Social justice

Gender-based wealth inequality, big thing for me.

Using business as a vehicle for social justice initiatives.

I come from a working class background.

I didn't enter dentistry via the, I guess, more traditional roots of, you know, an exclusive elite school, yada, yada.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So again, there's that social justice piece.

I love it.

I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

And yes, I, after 11 years of running my consulting practice, doing important social justice work, I made the decision to sunset that company and to start on the new journey of Ioku Healing Retreat Center.

And it was a difficult decision, but in the season that we are in, internationally with everything that's going on, as well as in the life season that I personally am in, I recognized that I wanted to shift my focus from being on the front lines of doing racial justice and social justice work to being the person who takes a step back and provides safety and healing and warmth and restoration for the people that do that work on the front lines every day.

I think You have shared somewhat publicly that there was kind of a moment when your health, your physical and emotional health drove you to that shift.

So you experienced that need for this kind of healing and restoration very personally.

And then at the very end, he died.

He died from the exhaustion and the hard work and the beating up on his body that happened as a result.

And so that parable is one that we see and hear a lot in this work around racial justice and social justice.

You know, wealthy people are always going to be able to afford to eat and have clean water and air conditioning when it's too hot out and everything else.

But like a lot of other social justice issues, when you have these kind of laws, what it does is it impacts the most vulnerable who don't have the political power to say, you know, this is wrong.

So I'm just throwing in my social justice perspective on that as well.

I agree with you, Roland.

Thank you so much for that.

anyway,

but also Doralee and I do the racial and social justice group once a month, which is, which is a wonderful way to be with.

I mean, if you're inclined that way to, to bring your practice to socially engaged Buddhism.

And I really want to say, I, I, I'll just confess that, Someplace along the way, I thought, why am I doing all this? Other people don't seem to need to do all this.

And you can also see this, how the Pope is even struggling.

that Pope has difficulty to relate to the historical perspective that the church had over the death penalty or social justice or other topics.

And he tries to find some kind of balance between the zeitgeist and the original aesthetics of Catholicism.

But there doesn't seem to be some kind of stewardship where this is clear.

You need to move beyond it.

You need to transcend it to make God's kingdom happen in which there is no suffering, no injustice anymore.

It's also at the root of many of the social justice movements that we still have that are, I think, at the core Protestant.

that are an outcome of this Christianity.