We had a rich and insightful conversation on Saturday, November 7, with Fania Davis, the founder and Director of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. (Skip to 2 min, 18 sec.)

Highlights from our conversation with Fania Davis:

“As a trial lawyer, my job was to decimate my adversary, to tear them apart, the judge had to find us innocent and them guilty.  It was a very binary way of being in the world – “right or wrong,” “guilty or innocent,” “us versus them,” After all of this fighting, after so many decades of cultivating this hyper masculinist and belligerent way of being in the world, I began to feel sick.  I literally became sick.”

“I knew intuitively that was I being called to bring more feminine energy into my life, more nurturing and caring and healing and creativity. There was too much fire and not enough water.”

Fania’s inner work eventually led her to discover restorative justice as an external mechanism for social justice.  She discovered a justice that heals and seeks to repair damaged relationships instead of harming them further, a justice that seeks to create peace instead of deepening the social conflict.
 
“Our current justice system is one that harms people who harm people to show that harming people is wrong. Restorative justice seeks to reverse and interrupt the cycle of violence. It is work that requires the transformation of relationships. It’s a “relational” form of justice.”

In a restorative justice circle, everyone takes responsibility, everyone tells his or her story, and everyone is heard. 

A Conversation About Restorative Justice

Most of us lead double lives. Mondays through Fridays (Mondays through Saturdays for some parts of the world), we are at work, caught up with our endless goals, tasks, and deadlines. It’s in our quiet times that certain questions are given space to arise. What is our larger purpose? Are we living in alignment with our values? How do we reconcile these two worlds? How do we bring our internal work into the outside world? How do we create a world that supports our internal quest? How can our work become a clear path to our own awakening and how can we become a more purposeful and effective instrument to change in the external world? - See more at: http://www.awakin.org/calls/246/mirabai-bush/blog#sthash.SjkgY18a.dpuf

Dalai Lama Fellows