What Remains After Bearing Witness: Investigating Atrocity, Holding Anger, Healing the Body

Dec 29, 2023

Living with bile duct cancer—a tumor wrapped around my liver—has required more than conventional treatment. It has asked me to become a student of my body’s quiet language, to follow threads I once might have overstepped. This is the second post in a series tracing how my healing unfolds at the intersection of Western medicine and ancient traditions—where body, mind, and spirit converge.

At its core, this piece explores anger—not just as an emotion, but as a guide, a signal, a force I’ve come to know intimately. It follows how that anger shaped me in my profession—through years of human rights work in post-genocide Rwanda, Bosnia and beyond—and how it later re-emerged, asking to be witnessed in the landscape of illness. It moves through memories I thought I had left behind, and into the breathwork and other practices that helped me metabolize them decades later. Along the way, I confront what it means to carry the weight of injustice in the body, and how healing asks us not just to feel—but to transform.

This is a story about pain and purpose, about bearing witness and breaking cycles, about meeting each emotion as a teacher and allowing the body’s wisdom to guide the way. It’s a story about how healing doesn’t always arrive through cures, but through an honest reckoning with what we carry—and a tender willingness to let it change us.

Hello anger, my old friend

In Western medicine, the liver is understood as an organ of filtration and detox. But in Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is the seat of unprocessed emotion and the keeper of life force—Qi. In this view, anger, frustration, and impatience aren’t just emotional states; they are energetic imprints that shape, and are shaped by, our inner terrain.

TCM holds that when the flow of Qi, the vital life force, is disrupted, the body often speaks through illness.

When I learned I had cancer in my liver, I began to peel back the stories my body had been holding all these years.

As I turned inward, anger emerged with striking clarity—not as an intruder, but as a long-time companion. It had accompanied me through much of my life, woven into my responses to injustice, cruelty, and dysfunction. But it also lived in subtler forms: in my impatience, in my rigidity, in the sharp edges I showed to the world when tenderness felt too risky.

Underneath its heat, I’ve found something sacred: a fierce longing for justice, a devotion to truth, and a voice that refuses to go silent.

By honoring the complexity of my anger—by allowing it to speak and learning to listen—I’ve started to alchemize it. No longer a wildfire to be feared, it has become a source of clarity, conviction, and energy for change. This shift has been a turning point in my healing: a reclamation of power, a softening toward myself, and a step closer to a world built on compassion.

Anger has often been my armor, my fuel, and my voice. But what if it was also a signal—a call to meet the parts of myself still waiting to be witnessed, held, and healed?

This exploration pulled me deeper into the roots of my anger—the lifelong fire that had burned against injustice, violence, and cruelty in all their forms. But the rage I carried wasn’t only a response to atrocities. It also stirred in quieter moments—in meetings stifled by inertia, in institutions paralyzed by the fear of change, in systems that prized image over integrity. It festered in the presence of rigid hierarchies, risk-averse cultures, and the soul-numbing compartmentalization that so often defines bureaucracies.

Much of my career took place within institutions committed—at least in principle—to justice and human rights. Yet, in practice, I often encountered systemic dysfunction, including bureaucratic inertia, gender-based harassment, and entrenched patriarchal norms. The gap between organizational values and internal culture was not only disheartening but operationally and ethically destabilizing. At times, addressing internal misalignment and institutional contradictions felt as urgent—and as depleting—as responding to the external injustices we were mandated to confront.

Often, my anger served as armor—a fierce and familiar shield that protected me from the softer truths beneath. It was easier to burn with indignation than to sit in the raw ache of sadness. Easier to fight than to feel. When torrents of fear or grief threatened to rise, I transmuted them into determination—pouring my energy into advocacy, into the relentless pursuit of justice and decency. That fire helped me survive.

But I no longer seek to be ruled by it. I am not here to exile my anger, but to be in relationship with it—to soften its edges and uncover the truths it guards. I want my anger not as a weapon, but as a compass—one that points to what matters most. When honored rather than suppressed, it becomes a guidepost, alerting me to breaches of integrity, violations of core values, and places where love demands a boundary.

By staying curious about when anger is speaking on behalf of deeper pain—grief, fear, shame—I can meet those hidden parts with care. And from that place, choose differently. I can transform that fiery fuel into steady light—one that illuminates the path to both justice and reconciliation.

Revisiting Rwanda: A Journey Through Pain and Purpose

Trigger Warning: The following section contains graphic and sensitive content related to the Rwandan genocide, including violence, loss, and trauma. Please take care while reading.

My time with the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in post-genocide Rwanda in the mid-1990s brought me face-to-face with the extremes of human capacity—both the unimaginable depths of cruelty and the unwavering desire for justice. It was a mission that aligned with my highest ideals and deepest convictions. And yet, beneath the surface of that righteous clarity, I carried reservoirs of pain, disillusionment, and sorrow that would take years to fully name.

On Kigali tarmac with fellow UN Human Rights Field Officers, November 1994

The mission’s initial deployment was marked by chaos. This was the UN’s first large-scale human rights operation, and it showed. We were dispatched across the country with almost no training and barely any equipment—tasked with documenting massacre sites and mass graves in the wake of one of the most horrific genocides in modern history.

What we found defied imagination. In village after village, churches, schools, and government buildings had been transformed into killing grounds. Nearly everywhere we went, we were the first international presence since the genocide. Survivors emerged from the shadows—sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once—desperate to tell their stories.

Their testimonies came in torrents. The details were devastating, and their grief was palpable. I felt myself split open—overwhelmed by sorrow, shaken by rage, and gripped by a fierce commitment to do whatever I could to seek justice. I poured myself into the work, exhausting every tool I had to elevate their voices and expose the crimes committed. In the face of such staggering loss, it felt like the only thing I could do. And the absolute least.

But our mission didn’t end with documenting genocide and war crimes. We were also tasked with investigating ongoing human rights abuses committed by the post-genocide government—abuses that sharply contradicted official promises of non-retaliation and justice. Despite public assurances, we uncovered thousands of cases: extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions, torture, and cruel punishments. As our investigations drew closer to the centers of power, the work became more precarious. Death threats began to follow us—a chilling, if ironic, validation that we were getting too close to truths some preferred to keep buried.

Then, just one year after the genocide, nearly two thousand internally displaced persons—mostly women and children—were massacred by the Rwandan military during its brutal closure of the Kibeho IDP camp in southern Rwanda. The camp, administered jointly by the United Nations and the Rwandan government, gave the military a convenient pretext to frame the assault as a “joint operation.” Over four harrowing days, the violence escalated. And throughout it all, UN agencies and peacekeepers stood by—watching, but not intervening.

In the aftermath of the massacre—and the absence of any meaningful investigation into the failures that allowed it—I felt a moral imperative to conduct my own inquiry once my mission concluded in late 1995. That effort eventually led to the publication of a book..

While I had carefully documented the external events unfolding in Rwanda, I hadn’t yet confronted the internal cost they exacted. Writing the book forced me to reckon with the despair and fury that had quietly taken root within me. Soon after, while serving with the State Department on the OSCE mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I encountered eerily familiar patterns. It felt as though I was trapped in a relentless cycle—witnessing the same traumas, just in different geographies.

Just Breathe: Holotropic Breathwork

Twenty-five years later, my cancer diagnosis landed amid two powerful events: the release of a book that reopened long-buried memories, and the discovery of a breathwork practice that helped me begin to metabolize them.

The book was Do Not Disturb: Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michaela Wrong. Published just after my diagnosis, it shook something loose in me. Her account resurfaced the anguish and fury I’d buried—anger not just at past atrocities, but at the enduring repression and extrajudicial killings still being carried out by the same regime I had investigated in the mid-1990s. That these abuses continued with so little outcry from the international community was maddening. As I read, the fire of my younger self reignited. My grief and rage returned—not as distant echoes, but as visceral reminders of what it means to witness and survive.

At the same time, I was immersing myself in holotropic breathwork as part of a certification program. This practice uses controlled, accelerated breathing to induce non-ordinary states of consciousness—creating a doorway into the psyche where deep healing can unfold. In these altered states, the veil between conscious and unconscious thins. Suppressed memories, unresolved emotions, and even early childhood wounds often surface—not to overwhelm, but to be seen, felt, and integrated. The breath became both anchor and guide, helping me stay rooted in the present while journeying through the terrain of long-held pain.

Believing that at least some of my anger masked deeper pain, I committed to dedicating a month of my breathwork practice to Rwanda—to see what might arise if I gave those memories space to breathe.

From the beginning, each session felt like navigating a turbulent sea of long-repressed emotion. It was as if I were wading through the wreckage of memory, fragments long buried in the shadows of my psyche.

Vivid, haunting recollections surged to the surface. I saw the faces of countless women—anguished, desperate—searching for their missing husbands, sons, and loved ones. Their eyes carried the hollow imprint of atrocities endured, the lingering terror of sexual violence, and the rawness of loss etched into every line of their expressions.

I was confronted by stark and haunting images—the unbearable stench of decomposing bodies strewn across fields, churches, schools, and homes. The smell would cling to my clothes, to my skin, to memory itself.

I saw again the faces of the Spanish forensic team, their brows furrowed in concentration as they carefully determined age, sex, and cause of death by day—then softened into laughter and warmth as we shared beers in the evenings, a fragile reprieve from the gravity of our days.

And I remembered the piercing gazes of eyes locked on mine in overcrowded village detention centers—eyes that held questions, fear, sometimes accusation. The air was thick with human suffering: no space to lie down, no proper ventilation, no hygiene, no privacy—nothing that resembled dignity.

Then I found myself walking into a courtyard beside the Nyumba chapel, where the earth gave way slightly beneath my feet. The unmistakable scent of decay hung in the air. Scattered across the ground were fragments of unspeakable horror—a piece of jawbone, shards of ribs, bones slowly pushing up through the soil. Inside the chapel, blood still stained the walls. The floor was coated in a thick, congealed layer of what remained. As I stepped back, the view widened to reveal thousands of scenes just like it—each a silent monument to the hundreds of thousands of lives extinguished only months before.

Investigating the grim traces of the Rwanda genocide

I remembered, with painful clarity, the bone-deep fear and searing humiliation of the day we were forced out of our Nissan Patrol at gunpoint—three unarmed human rights officers under the hostile glare of Rwandan Patriotic Army soldiers. As I stepped from the vehicle, a rifle butt slammed into my side, sending me sprawling to the ground. Moments later, they commandeered our car and disappeared down the road.

Amidst these and countless other visions, waves of grief, fury, and sorrow erupted within me—emotions that had long been buried, now breaking the surface with staggering force.

It felt as though I were treading through a vast chasm—an abyss of unrelenting pain and sorrow. To avoid alarming my neighbors, I buried my cries in a pillow. The tears came in waves, endless and uncontainable, as if no amount could ever adequately express the depth of what I was feeling.

This became a rhythm for days. Mornings began with breathwork, often leaving me flooded with emotion, tears streaming down. I’d then move into journaling before stepping into the day—tired, raw, yet somehow able to carry on. Alongside this, I worked with an Internal Family Systems (IFS) coach and continued other grounding practices. These helped me sift through what surfaced, giving shape to the grief and rage, and gradually integrating the insights into my conscious self.

Inner work for those who come next

My healing has never been confined to the body. From the beginning, I sensed an invitation to go inward—to trace the fault lines of old memory, to feel what might have gone unfelt. This journey has carried me well beneath the surface of illness, toward the quiet places where pain took root, and where the seeds of healing could be sown.

At its essence, this is a path of freedom. Of love. Of returning to the fullest, truest expression of who I am. But it isn’t just personal. It is ancestral and collective. It is a pilgrimage toward wholeness—not just for me, but for all those who come after.

To walk this path is to say yes to healing in both directions—backwards, to tend the wounds of those who came before me, and forwards, to break cycles that no longer serve. I do this so that those who follow may be lighter, freer. So that my legacy will not be one of survival alone, but of transformation. This is the work: to grow, to feel, to shed, to leave behind a map toward joy and wholeness.

After the storm

And then, something shifted.

As the intensity began to wane, I noticed a subtle but undeniable change in my body—and in my heart.

Moments of relief began to surface. The once-torrential waves of emotion started to ebb, leaving behind a widening sense of stillness.

It was in this gentler phase that something unexpected arrived. Amid the quiet that followed the storms, a moment of clarity broke through—suddenly, my thoughts turned toward forgiveness. Not as an abstract concept, but as a living, breathing possibility.

The notion of forgiving those responsible for the immense suffering during and after the Rwandan genocide took me by surprise. I’ve long held forgiveness as a core value and have drawn strength from practices like Hoʻoponopono. But until that moment, my understanding of forgiveness had been personal—directed toward individuals who had caused me harm. The idea of extending it toward such unfathomable cruelty on a collective scale had simply never occurred to me. It wasn’t a door I had ever thought to open.

Once this new idea surfaced, it began to gather force. It stood in direct tension with everything I had believed about the necessity of accountability, justice, and meaningful reconciliation. Each time I tried to make sense of it, doubts rushed in—fears that forgiveness might diminish the gravity of the crimes, sidestep the demand for justice, or absolve perpetrators of responsibility.

Yet as I continued to breathe and reflect, it became clear that this forgiveness wasn’t born of logic. It transcended the familiar patterns of intellectualizing, analyzing, and compartmentalizing. It didn’t come from my mind at all—but from the deepest chambers of my heart. Never before had I so vividly experienced the tension between the cool rationality of my intellect and the raw, insistent pull of something far more tender and true.

Remarkably, my heart prevailed. The experience was profoundly liberating—offering a sense of relief and peace I hadn’t known I needed. In that moment, some of the burdens I’d long carried began to lift—the same burdens that had once propelled me through Rwanda, where I felt personally responsible for fixing a broken world and singlehandedly delivering accountability.

This shift didn’t mean my mind simply surrendered. Nor did it signal that the pain and anguish from Rwanda had been neatly resolved. Those truths remain, still pulsing in an ongoing dialogue—a complex interplay between heart and mind that continues to shape my inner landscape. I watch it closely, with curiosity and care. Now, as I pursue my own certification in Internal Family Systems, I’m deepening into a framework that honors these very contradictions. IFS offers space for each part—each voice within—to be seen, heard, and understood.

In addition to IFS, I draw on a range of modalities to meet and metabolize the emotions that continue to arise. These include journaling, somatic practices (see endnote for more), cognitive restructuring, self-compassion exercises, the RAIN method (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and others. Each offers a unique portal into the terrain of my inner world—tools that help me move through complexity with presence and compassion, rather than resistance or overwhelm.

The ultimate aim of this journey—like many true paths of healing—is not to eliminate pain entirely, though that may be an understandable longing at times. Often, we envision healing as a destination: a trigger-free existence, a serene and sustained state of inner peace. But for me, healing isn’t about achieving a permanent “Zen state” or bypassing discomfort. Instead, it’s about grounding in presence and spiritual connection. It’s about meeting emotional pain with awareness and compassion, rather than avoiding or suppressing it.

I’ve come to see that healing asks not only that we acknowledge our pain, but that we understand the needs beneath it. The aim isn’t merely to lessen its grip, but to build emotional resilience and fortitude of heart. We cultivate an inner landscape where pain is not silenced or exiled, but welcomed with compassion. In doing so, we expand our capacity to hold the full spectrum of our emotions, allowing each part of our inner world to exist without shame or judgment.

Rumi captures this beautifully in his poem The Guest House, where he likens emotions to unexpected visitors—some joyful, others painful—who arrive unexpectedly. “Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture,” he writes, “still, treat each guest honorably.” In this way, our pain becomes not just a burden to bear, but a wise teacher—one that arrives with gifts we may not yet understand.

In today’s fast-moving, often disorienting world, some of the most essential inner work lies in learning to recognize and engage with our emotions. This means developing the capacity to notice, accept, and truly feel what arises within us—emotions that often first appear as subtle sensations in the body (see [i] below for more). By cultivating this awareness, we begin to create the conditions for our emotions to move through us freely. When we allow rather than resist them, we reduce the risk of those feelings becoming lodged within us—unfelt, unprocessed, and ultimately harmful. In doing so, we invite a gentler, more compassionate relationship with ourselves and our emotional world.

As we begin to consciously acknowledge and allow our emotions—even the ones that feel uncomfortable or overwhelming—we invite them to move more freely through us. Though it may seem counterintuitive, turning toward our feelings rather than resisting them creates the conditions for their natural release. This process fosters greater ease in navigating emotional terrain and reduces the lingering weight they might otherwise carry. In doing so, we become more anchored in the present, cultivating resilience and inner steadiness.

This strengthened emotional capacity empowers us in two profound ways. First, it invites us to gently question the assumptions and beliefs that shape our inner world. With greater clarity and compassion, we can begin to reexamine the stories we live by. Second, this openness makes room for new possibilities to emerge—potentials we may have once overlooked or dismissed. With expanded awareness, we become more able to see and step toward the paths that quietly await our readiness.

Without the practice of understanding our emotions or staying open to new perspectives, we risk unconsciously projecting our unresolved energy onto others. These projections—whether aimed at individuals or entire groups—can reinforce cycles of misunderstanding, conflict, and harm. But when we choose to turn inward, to meet our emotions with awareness and care, and to cultivate a mindset rooted in curiosity and expansion, we begin to shift the pattern. In doing so, we create the conditions not only for personal healing, but also for deeper insight, connection, and the kind of wisdom that ripples outward.

A part of me wishes I had come to these insights earlier—especially during the most demanding chapters of my professional life. Perhaps understanding these truths then would have allowed me to lead with greater ease, to advocate more effectively, and to carry less of the internal weight I bore.

And yet, I now find myself in a deeply meaningful place—guiding and coaching leaders on the front lines of change. I witness with awe as they ground themselves in emotional intelligence, discernment, authentic communication, and integrity. Their impact reaches far beyond their missions to support the vulnerable and marginalized. They’re better advocating for themselves, navigating resistance with clarity and grace, and uplifting others along the way. Even in the face of daunting challenges, they are reclaiming their narratives and shaping a more just, compassionate future. It is a privilege to walk beside them.

The most influential change agents and pioneers of justice today draw true inner strength from their commitment to emotional growth. Research in management and leadership consistently affirms the critical role of emotional intelligence in driving effective leadership. Leaders who prioritize self-awareness and emotional development create environments rooted in trust, collaboration, and innovation. By cultivating emotional intelligence, they navigate complexity with clarity, make grounded decisions, and foster resilient teams that can adapt and thrive in uncertainty. Their ability to attune to both their own emotions and those of others becomes the foundation for building cohesive teams—and for creating lasting, meaningful change.

My liver cancer became an unexpected catalyst for deep inner reckoning—an embodied call to attend to what had long gone unspoken. As Bessel van der Kolk observed, the body keeps the score, and mine was signaling that unresolved emotional residues were asking—demanding—to be met. Looking beyond the traditional Chinese medicine view of the liver as the seat of anger and emotional flow, I began to trace the intricate web between my cancer, my values, and the unprocessed emotions from my time in the field and beyond. What emerged was a clearer picture of the anger I had long used as a shield—and the deeper layers of pain, purpose, and transformation waiting beneath it.

As Ram Dass once said, “While cures aim at returning our bodies to what they were in the past, healing uses what is present to move us more deeply to soul awareness.” My journey through terminal illness has never been solely about restoring the body to a former state. It has become a path of transformation—one that invites me to work with what is, to meet each emotion as a teacher, and to let the present moment guide me deeper into soul awareness. This commitment to emotional healing and soulful evolution—especially in the face of adversity—remains at the heart of my path forward.

Ram Dass wrote, “While cures aim at returning our bodies to what they were in the past, healing uses what is present to move us more deeply to soul awareness.” This cancer journey has not been about going back. It’s been about going deeper—into the emotions I once pushed aside, into the truths I hadn’t yet faced, into the mystery of what it means to be whole. Healing, for me, is less about fixing and more about becoming. It’s about letting what’s here—grief, love, rage, awe—shape me into someone more awake to soul, to presence, to what really matters.

Journeys Within and Beyond

Discussion about this post