Energy is popping and exploding, and I think that is an important sign that we must shift into a culture of care, a culture of mourning, and a trauma-informed culture. also the language of people who are hurting and don’t know how to take care of themselves. King said, “Riots are the language of the unheard.” I take it further. That’s going to usher us into a new place.ĭr. We have to choose to be embodied we have to choose to touch into and metabolize that brokenheartedness. Can you say more about that? We’ve been running away from our collective heartbreak for centuries and centuries-particularly in this country-and now we’ve reached the breaking point. The theme of what you call “brokenheartedness” and the struggle to survive it runs throughout the book. For a while, the dharma explained everything, but then I saw that there were things that Buddhism was saying that didn’t line up with certain experiences in my life. (I recently wrote a chapter for the upcoming book Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation and Freedom about my experiences with ayahuasca and plant medicine.)īuddhism is definitely my root practice, but I also practice other indigenous, ancestral religions-I consider myself a tantric shaman. There are other spiritual paths and traditions I’ve trained in that shape how I see the world, including yoga, Hinduism, and plant medicines. What are you “coming out” about now? I’m more than just Buddhist. And every few years there’s been a major coming out. But I tuned into those messages from the world, because I’ve been looking for freedom my whole life. Some of us will die never figuring out who and what we are outside the system. We’re born into systems, and these systems are informing us they’re shaping our development. How did you go about bringing your whole self to this project? I looked at my life and I looked at the way in which the world-and by world I mean people, organizations, family, friends, lovers, and so forth-was always trying to help me to be myself. Your experiences of activism, racial struggle, and queerness play a prominent part in Love and Rage alongside formal knowledge and practice. Tricycle spoke with Lama Rod about his new and timely book and how he approaches Buddhist teachings with an activist spirit. Lama Rod’s new book, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger (June 2020, North Atlantic Books) serves as a guide for transforming our anger with love and grace in a moment when collective calls for freedom are ringing ever more loudly. In 2018, Lama Rod co-founded Bhumisparsha, an inclusive online sangha, with fellow Vajrayana teacher Lama Justin von Budjoss. In his own words, Lama Rod Owens is a “Black, queer, cisgender, and male-identified, fat, mixed-class Buddhist teacher and minister, yoga teacher, and shit-talking Southerner.” He is also a Harvard Divinity School graduate and the co-author of the seminal 2016 book Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation. During this time of uprising and reckoning, disillusion and disorientation, pain and loss, it’s hard to think of a more relevant voice than Lama Rod Owens’s.
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