Video: Becoming A New Saint: Exploring the Path of Emerging as Warriors from Our Broken Hearts

June 19, 2024

Saints, spiritual warriors, bodhisattvas, zaddikim—no matter how they are named in a given tradition, all share a profound altruistic wish to free others from suffering. Saints are not beings of stained glass or carved stone. “Each of us can be a new saint,” says Lama Rod Owens. “In our pain, our trauma, and all our complexity, we all can—and must—awaken the virtue of our compassion for the benefit of our communities, our planet, and our own souls.” Watch Lama Rod as he shares personal stories, spiritual teachings, and instructions for contemplative and somatic practices from his newest book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors. This work reinforces the truth of our interdependency—allowing us to be of service to the collective well-being, and to call on the support and strength of the countless beings who share our struggles and hopes.

Bio

Lama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen. An international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Author of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors and Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, his teachings center on freedom, self-expression, and radical self-care. A leading voice in a new generation of Buddhist teachers with over 11 years of experience, Lama Rod activates the intersections of his identity to create a platform that’s very natural, engaging, and inclusive. Applauded for his mastery in balancing weighty topics with a sense of lightness, the Queen has been featured by various national and international news outlets. Highly sought after for talks, retreats, and workshops, his mission is to show you how to heal and free yourself.

This event took place on March 19, 2024.

ANNOUNCER: Harvard Divinity School.

ANNOUNCER: Becoming a New Saint, Exploring the Path of Emerging as Warriors from Our Broken Hearts, March 19, 2024.

LAURA TUACH: But I'm up here to welcome you and to introduce our speaker tonight, our guest. So welcome. Welcome to Harvard Divinity School. I see a lot of familiar faces, a lot of students here but also some new friends, is that right? First timers to Harvard Divinity School, we're so glad you're here and that you found your way to Cambridge, in this part of Cambridge, and hopefully, parking in a legal spot. Cambridge doesn't tow as much as it used to, so you're in good shape.

My name is Laura Tuach. And I am the assistant dean of ministry studies and field education. And I am here to welcome a student of mine, isn't that weird to say because we're like all students of his? I met Rod in 2014. And that's 10 years ago now that he arrived at the Divinity School to do his master of divinity.

And we sat in my office, which is now a bathroom behind me after they did the renovations and talked about what he might do while he was a student here. And in that first year, he was a student in one of my classes, a class where we made meaning of the things that students encountered in the field. And he was at the first church shelter in Harvard Square.

And we sat in this little classroom that used to be over there. This building is new for those of you who are visiting. Little tiny classroom that barely held all of us. And there were many a day when I was teaching and also student of Rod's. And he brought just such a depth of wisdom and knowing to our conversations that I was sometimes, again, wonder, am I student or am I teacher?

So welcome back. We're so happy you're here and so proud of you for the work that you've done since you left here. A lot has changed in the world, yeah, since you were a student here. And we're just so grateful for the depth of the work that you're doing.

And what I've most noticed, especially with this new book, The New Saints is the integrative work that you're doing not negating your Christian upbringing, not negating the natural world, but connecting deeply to it, not forgetting about your ancestors but knowing that they are right here with you in the work, not forgetting to play and be playful and experience joy and beauty and pull upon, as you said in your book, all these energies.

LAMA ROD OWENS: Right, so when we walk the land, when we walk the earth, each step should be appreciation for this land, remembrance of what the land has lost, and then a further dedication to restore what has been taken, what has been decimated, to return back to healing, to remembrance, to remembering, to bringing things back together that has felt so desperate for so long.

And I often say, this is an age of apocalypse, but I've been going a little further with this recently. It's not just an age of apocalypse or an age of unveiling, it is also an age of decolonization.

Decolonization is remembering who we were and who we are, who we were before systems, who we were before race and white supremacy and capitalism, who we were before violent genocides, who we were before the hate, and to remember who we were, so remember our most authentic self. And our most authentic self is not expressions of violence and chaos and messiness and drama and all this stuff that we love to watch TV shows about.

Who we are is an expression of liberation itself. We are free. We are free. And none of us can be free if others are not free. How can we possibly embrace liberation at the cost of other people being in bondage and oppression and experiencing genocide?

If you want to do liberation work, you have to get into this liberation work knowing and understanding that every single being deserves to be free, not just you, not just the ones with money, not just the ones with American Express Platinum cards, not the ones who are housed, not the ones who are smart or not just the ones who get to go to institutions like Harvard. Everyone deserves to be free, everyone.

But even go further within Dharma, right everything has to be free. Everything must be free from our misunderstanding of it. We must free ourselves from our own misunderstandings as well. But to be free, you also have to understand that you deserve to be free as well and you have to choose it.

I think one of the things that feels heartbreaking for many of us right now is that we're realizing that there are a lot of beings, a lot of people who aren't choosing freedom and liberation for real and we were just making some assumptions, especially some of the ones who love to talk a good game about getting free, but when it's time to make that choice they always fall back into domination to oppression, into justification of violence against the most marginalized.

But if you choose to do this work for real, if you choose to get free in the same way the Buddha chose to get free, you will lose shit. And are you ready to lose shit? Are you ready to be misunderstood? Are you ready to be uninvited to the party? Are you ready to be a nuisance? Are you ready to be disliked? Because freedom isn't about being liked, it's not about being celebrated, it's not about any of that, it's about actually choosing our most, again, our most authentic self.

And when you start making choices to get free, you become a mirror for so many people who aren't making that choice for themselves. I think what some of us have experienced and what many of us continue to witness over and over and over again is how when some of us choose to be free, we mirror that choice back to others reminding them of all the ways they are not choosing to be free.

And instead of tending to that discomfort and even further choosing to do their own work to get free, they would rather annihilate you and others reminding them of what the possibilities are.

And in that sense, I just want to remember and hold space for so many of the beautiful ones who have chosen liberation and who have embodied liberation and who have had to pay the consequences because there were so many people around them who weren't ready to understand what freedom was.

And I want to hold space for many of you who are constantly trying to get free and what you get back is violence. And these are some of the things I've been thinking about since I left this institution. At some point I just told myself I have to this shit.

I remember in my last year brother Cornel West walking this campus and he would just be like, brother, are you ready? Are you ready? And I'll be like, brother Cornell, you have to leave me alone right now? I'm trying to get to this class.

[LAUGHTER]

Because I tell you, when he saw you-- I related, I was like, don't you have somewhere to be?

[LAUGHTER]

And sometimes I just wanted to go, brother Cornell, aren't you tired? And here you go running for president right now. I'm just like, I just don't understand. When do we get a break? And what I realized now is that freedom is a constant struggle. It's not just for us, it's for the collective as well.

So when we choose liberation, we're also choosing it for our communities, our collectives, our families, our beloveds, our lovers. We become the embodiment of something that will inspire so many people around us, but sometimes we have to go first.

And again, this question of liberation has driven me not just over the past few years since I was a student here, but the question of liberation and freedom has driven me my whole life. I knew that I was not free. I knew that I was not free. I knew that there was suffering. I knew that I deserved better and that began to drive me from an early age.

I became a seeker at an early age because I kept saying this got to be something else. And I did a whole bunch of stuff to try to figure out what that something else was. And then I was very fortunate enough to have a little bit of an emotional breakdown, which is really lovely.

[LAUGHTER]

I just love when it's held in community, but I went through this period where I was like, no, I have to choose something now. And then Dharma arose. Dharma became this path of liberation. And someone said, you know what, Rod? You need to pay attention to your mind. And I said, well, can I pay someone else to do that for me?

[LAUGHTER]

Because I'm busy.

[LAUGHTER]

And the response was no, baby. You have to do this labor yourself. You have to get-- you have to start knowing and understanding who you are because you have spent your whole life believing what the world keeps telling you are, particularly how the world keeps telling some of us that we do not deserve to be here, that we're not good enough, that we don't deserve to take up space, that we'll never contribute anything valuable and how we deeply internalize those messages and that becomes this disrupted self-value.

And what I also began to understand much later is that we can't get free feeling like shit or believing we are shit nor can we get free depleted. And I was doing all of that at the beginning.

I was depleted, I didn't feel good about myself, and I thought that I could just evaporate into liberation. But that's not really-- it's not really the path that the Buddha pointed out for me or for any of us.

And then I was told, no, baby. You have to be in relationship to your suffering. You have to start tending to the suffering. You can't keep running away. You can't keep bypassing it. You can't keep trying to go around it or under it. You have to go into it. And not only do you go into it, you say, welcome, welcome.

And I think often that we're living in this age where many of us don't feel as if we have the capacity to say welcome. And if we don't have the capacity to be in relationship to our suffering, then we find ourselves just overreacting to the suffering often creating more harm for ourselves and for others.

When we lean into the suffering, when we say welcome to the suffering, we begin to transform our relationship to the suffering itself and that's when liberation and freedom started. You can't get free running away.

And then in that sense, the suffering becomes the teacher instead of this obstacle, instead of this taskmaster, or whatever, however we relate to our suffering, the suffering becomes the teacher and you say, what do you have to teach me about getting free because I'm ready? What does my grief have to teach me? What does my rage have to teach me? Even what does my arrogance have to teach me? What does the hopelessness have to teach me about getting free?

To be in that dynamic transformative relationship to suffering is why I started taking the path of Buddhism seriously because it was the first path that wasn't bullshitting me about suffering. It wasn't this whole self-help thing, it wasn't this positive thinking and shit that we're dealing with. Now, it's just some of the things that my colleagues love to talk about on their platforms.

But no, it was about-- it was like, no, baby, you suffering, you are suffering. This isn't a figment of your imagination, you are hurting. If you want to start this process, you need to name that, that I am experiencing this hurt.

And once you do that everything changes. The red carpet rolls out because you stop spending all this energy trying to avoid everything and you can start reinvesting this energy and metabolizing the suffering, being in a relationship with the suffering, right learning how not to weaponize your suffering against others around you, which is a big piece of what's happening as well, unmetabolized suffering being weaponized and justified.

To become a less violent person, we disrupt the reactivity to our own suffering and instead we give rise to deep care, deep compassion for the suffering, the gentleness for the suffering because your suffering isn't necessarily a punishment, it just happens because we have forgotten who we are. We have forgotten who we are and we suffer.

And that journey to remember who we are is a journey back again into these old narratives, into these old histories, to reclaim a history well before all of these systems arose and to do so in the most fiercest love and care we can embody. And so I've been struggling.

I have really in the course of my teaching and in my studying have been really struggling as to how to articulate this and not scare people away. Most of you are still here, so maybe we're on the same page.

And so I have-- and really my calling into the practice and teaching of Dharma was to not just support myself and making sense of the world, but to support all of you in making sense of the world, of making sense of everything, not just the things that feel good but also the messiness, the violence, the darkness, to actually offer a lens and then a path of practice that takes us into the heart of the suffering so we can begin this metabolizing work. This process of befriending the suffering so it becomes our teacher.

The suffering is always trying to get us free. We just misunderstand what it's doing. The brokenheartedness is always pointing us towards the freedom, but we get so stuck in it. So I wrote radical Dharma, I co-wrote radical Dharma. Many of you enjoyed that little text and whose history is rooted here on this campus as I wrote it here with my colleagues, Reverend Angel and Dr. Jasmine.

We did dialogues and talks here as we launched the book. And that was, of course, a reaction to the killing of Michael Brown and the beginning of this modern movement for the lives of Black folks. And then after graduation moving into thinking about my response to the 2016 election with the text love and rage a text that didn't actually really want to write.

But everyone was so pissed off and I was tired of answering questions about people's anger. I was like, I'm going to write this book. Go read the book, stop asking me questions about all of this. You're wasting my time. I'm not here to talk about anger. No, but I am. Actually as the book taught me, you're actually here to help people be in relationships with their anger.

But in 2020, something different began to happen, a worldwide global pandemic along with the killing of yet another unarmed Black person, a Black man, George Floyd, and the reigniting of the movement for Black Lives. And I said, what am I going to do now? What is my response to what I firmly believe is the apocalypse to the unveiling?

And the first phrase that came into my mind, popped into my mind was that of the New Saints, the new sainthood. And I said, what is that? Beautiful name, catchy title, but what does that mean? A new sainthood, a new ethical structure. A new maybe innovation of old wisdom. What does that mean?

And of course, that took me right back into the Buddhist sainthood tradition, the Bodhisattva, the spiritual warrior, the warrior, the practitioner who vows to free all beings from suffering even if it takes forever, the being who keeps coming back over and over again to places and sites of trauma and violence and suffering and says, I will lead people out much like mother Harriet Tubman. I will return back to the place that I have been freed from because others are not free.

And I said, this sounds wonderful. I love the Bodhisattva tradition. But I often back then felt like the Buddhist tradition was wrapped up in too much, I don't know, not romanticism, but it was so beautiful, the literature was so beautiful. It framed the Bodhisattvas as DC super heroes and Marvel super heroes that you're going to awaken these powers to free people. And I said, but that's not the point. I said I actually don't want to learn how to fly and to walk through walls necessarily.

[LAUGHTER]

Maybe some of you do that's why you're laughing you're like, who is this person? Of course, I do. But no, I said, but what's the point of the Bodhisattva? And I said the point of the Bodhisattva is to give a shit, is to care not just like this informal-- not like some of us say we care about things, but this awakened care.

This care that says I am intimately attuned to the suffering of beings and I am taking this personally and seriously that this is part of my responsibility, is to free my collective from this. And the more I get free, the more I'm all able to offer wisdom and teaching and work back to those around me. I said that's the Bodhisattva and that was the New Saint.

But even getting deeper into this work of the New Saint it's just things just started coming to me. Not only do we give a shit, but we also have to figure out what our work is. What is your work? And that was a hard question. What's the labor here? And the labor and the work was more than just practice. First of all, you have to figure out what to practice, you have to figure out what your front line is and then go to it.

And I felt like part of the issue for many of us is that we were so caught up doing other people's work that we didn't even know what our work was or that our work was so hard that we just chose to do something a little easier. And if it's easy, it's probably not your work. If you're not struggling, it's probably not what you're supposed to be doing.

And I said, OK, the work is where the struggle is, it's where that tension of transformation is arising because I am trying to shed this misconception of who and what I am in order to start residing in my most authentic truest nature. And so when you find your work, of course, well, you do it. You do the work.

And in case we get confused as to when the work is over, we just keep doing it. We keep showing up to the work, we keep returning to the work. We keep returning to the work when it's boring. We keep returning to the work when we're angry and tired and pissed off.

I'm not saying that you can't take a break, do some self-care, but you do it only because it's going to help you return back to the work. And if you're thinking, oh, the work that I think I should be doing is impossible, I would love to say and just point out that you have officially found your work.

[LAUGHTER]

Oh, I can't possibly do this, this is just signs that you're being pointed right to your front line. I can't possibly undo white supremacy as a White person. Good luck, you're going to have to. I can't possibly undo patriarchy, it's just cisgender man. Guess what? I have no choice. You get closer to the work when you stop giving yourself choices. You do it.

Of course, the other option is that you don't, which is a choice. And a lot of people are making that choice right now. But if you care, if you give a shit, then you're making the choice to do the work. And so all this just started happening. All this stuff started coming to me. This is The New Saint.

And for you to take this book seriously, I had to show you what that work looked like for me. So the text very quickly became an expression and an articulation of my struggle to get free. The joy, the pain, the struggle, all of that.

How can you believe me if you don't see me doing it, if there's no documentation? Because there are so many people in this industry who talk a really good game, but who aren't doing shit. But, oh, they write such lovely books. And I said, I didn't want to write a lovely book, I wanted to write a hard book because the work is hard.

The pain is real, the suffering is real. Metabolizing of all of this is real labor that doesn't look good. It doesn't look so good that I can put it on social media for likes and clicks and shares because when you get into your real work, you will look a mess and then people will call you a mess. And people don't want to hang out with you because you're a mess.

But that's what liberation struggle embodied looks like. You are not well put together. You will say things that don't make sense. You will speak in tongues. You will become annoying. You will say something that, yeah, most people don't agree with, but it's actually quite so much about getting free.

And if you're doing the work your heart will break and that brokenheartedness when used correctly will take you into a real lived experience of reality of the truth itself because if you can't get to the truth, you can't get to the liberation. But if you can't get to the suffering, you won't get to the truth and therefore, you won't get to the liberation. You see how all of this is connected?

So what you want to read just the passage from here from New Saints. If you have your book I'm starting on page 81. And this is the heart advice. When I was writing this chapter-- I mean, there's so much to say about this book. I just didn't really say much about it. I never do.

This is a lot of work here, this is a lot of channeling. This is a channeled book. I open up real wide for this and barely survived it. And it was through the support of many friends, particularly spiritual friends who held me during the writing of this book.

And I just want to highlight Professor Mark Jordan, who was my academic advisor when I was here. Amazing scholar, queer studies scholar, queer sexuality, and so forth. And when I was writing, working on Radical Dharma, he really taught me how to take care of myself in the writing. So I would check in with him and he would be like, are you OK?

And at the beginning I was like, of course, I'm just writing this little essay about Dharma and teaching as I was doing and love and rage. But he was like, no, you have to take care of yourself in the writing because this is real personal and deep. And I just hold his advice as I was writing this and I continue to hold his advice now.

So page 81, hard advice. When I said and prayed to Mother Harriet letting my awareness mingle with the light of her consciousness, which is the purest and fiercest compassion, I am reminded that the most important thing that I can do with my life is to work for freedom and help others to get free.

She reminds me of her last incarnation in this world and what it took to awaken to the level she did and what she did for my ancestors to free them. She reminds me that freedom is a process that begins with understanding what freedom means for me as a lived, embodied experience and that I don't need to wait for the permission from the state to free my mind.

Even though I may not have the complete agency over my body, freedom means that I no longer believe that any state has agency over it. After practicing Dharma for 20 years and teaching for over 10 years, I finally understand something important, the root of my practice in teaching has been grounded in the integration of both social and spiritual liberation.

Over the years in my teaching, I've been confused as to why so few people are committed to the hard work of liberation. I have wondered why my practice and choices from entering a three-year retreat to studying in different traditions and allying with plant consciousness have often seemed so extreme compared to others.

I started practicing Dharma because I wanted to be free from suffering. And then that initial motivation expanded into a need to achieve complete enlightenment. Although most practitioners of all identities are indeed reducing suffering, that reduction of suffering often has happiness and comfort as its end goal, and that is not liberation, but rather getting cozy in the carceral state.

And just as a note, I refer to the carceral state as samsara or as a cycle of birth and rebirth, so the mental carceral state, this experience of bondage and captivity policed by delusion in case you haven't read the book. I don't teach people how to be happy or comfortable. I help people to remember the fluid energetic spacious and empty nature of everything, including their own consciousness.

Remembering the nature of everything, we are freed from the delusion of the carceral state that is fueled by our belief in the realness of ego and duality. I am also speaking of the liberation of all phenomenal reality from the violence of forgetting the essence of what it is and is arising from. This freedom is not just for me, but for all conscious beings in this world and all the worlds both seen and unseen.

Real freedom can only be fathomed when we can get a glimpse of who we are, which is our most natural state of being beyond the indoctrination of the carceral state. I'm going to skip down just a bit to the next paragraph, freedom is a process. Freedom is a process. No one is going to save you, no one is going to save me. You are saved through your own labor with the support and inspiration of community and other individuals who embody the expression of liberated living.

Freedom isn't about or me being special or good enough, it is about whether we are ready to choose clarity over bullshit and drama. We can't figure out who we are beyond the trauma until we go back and figure out who we were before the trauma. To know ourselves before the trauma is to construct journeys back into history and time, back into old forgotten narratives and even mythologies.

Ultimately, we are trying to touch back into the primordial mind the unborn essence of everything. As the ancient Gate Gate mantra proclaims you must go beyond, coming to the edge and stepping off the edge into the awakening of who you are beyond the boundaries set by the carceral state.

So are you ready to get free or not? Because freedom isn't some willy-nilly shot in the dark with no intention or discernment. It's not something we randomly sign up for because we're bored nor is it a hashtag we post to make us look woke. It is not a club we join because all the other cool kids are doing it. It is not a pickup line to impress lovers. I've tried.

[LAUGHTER]

It is definitely not some hip existentialist intellectual pursuit that feels like the work, but just shoves us deeper into the same old bullshit smugness that somehow confuses apathy with freedom.

If you choose freedom for real you will lose shit and maybe never get it back again. You will be misunderstood. You will not be invited to hang with the cool kids anymore. Your heart will break wide open revealing the marriage of both sorrow and joy. You will fall into dark places. You will speak in tongues. People will avoid you. You will start to understand that what you thought the world was, it is not. You will start to give a shit.

And even for the people who hurt you the most-- this is not crazy sexy or cool nor is it glamorous. Your struggle will not be televised because people will not be interested in watching you fall apart outside of laughing at you.

Freedom is the shedding away of the skin, this reality stuck on you and forced you to play in. And the freer you get of the skin, the more you will be blamed for the suffering of others because your labor will remind them of the labor they are not doing for themselves.

And many of our prophets in the past who were often just mirrors reflecting to people their labor, you will be stoned to death because they're erasing you is easier than doing the work to get free. So once again, are you ready to get free? And if you're not, don't read this book, but you should buy it--

[LAUGHTER]

--and distribute it among your friends who are ready to get free. So we're going to transition now into questions or something, into a discussion.

DESTINY: Hi, everyone. I'm Destiny, second year MDiv here at Harvard Divinity School.

BOBBY: And my name is Bobby. I'm a first year MDiv here at the Divinity School.

DESTINY: I want to start off by saying thank you to Cheryl Giles because she volunteered me for this position.

[LAUGHTER]

And I emailed her I said, what are you doing to me right now? But this is me getting free being up here because I can barely speak in front of a class of 15 people. So this is me right now. But I just want to show gratitude also because reading this book has brought so much light to me because I said there's someone that I can relate to when we're talking about the New Saint.

I come from a COGIC background. So when we talk about the saints of the church and how conservative the COGIC background and strict it really is. I had a pastor tell me that I'm going to hell because I have a tattoo. So I never went back. But I remained rooted in the tradition and in the teachings that my grandmother brought me up with.

I had a friend one day saying to me the Christians have it wrong, but it's the Buddhist that they got it right. And so I started thinking more about that as a Christian and just correlating it because we believe in the ethics, the compassion and love and mindfulness.

And so I do have a question for you on that. Let me pull that up for a second because most of the classes that I'm taking right now with Cheryl Giles and Metta McGarvey and Chris Berlin, those are all Buddhist teachers here at Harvard Divinity School.

And so one of the questions that I have for you is, how can seeking guidance and knowledge from knowledgeable teachers or spiritual leaders from both traditions help in navigating the complexities of each tradition and offer valuable perspectives?

LAMA ROD OWENS: Absolutely. I did a lot of work around theology and the book on purpose because, one, I love Jesus, but I began to understand. And it was also during my time here that I began to understand that the religion of Christianity was something given to our ancestors that actually kept them from pursuing real freedom.

And the teachings and theology in Christianity are there, but we have to reclaim that. And we reclaim that by actually figuring out who we are beyond the etiquettes and the politics, the conservatisms that we engage in.

I had to start reclaiming that for myself and saying that this idea of hell was so over weaponized against me to be good and to be quiet and to pacify my innate desire to disrupt, to keep me in line. You need to stay in line or you'll go to hell and that's why I had to break up with God in college.

Well, I tell the story all the time because I needed to find freedom from that violence and actually find God on my own terms and those terms were about actual love, not conditional love, but unconditional love. The critique of power, the critique of violence, that's what God was for me. And if God was always sending people to hell I just didn't understand how that was an expression of love.

And so it was coming into Buddhism that actually gave me the framework of what love and compassion was and that began my healing and also my reintroduction back to Christianity as this tradition of liberation. Many people have embodied real liberation as Christians. And I wanted to embody that ethic and that labor not one of control or domination.

BOBBY: So this book gave me life. I connected so deeply to all of these aspects. I love the way it was written. You say at the very beginning that you want to be able to connect with your audience and you do that because you connect it so deeply with me. And I'll have to say, you got to Pentecostal liberation seekers here.

I'm an animist now. And so I'm really appreciating your discussion about your journey of liberation where you had to struggle against it in order to be able to find out where the freedom is.

And again, just the writing you embodied your teachers, Chenrezig and Oshun and Ganesh as the remover of obstacles because with this book, The New Saints, you took a concept that I had been having problems with where it's the idea of the Bodhisattva, the Messiah, the Savior who is way out in the stratosphere, outer realms of the stratosphere walking on water and doing these resurrecting the dead, doing amazing things that I'm not going to do. So why am I even bothering this process?

And so you brought it home and say, well, just try and do good in the moment, good-ish, and give a shit. And so I'm appreciating this new take on Buddhism. I'm listening to it now with a new ear. I'm just like, oh, it may be something in here for me. And so I'm wondering-- my question is because what I'm observing is that today as part of this apocalypse and that is unveiling, is we're seeing people holding on tight to the old stories and in the meantime, you are weaving this new story.

So what is it-- how do we navigate this unraveling in perhaps both a violent non-violent way? How do we be storytellers [INAUDIBLE] in this process of liberation?

LAMA ROD OWENS: Yeah, well you have to tell the truth about suffering and what has been lost because of colonization and everything that has gone into colonization. And this is why I call this a period of decolonizing because this old self both individual self and collective self has to die now.

But you're going to think you're dying, so you're going to hold on violently to these identities that actually are just based on domination and violence towards others. And one of the things that's heartbreaking is I've been talking about is that there are some people who don't want to decolonize because they're colonizers and that's who they are, but you don't know that you're much more than just the system, this violence that's really often been passed from generation to generation.

And so much of the decolonizing work that I think some of us are involved in is the disruption of the transference of this violence and we're saying no. And so another piece here too that you pointed out was our relationship to divine beings. And I had to-- I was very grateful, I am very grateful to Buddhism because and many of the teachers that I practice with who were like, no, you are the Buddha. You are divine.

And when I talk to a lot of Christians, a lot of Christians that I'm with and around, they just position Christ all the way on this pedestal. And I'm like I don't think that's what his intent was for you to find him impossible to relate to. I thought he was deeply human in order to mirror our humanness back to us and to invite us into a expression of divinity that was really truthful and honest and human.

But when you make Jesus a God then you say, well, I can't possibly be like that and then there's a tension that I think that awakens there a disappointment that you don't know how to deal with. And then from that disappointment, you weaponize it against others.

It's just like, well, I can't be like Jesus. This is the best that I can do, but that's a dangerous place to be. I think that has been the root of so much genocide and slavery and wars. I can't be like Jesus. This is the best that I can be.

You're trying to-- I don't know, I don't want to keep going into it, but around that deep disappointment is a rage right now. There's no such thing as white fragility. Reverend Angel used to say White people conquer the world. Nothing fragile about that.

[LAUGHTER]

She used to kill me with that. Some of you have heard her say that. Where's the fragility there? No, there's is rage. Look at what's been taken away from me and look at what it has cost not just me, but countless people who did not deserve to be the recipient of violence.

This is why I say that comfort and happiness aren't the point here because if you're just going for comfort and happiness, then you will justify the pursuit of that comfort and happiness through violence. But go all the way to freedom, happiness and comfort and joy all that stuff will happen.

But you don't want to stop at happiness as limiting. And happiness in a sense will become yet another carceral logic that you're going to get wrapped up in. It's going to start policing you and limiting the ways in which you're being called to disrupt and break into a new sense of self, that's really about freedom and spaciousness. Yeah, that's intense. You can take a breath. It's OK. It's a lot, yeah, it's a lot.

But this is the work. This is the labor. If you're uncomfortable then that's where your work is. And your discomfort doesn't mean you're unsafe. So let's stop, let's disrupt that right now. Let's do something different. Yeah, thank you.

DESTINY: Well, I want to talk more about ancestral work.

LAMA ROD OWENS: Yes.

DESTINY: Because you talk about your journey and who you are on the Middle Passage, can I read a few?

LAMA ROD OWENS: Yeah.

DESTINY: OK. Page 157, if anyone wants to follow along and it's under the Middle Passage. He says, "I've known for a few years that as a descendant of enslaved people I would have to return somehow to the experience of the Middle Passage because as mother Alice Walker has taught healing begins where the wound was made.

Healing from my personal trauma has often meant returning in time and space to experiences that must be liberated. The Middle Passage is gigantic trapped energy howling in our bodies and our thoughts and even sabotaging our dreams of a freer future." Listen. Because when I read that and I kept going and you were talking about your first and second journey with ayahuasca.

And I remember during the pandemic I was experimenting a little bit. And I'm on a 12-hour trip and the first thing I see when my ancestors in chains and I thought I didn't know what to do with that. And I started dry heaving and dry purging and taking ownership of myself by wrapping my arms around my body saying my body is my body, my body is my body.

And I didn't know what that meant at the time. But now being at Harvard Divinity School and I find myself being so exhausted all the time, all the time and I had to find a therapist that deals with ancestral trauma. And we talk as home girls, but she always brings it down to historical context. That's why this is so important to have someone that you can relate to.

So reading this book I just felt like I can relate so much to what you're writing and who the New Saint is and who we are. And so my next question is, what's the significance of ancestral work for personal and collective healing?

LAMA ROD OWENS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is some of the most important work that we're called to do, all of us are called to do, especially if you don't like your ancestors because what's the rule? If you don't want to do it, it's probably what you should be doing.

But ancestral work, we are connected. There's this web of ancestors of beings around us that we're connected to that we share this karmic relationship to. It's not just blood, family, or genetic family, it's beings whom we embody or we reflect in this life.

And they have chosen to accompany us in this life, but that is an obligation that we have to take seriously. For those of us who come out of severe ancestral trauma, our labor is to return back to those sites of trauma to metabolize this collective trauma on behalf of our ancestors to use our bodies to metabolize and to move this trapped energy along, to free our ancestors from this ancestral trauma.

As they're freed, we're freed. And as we do our part, we lift some of this collective trauma. We can't do it all. We can do our piece. So for those of us who are coming from significant ancestral trauma, that wound is asking for metabolizing.

And we talk about ayahuasca, we talk about the plant medicine culture and tradition, my practice of plant medicine in the spirit underground, community that I'm a part of and helping to form, we believe that these ancient indigenous medicines are being made available even more so because it helps us to do these journeys back into these sites of trauma to metabolize the pain.

I'm not into psychedelics, I'm not into having trips, and I'm not into the colors. I can do that elsewhere. When I ally with medicine it's about doing the work of liberation and healing. And when those of us who are descended from enslaved people go back and do this work, the chains are what we have to break. The trauma, the sadness, the hopelessness, the terror is what has to be liberated and heaved and purged in our practice.

And it's not easy. It's not fun. It's not glamorous. I wanted to do this work before allying with medicine. And when I got into the work I was like, what the fuck is this? And I talk about in the book-- and I've talked about it also in other collections, Black and Buddhist. It's another collection of essays that I contributed to. And I talk really exclusively about that first experience going into the Middle Passage. It was the worst night in my life and experience of my life.

And again I had community and people holding me going through that. But if I want to get free, then this is what I have to choose to get free. And because I've done that experience, I feel like-- I don't know.

I don't want to say I feel like a different person or a freer person, but I just feel like for the first time since having done that, and this was in 2019 when I went through that process, I felt like for the first time I was communicating with my ancestors not through trauma, but through joy, through joy. And that awakened my relationship to my ancestors and now we work collaboratively. We're a team now.

So when I talk about my ancestors, I'm talking about beings I am in direct communication with. For those of us who identify as queer or gay and so forth, there are ancestral wounds that we are being called to return back to, including the AIDS epidemic, for instance. That trauma has to be lifted particularly for gay and queer men.

For those of us, for those of you who descend, whose families survived or were impacted by the Holocaust, that's ancestral healing that has to go back. For those of us descended from indigenous people who experienced genocide, we're being asked to return back to those experiences, to liberate our ancestors still bound by that trauma who haven't been able to escape and to heal from that trauma.

This is when identity is important because these identities have shaped who we are in this age. And this is why I keep calling this an age of decolonization. But it just doesn't-- the decolonization and the violence from colonization from the past doesn't just go away because we wake up to it.

We are being asked to return back to free our ancestors from those cycles of trauma that they're still trapped in because they didn't have what they needed to metabolize the violence that they were experiencing and they transitioned into a state that feels really carceral and we are being asked to release them, but we're also being asked to release ourselves at the same time.

BOBBY: That was an element of the book that I really resonated with. I love that you didn't just focus on anthropocentric human-based liberation. Liberation has to happen on both the physical and spiritual levels, both with the spirit realm of our ancestors, but also the spirits of the land also. That was beautiful.

And I just came back, some of you all are aware that there was a class trip that went with Dr. Hawkes and Dean Bartholomew to one of the major sites of the wounding for Black folks here in the US in South Carolina. And so we [INAUDIBLE].

And we went to the plantations and it was so important for me. And what I was getting from my ancestors was to arrive there as a Black woman who was free. I could grieve, but also feel the joy because they're feeling that joy of being able to walk into this space and there is no shackles, there's no body telling me what to do with my time, with my body, whatever, whatever. I am free.

And one of the other pieces that I really appreciated and you just touched on them a little bit was the four liberations, which was dedicate it to queer trans men. And it was just so beautiful even that section with the body because it's liberation, but it's you're not saying that you have to restrict yourself in to other suffering and just this narrow way of being. But there's just opulence that you use, that's one of the titles, opulence, just allow yourself.

And it's not just about you, allow all of those in your lineage to be able to experience that thing that they could not experience. And so I'm wondering as you were talking earlier about how we have got to-- suffering is just part of it. And I know that I had my crash and burn. I had my little nervous breakdown in one little bit, but we'll say it's little for the sake of propriety.

But I also had a little bit of a privilege. I was single and I had no kids. I had a [INAUDIBLE] so I could just fall out and collapse and just be like I'm done. And we got a row of ayahuasca. I see people here. They've been also in ceremony. One of the things they would say is you can purge on behalf of the world.

For those many, many people who cannot take the time to stop and grieve and do that work, is that also something that we can do on behalf of the world? Can we take on that? Should we take on that?

LAMA ROD OWENS: Yes, and you can grieve and go at the same time, that's a nice privilege to stop and grieve. But sometimes we're grieving at work, we're grieving walking down the block, we're grieving at the grocery store. You have to incorporate grief into everything, absolutely.

And we have to grieve on behalf of those who do not have the capacity to grieve. We have to cry for people who aren't crying right now to help to release this energy, but also to show them that it's OK. We need to return back to public grieving not to pushing grief away behind closed doors. It has to be a part of our culture to grieve together, to grieve openly.

And you don't have to get swallowed up and consumed by the grief either. You can hold grief in this gentleness and this openness and you don't have to get consumed by it. And that's what-- maybe we have to learn initially, maybe we have to get consumed by it in order to learn how to actually consume it instead through spaciousness and openness and so moving that.

Both of you have experience with plant medicine because you bring a different narrative to plant medicine culture that's more than just having a good time and having an experience. You're bringing liberation work and this is what medicine is asking us. This is what the mother, as we call it in plant medicine culture, the mother or the grandmother is asking us to do.

The mother gives us the tools to do the work and we just have to show up and do it. And that's incredibly important because you're a liberation through medicine is the liberation you offer back to everyone else around you. That's why I do medicine work and ceremony. So looks like we're getting ready to close.

ANNOUNCER: Sponsors, the Buddhist Ministry Initiative and the Center for the Study of World Religions.