Tara Brach

And he told me, he said, a month earlier, I would have unwittingly added to this man's burden by getting angry.

I would have been playing out my young victimized self and shut down the possibility for human contact.

So in some deep level, he felt like he had found his way back to being who he really was, a real human being.

I wanted to share that story because this is the taste of freedom from victim identity and from playing out our victim identity.

It's waking up to our full capacity, empowering us to express love for unliveness.

And the process requires that we go to the roots of what's been keeping us a victim, which really in some deep way always has grieving to it.

And you can see this with collective victim identity, that where there are rituals that include speaking truth and mourning,

like truth and reconciliation in the post-apartheid time in South Africa.

Like I see each year with this beautiful memorial ritual where bereaved Israelis and Palestinians come together and they speak the names and they share the grief of those they've lost.

You know, they tell their stories and grieve together.

And you can see that rather than hardening hearts, rather than fueling victim identity, they're opening into their shared humanity, this vibrant field of caring, which then gives them the capacity to act together, to act against the horrors of what are happening but from an empowered place, a creative place, a compassionate space.

So again, just to name that collective awakening from the victim identity is not a bypassing of the realness of the harm.

It's relating to the harm not from victim but from an awake heart.

And we can see this modeled by the well-known spiritual leaders in this last century of oppressed populations like Nelson Mandela, like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King, clearly honoring the realness of the suffering, dedicated to relieving it and embodying the possibility of not being defined by the suffering.

The victim is disempowered.

And when we're no longer bound by victim consciousness, we access what Martin Luther King described as soul force.

Okay, so I started with Jarvis Masters and his process of moving from victim identity to going through that whole...

deep, deep experience of facing the wounds, the grief, and discovering really the spirit, who he is, the soul force, because he has become an agent of change, of compassion for many.

Jarvis has now spent 35 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

The case has recently been appealed yet again, many of us supporting.