Having grown up in atheistic household, I am always surprised at how spiritually I define myself, and how diverse the spiritual influences of my childhood truly were. My mother is a secular Jew who came to the United States from Germany during the Holocaust. My father grew up in the Methodist Church in Texas, but was greatly influenced by his Catholic Mother, and self identified as an atheist. My stepfather is a practicing Buddhist, with Taoist leanings. I have chosen the Sufi path, on which I have been walking for almost 20 years. The lure of American Sufism was its ecumenical inclusion of practices from all of the world's traditions as a way to acknowledge the unity of all religious and spiritual ideals. I married a fellow Sufi who grew up in the Unitarian Universalist Church, studying Norse Mythology, and who has subsequently become a Muslim. When our son was born five years ago I discovered some of the inescapable bonds to my Judaism, which I have been exploring.

In adulthood, I have been able to retrospectively observe how profoundly the story of my mother's life has influenced my life, and shaped the person I have become. This is ironic because the story I refer to is not the one she tells. As with many refugees from the Holocaust and from other wars and atrocities, my mother chooses to identify with her successes and accomplishments -- not with the circumstances that victimized her. While I knew that my mother left Germany as child because she came from a Jewish family, the details of the story were hazy. For example, I grew up believing that the terms "Jew" and "German" were synonymous. I was taught differently when I was ten years old, babysitting for the Feldman’s across the street. Perhaps other Jewish children learn about the stories and the lessons of the Holocaust from their parents, I did not…which was of great concern to Mrs. Feldman.

I pieced together the story of my mother's adventurous exodus from Germany, and her family's subsequent struggle to learn a new language and culture. The drama and emotions related to the story were always downplayed in an effort to keep our history from sounding desperate, and to keep us from sounding like the losers. My grandmother, who was only 5 feet tall, told stories of sassing SS Soldiers, and fist-fighting them for groceries, painting herself to be victorious in these epic battles time and time again. Our family seemed to always keep our chins raised high, and we were too sophisticated and too worldly for the circumstances we stumbled into. And God never found a way into any of these stories.

It was years later, after working with refugees for a decade, developing programming in trauma healing, and teaching courses in social justice that I started to make the connection between my mother's story and the focus of my life. How was it that I became a champion for the liberation and healing of oppressed peoples when I grew up in the comfort of an upper middle class suburb? It took a while for me to recognize the connections, and quite a while longer to own them as rightfully mine. It was hard to believe that such a rich story of life and death lived underneath the complacency of my seemingly mundane family. I have subsequently learned that not being Jewish enough to own a story about being Jewish is a common theme among Jews.

My academic background starts off from a different place of self-awareness. I studied the arts and business for my undergraduate degree. I had intended to be a music major (voice) until my parents found out. As the first woman to receive a college education in my family (my father was the only other college educated family member at the time), music was not the course of study that they had envisioned for me. It was my father who convinced me to combine music and business, encouraging me to design a degree in arts administration which had greater potential of leading to lucrative employment in the arts upon graduation.

After graduating, I decided that what I really wanted to do with my new freedom was study gamelan in Indonesia. I sold all of my worldly possessions and bought a one-way ticket to Indonesia. I wandered around the islands, meeting people and becoming familiar with the culture, and eventually found my way to Bali where I lived for almost a year. I studied music, dance, art and Balinese culture, reveling in the exoticness of the experience.

When I returned to the United States I longed to find a way to stay connected to people from different cultures and sought a career that utilized my education in non-profit management within the context of multi-cultural human services. I found a job with a local refugee resettlement agency and developed an immigration counseling and advocacy program to assist refugees and political asylees gain legal status and access to social services in the United States.

After spending a couple of years working with refugees I realized that I was spending my efforts dealing with the tail end of much larger problem. I wanted to find a way to contribute to the harmony in refugees' native countries so that they would not have to leave their homes in the first place. I arranged to do an internship in Cambodia, monitoring the repatriation of women and children from Thai border camps, and gained acceptance into the Program in Intercultural Management at the School for International Training/World Learning so that my internship would count towards earning my Masters degree.

I did earn my degree, but the internship in Cambodia fell through. I ended up doing my internship at the Tuscarora Indian Reservation in Niagara Falls, New York, helping a family of Tuscarora and Seneca Indians rediscover traditional Indian culture and establish a community center for Indians and non-Indians to learn about the traditional values, beliefs and practices of Native American people.

After a couple of years I returned to Oregon and resumed my work with the refugee community. I continued to direct the immigration counseling and advocacy program and developed workshops and conferences on Trauma Healing. I founded a coalition of citizens, service providers and faith communities, working to address an increase in xenophobic social norms and government policies. This led me to pursue my interest in conflict resolution education, and I began to explore the nature of resolution in greater depth.

For the next several years, I worked with Multnomah County Health Department as a Violence Prevention Specialist. The public health community in the United States had recognized violence as a leading cause of injury and death, and began to evaluate it from an epidemiological framework. Germ theory provided an interesting lens through which to consider the social factors that contribute to outbreaks of violence, with an emphasis on primary prevention, including: education, community building and strengthening, and the development of greater self-awareness.

From my experience in violence prevention, I began to teach workshops and classes in related topic areas. For the past eight years I have served as a core faculty member of the Graduate Program in Conflict Resolution at Portland State University where I am the Director of Violence Prevention. The courses I have developed include Understanding Violence, The Theory and Practice of Nonviolence, Media Violence, Restorative Justice, What's Love Got To Do With It: Love and Conflict Resolution, and Enmification: The Art and Consequence of Enemy Making. All of the topics that I teach emphasize the process of self-discovery, encouraging students to understand themselves, their culture and the world around them, and their relative power and privilege.

My research in violence prevention brought the issue and relevance of early childhood development, especially brain development, to my attention. I became fascinated with the alphabet soup of behavior disorders and the growing correlation between these behavior disorders and the propensity for violence. I began to wonder about the lack of community strength available to support children in their development and the lack of opportunities for healing to take place. In my effort to learn more about this topic, I enrolled in a two-year training program in Infant Body Psychotherapy. The course was based within the system of Bodynamics (a Danish discipline of somatic psychology), incorporating elements of Hakomi Therapy and utilizing specialized cranial-sacral techniques with the goals of healing in-utero, birth and early childhood trauma. The literature on childhood development suggests that giving children as many physical, psychological and relational resources as possible during the first five years can be the most effective strategy for violence prevention.

In addition, during this same time period time I attended the Jaffe Institute of Spiritual and Medical Healing to study Sufi Healing. The healing techniques taught at the Jaffe Institute are based on traditional Sufi teachings, which encourage healing within oneself as a necessary prerequisite for providing healing to others and, ultimately, for achieving world peace. The healing techniques have been successful with individuals and groups, as well as with businesses, health care institutions and political organizations.

Which brings me to the present, and to the decision to study how transformative education can facilitate the liberation of oppression, inspiring individuals, organizations and institutions to support the transformation and healing of humanity.

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