“Your mind is like a piece of land planted with many different kinds of seeds: seeds of joy, peace, mindfulness, understanding, and love; seeds of craving, anger, fear, hate, and forgetfulness. These wholesome and unwholesome seeds are always there, sleeping in the soil of your mind. The quality of your life depends on the seeds you water.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
(Photo taken by me at Thay’s continuation ceremony at Magnolia Grove Monastery in February 2024)
If you’re here, it’s because you care about building new forms of community safety that don’t rely on policing or the carceral system. That means a lot to me. I’d like to share a little more about my approach so that you can feel confident about what you’re supporting.
Above all, I want you to know that working with me means helping me share what I know with anyone who is part of a community accountability process with me. My goal is that with every conflict we navigate together, you grow more equipped to handle relationships in your own workplace, family, and community. The more capable we can become at de-escalating conflict and addressing harm in every space in our lives, the less we’ll need to rely on the policing and the carceral state.
I believe that if we can learn to attune to each others’ emotions and needs responsibly, we can grow into people who flourish in mutual relationships. That way we can help each other grow and keep each other safe without the prison industrial complex.
As wonderful as that sounds, many of us also need safe, spiritually mindful containers to keep walking the path toward that ideal because of the ways we have been affected by racial capitalism, imperialism, and systems of oppression. Through holding ourselves accountable first and foremost — observing our own needs, values, and places we can grow — we learn to create those containers for ourselves and others.
I came to transformative justice after organizing within a range of socialist-anarchist spaces since 2016 and primarily abolitionist spaces since 2020. After years of watching conflicts tear people apart while trying to work together toward liberation, I started to explore frameworks that could help people stay aligned while paying due respect to the ruptures caused by harm and difference within these spaces. In 2024, I took a training course with the SpringUp Collective and began developing my own resources for facilitation.
Through my learning, I’ve come to believe that conflict is a portal that changes everyone who passes through it. In order for our movements to last, we have to become people who can flow and stay mindful as things change so that even when things get hard, we stay focused on the true enemies of truth, love, and community power.
FOUNDATIONS
My practice is informed by a few different experiences that might make me the right facilitator for you.
- I have experience practicing Buddhism within the Plum Village tradition which brings a spiritual lens to my work. I use somatic attunement and mindfulness to hold spaces that I hope will be filled with intention and care.
- I am a committed abolitionist working toward the end of the carceral system in all its forms; from policing and prisons to forms of punishment that emerge in our interpersonal relationships. Black liberation, queer liberation, and the liberation of all colonized peoples around the world require abolition.
- As an anarchist organizer, I have been a member of multiple non-hierarchical collectives. I’m interested in helping people work and organize within decentralized formations.
- I’m child of immigrants from Armenia and Colombia. I’m a believer in the healing and learning that can happen through honoring cultural difference and exchange.
- I identify as a queer, non-binary person. Queerness was the first lens that helped me liberate my mind and it forms the foundation of spaces that I create for people to express themselves freely. Non-binariness allows me to explore and imagine different gender expansive realities for my spirit to inhabit.
My practice has also been shaped by the work of dequi kioni-sadiki, adrienne maree brown, Mariame Kaba, Shira Hassan, cyrée jarelle johnson, Angelique (Omi) Geehan, and Kara Grant who have offered their teachings, insight, or support in various forms.
Katya Abazajian ~ 