without inner change……
Without inner change
, there will be no outer change,
without collective change
,
no change matters.
– rev angel Kyodo williams
Small towns. Here or elsewhere. The walls thin. The faces closed off. Everything echoed there—voices, footsteps. Being given a second name: difficult to raise.
Families. Generations made of heaviness and pain that often could not be felt, and often were not allowed to be spoken of.
The "Baseballschlägerjahre" (the baseball bat years of 1990s East Germany).
The neighbors and other humans. Who looked away when the Nazis struck.
Body and Soul, experienced as a place where things inscribe themselves that were not invited.
At some point: Getting Out !! Punk. Rebellion. Squatting. First feelings of freedom around the campfire. Then Berlin. Demonstrations. Old squatted houses. The Nazi violence grew less. Police violence grew more for a while.
By the time I was twenty, I had accumulated quite some baggage.
Only later would I understand: This wasn't a sequence where something gets left behind, but layer
upon layer. Layers
that my body stores and remembers, and shapes itself with them into the future,
Starting at fine art university at 30. With a lower secondary school certificate. White spaces where most seemed to move very confidently. They knew the words from academic art discourse. I quietly learned new words: class and shame. And practiced: permanently failing to belong.
Added to that, years of too much body tension, suppressed anger and hurt, and a grinding jaw.
Eventually, the time came. Breakdown piled upon breakdown. They nestled against old stories and traumas. Formed mass. That let me sink.
I became "chronically ill". With pain. Blocked. For a very long time.
I sought help. Orientation. People who understand.
In the political circles I moved in, there was much engagement. We fought against oppression, exploitation, discrimination. But there was so little room for questions:
How does this shape us? How does the violence mark us,
take up space between us? How do external conflicts become internal ones?
Instead: Pull yourself together, keep going. As if we had to shed our vulnerability to be strong.
And the therapeutic offer? They saw something to fix. Made me the problem. Individual case, disorder, swallow pills and function. Their interpretations of me - as negative symptom collages in their diagnostic reports - left me even more depressed.
I failed at everything. Thoughts took hold: Something's wrong with me. I think I'm broken.
Eventually, I came across other voices.
They said: You're not "broken". The conditions have inscribed themselves into you. They built bridges between the personal and the structural. They offered language for experiences for which I had no words. They seek new ways – from paralysis into movement.
Rev. angel Kyodo Williams is one of these voices. Zen priest, Black, Queer – and radical in the sense that she goes to the root.
Transformative Social Change is what Rev has been working on for over twenty years.
She says: We won't dismantle systems like capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy if we don't recognize our own entanglements and damages within them.
Deep liberation and transformation work requires that we look at our prejudices and inner rigidities. And recognize the patterns through which we perpetuate violence, even when we don't want to.
Without inner change, there will be no outer change. Mindfulness and empathy are revolutionary practices.
What binds us and what frees us live not only in our thoughts, but in our bodies, our everyday actions, our feelings. The wounds between us – personal, collective, intergenerational – require awareness and active healing work
This requires spaces where we can try other ways.
Spaces where we can begin without being perfect.
Where uncertainty and not-knowing are welcome. Where faltering is part of learning.
Rev. angel Kyodo Williams' work became an important source for my own transformations and for the way I want to move through the world.
Rev’s approach is not about the great battle or the grand enlightenment. Instead, it is about a path of small steps, of everyday practice. In moments when the scale of the crises overwhelms me, her work reminds me: change is possible. I can start anew. With every breath. Every moment. Now.
Taking up the movement of small everyday steps. Steps that become a path through sensing and fumbling our way forward. Becoming more attentive. Becoming still. Listening. Questioning. A path full of attempts.
Not comfortable. But one that makes me feel more alive.
That teaches me to investigate, to recognize.
A path that enters into deep contact: with myself, with you, with us, with our worlds.
As a way of becoming more mindful—toward ourselves and what is happening around us.
As a coming together where we can learn together to be present with what is.
Where pain and softness and silence and being lost and anger and irritations become our partners in dialogue and reflection.
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Homepage Rev angel Kyodo williams
Books
Beeing black - Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace
Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation
Meditation Space / online
a simple practice of liberation.
a simple practice of liberation.
