in a, traumatized state or.
Maybe the next generation of people who have inherited trauma from their survivor parents. I think they're particularly vulnerable to manipulation, especially fear-based manipulation. I think there are also tons of health effects that we have to consider. I read just today that Yale anthropologist, Catherine Panter Brick just published a study about Syrian refugees who had experienced a mass atrocity.
I believe the place is called Oma or Hamma, I'm sorry, for the most mispronunciation to all the Arabic speakers. But the study is the first of its kind and it shows the chemical markers of epigenetic trauma on the human genome and that those chemical markers actually. Terry for three generations.
So the question of, how we might disrupt the trauma loop, which animates the cycle of violence is a pressing one. I would say it might even be one of the most urgent conundrums of our time. And to that question, I think part of the answer lies in ritualizing, the healing, not the trauma. Yes. I really think that's how we find our way out.
We ritualize the healing, not the trauma. And here I wanna introduce the concept of Han, which is a Korean word for the embodied accumulation. Of grief and rage and resentment as a result of big usually collective historical traumas. So when we talk about Han in a Korean cultural setting, we are referring to a kind of collective shared pain.
And I think what is really useful about this is it provides perhaps a shorthand. I would love if we could mainstream the word han so that we, people who come from these lineages that have been forged in the fire. Of colonialism us, imperial wars of planetary destruction, which are all like three heads of a hydra, right?
That we have this kind of shared frame of reference that we carry this generational pain, that there is a sense of helplessness and resentment because of the lack of justice and accountability and that this is embodied it's in our bodies. I also wanna say, I think Han provides a really interesting framework for liberation because the presence of Han in our bodies insists on correcting the historical erasure of the wars and the atrocities that have affected us.
So no matter how hard the Trump administration. Tries to go after our national archives or to silence cultural workers or to take over cultural institutions or to eliminate curriculum that is really related to the violence that the United States has wrought all over the world. The US not being the only country, of course, but I'm here.
So that's what I've been focused on. Um, they can't erase the han because the Han lives in our bodies. And I think that even if the Korean War is referred to in US history textbooks as the forgotten war, or even if, we've only just begun to confront the mass atrocities that I. The US military committed in Vietnam during Vietnam's American war.
I should also mention here that South Korea sent its own soldiers to fight alongside the Americans, and they also committed terrible atrocities in Vietnam, for which I feel deep shame and regret. Um, but even if we are trying to fend off all of these attempts at historical denialism, they can't touch the Han.
The Han lives inside of us. It animates so many of us in our work, in our commitment to human rights, in our creativity in our community organizing. And I think in that sense, we can and must lean into ritualizing, our healing ritualizing, our acknowledgement and honoring, and then eventually release of our Han as an act of community care.
It fits into an abolitionist framework where we begin to understand the state is not the right mechanism. The state is not going to pro provide repair or reparations to war survivors of imperial US imperialism. And even if they did, it wouldn't be right. It wouldn't bring back relatives who were lost, separated and killed.
It wouldn't, it wouldn't give me maybe it would allow me to finally visit my mother's, hometown. But who knows? I think. It's this, I've come to this realization at this stage in life where, I'm done waiting around for someone to acknowledge what's been done.
We actually need to bear witness to each other and we need to do the repair. And so creating community-based rituals and ceremonies designed to transmute our Han is something we can take into our own hands. It feels very exciting in a sense to claim that agency for our community wellbeing.
And I think, in doing this, we can. Compliment individual therapeutic modalities with this kind of overlay of community-based ritual healing which provides some socio-emotional relief. And in doing so, one of the interesting kind of benefits of this is that we offer our own form of narrative intervention.
We are correcting the historical record. Plenty of scholars are doing this in their books, in their research and doing this together, we are able to offer another form of that narrative intervention.
Linda Thai: Each generation is gonna have their own experiences and we know that trauma is held in the body as frozen terror, because trauma is incapability. Trauma is inescapable. So there's that frozen terror and the frozen truncated attachment cry and the frozen silent screen, the inability to reach towards our caregivers.
Yeah. And when you have the first gen, the first generation is wrapped. Totally racked by the horrors of war and fleeing and the dismemberment of war, the dismemberment of their family, their village, their culture. And the second generation is living with the aftermath of being raised by parents who are traumatized or traumatizing, as well as society's response.
Yeah. And the resources that society has available in this other new place. And so for me, being generation 1.5, I do feel like I'm at the bridge in so many ways. And I wish I had, have met you when I was in my twenties, the you that you are now. But the third generation wants to remember they have the capacity to fuse tradition in old ways with with the aspects of this current landscape that they're living in.
Yeah. And they have more capacity to, because they're not living in the direct, of, of the aftermath of all. And the fourth generation is the generation that risks forgetting. That risks forgetting. And so we see these nuances here and around trauma and around, around narrative and around the complexities of remembering and forgetting.
And we know that trauma is unspeakable. And I know that the first task of grief is to come to terms with reality. Yeah. And this is where denial is such an adaptive survival strategy that allows us to stuff things down and keep moving forward. And so to be able to name the impacts and the aftermath of war upon yourself and your forebears is the first task of brief.
And especially for our inner child. You can't grieve your inner child unless, until you bring your inner child inside your circle of worthiness. The losses and the longings of your inner child have to be placed inside your circle of worthiness. And it was only after I did that, that I could place the losses and the longings of my parents who gave up the best use of their lives to start afresh in a new country.
I could then place their losses and longings inside my circle of worthiness. Yeah. And so grief ritual gives us a container and a framework within which we can allow that, which we may not have yet got words for, to begin to surface and emerge. Through our bodies, through our soma, this somatic liberation, this somatic abolitionism, this collective somatic liberation and abolitionism where the rhythm and the movement helps us to stay tethered to something that, that prevents us from collapsing back into that frozenness.
Yeah. And there is something to that tempo that cre eights a collective heartbeat. Yeah. And that synchrony, that, that creates, that collective heartbeat is also one of the, the primal primordial ancient mechanisms of culture and cultural architecture. Song story, movement, silence, interpersonal rhythmicity, cultural rhythms connected to the landscape, connecting us to each other.
This is what you, this is what happened. And within that, there's a vibration. And that vibration begins to shake through the armory that many of us have created in order to protect ourselves. That armory at the surface level of the body, that armoring around our viscera, that armoring around, and our our vocal mechanisms, which is, the up here in the throat.
But the armoring also continues around the heart, around the diaphragm, around the pelvic diaphragm. Yeah. And then that begins to move things.
Jungwon Kim: And does it disrupt the homeostasis? Collusion, which I should just explain 'cause I had to ask what that was the first time we met. But it's an unspoken agreement among a family and a community to not rock the boat, not to ask the questions that might open a scary can of worms.
But when you talk about the shaking, it makes me think that it's a kind of shaking you out of the collusion.
Linda Thai: Yes. Because that homeostasis, collusion, which expresses as like a rigidity in the family system also expresses internally. So I have also my, the things I can't even say to myself.
And that which is unspeakable within that which is unspeakable to, to another actually then becomes unspeakable within inside ourselves. We keep secrets in here and we also keep secrets from ourselves and we clamp down, the thing where you wanna say something and then you're like, no. Yeah.
And so that constriction inside, over time, that constriction becomes even more firmer, more stronger. Yeah.
Jungwon Kim: And so think also, sorry,
Linda Thai: go ahead.
Jungwon Kim: It just, when you're, the way that you're describing the drumming and the song and the shaking I feel like there's an element in here of cathartic joy that when you get into this.
Trance state if you're really willing to let yourself go and be held you need a capable ritual practitioner. You can't just surrender to anybody. But if you really let yourself go there is just this kind of cathartic joy. So in that ceremony in 2023, there was, as we were dancing, there was also lots of shouting.
Happy shouting, it was, it got a little, and the elders actually were the ones who were shouting the most and dancing the most wildly in a sense. And then there's also this element so the, I wanna say that el the idea of cathartic joy, or joyful catharsis is in Korean called Hung.
And it's often talked about as like an antidote to Han. And then there's a third element that also is part of this beautiful. I don't know, like a triple yin yang called Chong, which is this web of kinship and mutual responsibility and interdependence. And one of the things that I keep coming back to is that this ritual would not have done the same thing for me if I did it alone.
If I watched a video of do he and danced around in my room by myself, it wouldn't have had the same effect. But we were there together. So that was like the chang, the togetherness, the web of relationality. And I was thinking about this. Why that's part a necessary part of the ritualized healing.
I think it's what you said about the horror that the first generation carries and the second generation feels intuitively. So it's like. When you're a kid, I don't know if you have this in Australia, but here in the United States they have haunted house or House of Horrors. So you go to an amusement park around Halloween and it's this like nightmarish thing and things pop out and scare you and there's like peeled grapes to look like eyeballs, and it's terrifying.
As a kid it's terrifying. I was always really scared. And it's you can, you don't feel like you can't go into the house of horrors alone, but if you're together and you're holding hands, it's easier to face the horrors. And I feel like that's something I wanna just carry forward into this moment as we are witnessing collectively many horrors around the world, many scary things at home.
The idea of. Community, relationality, interdependence, mutual aid, mutual care, reciprocity, all of those things like that. We are much stronger as a woven fabric than as individual strands. And that's obviously not a new idea, but I feel like that's another thing that was happening that ceremony.
Yes.
Linda Thai: And you as a somatic therapist, right? It's the diaphragm. When there's horror and terror, the diaphragm becomes so constricted. And then we disconnect ourselves from our capacity for joy or for grief. Because any movement in the diaphragm is gonna release the silent scream. It's gonna release the horrors.
It's, yeah. And then we shut, we create even more armoring to protect ourselves and our families from that which we're hiding inside. And yet it, it bursts out. It bursts out. Yeah. And so that fine line between grief and joy is actually in the body. In the body. And for the many second generation, we can't experience joy unless it's through addiction.
It's through a dissociated state that we can actually touch upon pleasure. Yeah. And so to actually come together to liberate the diaphragm so that we can actually liberate our capacity for joy is so necessary. So incredibly necessary. And I find that in the activist circles that I swing in, the imperative for laughter, for rest, for joy, and for grief and for rage is how we are moving so much of our nervous system activations through our bodies together so that we can engage in the change that we want to see in the world.
From a place of love, from a place of fierce and unrelenting love
Jungwon Kim: and feeling so many feelings. And I just want you to know that after we're done, I'm probably gonna go outside and release a silent scream that I've been carrying for, 55 years. I'll wait until the zoom is done.
Linda Thai: As you do that, if it feels right for you, you can imagine yourself screaming into my body.
Jungwon Kim: Yeah. Or we could hold hands and scream across a canyon together. Yeah.
Linda Thai: And that our scream is landing upon the earth. Old. Yeah. As well as echo back to us. As a song. As a song. Because this is what I mean, it's existential. It is so deeply existential, right? That I am real. That you are real. What you went through was real.
What your people's went through was real,
and that is over now.
There is still ongoing things around that are happening in the world around us. However, we can celebrate these small or celebrate bit of the, we can commemorate, we can name Yeah. While also naming the complexities that for Koreans, it's not over, but the country is still separated.
Thank you so much for this deep deep space you offered us. And so much I feel is moving in my body, in my heart. And I think for all of us, this is so alive.
Zaya Benazzo: And thank you for planting lots of seeds for us to, allow us to begin this journey and individually and collectively and. It. I, yes I'm at Lost with Words just because I feel very un raw insight and which means it's very potent, the space we shared. So thank you so much both. Thank you everyone who joined.
This is huge topic. In one hour, we cannot barely touch the surface, and at SAND we are committing to continue offering this space and continue these conversations together. So please tune in and at the beginning of June, we'll have a week long event that will be just focusing on this conversation of healing intergenerational trauma.
I hope we can continue this conversation with the two of you and maybe even create a deeper space, longer space that we can come and be with you.
Maurizio Benazzo: And maybe we can come up a way to create those rituals as a community starting with Zoom, and then one day we'll ideally be able to do it.
Jungwon Kim: I would love that. I think one of the big learnings for me is how important it is for us to do this in three dimensions together to be able to really, co-regulate through our communal healing process.
I am working on I'm developing an event series for. People who come from lineages affected by colonialism and imperialism and war as a way of actually learning about each other's han and sharing our transmutation practices with each other.
So if you are interested in learning where and when those will be. At the bottom of my website, there's like an email signup. I rarely, I actually have never sent an a mass email yet, so don't worry, you won't get a lot of email from me. But I'll probably send like one email when the times and dates are confirmed.
It is my wish and my prayer that Linda Zaya, Maurizio Lisa, and maybe some of you can be together at some of those events too. We shall see.
Zaya Benazzo: And Linda, anything you would like to offer for people to follow up with you And I know,
Linda Thai: follow up with me.
I have a website. I send out a monthly newsletter. It's, a way of being in connection and in community with each other. Do the things that help you to remember who you are and stop doing the things that cause you to forget who you are. And they are my grandfather's words. And we don't have to be experts in language or ritual or the stories of our people in order to begin and begin wherever you are at with whatever resources you have access to.
Zaya Benazzo: Beautiful gift. Thank you. This beautiful offering. Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: you're right. I love the sweetness of it, the way your word has been entering in my body with such a ease and delicacy that has been able to touch me at the core without ev any shake you are able to avoid. And I feel like a tingle inside on my diaphragm.
Actually, Linda, you were mentioning. So thank you for kindness and your precision, both of you and what you share. Thank you.
Jungwon Kim: Yeah. Thank you for holding space for the conversations I really believe we need to be having right now. You all are doing incredible work. I just, I, your community is amazing.
Your catalog of past talks are just it's, they're incredible really important topics together.
Zaya Benazzo: Beautifully curated, long coming together. Yeah. Stick with
Maurizio Benazzo: us all of you.
Zaya Benazzo: Be well and deeply grateful. Thank you
Jungwon Kim: so much. Take care.
