A Passion for Peace – an Ojai Couple works toward global harmony – Ojai, California-USA

Lisa and Brian Berman have traveled a long journey for peace.

She grew up in a deeply traumatized Germany in the years following World War II. He was a Jewish student peace activist at Ohio’s Kent State University in 1967-68, not long before the campus was scarred in a 1970 shooting by national guard soldiers that left four unarmed students dead and nine wounded. He went on to become an accomplished artist and yoga instructor and she charted a career as a naturopathic healthcare provider.

The Bermans met and fell in love during 2002 while participating in a Jewish-German reconciliation project in Germany and were married the following year. Their shared journey has included co-founding Ojai International City of Peace, which led the Ojai City Council to adopt that designation in 2015, supporting the goal of creating a network of 1,000 cities committed to promoting global peace.

Participants in the Peace Week 2024 Journey to Japan traveled from all over the world to gather at Mount Fuji and Hiroshima.

The latest chapter in the couple’s quest to promote global harmony was a peace-building convergence in Japan last month that took them to Tokyo, Mount Fuji and Hiroshima, the site of the first nuclear bomb explosion over a populated city.

The Bermans will share photos and observations of their peace mission to Japan on Oct. 27 at Ojai Retreat and Inn from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Sacred mission to Japan

During an interview in their shady, tree-lined Ojai backyard, Lisa Berman told the Ventura County Reporter that she had never visited Japan prior to their weeklong pilgrimage, which included meeting with youth leaders and various peace organizations in Japan, culminating in marking International Day of Peace on Sept. 21.

“We learned a lot about the Shinto philosophy. So personally, I took that after the atomic bomb blast, I feel that Japan reconnected deeper with the philosophy of Shinto, which is a philosophy similar to Buddhism, honoring nature, respecting the other. So, it was a deep, deep experience to see the heart and the respect that people live in their daily life,” she said.

Her impression of the world’s most populous city, Tokyo, which has around 37,000,000 people in the metropolitan area, at first was a bit overwhelming, with all the tall skyscrapers and homes that seemed to go on forever. But then she started noticing small details that brought her closer to the peaceful aspects of Japanese culture.

“You have little parks everywhere. And these parks are so beautiful, you feel nature is happy. So, I felt again this philosophy they are holding. You don’t see any drug addiction. You don’t see any dirt on streets. It’s so clean. It’s in the heart,” she said. “Like one little example, when you arrive at the hotel, which I did several times, the employees are in front of the hotels and wave and welcome you. And when you leave, they wave to send you off again. So many personal, heartfelt connections.”

Peace Poles (like the one installed outside the Bermans’ Ojai home) representing every nation on earth are on display in the peace sanctuary on Mount Fuji. 

On Mount Fuji, a place of sacred reverence in Japan, people from many other nations, including Ecuador, Australia, and Kenya as well as Native American representatives, joined the delegation. When the Bermans reached the peace sanctuary, they were welcomed by “peace poles” representing every country on earth, much like one they have in their own Ojai front yard with messages of peace in various languages on each side. Brian Berman told the VCReporter it was an emotional experience to walk among the peace poles and see flags of the world waving in unison.

“And then we started to enter the field, and, in the distance, you could see people standing up, waving flags, and greeting us. You could just feel like you were taken over by their love,” he said. “We entered and I have to say, I was just in tears. I was weeping by such a response. I never expected it.”

The Bermans marked the International Day of Peace in Hiroshima where a tall, domed building shorn of its outer materials by the 1949 blast still stands as a stark reminder of the destruction caused by war. After touring the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the group gathered in a circle to release the feelings of what they had just experienced and heard from an 86-year-old woman who survived the destruction of her hometown.

“It took her until she was 70 years old before she could really even talk about it,” Brian said. “And she’s become like a major peace leader. She’s traveled to many different countries, and she healed mostly through her artwork. And she’s given her artwork to the Dalai Lama and different presidents of nations. So, she was a great inspiration.”

Processing intergenerational trauma

Lisa grew up in a small town in what was then known as West Germany and moved to West Berlin when she was a young adult, prior to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. She said troubling aspects of German conduct during the war — including the Holocaust — weren’t discussed as openly as they are today.

“Growing up, that probably gave me the longing for greater peace because as a child, I felt the silence in my society,” she said. “I find there is so much hidden of the trauma that had happened and was not spoken about. So, when I was young, I had really the longing to understand what had happened.”

While in Berlin, she became active in the peace movement, participating in a Jewish-German reconciliation project. What she found was that people on both sides of the conflict repressed their emotions or tried unsuccessfully to forget what happened.

Lisa and Brian Berman (top left and middle right) with other participants of Peace Week 2024 Journey to Japan. 

“We listened to Holocaust survivors who were at the end of their lives. They had never talked about their experiences in their family, but they felt an inner need to free themselves from the trauma. The same happened on the German side because of shame and guilt,” she said. “We had children of former SS officers, Nazis, and they had nightmares, not knowing and understanding why they had that experience and then became curious.”

Lisa mentioned one German participant who opened a suitcase after his father’s death and discovered his father was a shooting commando in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust but had never talked about it.

“He, as a son, had the guilt. He had the guilt his father should have had. You know, so it gets passed down generations,” she said. “And I think we underestimate when we send soldiers to war zones, they hold that in their system, and it’s passed down to children and grandchildren. So, we have the consequences for many generations when we have war. So that’s what I felt as a child of the Second World War.”

Shaped by protest…and meditation

Brian told the VCReporter his dad was a U.S. Army Captain, who was very interested in watching anything about World War II.

“I was his son, and I just wanted to be with my dad,” he recalled. “So, I got to watch a lot of footage. And when there was footage about the Holocaust and the liberation of the camps that the British filmed, I was completely traumatized by that as a little boy.”

During his time at Kent State, protests the Vietnam War were raging.

“And I have to say that because I had my older sister, a lot of her peers went to Vietnam, and a number of them didn’t come back. And so, I already had that going on in me,” he said. “And so, I became a peace activist. I was trained by the Quakers to be a peace marshal.”

Participants in Peace Week 2024 Journey to Japan pose near Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. 

Brian participated in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a major protest in Washington D.C. that took place on Nov. 15, 1969, and drew around half a million demonstrators.

“And at that point, it was obvious that this can’t go on indefinitely. And, you know, there is what even Eisenhower referred to as the industrial military complex that is feeding itself by feeding the war movement,” he said. “And after a certain level of activism, I saw that I was ineffective and not at peace in myself. And by an amazing fate, I met an Eastern teacher who emanated peace through meditation, yoga practices. And so, in 1970, I became a yoga teacher, meditation teacher, and began my path of peace building through that.”

Charting a path to peace

The Bermans founded Awakening Peace Inc. during 2018 to support various peace programs, including local observances of International Peace Day and the awarding of an Awakening Peace Award. The organization hosts programs and events to teach peace building skills and healing practices of empathy, compassion and speaking from the heart. The Bermans also offer reconciliation programs, listening circles, counseling and workshops building skills to heal traumas.

The couple also participates in a free weekly online discussion with the group Unity Earth, which organized the “Peace Week 2024 Journey to Japan.” The meetings are open to anyone interested in promoting peace and happen over Zoom on Wednesdays at 3 p.m.

“Their community of peace builders that come on to that…It was like, this is our tribe. These are our people,” Brian said. “It ranged from indigenous people doing work in their cultures and, you know, reestablishing language. I mean, every imaginable peace organization.”

Lisa said the peace movement is important to everyone whether they realize it or not.

A peace pole with messages of peace in several languages adorns the Ojai front yard of Lisa and Brian Berman. 

“I think it’s a core longing in all of us. We all long for love. We long to belong. We are not hermits and isolated in our hearts. We are part of everything. So, I think peace is our deepest longing, in everyone,” she said. “And if the opposite is hate, you could say it’s maybe because we lost our connection to who we really are. It’s like a survival mechanism, a reaction to our own trauma. There’s even a saying. ‘Hurt people hurt,’ you know? So, from a psychology perspective, I understand it. And I have to accept that many people seem to be having not the longing for peace. They’re still stuck in their own story.”

Lisa said the peace mission to Japan was a success, and that she will never forget the experience of folding paper into tiny origami artworks resembling cranes.

“The legend says that if you fold a thousand peace cranes, you have a free wish. So, we had our group make a thousand peace cranes and put them at the Children’s Peace Monument in Hiroshima. So, does it help for greater peace in the world? I think it’s created a lot of hope that there are more people who build peace and who connect with people and have a big heart,” she said.

Even with all the bad news about wars and international conflicts reported in the mass media that can cause despair and frustration, seeing people from all over the world carrying home a message of peace brings hope, she said.

“In that way, I would say it was very successful. Really, it increased my commitment to peace for myself. And I think I can speak for Brian and the whole group. You know, we’ve already got feedback from the group in Kenya, somebody who works for clean water there,” Lisa said. “We are more than individuals. Let’s work together, let’s network together. So, this energy was clearly in force. And that’s what we brought back here.”

“Peace Pilgrimage From Auschwitz to Hiroshima” takes place on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2-4 p.m. at Ojai Retreat Cultural Center, 160 Besant Road, Ojai. For more information, visit 

By Alex Wilson