Lama Rod Owens Quotes

If we don't do our work, we become work for other people.

There’s something about our identity as activists that is so closely related to the anger that we experience. What would it look like if we formed our activist communities around joy, not the suffering or the anger, as a basis for our change work?

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor E. Frankl

Sometimes it’s okay to think that our anger is trying to protect us. However, it is more truthful to think that it’s actually protecting something else that’s a little deeper than that. It’s protecting our hurt. It’s protecting our broken hearts. The work to turn our attention back to the woundedness is this really intense, profound path of transformation, which doesn’t feel as good as just responding to the anger, because the energy of anger makes us feel powerful.

I have had to learn to invite my broken heart to dine with me at the table. It is meaningless to run now. My broken heart is not a judgment or a crime. It is a detailed record of how I have tried to meet the violence of the world with as much openness as possible.

The most profound practice I have ever been taught by my teachers is simply letting my shit fall apart, developing the courage to sit with all of my rough edges, the ugliness, the destructive and suffocating story lines I have perpetuated about myself, and letting go of the same suffocating storylines others maintain about me.

To begin with, this is not a mindfulness book on how to bypass anger and focus on happiness. Nor is this a book about using any other spiritual path to transform the nature of anger into something more profound or transcendent. This book is about facing our anger and welcoming it as a teacher and friend so it can help us to benefit ourselves and others.

Systems of dominance have co-opted the work of goodness to keep people from disrupting systemic violence.

The body tells the truth regardless of if we speak its language or not. ... Often my practice has focused on trying to meet my body where it is, instead of constantly trying to get it to meet me where I am.

and the thing about white colonist fear and rage is that i have nothing to do with it but my body still becomes a receptacle for this unmetabolized woundedness. at the end of the day i find myself hauling not just my trauma but also the trauma of whiteness.

I do the things that I do because I know that I can die at any second. I experience great suffering when I forget my impermanence. My teachers have taught me to love myself, and that has cause me to love beings in the world. There is no greater work than the work of self-love because it lies at the heart of our liberation from ignorance. I show up because I love. I am present because of love. I am alive because of love. I thrive because I am loved. Radical presence is born out of love. In the end, may all beings be liberated through the celebration and love of the things we all once suffered from.

I believe anger is like a controlled fire. We do controlled fires in forests to create room and space for new growth and to fertilize the soil. But that fire can get out of control if there aren’t any skilled people there controlling that fire. For us, if we have no wisdom, then our anger gets out of control, and it starts burning up everything. I see so many people burning up everything.

the body will always tell the story of our wounded was in a language so direct and simple that it can be too much to bear witness to. as protection, the mind pulls away and keeps itself isolated from the body. the most radical project we could ever engage in during our lives is the project of embodiment. this is the most radical act because there is no liberation without the union of mind and body.

We must allow the anger to be in our experience. I continued on and spoke about letting ourselves be angry as the first step to healing the hurt that is beneath the anger. I talked about my anger and how learning for my anger about all the hurt inside me that the anger was covering. And that if we don’t wrestle with anger, we will never get to the heartbreak. And if we don’t get to the heartbreak, we don’t get to the healing.

Even liberatory self-care remains difficult for many of us because we don’t believe that we deserve care to begin with. I often say that the world is trying to care for us, but we keep sabotaging that care. I frequently sabotaged care from others because I believed that I wasn’t good enough to be cared for. I also believed that I didn’t deserve care because there were so many other people in the world going without it.

we are not experiencing the end of the world, but we are experiencing the end of some provocative and desperately enduring lies we have told ourselves. With the end of lies comes the awakening of truth. And so we are living in a period when we are confronting truth — truth about ourselves and our relationship to death and dying, to systems and institutions of violence, to transhistorical trauma, to the health of our planet, to capitalism, and, ultimately, to the fact that we can no longer continue living like we have in the past. Real truth is unrelenting, like the sun piercing the clouds on an overcast day, and it doesn’t go away just because we can’t handle it. Truth uncovers everything — all the shit that we have spent our lives running away from. And when something is uncovered, even if it’s the most intense individual or collective trauma, it demands to be taken care of.

Choosing aloneness doesn’t mean that I disconnect from the experiences of others, especially their suffering. I don’t think I will ever have the capacity to forget the suffering of others. But what it does mean is that I can notice and hold space for others’ suffering without trying to absorb it into my experience.

Choosing aloneness reminds me that though I belong to others, I still belong to myself, and because of this belonging to myself, I am accountable for my own healing.

Those of us who have not been allowed to be openly angry have often reverted to passive aggressiveness to express our upset without being punished.

trauma may make it difficult for us to be in our bodies because of pain. Therefore, it can be hard to trust myself, and it is hard for me to know what I really need.

It is hard to let go of our ways of being in the world, because we simply do not know who we will become after we let go of our old selves.

To sink beneath the anger or to move through the anger was to recognize the anger for what it was: an indicator that my heart was broken.

In activist communities, our relationship to anger is immature, ill informed, and overly romanticized. We manipulate anger as a false source of energy and inspiration. Many of us have no idea how to really use anger to see the changes we need to see in our communities. Our relationship to anger is a reactive and compulsory one. We feel the anger and respond.

if we don’t do our work, then we become work for other people.