Good Life Project - Lama Rod Owens | Love & Rage

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist minister, author, activist, yoga instructor and authorized Lama, or Buddhist teacher, in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism and is considered one of the leaders of his generation of Buddhist teachers. He holds a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is a co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, along with my friend and past GLP guest, Rev. angel Kyodo williams. Lama Rod is the co-founder of Bhumisparsha, a Buddhist tantric practice and study community. Has been published in Buddhadharma, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle and The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and offers talks, retreats and workshops in more than seven countries. He’s also someone who has spent a lifetime exploring and working with the often blurred lines between love and rage, which also happens to be the title of his latest book, Love & Rage: The Path to Liberation Through Anger (https://bookshop.org/a/22758/9781623174095). Its prophetic truth, timing and honesty and wisdom, in dealing with the multiplicity of challenges this generation is waking up to is both an invitation to a deeper set of truths and a set of practices to help navigate the experience of life in this moment in time.You can find Lama Rod Owens at:Website: https://www.lamarod.com/Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/lamarodowens/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://www.goodlifeproject.com/sparketypes/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So imagine growing up in a community with a generations-long history of trauma and knowing that for you to just kind of move through each day, you had to hide a big part of who you were and how you felt you needed to be in the world. Well, that was the experience of today's guest, Lamarod Owens. Lamarod is a Buddhist minister, author, activist, of today's guest, Lama Rod Owens. Lama Rod is a Buddhist minister, author, activist, yoga instructor, and authorized Lama or Buddhist teacher in the Kagi School of Tibetan Buddhism. And he's considered really one of the leaders of his generation of Buddhist teachers. He holds a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist studies from Harvard Divinity

School and is a co-author of Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, along with an old friend and past Good Life Project guest, Rev. Angel Keodo Williams. Lama Rod is the co-founder of Bhumisparsha, a Buddhist tantric practice and study community. He's been published in Buddha Dharma, Lion's Roar Tricycle, the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and he offers talks and retreats and workshops. He's also someone who has spent a lifetime exploring and working with the often blurred lines between love and rage, which also happens to be the title of his latest book, Love and Rage, The Path to Liberation Through Anger. I know that seems like an odd combination, and we dive into that. We really deconstruct it and understand its logic and its power in this conversation.

The book's prophetic truth, really timing and honesty and wisdom in dealing with the multiplicity of challenges this generation is waking up to is both an invitation to a deeper set of truths and a set of practices to help navigate the experience of life in this moment in time. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary.

I want to take a little bit of a step back in time with you. You grew up in Rome, Georgia, which has, you know, a very sort of a complicated history, you know, in multiple layers, you know, going back to, in no small part, being a part of the Trail of Tears. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, it was very complex, you know, even though, yes, that was one of kind of like the last seeded lands in Georgia for the Cherokee Nation. There were actually Cherokee, members of the Cherokee tribe who actually owned slaves as well in my hometown.

So it was quite complicated. You know, that's a history that we'd never talk about, you know, is that there were Indigenous folks who owned Black African slaves, you know, particularly in the South. But the South in general is just this really complicated place where there's so much trauma still left in the land, right? You know, the trauma of settling and colonization and the genocide of indigenous communities and then the enslavement of people. And then there was civil war, you know, on top of that. And then this brutal system of segregation, you know, in the way that we create relationships and our thoughts and

our speech and our actions. But growing up, you really don't get that. I never had a language to talk about trauma. I didn't actually know what trauma was, you know, like many things growing up, you know, it just felt like that these experiences were other people's experiences and I had a different experience. Right. You know, it wasn't until I, you know, grew older and started exploring mental health, I began to really quite, you know, just intimately understand that, like, I too carried this mountain of trauma really from my ancestral land my homeland you know in the south yeah i mean i'm always fascinated by this the phenomenon of felt experiences that don't quite have a clear source really a clear understanding of really what you're feeling in the moment um have a lineage that where you can sometimes even point to external circumstances but underneath it there

are layers and layers and layers and history and history and history and sometimes it's not until much later in life where you can kind of reflect back and say oh oh that plus that plus that. Well, and it's also the work of developing language to express experience too. And I think I was really fortunate too, because I was intuitively being led into languaging my trauma. I didn't know I was being led, but my experience was definitely having a desire, a hunger to try to talk about my world and my experiences in a way that was as clear as possible. You know, and of course, the process of languaging is very much related to, you know, kind of peeling back layers of experience where the language at the beginning is very coarse and very unclear. And then over time,

through practice, through study, through conversation, and just through basic experiencing, the language gets more refined and it gets clearer, it gets sharper, it gets more direct until you're able to name something really clearly, right? And to name something in a way that it instantly connects to the experiences of others around you, where people, when people hear you talk about your experiences, they say, oh, like me too, you know? And often with me, where people, when people hear you talk about your experiences, they say, oh, like me too, you know, and often with me, you know, people always reach out and say, I never, I could never articulate this thing until I heard you or read you, you know, and that, and that's, you know, that's important because I went through the same process. I had to isolated and suffering, and then we read,

and then we realize that we're having this shared experience. And I just think that, you know, for me, reading was crucial. And I just found that reading was very natural for me, you know, but of course, looking back, I read back then because I wanted language to define my reality. Yeah. And I mean, at the same time, even when you find language, right, on the one hand, it gives you a way to start to understand process, your own personal experience, and potentially share it. But simultaneously with that,

the very circumstance that is leading to trauma in you and to emotion and to feeling, to pain, is also the thing where you've been conditioned to a certain extent not to express that. Because as a black man in the South, growing up where you grew up, and even to this day all over the country, expressing it in a lot of different ways, especially in the early conditioning, is dangerous. Absolutely.

And I just think that many people across many different kinds of identity locations have been conditioned in the same way not to articulate experience because that articulation begins to bring light to systems, you know, that systems that actually shouldn't be operating at all. Right. So like we've, we've been really shut down and that's a very, that mentality, that, that perspective is a very like white middle upper-class mentality. You know, we always say WASPs are very WASPy, you know, where it's like, no, you don't talk about that, actually, right? And then in my experience, as a Black person, a person of slave descent, and growing up within the system, yeah, it was definitely a real thing that my articulation was seen as a threat, you know, because my articulation actually began to shine light on the system that was creating violence for me and many people like me, you know, and no one wants to hear that, particularly if you're the one enjoying the oppression of others, you know, and when I say enjoying, I'm not saying that people are just like consciously going around saying, oh, my God, I'm so glad there are people who are oppressed.

But when I say enjoy, I mean that there are benefits that we're really into because of systematic oppression that we're not actually bringing awareness to and articulating the reality of those benefits, you know, and how they come about, you know, and I, it's, and for all of us, we, we express ourselves at intersections of identities that are both privileged and disprivileged, you know, and for all of us, we have positions of privilege that come out of the disprivilege of others. And we have to name that. We have to articulate it, no matter how uncomfortable that work is. And the same thing for our locations of disprivilege.

Like, why? And we tend to be closer to the disprivilege. You know, it's easier for folks, folks i think in general to name the disprivileged but to bring language into privilege it's threatening it's counter-cultural right it will quite frankly it's un-american you know because right because in the american mythology you know our ideology is like oh it's all about individualism. Like, I only have what I have because I worked for it. You know, which is so shocking that that narrative exists so strongly still when all we have to do, as James Baldwin points out, is read a book, you know, and where people for centuries in this country have

been struggling to articulate that, no, actually, you know, we're moving, you know, through these layers of privilege because we're stepping on the heads of others together and the bodies, you know, of others. And if we talk about american land the physicality of america we are living on the bodies of indigenous americans literally living you know on on on the graves of of native americans who were killed for the land And we're all a part of that. You know, I am, yes, I am descendant of both indigenous communities as well as of enslaved communities, but I still exhibit a settler mentality. I'm still a settler as well.

And it's very complex, right? So that's, again, naming the intersections of privilege and were either faith-based leaders, ministers. And it sounds like part of the expectation was that you would also continue along in that tradition, and yet it starts to feel like it doesn't allow you to be you to a certain extent. Well, you know, it's strange, you know, growing up in church, you know, and my grandfather was a minister. I didn't know my grandfather well because he passed right after I was born, you know, but I grew up with the impact that he had in our communities, very well respected, you know. And then when I was about 13, my mother, you know, began her ministry and she's still, you know, United Methodist minister. And I just felt that it

was so familiar, like the church and religious service was so familiar. And what was also really familiar was teaching and service, community service advocacy. Those were the three things, strangely enough, that were very familiar to me when I was young. You know, the church, community service, and teaching. You know, and as I got older, you know, particularly moving through high school, you know, I thought that I was going to, well, I thought I was going to become a couple different things. I was kind of all over the place. You know, I wanted to be a psychiatrist, too.

So that was another thing that happened. Right. Just in mental health. So I thought I was going to be a psychiatrist. And then I ended up, you know, studying secondary English education, you know, but all the while, you know, people were, you know, my mom was like, oh, I would really love for you to go into the ministry. By the time I hit college, I didn't want to hear anything about religion anymore, quite actually.

But I had a very distinct experience of saying consciously, you know, this wasn't something that, you know, I look back and say, oh, this is what I thought I was saying. I literally said at one point, you know, in college that like, I have to, like, I'm breaking up with this, this God, this religion, because it's just not working. And I'm going to dedicate myself to service. You know, to helping people. You know, I just felt that that was the thing to do. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that you were able to, to dissociate to a certain extent that, you know, the, the tradition you were raised in was not the exact same thing as the notion of service, the notion of teaching that this was one container, but that the, the things that

resonated most deeply with you about it and the offerings like the way to invest yourself was not constrained by it you know that there were other other ways to get out and and simultaneously it sounds like you know part of the struggle for you was you start becoming aware of your sexuality within this container that says you can't be you. Yeah, right. And there was no space to be me, right? So it's like outgrowing something. And you say, okay, well, either I leave this or put this down, you know, or I will continue to suffer growing into something where there's absolutely no space. And I knew people and continue to know people who chose to stay in a container that could not hold them.

You know, and that created immense suffering. You know, and for me, I just looked at the situation and said, you know what, I'm going to choose me now. And fundamentally, back then, I i just something inherently didn't make sense it was something that was very fishy about this whole like organized religion thing you know because it just felt like it was constructed only for a specific kind of person you know and it was it was obvious that that wasn't me, that this wasn't created for me. And somehow I knew that there was somewhere, somewhere where I could go that would hold me, you know, and allow me to be who and what I was.

But, you know, later in my life, I really began to understand that a little more clearer, you know, and for me, again, growing up in the South, growing up in the Black church, Black religion was so pol them as a way to to keep them in line by offering a theology of control, a theology of otherness. Right. And so that transmission of that theology was highly monitored. You know, and in many ways, that became the structure of the Black church. And when I began to really understand that, and I said, oh, like, what does it mean to actually choose a path of practice and belief that was actually about liberation opposed to staying in line. And what would that mean to embrace every single part of who I was in order to experience that freedom in space? Yeah, I mean, it's a powerful thing to arrive at that point. It also sounds like for you, it wasn't a moment in time. This has been a process of gradual evolution, discovery, you know, like awakening.

You know, when you make that decision to step away from the church, you know, at that point in your life, it sounds like there is already a deep well of sadness and anger and futility welling inside of you. I've heard you use the phrase black heartbreak. Yeah. And it's that plus you not being accepted from a sexual identity standpoint, plus everything's really piling into this one place. And it sounds like you found a direction for all of what was inside of you for a moment or for especially in the early days in um certainly the the black radical and prophetic traditions

really called you yeah and you know in my relationship to the black radical prophetic tradition really began in my early teens because i was a reader yeah and i was exposed to all kinds of literature you know primarily back then because of my dad you know who was had also been exposed to that literature and wanted me to read it so i was reading w.e.b. du bois and booker t washington booker t washington isn't necessarily an example of like black prophetic, but he was still a thought leader. He was still someone whose views are still held in value even now. and into these Black Panther movement, the Black Power movement, and studying the Haitian Revolution.

And I had to do that study outside of school because we weren't being assigned Malcolm X and the Panthers in our history class. So I did that study on my own and that really began to form, you know, this belief that like, if I want to be free and happy, but back then it was more about free. If I wanted to be free, then I needed to do something to get free. And that wasn't necessarily about praying to God. It was about getting active and organizing, taking stances, you know, getting educated,

joining others, you know, and working towards a goal, you know, associated with liberation and freedom. And that was my first dharma, if you will, in the Black radical tradition, Black prophetic tradition. It was something that helped me to channel my anger. It gave my anger somewhere to live. And it was

really because of my study in the Black radical tradition that I began to understand the power of the Black church as well. What I was given didn't really resonate with me, but when I was able to step back and to apply this lens of Black agency, for instance, I began to say, oh, but when I was able to step back and to apply this lens of Black agency,

for instance, I began to say, oh, the Black church was actually functioning in a certain way that was not able to identify moving through the church as a practitioner. And then, you know, earlier you spoke of this kind of Black heartbreak, right? And it's, the heartbreak is palpable and evident in the Black church. And I saw it, you know, that was very, it was very present, but like it was so hard for us to talk about. And I knew that so much of my path

as I got older was to talk about the heartbreak. And to talk about the heartbreak in a way that I framed that narrative of the heartbreak and to talk about the heartbreak in a way that I framed that narrative of the heartbreak around freedom, not around overwhelm, not around continued suffering, but what it meant to articulate the heartbreak and then that articulation actually opening the door to a kind of openness and deeper vulnerability and an experience of letting go you know being through with certain heartbreaks and then just offering this back you know and just saying yeah i'm through with this now i'm going to choose happiness

i've mourned enough yeah which is you know on, just it's time to choose happiness in reality. Yeah. You know, it is a much more complex and often long and deep and studied unfolding if we ever get to that place. And of course, you know, it also depends on a certain level, how we even define happiness. Yeah. You know, we're not talking about just getting to a place where life is good everything's happy-go-lucky but right it's a different context you know yeah you know choosing happiness means that at some point i accept what's happening that doesn't i i don't it's not when i say accept it doesn't mean agreeing with or condoning. I'm saying this is happening. But to make that step, to take that step means that I have to contend with the heartbreak

that comes with acceptance. I can no longer live within a fantasy of what the world is. I can't continue to hang out in my hoping for things to be different. Hope is still very important for me, but I have to be realistic and say, at this moment, right now, this is what's happening. And there's a kind of soberness that arises. And that soberness comes, again, from having to hold space for the heartbreak that arises and that soberness comes again from having to hold space for the heartbreak that

arises that oh like i have to i have to touch into this reality like i have to touch the ground because i've been afraid of the ground like we're afraid of touching the ground because the ground is dirty you know when i touch the ground i'm touching into reality and then i move into the heartbreak and i let the heartbreak be there and the heartbreak doesn't have to be overwhelming because actually the nature of my mind is much greater than a heartbreak right if i if i use like my tantric language you I would say, yeah, and the heartbreak is actually just an expression of my mind itself. And if I can realize that, then there's a freedom that begins to arise. I'm no longer reacting to this energy because I realize that the essence of this is just this essence of spaciousness and emptiness and just like this energy that's moving and taking

shape in different ways. And I can just watch it and let it be there, right? And my reality begins to shift. It changes, right? And then I'm sitting in a reality. And when I get through that heartbreak and I want to also say that heartbreak doesn't just disappear. It just stays there, but I'm still holding it. It's just there, right? And then there's a soberness and then a contentment that arises, right? And where you say, yeah, this is the world, right? And now how can I choose the best way to take care of myself and to do the work and getting

myself free and getting others around me free? Yeah. I mean, part of my curiosity, I have a lot of curiosities around this. Part of it is when we aspire to step into this state, this place, so often what leads to it is action fueled by, as you've shared, anger, rage. And because there is pain, there's suffering, there's physical violence that has often led to this psychic and emotional violence that has led to a certain place. So I'm fascinated by this notion of, I don't know if the right language is letting go of that or transmuting it or the process of moving from there and saying, this still matters to me. My external world is still largely the same, but I need to change my internal world in a way and still take action and be in the world around me and be a part of shifting. The journey from that place where there is a certain anger and a certain rage to the place that you've just described, it feels like a brutally hard transition.

Well, yeah. Well, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. It was, you know, it took me about 15 years to do that. And that was heavy labor on my part. That wasn't casual, informal,

you know, weekend work. It was every day and giving up a lot to go deep into those experiences. But, you know, the work is really just about transforming our relationship to the world, right? In the world, you know, when we transform our relationship, it's not that the world just instantly changes. It means that I have an agency in how I'm choosing to react to the world, to the forces around me, right?

And it feels natural to assume that if you get to that that not a lot of people have reached this level that you've reached and then it becomes an ethical mandate for you to help others because you know what the experience of being lost deeply fixated on the trauma feels like. Right? You know, and so we're not trying to bypass anything. You know, but there is, you know, when I think about Buddhism, there is this path of what we call solitary realizers, where it's like people get free and then they're like,

okay, great great i'm getting the hell out of here and i think that's i think that's legit you know that's that's also a part of my belief system it's like yeah you get free you know i'm talking about awakening like you awaken to the nature of reality and then you just head on, you know, you're like, you know, I, I think that's fine. But for me, I choose to whatever realization I experienced, I choose to return back to places to help people come out of the same kinds of suffering that I was able to come out of. I only did that because there were people who came back and got me, right? So I had teachers who did this for me. They had teachers who did that for them. That's what's called lineage.

You know, there are people who have come back over and over and over again and have sacrificed immensely in order to pull people out of the trauma, of the violence. And because I realize what has been done for me, then I also am ethically mandated to offer that same help to others. Yeah. whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. interestingly I mean it's also you describe this impulse towards service and teaching from a very young age. And it's also returning to that impulse for you. It's sort of like if there's a script that has run in your head for as long as you can remember that says, this is part of why I'm here, then that's sort of like, it's part of the path. For you, the 15 years or so that you've described and that you're still within,

it sounds like it really does begin with this introduction to Buddhism. You move through the traditional church upbringing. To a certain extent, Black radicalism and prophetic tradition becomes your church in a certain way for a certain window of your life. But there's still a lot of pain. There's still a lot of suffering. It's not processing that through. And it sounds like Buddhism was the thing that allowed, that kind of started to open the release valve to a certain extent. Well, Buddhism named suffering.

And that sold me off the bat. It was the first teaching of suffering. Right? You know? Yeah, for a lot of people, that's a turnoff. For me, I just think that's one of the kindest things that I had ever encountered was for this profound path to say, oh, you're suffering. Like, you're not imagining this. Right?

Well, relatively. On a relative level, this is happening. Ultimately, not so much. say oh you're suffering like you're not imagining this right well relatively you know on the relative level this is happening ultimately not so much but relatively like you are definitely moving through a lot of discomforts and you have to start there you know and i think there is there are certain paths who invite us to start with the happiness you you know, but, but I don't know how to do that, you know, but being encouraged to start where it hurts was this profound, profound permission for me. That was the language that I was looking for that I was like, oh, I am really uncomfortable. I'm suffering. Right. And it's okay because everyone else is as well, especially the ones who claim that they're not suffering.

They're in the most suffering, right? And so that took me from that basic truth into a deep relationship with what discomfort was and how discomfort arose, you know, and that the mind was the root of liberation. in detail as Dharma and Buddhism offered it. That the mind had to be awakened in order for social liberation to happen. You know, and here's the pedagogy to do that. And that's what, you know, that was the next thing that sold me.

Here's a pedagogy, you know, and just, you know, you're instructed to take these teachings and work them, you know, you just work them out. And working the teachings out produce more insight, more wisdom. And you begin to feed off of that, that production of wisdom, of clarity. It's quite interesting, too, to study some, you know, for me to study some of these great leaders you know um that i idolized and how many of them had a secret practice of meditation or prayer yoga you know rosa parks was a you know a yogi oh no kidding i'd never heard yeah yeah there were pictures um

you know there are pictures of her doing yoga, actually, which is so profound when you think about that. But I thought, okay, how can I do more work to bridge this liberatory mind teaching with these liberatory teachings of the relative world together. And that was just something that started naturally happening without, I mean, I didn't sit down and say one day, okay, I'm going to bring this together. But again, it was the hunger, you know, for me to bridge all these parts of who and what I was. And that has made, you know, for me, all the difference. I mean, well, that has shaped the way that I teach and offer instruction. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like that becomes really

the foundation of the notion of radical dharma, right? You know, spiritual liberation is bound to social liberation, to societal liberation, to societal liberation. And that you can't just do the work outside with the external circumstances. You've got to work on the outside world and also the inside world. Exactly. And there's no way to unbind them. Absolutely.

And I was kind of wandering through the world, you know, until, you know, I met Reverend Angel, you know, and we got together and we started like creating this kind of notion of radical Dharma. And that for me was a way to ground all of these things that I was thinking about, but didn't really have a foundation at all, nor a container to kind of place them in. And Radha Padana became that container for me. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned the pedagogy that is built into the Buddhist path. This effectively

becomes your pedagogy in terms of how do we relate these two things, spiritual and social and ethical liberation, you know? So this is the, you know, these are the five pieces of the puzzle for this particular pursuit. You know, it's, it's interesting. We're both, Rev Angel's a friend of both of ours and just an amazing person as well. As you're developing this, you reference actually in your new book, Love and Rage, sort of like being out and teaching with her. And there's an evolutionary question that sort of gets presented to you that leads to sort of like this evolving body of work around love and rage. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, you know, and that moment came really before that moment, you know, just the 2016 presidential elections that just kind of blindsided everyone. And afterwards, we were all just really pissed off and scared and traumatized, you know? And so those are the questions I kept getting as a teacher. What are we going to do? What do we do with anger? What do we do with the hurt? You know, it was just so much, right? You know, and I didn't really want to write anything about

that because I just felt so uninterested in talking about anger and hurt, you know, in around 2017, Reverend Angel and I were teaching at Columbia Law School. I had a friend of mine from graduate school who was now in law school and had asked us to come. And, you know, we're just sitting there, we're taking questions about mindfulness and race. You know, there was a young Black man who was a little younger than me, probably, you know, who was like, how, how do I choose happiness when I'm angry? Right. You know, and we answered the question and it was just the last sign for me. I just looked at him and I said, Oh, like you need something.

Right. And no one else is doing it. Right. You know, and, you know, our publisher for Radical Dharma happened to be there that evening. And that's when I made a commitment to do this work. And then, you know, this work was just immense emotional labor for us, for myself. I think that's why i wasn't interested and then i just i just i had to do the emotional labor for myself and it became i had to learn we talk about language i had to learn a new language to write that book and so i think why it took so long for me to get it out. That was developing a new language I hadn't seen before, read. I had to develop a language that met the times,

that met people where they were. But I had to figure that out for myself. Again, you know, as James Baldwin talked about, where he says, like, if this hurt you, then it hurt me first. Right? As a writer, like, as a writer, like, you have to understand that this went through my body and my mind. First, I had to deal with this before I offered it to you. And if it hurts you, you have to know that, like, you're just having the experience that i was having right so i had to hurt through this book yeah you pose the question in the work how do we tend to the wound beneath the anger i think the word specifically you wrote if we don't wrestle with the anger we never get to the heartbreak and if we don't get to the heartbreak we don't get to the heartbreak. And if we don't get to the heartbreak, we don't get to the healing. Yeah.

So many people are so, they're bypassing the heartbreak. And you can't, you have to go to the wound. Right? How do you heal if you're not dealing with the wound itself? And I know absolutely that it's terrifying. Absolutely. I go to these places regularly, actually. But I know that healing can only happen if I go and if I show up and offer a lot of see that the woundedness is just a teacher for us. But even the woundedness is trying to love us.

Right? And it's loving us because it's showing us where it is. And it's being vulnerable and open if we can just pay attention. And of course the whole process, paying attention, holding space, letting go over and over again, that's like a really basic contemplative practice over and over. of that letting go is create a sense of self. And when those things are disrupted, then our sense of self is disrupted. And that's where the loss arises.

You know, as in, you know, Stevie Nicks, you know, and says in Landslide, you know, I've built my whole life around you. You know, I've been afraid of changing. You know, and it's just one of my favorite songs. Actually, that's a song that I am often reflecting on, you know, like, because it's like a lot of us get stuck because we've used things around us and relationships and people to define a sense of who we are.

And we don't want to disrupt that. But it will be disrupted because things change. Things die. Things are destroyed. Things dissipate. We're always changing. And if we choose not to show up to that change. There's the grieving there. We have to choose the grieving in order to negotiate the energy of loss.

The energy, well, the energy specifically of longing for permanence. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense it part of what i'm wondering also as i hear you share that is when on the one hand you feel the weight of current and present harm you see the systems all around you that continue to create that. And there's a deep wounding underneath, but also this rage and anger on the surface. choosing to step away from that can be conflated with choosing to step away from a commitment to change and rather than saying well is there another source fuel well that's that's the misconception anger isn't fueling our work of liberation. It's love that fuels the work of liberation. Tell me more. You know, love is something that, you know, many of us have been beat over the head with.

You know, again, I grew up in the South. You know, I live in Atlanta now. And I live like a mile from Dr. King's, you know, the MLK National Memorial site. So it's like, oh, you know, and growing up with Dr. King, you know, my whole life in Georgia was love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love,

love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, because I just, I didn't see, or I didn't understand how to connect to actual examples of love. I was being loved and cared for. I just didn't get that, you know, and it I didn't understand love until I began this really intense work of loving myself. And then that's where love actually came into focus. And I said, oh, this is not this romantic, idealized, you know, thing. This is this hard work of learning how to accept myself and to hold space for all of the woundedness. And going through that and saying, you know what?

It's okay. And I'm not the only one. You know, over and over again. And so understanding that and coming back out into liberation struggle, the struggle for me or my work in the struggle is fueled by my deep wish for people to be safe and happy. That's what fuels the work. That's what makes the work. That's what makes the work sustainable.

Because I believe all beings, regardless of who you are, regardless of how much you hurt me, you deserve to be free, safe, and happy. And that's what motivates the work. Now, the anger is still there. And the anger actually helps me to understand what's wrong and how things are wrong. It reminds me that I'm still connected to the world and to the welfare of beings and to the welfare of myself. It reminds me that there's hurt still present. And that I can use that energy of anger as I take care of myself.

I can use that energy and channel it back into the work of liberation. Because it keeps me sensitive to the world around me. It keeps me sensitive to the realities of others around me as well, particularly. It always tells me that there's still imbalance. And of course, yeah, there are all kinds of different angles. Righteous anger, for instance, which is still legitimate. Yeah, we've been hurt in really significant ways because of injustice.

Anger arises from that. I have a right to be with that. And I have a right to be heard. I have a right for my anger to be held and witnessed. And the wounding that comes for many of us comes from the ways in which our anger has been erased, sidetracked, invalidated. Your anger isn't important. Who cares? Or, in my case, my anger is dangerous.

Because my anger actually highlights the fact that there's a debt that's owed. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals no pressure to be who you're not just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are so no matter your era make it your best with peloton find your push find your power peloton visit peloton at onepeloton.ca the apple watch series 10 is. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot.

Flight risk. It's so powerful in a lot of ways. My curiosity around it also is the shift where you're not entirely letting go of the anger because you can't. And it's important not to, to the extent that it is a signal of the work still yet to be done and the existence of harm and sources of harm in the world still to this day. And yet, if that remains, tell me if I'm getting this right, if that remains the central source fuel of what motivates you, It may motivate action, but it simultaneously consumes you. So it's almost like shifting anger to the signal that tells you, almost like your compass and shifting love or these indicia, the way you described love rather than the sort of holiday card notion of it that we're talking about.

It's not an offering to other people. It is an act of self-care, of self-preservation, of saying that I matter and this is the way that I can still do the work in the world and be able to take care of myself along the way. I think that's absolutely right. And that also, that love is the container for the anger. Like my anger expresses itself within the energy of love. That love is what helps me to remember that people are human and suffer just like me. No matter if you're being violent towards me, you're still human. You're not evil, you're not all the things that we like to say about people, but you're still human. Someone loves you, and you love someone else. My early teacher around love used to always say that no matter how vile someone seems, someone loves them and that they love someone. And that's evidence that love can be cultivated for them, even if they're choosing not

to embrace that and express that in the moment that they're expressing violence towards you. And this isn't, you know, I know people listen to this and they say, oh, this is so, you know, whatever, right? Love, whatever. And I come from that. I come from a place where I was like, fuck love. Let's just go and burn everything down, right? You know, and then getting older older deepening the practice it was important for me

to understand that no actually i want to be sustainable like i want to create instead of destroying things right i don't think it's cool for the world to become an object of my anger or a target for my anger. Because I struggle, it doesn't mean the whole world should be burned down. But, I mean, it's easy, well, the one that's easy to say that, but when you say, because I struggle, it doesn't mean the whole world should be burned down. And yet, if you perceive the world as the source of your struggle, it's complicated.

Well, and what's complicated because we don't see it as complicated. Yeah. Like, it's too simple. The world is the cause of my suffering well what's the world right to begin with the world isn't this like one solid thing the world is a complex eco you know ecological system of these different parts you know creating different realities for different people so you know part of that is stepping back and holding space for our suffering

and then the world this idea of the world changes significantly right you know for me early on yeah my practice the world was this huge antagonist right the world was just the world was just this antagonist that was trying to kill me. And then once I started the practice, I began to see that actually, I was trying to be loved by different aspects of the world. There were people trying to love me, right? And I never realized that. And that expression of love was experiences that I started hooking onto and holding onto, that people were trying to get me free through kindness, through emotional labor, through service for me. You know, my mother, my family, they were trying to get me free. I just didn't get that.

The church was trying to get me free in a specific way that I didn't get. Right. You know, and so I began to see that and say, and I began to say, oh, okay, the world is actually full of love. But my hurt, my trauma blocks that because trauma becomes a lens that we view everything out of if we're not taking care of the trauma. The wind blowing becomes a traumatic experience. The sunshine, I mean, puppies and kittens can be, I mean, that's just kind of the reality of trauma itself. You know, and for many of us, yeah, we can't help that. Like we get triggered.

We can't help that. Right. But that's also the nature of trauma. Everything is colored by this, you know, this energy that we're trying to move through, that's stuck in our experience. You know, that's creating these obstacles of perception and experience. Yeah. And not all of us are going to make it.

That's a big part of it. I, you know, this sounds really great, you know, and I say, oh, all you have to do is pay attention and do this and that and read my book and you'll be fine. It's just really not the reality either it's not all of us will have the capacity to embrace love in this life in this body yeah i mean there's you know a huge part of the process is and i guess this is what a lot of the practices that you speak to and that you write about and that you teach revolve around, I think, seeing more clearly, not welcoming, but acknowledging discomfort, unease, allowing yourself to experience it rather than doing everything possible to push it away.

And that doesn't mean being complacent in your circumstance. It means acknowledging that this is my reality in this moment in time rather than sort of like living in a delusional state and then embracing the practices that say, well, like, how can I be okay in this moment in time without saying I'm not going to take action externally? I'm not going to walk away from this. But at the same time, how can I be okay, you know, through my own experience, through my own practices, through my own intentions. Yeah. I mean, whether we are talking about in the context of race, in the context of trauma that has happened in any other part of life, in the context of the source of any suffering that is deep and sustained, you know, like these are the questions and they're brutally hard ones to grapple with. And there's no, I think the American mindset, the Western mindset is so pill-based. Like, where's the switch that I can flip to make this all, to fix it?

You know, rather than, oh, what if the answer is a sustained and long commitment to a series of actions and practices and ways of being without immediate gratification. Right. Well, that's called work. Yeah. You know, that's the work, right? And we can't always expect to be comfortable in the work. You know, and it's not just this lifetime. In my belief system, it's multiple lifetimes that we're working.

You know, we do pieces at a time right after life we get a piece we do what we can we go to the next one you know and that's you know that's something that i have found to be very true for my experiences you know birth and rebirth and so forth you know that like i have a clear sense of what my work is in this life. You know, we talked about this earlier, like when I was younger, I already knew what I was going to be doing, you know, at a young age. I just didn't know how that was going to happen. Nor did I know that I knew. Like, I just had these vague impressions of what I thought I would do. You know, the teaching, the religion, the service, right?

The mental health, like all those things were really important to me. And I tried to get into these things in really different ways. And all of a sudden this happens. It's like, no, actually, who doesn't? It's actually how you're going to get into this door of doing all of this. You know, there's a lot you know even there even then there's a lot of of teaching around again the black prophetic tradition how do we read the times like how do we show up and pay attention to what's happening now? Because what's happening now is just a pattern that's going to keep repeating itself over and over and over again, right? If I can just learn the pattern and I enter into this kind of profound

path where I'm actually being taken care of, when we enter the pattern, we're being cared for. Because the pattern is just the energy that we've created that's actually propelling us towards freedom towards liberation so virtue is a virtuous path that we enter into right and to to acknowledge that means that like we get swept up into something that is leading us towards freedom i mean when i think about the um allowing yourself to be swept up in that again you know there's wouldn't that be amazing and at the same time it requires a certain amount of openness and honesty and clear sight and letting go, identifying the wound, grieving it, allowing yourself to move away from it while holding on to... It's interesting.

I think a lot of anger, part of it is emotion, part of it is circumstance, and part of it is data. And it's like you were saying, we want to hold on to the data because that's the signal that allows us to understand and to continue to understand where to focus our energies. But if there's a way to hold on to the data while releasing the harm that it causes us, not just because of the external circumstance that's imposed on us, but because of our grasping to the circumstance and to our experience of it, then we gain a sense of agency over our own liberation that is somewhat disconnected from external circumstances. Does that sound true to you? Yeah, I think that agency is the key there.

Yeah. Like we have to understand that it is for us to take responsibility for our own experiences, particularly experiences of mind and body, and to do whatever we can to do that. Because again, we're going to be in different places with this agency, right do whatever we can to do that. Because again, we're going to be in different places with this agency, right? And we can only do what our resources allow us to do in any given moment. But that agency is so much at the heart of Dharma and Buddhism that I can actually begin to make choices

about how I relate to my mind and the external world. And that no one's going to heal me. That ultimately is me as healing myself through the profound support of people and communities and teachings and other medicines. I have to put the effort in myself to experience that freedom, that healing, actually. And allow ourselves to feel along the way, which is not always the easiest thing, for all different reasons. I often wonder if sometimes as a white person existing in this world the way it is right now and having conversations, I feel like there's a certain tendency often to intellectualize rather than feel because it makes it more comfortable for me, which doesn't serve anyone. It doesn't serve the circumstance.

It doesn't serve the people who are being harmed by it. And at the end of the day, it doesn't serve me. And yet I think that tends to be so often the go-to. Yeah. To leave the body, move into the mind, because it's easier. Because the mind can be in the past, it can be in the future, and that's wonderful too.

But the body is right here recording a specific kind of data that's actually telling us about how we're literally showing up in this particular moment. Without that data, how can we actually ever develop this kind of wisdom that's about liberation? Yeah. As you described, so much of the practice is about coming back into your body, being present and coming back into your body, which feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So sitting in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? For me, to live a good life means that I'm living a life that is as clear and

conscious as possible. But I know as much as I can about how I'm showing up and how I'm impacting the world around me. Thank you. Thank you. a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com. Or just click the link in the show notes.

And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation, share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. See you next time. thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet-black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew and actual results will vary.