Lama rod owens love and rage series#

I had redirected it, and deeply internalized it. LRO: What I began to see was that anger was deeply turned around, like I wasn’t acting angry. KJ: What was the relationship between the anger and the depression?

But as I moved out of my early twenties, I began to see what people were talking about, and for me, clinical severe depression was really the first time that I began to understand the impact of anger in my experience.

LRO: Yeah, it was so ingrained, like anger was so much a part of my life, and I was heavily in activism so it was really fueling something for me. KJ: That reaction to being told you were angry. I would be like, Fuck you, and I couldn’t see that reaction as an expression of anger. People would come and sit me down, and they would be like, This is what I’m seeing. They were coming to me saying, “Rod, I think you have a problem with anger.” I couldn’t see it it was so normalized for me. Actually, there were senior practitioners that I was around who were coming to me initially, before I really had a practice. Lama Rod Owens: I would say anger was really the first material I had to work with, that began my practice. To start, I know you hold a dual role in your community as a dharma teacher and as well as an activist, and someone who spends a lot of time in politically active communities, and so I’m wondering for you-how do you hold the role of anger? And is it different for you in moving in these two communities? Is there something you bring from one to inform the other? How does that work for you? I was really working with not performing anger, because I needed to stay alive. Kate Johnson: I am just really excited to talk to you about this topic of love and rage and accessing the wisdom that’s available in the dharma for working with our own rage, for working with rage that we experience coming from outside sometimes directed at us, and certainly in this turbulent political time it feels like a prescient topic.

Lama rod owens love and rage series#

It is a necessary text for these times.This conversation is from the series “U Mad?” hosted by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. The result is a book that serves as both a balm and a blueprint for those seeking justice who can feel overwhelmed with anger-and yet who refuse to relent. Love and Rage weaves the inimitable wisdom and lived experience of Lama Rod Owens with Buddhist philosophy, practical meditation exercises, mindfulness, tantra, pranayama, ancestor practices, energy work, and classical yoga. Instead, it is one that offers a potent vision of anger that acknowledges and honors its power as a vehicle for radical social change and enduring spiritual transformation. This is not a book about bypassing anger to focus on happiness, or a road map for using spirituality to transform the nature of rage into something else. In Love and Rage, Lama Rod Owens, coauthor of Radical Dharma, shows how this unmetabolized anger-and the grief, hurt, and transhistorical trauma beneath it-needs to be explored, respected, and fully embodied to heal from heartbreak and walk the path of liberation. White supremacy in the United States has long necessitated that Black rage be suppressed, repressed, or denied, often as a means of survival, a literal matter of life and death.

In the face of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence, how can we metabolize our anger into a force for liberation?