Hello. Hope February has been treating you well. In the second and concluding part of Gelek’s conversation with Lama Row Owens, they speak about the loss of magic and exploring Indigeneity (01:25); holding space for anger and violence in creating justice and peace (09:05); the weaponization of niceness (20:55); bodies, movement and breathing in the time of a pandemic (22:40); and more. If you missed part one of the conversation, click here. Episode notes * Loss of magic and exploring Indigeneity. [01:25] * Loving our anger. [03:56] * What Black History Month means to Lama Rod. [06:15] * Holding space for anger and violence in creating justice and peace. [09:05] * Discussing police, prison abolition, political systems and institutions in dharma teachings. [15:29] * Weaponization of niceness. [20:55] * Bodies, movement and breathing in the time of a pandemic. [22:40] * Lama Rod’s current and upcoming projects. [26:30] Interview transcript You have a chapter towards the end of [Love and Rage] where you speak about the loss of magic. Yeah, that’s part of my Indigenous work right now. This is work that I hope to present in the next couple of years—me connecting more to my African as well as Native American ancestry, and putting all of that in conversation with Tibetan Buddhism. For me, again, it’s a synthesis of what’s being created. I think “Love and Rage” was a good beginning step to demonstrate how I am transitioning into this space. As an American Black person, my Indigenous spiritual practice is hoodoo. Hoodoo derives from the practice of Africans coming on to the West, meeting Christianity, and developing the system of philosophy, ritual magic and so forth. It’s so related to tantra and Vajrayana in Tibetan Buddhism. I wanna understand how I can synthesize that even more so that it’s more authentic for me. I remember years ago, Rinpoche [Norlha] was talking about the magic of Native Americans. He was saying, “Native Americans were so strong that they survived genocide.” It really struck me when he said that. For me, that was just the way he recognized the validity of this community of people. He respected Native American gods and spirits. When Kundun [HHDL] makes his trip to North America, he always makes it a point to also have representatives or emissaries from the local First Nations or the Native communities to meet with them and speak with them. I always find it beautiful how there are these patterns of elemental rituals that’s consistent across hemispheres, cultures and Indigenous communities. I am reminded of, for instance, the whole myth or idea of how Buddhism was propagated by Padmasambhava [in Tibet], and him having to clash with nagas and deities. It’s very fascinating to actually look into those things, and I’m really excited for this project that you are undertaking. The title of the book itself, I was curious about that. When you placed “Love and Rage” in that order, was that intentional? Yeah absolutely. The title came first before the content. Like not “Rage and Love,” but “Love and Rage.” Was that intentional? Yes, because love holds the rage. Love leads. So, when I talk about this conversation between love and rage, it’s not a fight. It’s more about how love is holding the space for our rage to be there. Love is the container that holds everything. If there is no container of love then that rage actually becomes an expression of violence. “My anger is like a living being I am in partnership with.” And then a couple of pages later you say, “Loving our anger invites it into a transformative space where it emerges as the teacher.” That’s so profound. I wonder if you can expand on that a little bit. That’s rooted within the teachings around the manifestation of the guru. How the guru is manifesting in the phenomenal world. One of those manifestations of the guru is through emotions. Once we pay attention to the emotion, the emotion is actually trying to teach us how to be in relationship with it. For so much of our lives, we tend to be overreacting and running away from our emotional reality. But to turn our attention back to something like anger, we begin to hold space for it and to experience it, that experience begins to teach us about the nature of emotion. And of course the nature of emotion is the nature of the mind itself. Once we realize that, the guru emerges in that moment. You’re saying anger can be a vessel that helps take us to the ultimate reality. Well, anything can take us to the ultimate. The nature of the whole phenomenal world is of one essence. So if we recognize the nature of that phenomena—an emotion, an object, an idea, whatever it is—it unlocks the nature of all phenomena, and that opens us right into the ultimate. Does Black History Month hold significance for you? That’s a good question. It doesn’t hold significance for me because I feel like I’m always celebrating my history and culture. It’s not relegated to one month—the shortest month of the year, by the way. I just think that we have to establish a culture where we’re celebrating all the parts of our history; all the different groups and communities that have helped shape the world. We should have knowledge and an appreciation of that. And yes, I understand that there are histories that have been so silenced that we have to create and designate these periods of time to bring attention to it. But I really want to take it to a point where we don’t need to have a special time to think about these things. That it just happens naturally. That we think about Black folks, Asian American communities, queer history, Native American history… where we just know that. And we don’t. There’s so much history that has been erased. This is different from how some people then take that other approach where they say, “I don’t see race. I’m colour blind.” You’re not saying that at all. You actually have a passage—I can’t find it right now—in your book where you affirm and celebrate the different histories, traditions, lineages that we embody. Yeah, I see differences. I love that. Again, it goes back to the teachings of the mind. I can hold space for everything and notice everything. And I can look at the ways in which I have fixations on certain things. I can examine that. That fixation may also mean prejudice. It may mean resistance to certain things. I can look at that and hold space for it and allow it to be this immense amount of openness. We can hold all the difference in the world but the problem is our relationship to that difference. Is that relationship one of opening and acceptance or is it one of restricting and defining and pushing away? And asserting power. And asserting power, absolutely. Because we’re fixated on our sense of self and ego, right? But there has to be space for it too. Spaciousness is another theme that’s quite prevalent in your book. Early on in your book, you say (in speaking of anger): “In activist communities, our relationship to anger is immature, ill-informed and overly romanticized. We manipulate anger as a false sense of energy and inspiration.” The first image that came to my mind when I read that line is the burning of the 3rd Precinct building of the Minneapolis police department shortly after the killing of George Floyd. For me that was such a powerful, revolutionary emanation of what activism means but also what taking back justice means. Do you think your line and that image are in contradiction? I think that one of the things—and this is a really subtle, nuanced argument—that I’m always trying to push for, particularly with activists, is knowing what you’re doing, and not just reacting. If you’re gonna burn a building down, know that you’re burning it and know that you’re doing this in order to hopefully trigger freedom, liberation. Not just cause you’re pissed off. I know that’s a very nuanced thing. Our holding space for anger and reacting to anger may actually look like the same action. Often I’m trying to avoid violence, but at the same time, sometimes violence has to be expressed in order to reduce greater forms of violence. And so I’m not a 100 percent non-violent person. I think violence can be used skillfully to reduce other kinds of violence and harm. So we have to know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The use of violence has to be skillful. And of course people push back, but then I use this example of like, if you have a child and someone runs up and grabs your child, are you going to stand there? Are you gonna do whatever you can to get your child back in that moment? We all have the capacity to express violence. Every being on this planet has been violent in some capacity or another. What I’m arguing for is can we skillfully use that violence to reduce other forms of violence when we need to. Dr. King said, “Riot is the language of the unheard.” I think that’s important for us. And then, when something needs to be destroyed, can we critically say, OK we’re going to do this? Not out of hate and anger, but out of this need to be heard; to disrupt certain systems that are increasing harm and violence for others. This is perhaps my own Tibetan neurosis surfacing where I feel like non-violence tends to get weaponized, funnily enough, in how we are meant to come to terms with our traumatization and our oppression. It also operates through respectability politics, where the idea is that if you conduct yourself civilly or in a way that’s appropriate, that somehow it elevates your dissent over others. I think it’s very timely or relevant that you quote Dr. King because I’m reminded of his quote where he says, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension. It is the presence of justice.” That piece, again, gets easily paved over when those in power talk about non-violence or of being peaceful but miss t
