Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge.
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And welcome. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, I am pleased to have the chance to introduce you to someone who I consider a friend, a brother—Lama Rod Owens. Let me tell you a little bit about Lama Rod. He is a self-described Black Buddhist Southern Queen who is an authorized lama in the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, with a master of divinity degree from Harvard. He’s the coauthor of the book Radical Dharma and the author of the widely acclaimed book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger.
Lama Rod is a truth teller. He’s someone who has a deeply sensitive nature, and he leads with strength. He is someone that I think of as a good kind of troublemaker, who has a gift for balancing weighty topics with a sense of lightness and humor. With Sounds True, Lama Rod—I am so proud to say—is the author of a new book. It’s called The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors. Lama Rod, welcome.
Lama Rod Owens: Thank you. Thank you so much. How moving.
TS: Welcome, friend. To begin, you start your book with a powerful sentence. “I am a New Saint.” And I thought, what a bold beginning. You’re not waiting until after your death, somebody could proclaim whatever. You’re just writing your own book here in the middle of your life, saying, “I am a New Saint.” OK, what does it mean to be a New Saint?
RO: Yeah, you know what? You have to proclaim it. You can’t be willy-nilly about things anymore. It’s like if this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to say, I’m going to proclaim that this is the path. Because when you undertake the path of the New Saint, which is really about developing a deep care for ourselves, developing the same care for others, developing this deep intention to get involved, and helping to reduce harm and suffering in the world, that’s really intense. And it’s not something that we can be really indirect and ambiguous about. It’s like, “Maybe I’ll do this, maybe I’ll do that.” No. When we’re confronting real harm, real violence in the world, we have to be direct.
And so when I call myself a New Saint, I am proclaiming this is what I’m doing, this is what I will be doing for the rest of my life, and if possible, for the rest of all of my lives to come. This is the most important thing that anyone can do with their life is to say, “This is how I’m going to help. I’m going to commit myself to this path of helping for as long as I can.”
TS: You talk about this notion of awakened care. Tell me more about that. What’s awakened care?
RO: Yeah. Awakened care comes out of this Buddhist notion of bodhicitta. And bodhicitta is this altruistic attitude that we’re practicing only to help others. And our practice helps us, but I’m only doing this because I really want to be of help for others, and to ultimately help people achieve liberation from suffering.
And so when I was thinking about the book and thinking about bodhicitta, I asked myself, “But what is my experience of bodhicitta?” And the first word that came to mind was “care.” OK, so I care. I care about myself, I care about the world, I care about people. But there’s more in this experience of care.
And so as I unpacked it, I found that there were streams of compassion, which is the wish for people to be free from harm and to do something to free people. And I found streams of love, which is really this deep desire to want people to be happy and resourced. And I found joy, right? Joy for me is rooted in deep appreciation, but joy is this fluid open space that allows me to do really important work and have a deep gratitude for the work that I’m doing.
And so all of that for me felt like it was streaming together, and it was something that I felt like I was drawing upon. And so “care” turned into “awakened care” when all of these streams come together. So this really profound care that says, “No, it’s not that I’m just going to stand here and send positive vibes, or well wishes, or prayers, or thoughts,” as we often do in national tragedies. No, this means that I am actually going to move into a direct relationship to the suffering of the world, including my suffering and the suffering of others. And I’m going to disrupt that suffering, right? And I’m going to call in joy to support that work, right? Because this is the most important thing that I can offer anyone is support and disrupting their experience of suffering.
TS: When you talk about this awakened care, your way of describing a kind of contemporary bodhicitta, I’m curious, what does it feel like in your heart center, if you will? And do you feel it there? Do you feel it throughout your whole body? Describe it for me—these streams, you said, coming together.
RO: It feels like these streams kind of coming down into the top of my head and then kind of collecting in my heart, and my heart center feels really expansive, and fluid, and clear. It feels nourishing. The sense that I get, it’s like coming upon a spring, a clear, pure spring in the forest, and being so thirsty that you kind of bend over or reach down and begin to sip from that stream. And that stream is the most pure, nourishing water you’ve ever drank. And that’s how I feel when I begin to really open up to awakened care.
On top of that, just space, just intense space, and openness, and fluidity. I feel nourished throughout my body. I feel held, I feel tended to, I feel like my expression of awakened care is first tending to me and taking care of me first. And then whatever fills me up and however I begin to overflow, the overflow is what I extend to others as an expression of awakened care. So I don’t feel depleted when I’m expressing this. I just feel like I’m just overflowing into the world.
TS: In The New Saints, you describe how you can sometimes think of your own work as a healer teacher as a type of unusual laying on of hands. And I thought it would be interesting to connect that to this notion of these streams of awakened care flowing through you to others. And how do you understand this notion of your version of laying hands?
RO: Well, laying hands comes so directly out of my ancestry, out of the healers of my family, particularly my grandfather, James Moses Holiday, who was a Baptist minister, preacher. And I was told later in life actually that he had this gift, almost like a hidden gift, of laying hands on people, which is energy work.
And for me, hands have always been really important for me. I’ve been so obsessed with my hands. I’m also really interested in other people’s hands, because hands also for me, rooted in my ancestry, is about work, is about caring for others. It’s about doing for others. It’s ultimately about how we get involved, like my hands are how I get involved. I touch things, I touch the world. I shape the world and shape the world around what I need the world to be or what others need as well.
And so awakened care for me can flow into the work of my hands. As I touch, I touch the world gently, but directly. And that is an expression of awakened care as well.
And so, so much of these images of hands and of care is really rooted within my ancestry. I come from formerly enslaved people. I come from Africans. These are my ancestors. And I come from people who have had to embody and actualize deep care for our community in order to survive systemic violence in this world. Right? So this book is not just a Buddhist book, but it’s also an ancestral book honoring my ancestors and the awakened care that they actualized that has helped me be in the world to do this work.
TS: In The New Saints, you talk about how a New Saint is someone who is in sync, in partnership with the unseen world, with ancestral forces. How does that roll for you, Lama Rod?
RO: Yeah. First of all, it’s understanding that I am situated on land, the ancestral lands—in this case of the Creek, Muscogee, and Cherokee people. And I feel the elders on this land. I feel the consciousness of the land itself. I feel my ancestors around me. I feel my home, the home that I’m currently present and full of spirits who are also a part of this work of supporting me. I feel as if the world is much more dynamic than what we can sense through our sense faculties. There’s more to perceive than just the phenomenal world.
And for me, I have made it a point to reconnect to the unseen, because I feel like there’s so much benefit, so much help that’s waiting to be tuned in to if I can just remember how to tune back into the resources of the unseen.
And for me, also just acknowledging that so much of how I have understood the ways in which I have been colonized and have descended from colonized people is directly related to the ways in which, at some point, my ancestors were told that our belief in the unseen was savage or evil, and those beliefs were replaced by something else that could more easily disrupt our connection to the unseen. Which in turn, disrupts our agency to get free and to gather the resources that we need to be well. And ultimately to be well, we need to be free from occupation, and colonialism, and systematic racism, and so forth and so on.
So for me, at the end of the day, it’s just this deep feeling that I am not alone. And not only am I not alone, I am always being cared for by the unseen world no matter where I go.
TS: The subtitle of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors—and Lama Rod, I want you to talk right now, if you will, because you’ve talked about awakened care, this love and compassion and joy that can flow through us, being supported by the unseen world. Talk to that person whose heart is broken, and they say right now, “Look, [I] feel so much of this streaming through me. What I feel more is the pain of this time, this brokenheartedness.”
RO: And I think one of the first things that I always say is to contemplate that you’re not the only one feeling this right now, while brokenheartedness in general can feel very isolating. And so for me, when I find myself in those places when I feel disconnected, I say, “No. I am not the only being in the world who feels this heaviness, this sadness, or this despair.” And this is natural to feel this, because I care about things. I care about myself, I care about people, I care about the world, I care about the planet. And of course, I’m going to feel some despair around the overwhelming harm that beings and the planet are experiencing. Yes, that feels like a response in a way to the anxiety of wanting people to survive and to be well.
So I started with that, and that begins to open my heart a lot more, that actually I belong to a community of beings who all care and who are all struggling to work through this experience of brokenheartedness. And then when that space opens, then I can start connecting to these different pieces of awakened care, like compassion. Yes, I want people to be free from harm. And what can I do? And the love begins to awaken where it’s like, yeah, and I want people to be happy. I want people to have what they need.
Then next comes the gratitude, which again, opens the door to joy for me, where I’m like, I have this incredible opportunity to do this work for myself and for others, because I believe ultimately that this is emotional labor, collective emotional labor. When I open like this and begin to connect to these aspects of awakened care, I’m doing emotional labor for our collective. I’m taking on, I’m processing, I’m metabolizing. And in doing so, I’m beginning to lift some of this heaviness. Maybe just a little bit, but I’m lifting something. And that’s all incredibly important in this path.
But again, just coming back, it’s like this aloneness. And I cut through that aloneness or that sense of isolation through remembering that I’m part of a collective, and I’m part of a lot of people who are trying to be of help right now.
TS: You use this term “emotional labor”—because I’ve never really heard that in description of spiritual practice, of doing meditations on compassion and receiving love. “We’re doing emotional labor.” It’s interesting that you’re using that term in reference to deep inner work.
RO: And as a lot of people understand, emotional labor comes out of feminist work. It comes out—well, it’s a way for us to describe the work we have to do to be around people, and microaggressions, and surviving harm. But for me, emotional labor is the labor first and foremost that I’m doing for myself to really connect to and identify what I’m feeling, and to be in relationship to what I’m feeling. Because the more I’m in relationship to how I’m feeling, the more I’m able to tend to those feelings and to disrupt the ways in which I react to those feelings. And then that creates much less labor for others, who I may be forcing to do emotional labor for me, because I’m not aware of what I’m experiencing.
TS: You said this very interesting thing, “disrupt the ways I react.” Tell me more about that. So whatever we’re reacting to that’s in our emotional experience.
RO: Yeah, reaction really, there’s no space for thinking or processing. We feel something or we get close to something, and then there’s this habitual reaction. And sometimes, it happens so quickly and it’s been happening so long for some of us that we don’t even know that we’re reacting.
I think about my early practice, particularly with anger. People would always say, “Well, you know you’re just reacting to something.” But I’m like, “No, no, I’m pissed off and I can’t help but to do something.” It took many years of meditation practice, which I document in Love and Rage, of really getting into disrupting reactivity, which meant for me getting space in between the arising of something and my reaction. And once I got some space there, I could actually transform reactivity into responsiveness where I’m like, “OK, I feel this. I see it, I feel it, I’m experiencing it. OK, how am I going to be in a relationship with it? How am I going to respond?” If it’s something for me, how am I going to respond to something happening for me? Or how am I going to respond to something happening in the world or in the space around me that needs tending to?
TS: Do you think that same disruption, the same principle, the same practice of disruption could be applied to intense feelings of sorrow or hopelessness? And if so—
RO: Absolutely. Well, it’s first understanding that these intense experiences are indeed just experiences. They’re not inherently who I am. And that’s really such an important transition from being sad to experiencing sadness. If I’m experiencing something, then I’m inherently not what this thing is.
That opens up space for us to really survive the overwhelming energies that we’re working with every day now, collectively and also individually. This is just an experience, and this experience can happen with other experiences.
Yeah, I can feel hopelessness. Absolutely. I can feel hopelessness and despair, and I can feel joy at the same time. And joy can hold helplessness and despair when I have this level of awareness that allows everything just to be an experience, not inherently who and what I am.
TS: In The New Saints, you write about joy as a radical act, and you talked about the joy of Black people historically in the face of so much violence and oppression, and how it actually was a huge resource and is a huge resource. And I wonder if you can share more about that, and do you sort of consciously choose joy? Or how do you bring it forward and evoke it in a way that also is authentic for you?
RO: Well, it’s both. Sometimes I have to choose joy. I have to think about it, because I’ve lost connection to space and fluidity, and joy is how I get back. But also, it’s just there. And when I think about the community that I come from and I think about my ancestors, there’s always been joy. There’s always been joy in the face of such overwhelming situations.
And this joy is, I think, really related to how we understand that the world is not our home. That this world, this experience of living, is again, indeed an experience that we’re moving through. And so we’re passing through this, and we know that we have to make the best of this, because there’s more coming as we transition out of this life. And I think that’s really important for a lot of marginalized, suppressed folks. It’s like, yeah, the world is hard, and also the world isn’t our ultimate home. And for me, and for a lot of folks coming out of this, in this same position, it’s like, yeah, that’s an experience of joy. There’s something else coming.
And in terms of liberation theology, particularly Black liberation theology, it’s also this understanding that we are experiencing a lot of suffering because of these characteristics of skin color and so forth. And because of that, we know that, in a way, God is on our side. Compassion comes to us, because we are the ones trying to survive. And trying to survive and not add more harm back into the world. So joy is a way that we begin to disrupt, sometimes, the tendency to return the same violence that’s being expressed towards us back to others.
TS: Now, I want to see if I can understand a comment you made a little deeper, “the world is not our home.” Because what I noticed is that for me—I’ll just be personal for a moment. As somebody—I mean, I never felt like I belonged here ever. And yet, I spent a lot of time in my life coming home, coming home to the earth, coming home to my body, actually making a home here. I feel like I have a home here now. So when I hear you say, “This place is not our home,” I think, “But wait a second. I’ve spent a lot of my life finding home here.” So I’m not sure maybe if I understand exactly what you’re pointing to.
RO: Well, in a way, the world isn’t our home, because we’re going to die. So for me, that was the first evidence. Apparently, this isn’t permanent, so there’s something else that’s going to happen. And at the same time, I’m here. So how can I actually acknowledge where I’m at? That yes, I am embodied, and this is a phenomenally rich world with lots of sensations, lots of things happening. And I can pay attention to that. And the more I pay attention to that and the more I feel myself grounded, the more I feel like this is something that feels always changing, always fleeting. Everything’s always in flux. Everything’s always in motion.
And I think this motion is kind of inviting us, or even pushing us—if I can use that word, pushing us—or gently guiding us, I would say, gently guiding us towards a deeper, more expansive experience. And of course, when I think about Buddhism, we talk about emptiness and space. But within emptiness and space, there’s this energy, and this energy is what I’m actually experiencing and the ways energies are shaped into phenomena.
And so when I say, “The world is not my home,” I’m also saying that there is another expression of the phenomenal world that I’m actually trying to connect to and shape, in a way that feels much more freeing, much more liberating than the materiality and the hardness of the phenomenal world right now.
TS: So describe your true home to me.
RO: Free beyond the causes and conditions of suffering. Free beyond the binary of comfort and discomfort, up and down, black and white. It is the most simple and direct way of being, right? Just being. And not just being a person but being an experience.
For me, my true home is me as this experience that’s boundless, that’s always fluid, that’s always open, that feels connected to everything in the universe. Free from desire, free from aversion, free from all of this. Free from anything that I’m shaping into a phenomenal world. Which all of this is completely beyond anything that I can fathom, but it’s not completely beyond an urge or a longing. The longing is pointing me back to remembering something, and that remembering is of what I am beyond the sense of self, kind of situated within this phenomenal illusion.
TS: This notion of a New Saint, a contemporary saint, how would you say your description and the cartography that you create, if you will, of the New Saint is different from historical impressions we might have? Let’s say, of the bodhisattva ideal in Buddhism. How are you updating this definition to make it relevant now?
RO: Yeah. Well, I think first, I’m making it less—more sexy. I think the bodhisattva tradition can seem like becoming a superhuman, or a Marvel or a DC superhero. It’s like, “I am going to learn how to fly. I’m going to walk through walls,” and everything. And that seems real fun and exciting.
But for me, the New Saint’s tradition isn’t saying that you won’t develop those capacities. But what it’s saying is that the primary kind of ability that you’re awakening is care, to cut through apathy and to see yourself as being a part of a sacred ecology of beings. And that our primary role is to care, but to love, and to choose love and care as the essential labor to be a part of this community.
And it’s also reframing the language of the bodhisattva in more contemporary terms. The bodhisattva isn’t for another culture over there. It’s not for white people. It’s not for Asian practitioners and heritage practitioners. It can be for me. And more importantly, it’s for people who look like me, Black and queer, or others who are transgender or gender-nonconforming, or people who are younger who feel as if they can’t escape the intensity of the world, especially the intensity of a future that seems very different than previous generations.
It’s a reminder of the importance of suffering here, right? Suffering not as something we’re choosing to create an identity around, but suffering as something that we’re just admitting is happening. Suffering, there is suffering, and there is a really profound way to take care of that suffering and to help others take care of that suffering as well. And to understand that we are not the suffering itself, but suffering is just an experience that we’re going through until we remember what we are beyond the suffering.
TS: You write that the New Saint—ready for this?—is a prophet. And I thought, “Whoa, OK, I’m a New Saint. The New Saint is a prophet.” Tell me about that, Lama Rod.
RO: Yeah. Well again, you have to cut through what we think a prophet is. What does a prophet do? Does a prophet tell the future? No, the prophet actually tells you what’s happening right now. And the prophet tells the truth. And the truth is so hard that you want to kill the prophet.
So a prophet is someone who deeply embodies clarity, and they’re able to say, “OK, this is what’s happening. This is what’s going down right now. And you may not like it, but this is happening.” And I think that is very much what I understand a prophet to be, someone who’s telling the truth.
TS: What do you think is the truth we need to hear right now, about right now?
RO: I think a big part of the truth that we need to hear right now is that we have to actually take care of our suffering, of our trauma, of our disappointment, of our hopelessness, of our hate. And stop pushing it away or weaponizing it against others who remind us of our suffering.
I think so much of the legislation right now, particularly around trans legislation, is really about people really terrified of their own suffering, particularly the suffering of being put someplace and being reminded that they actually don’t have to stay there, that there’s another way to be that may be more fluid and open. But instead of doing the work to tend to that suffering and to choose a different way of being, it’s a lot easier just to erase the people who are acting as mirrors for us.
So in this case, a prophet is someone who’s just living deeply authentically, who’s responding to their own needs to live truthfully, and honestly, and openly, and how that authenticity is being erased or attempted to be erased by others who can’t hold that for themselves.
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TS: So taking care of our own suffering is true emotional labor. And I wonder if you could give us an example from your own experience. In The New Saints, you write about lots of your own stories and examples, but of how you’ve been able to take care of some kind of form of suffering in your own life, potentially even in an ongoing way, what that looks like, so you can liberate that suffering and be the good New Saint that we’re here talking about who’s in the work. In the work.
RO: Yeah. Well, it’s all, for me—every single day, even now, it’s always staying attuned to my own discomfort. What am I feeling right now, and what am I doing in response?
So feeling that, feeling my desires, and actually holding space for those desires, which means that I disrupt the reactivity, and I choose to experience what these desires feel like. And that slows, of course, the reactivity down, if not completely disrupts it. And then I enter into the space of responsiveness. But I’ve been doing this, I mean, I would say most of my life, but it wasn’t until Buddhism where I had language to describe what I was doing, and I also got methods to go a lot deeper.
In the book, I have a chapter about some of the past relationships that I’ve been in, and what I’ve done to, first, identify the suffering that I created for myself or the harm that I created for someone else, and then the ways in which I learned how to evolve from that through really investing in the practice of care for myself and for others. And of course, the chapter is called Letting Go of the Lover I Used to Be. So the connotation is that I’m letting go of this really scared, traumatized, selfish kind of lover and opening to this way of loving that’s restorative, that’s generative, that’s boundaried, that tells the truth about what’s happening in my relationship with another lover and so forth. And that work that I’ve done for myself has dramatically reduced the ways in which I have created harm or emotional labor for people that I’ve been with romantically.
TS: You made this really important point, and you said it here in our conversation too—and I just want to underscore it—that when we take care of our own suffering, we’re not asking other people all the time to take care of it for us. And I think the question I have is, for a New Saint, what would you say is their ongoing relationship with suffering? What does it look like, ongoing?
RO: Well, I will say that suffering, again, is an experience, right? It’s not inherently who we are. So I see suffering, discomfort in all the ways that you may describe suffering, as being something that’s just kind of passing through, that’s passing through my body, passing through my mind. It’s something that I can offer enough space to, so that the suffering doesn’t become the main thing that’s happening for me. Or another way of putting this, that I can suffer and still connect to other more expansive experiences like joy, or happiness, or gratitude at the same time.
But suffering, too, is how we stay connected to others. This is how we develop a kind of sense of belonging. It’s like, yes, I’m experiencing suffering, and so is everyone else. And I believe that people are doing what they can to take care of that suffering, to be in relationship with it.
Now, not all the time does that relationship to suffering actually get us free, or does it always help. But I think people are trying, even if it’s bypassing. And so I understand, because I’m in relationship to my suffering, that suffering is what people are working with. And so when I am moving through the world, my attitude, my core work is trying to be of help to alleviate that suffering, in the same way that I’ve been doing for myself, also in the same way others have been doing for me as well in the past.
TS: You write about the New Saint as an ordinary human being. We’ve talked about the prophet, we’ve talked about in touch with—and it’s an ordinary human being. Why is it important to emphasize that?
RO: Well, it’s funny. In my world, that is ordinary for people to have a relationship to the unseen. But I know in general, that’s very different. But it becomes ordinary, and it has to be ordinary because it has to be accessible. Becoming a New Saint can’t be this extraordinary thing that only the chosen few can obtain. The path of the New Saint has to be something that anyone can choose, right? Anyone who’s committed to caring, anyone who wants to be in relationship to their suffering, anyone who wants to help, this path becomes open and accessible. And to let go of this idea that you’ll become a superhuman. But instead, I want people to know that you’ll become human. Humanness is my goal, to be more connected, to be grounded, to be in my body, to feel like I belong to people, to feel like I belong in the world, and to ultimately have this ethic that so much of my role is to really engage in this economy of love and care. Not over-accumulation, not materialism, not whatever, all the stuff that we’re doing, but to essentially just love and be loved. That’s it.
Of course, anyone who really works with love, who’s trying to embody love—yeah, this may sound extraordinary. But I think this is what it means to be human, is to be loved and to express love.
TS: You offer lots of powerful practices sprinkled throughout The New Saints. And one of them that I liked a lot—maybe because it’s something that will nourish me, that I need—had to do with receiving love. And I wonder, could we just do that together right here as a listenership? Could we receive love together? Could you take us into it?
RO: Yeah, absolutely.
TS: Let’s do it. Let’s receive some love.
RO: And the practice in the book is just a very general practice that can be the root of any other practice you want to add to it. But when I begin opening into and receiving love, first and foremost, I just develop an awareness of the seat under me or the floor under me. I just want to feel supported, first of all. So I’m sitting down right now, so I feel the seat rising to hold me and to hold my body.
And even now, I can open to the care and the love of the seat. Something doesn’t have to be conscious or alive for me to feel care from it. So as you’re moving through this, just experiment, what does it feel like to be cared for by the seat that you’re sitting on, or by the ground under you if you’re standing or lying down? And just to tell yourself, “I am being cared for by the seat.” And for me, that’s so exciting.
But to go even further, I reflect and I invite you also to reflect on a time in your life where you felt someone really loving you. So someone or something. So this can be a person, a pet. If we want to talk about the unseen world sometimes, we feel deeply loved by our ancestors, or our guides, or a deity, or even a Buddha.
So just remembering that experience of being loved and cared for. What was that experience? What was the moment? That moment when someone or something really saw you, they were holding space for you, they were doing emotional labor for you, they helped you. You were in distress, and this person just showed up. What does that feel like to receive that?
And sometimes, I like to imagine that this receiving of care from this benefactor, from our past, it feels like sometimes energy kind of flowing down through the top of my head, down into my heart center. And my heart center begins to be filled with this energy of care and love. And slowly, that love, that care welling up in my heart center begins to stream through the rest of my body, and filling up the rest of my body as well as my mind with this energy of deep care and love from this benefactor. And I just sit in this.
And for many of us, this may feel like a difficult experience, because this experience of love is really beginning to water and take care of these parts of our experiences that are just deeply neglected. And parts of these experiences are old memories or traumas that have not been touched and taken care of by deep care and love.
So I try not to force anything in this stage of practice, but just allowing this expression of love and care to just tend to these difficult experiences, and letting these experiences be saturated by this love and care.
And to even go further, in my practice, I like to imagine that all the beings in the universe are loving me right now, that they want me to be safe, and happy, and resourced, and free. And I try to hold as much of this care and love as possible.
And I do begin to feel a shift in my body and in my mind. I feel more space. I feel as if the material of my mind, thoughts and emotions, are much more fluid. I feel everything as experiences, not as inherently who I am. And I feel connected. I feel like I belong.
And there is emotional labor happening for me. I feel as if this energy of love is really beginning to call forth some maybe deeply buried sadness. And I feel that sadness coming up, because it has the conditions to arise, and I’m in a position where I can just hold space for it, notice it, experience it, and then let it go.
So everything around me is loving me, wanting me to be safe and free and happy.
And when you’re ready, shifting your attention back to the seat, or the floor, or under you. Allowing the seat, the floor to rise, to hold you, to ground you. Feeling the weight of your body, really surrendering to being held.
And then when you’re ready, just beginning to just offer some really slow, gentle movement back into your body, whatever feels appropriate. And maybe moving through a few cleansing breaths, which for me means inhaling deeply into my nose and exhaling out of my mouth. And as I exhale, just imagining releasing any energy that feels stuck, or heavy, or rigid, and just bringing this kind of life and movement back into my body.
And even though we’ve only been practicing a couple of minutes, I think that practices like this can really shift a lot of energy. So we just can’t run out of the practice, but take our time to warm up again, to stretch, to breathe. Maybe even having a sip of water as well is helpful.
And this is such an important practice to do as much as possible, considering the overwhelming amount of vicarious trauma and grief that’s being radiated into the space around us. It’s easy to just keep absorbing this energy without having space to release, and this practice can help you really release a lot of this energy.
TS: Gorgeous, simple, accessible. I really appreciate that, Lama Rod. I’m sure our listeners did too.
It brings up a question for me, which is, I think that this whole notion of awakened care and feeling the whole universe loving us, and then our ability to channel that love, to transfer that love to others, that I think is easy for people to understand. There’s another notion, though, where you talk about the warriorship of the New Saint, and you even go so far as to introduce this idea of spiritual warfare. And I wonder if you can explain that and talk about how that connects, if you will, to all of this love and care. And now, we’re warriors engaging in spiritual warfare. What do you mean?
RO: Well, I think there are different ways to understand spiritual warfare and being spiritual warriors. The bodhisattva is actually translated as “spiritual warrior” as well. So that’s not something I’ve necessarily made up, but just a direct translation from the tradition.
But when I talk about warriorship, I’m saying that there’s something I want to see happen in the world. Even more concrete, I want to see an end to systemic racism. And systemic racism won’t go away because I ask it to, but it takes a kind of really, very clear vision of how to disrupt systemic racism. And that means we have to go against the kinds of hate that other people weaponize against us, who are themselves really deeply invested in maintaining systemic racism because of the privileges and the benefit they get out of the system.
And so part of spiritual warfare setting boundaries is like, “No, this can’t happen anymore.” And that’s going to create tension. And that tension is something that we have to respond to. We have to choose how to respond to that. How are we going to organize? How are we going to act? How are we going to channel this energy, and shape this energy, and shift this energy to bring about benefit for people who are most marginalized by this?
But this also means that we actually have to fight. I come from an ancestry where, again, no one gave us resources because we asked. We fought for what we had. We organized. We were engaged in civil disobedience. We had to protect ourselves. This is also a part of spiritual warfare.
But another piece of this too, for me, is that this time is definitely a time of spiritual warfare, because this is about us having to do the labor of figuring out who and what we are. And for me, that is spiritual labor. I have to choose my most authentic, less violent, and most loving and compassionate expression of who I am right now. And that is like a light that begins to be expressed against the darkness of delusion, or hate, or avoidance. And that can feel, again, very tense. There’s a lot of tension there.
So I think that this time, yes, it’s also a time of political warfare, right? Yes, there’s an intense political struggle going on. But beneath that political struggle is the spiritual struggle of figuring out who we are that is not based upon isolation, and selfishness, and hate against others that we don’t understand as well. I think a lot of people are really uncomfortable with warfare language.
TS: I am. I am. I notice I’m comfortable with “activism” and “making a change” and “disruption.” But when I hear the W-A-R word, I feel a lot of tension inside me, and I’m looking for clarification.
RO: Yeah. Well, I think that I come from people who had to fight, literally had to fight, who continue to have to fight. And I think not having to fight to get the resources you need is a particular kind of privilege. And I think that people who have that privilege can unjustly criticize those of us who feel as if we have to choose fighting to stay alive. And I grew up in certain circumstances where it was physically dangerous to be in. I had to learn how to fight, or I actually wouldn’t be here right now. But yeah.
TS: I think this is very helpful, Lama Rod. So I would ask a clarifying question, which is, how does the New Saint engage in spiritual warfare in such a way that they’re not creating unnecessary harm, but doing the work of liberation?
RO: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s it. This struggle, this fight is about getting free and getting others free. We can hold our choices to fight within love. And that love means that I am only doing this because—I’m not trying to get back at someone. I don’t want people to suffer in the same way that I have suffered, but there are people who are out of control, and this choosing of fighting is a way that I have to set a boundary that they can understand.
TS: Can you give me an example of spiritual warfare, what it means to you, and make it explicit for me?
RO: For me, again, I stated earlier just being in the world, there’s a lot of vicarious trauma and fear and everything. And for me, I have to be out in the world. I have to be very clear about when I’m around people, acknowledging what they’re experiencing because I can feel it. I can feel their aggression. I can feel people’s discomfort around me as this big Black man walking through the world and what that means, and the meaning that people project onto my body. That has put my life in danger a couple of different times, especially with the police.
And so knowing that, then I can actually set a lot of kinds of different boundaries, energetic boundaries. I can make choices about the places that I go and don’t go. I can be aware of how people are registering me and then make different choices in a way that can communicates that I’m not here to hurt. That’s ongoing emotional labor that me as a Black man is having to do all the time whenever I’m out in public, given my size on top of that.
I am at war against misunderstanding, hate. And sometimes, if my actual physical space is being threatened by someone else’s violence, then I actually have to protect myself, physically sometimes. Physically, of course, it’s the last thing that I’m choosing.
But there’s another kind of spiritual warfare, that again, in my communities I’m a part of is something that’s really common. But there’s definitely a warfare against light and dark. There are definitely energies and experiences in this life that actually are trying to actively harm us.
TS: Can you tell me more about that, to help educate me on that?
RO: Yeah, absolutely. There are dark forces like demons. There are beings who actually are not situated in love. And these beings of course can be human, but can also be unseen beings, spirits, and so forth in the world around us who want to harm us actively. And therefore, I can choose different kinds of spiritual methods, not just including meditations and so forth, but also mantras, also different kinds of magic. I say a lot of prayers. I’m deeply connected to guides around me that help me to—well, they help to protect me, right? And I’m consciously thinking about that as I move through the world about the ways in which I am opening to being protected from these forces that are just out here trying to hurt me.
TS: Tell me more how you protect yourself. What kinds of prayers do you say to create protection?
RO: I pray to Tara, who’s the female Buddha of compassion. Very strong protecting energy, and that protecting energy is direct compassion, which is a very powerful force that we use.
I have my ancestors protect me. My actual familial ancestors are around me. There are deities that I practice with that offer protection. And this protection, yes, energetic protection, like these protective kind of fields around us that help to deter the ways in which harmful energies are being directed towards us as well.
But ultimately, I’m protected by clarity. I’m just getting clear about what’s happening, and how to move through the world, and how to interact with people, and how to avoid the places I don’t need to go. And I also get clear about the work that I’m doing. I don’t have to do all the work in the world. I do the work that I need to do, and that frees up a lot of extra energy to help others.
TS: In The New Saints, you refer to this notion of clarity a lot. And I thought, “OK, when I talk to Lama Rod, I’m going to get more clear about clarity.” And how do you, Lama Rod, bring clarity into your life? How do you invoke it? How do you create more of it?
RO: Yeah. Well, “clarity” is my word for “wisdom.” And I use “clarity” on purpose, because I think “wisdom” can be kind of convoluted. So when I use the word “clear,” I’m practicing seeing what’s happening as clearly as possible. This is what’s happening. This is what I’m feeling. This is what I’m experiencing. These are the sensations. These are the dynamics that are happening.
First of all, this practice is really about deep acceptance. And acceptance doesn’t mean condoning or celebrating. It means that you just tell the truth, as much of the truth as you can tell in the moment. Yeah, this is happening, this just happened, this needs to happen. And that clarity actually helps me to respond in a way that’s really much more directed.
So when I say “directed response,” it’s like no, this response is really geared towards what’s happening, and creating a certain kind of situation through this response, or changing something through this response directly.
TS: All right, one more clarifying question here, which is, I feel like the notion of the New Saint and the New Saint’s commitment to awakened care, I feel like I understand that. I understand that. The notion of the New Saint’s commitment to spiritual warriorship, I don’t think I’m as clear about in terms of what’s actually required? What does it take besides embodying awakened care? What do I actually have to commit to as part of the path of the New Saint?
RO: Well, you have to commit to wanting to get free from suffering, first and foremost. I have to understand that this experience of discomfort is something that I can actually transcend, and limit, and reduce, and I want to make choices to reduce that. Not just for myself, but I also have to believe that all beings deserve to be free from suffering. And so you have to commit to that.
But again, the ultimate commitment that we’re engaging in is caring, because I don’t think a lot of people actually give a shit. And I think every time something happens in the world, like the war over in Palestine, between Israel and Palestine, there’s a lot of people who just do not care. There’s a lot of people who actually do not know what’s happening.
For me, it’s caring about everything and everyone. It doesn’t mean that I know what to do. It doesn’t mean I know what to say, or it doesn’t mean that I even understand what’s happening. But it means that I know that there are people suffering. And to whatever extent I can, I just want to wish them an end to that suffering in a way that’s appropriate for everyone involved. If we can just get to that, I think we would be seeing a very different world right now.
TS: You end The New Saints on an important note that I’d also like to end our conversation on, which is this notion of consenting to this work. Understanding the work, but then consenting to it. What does that mean to you, to consent to the work of being a New Saint?
RO: You have to choose it. It’s not something I can choose for you. It’s not something I can guilt you into doing, right? It’s something that you’re choosing when you put everything in front of you, when you put everything on the table and say, “This is what I’m going to do. Because if I choose this, then I can take ownership of this and really develop a deeper sense of agency that’s about me, and my ethics, and about getting people free.”
There are a lot of people who are working and doing this work of liberation who haven’t decided that they want to be free, because to get free means that we have to leave behind or let go of all the stuff that we’ve built an identity in and around. “This is who I am.” So if I choose to get free, that means that this idea of who I am will shift. And a lot of people actually don’t want to take that risk, because they actually don’t know what’s beyond the sense of identity that they’ve established.
But there’s all a risk. Freedom is a risk, because it begins this journey that you’re just negotiating second by second. And this journey is going to look somewhat differently for everyone as well. But at the end of the day, we have to choose this for ourselves. We can’t get dragged to freedom.
TS: You say that the New Saint isn’t fearless, because of the risks we have to take, the unknown we have to step into.
RO: Yeah, we’re full of fear. But again, you take care of the fear like you take care of everything else. Every time I leave the house, I’m afraid. And I feel the fear of what it means to leave the house and walk down the street. And it’s OK, because I can connect to the love that’s always being expressed towards me not just from unseen beings, but just from actual people who want me to be in the world, who love me, who want me to have access to resources that I need.
So the fear is just one experience that I’m having, right? But I’m still paying attention to it. I’m still taking care of it, but it doesn’t stand in my way like it used to.
TS: I’ve been talking with Lama Rod Owens. He’s the author of the new book—it’s called The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors. And I just want to take a moment to bow to all of the emotional labor, Lama Rod, that you’re doing in your spiritual work that has so much of a fountain of benefit for so many people, including me. So thank you so much, so much, Lama Rod.
RO: Thank you. Thank you. That means so much. Thank you.
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