Black, queer liberation & Tibetan Buddhism: Lama Rod Owens - part 1 (43 mins)

Losar Tashi Delek and Happy Lunar New Year!

In this episode, a Good Refugee Podcast speaks with Buddhist teacher, activist and writer Lama Rod Owens on a wide spectrum of topics covering spirituality, silence and power (06:55); how class, race, wealth and justice intersect with Buddhism today (12:35); sexual abuse in dharma spaces (26:56); drawing boundaries between the teacher, student, sangha and social life (29:38); and mental health (40:00).

This is part one of the conversation. Listen/read part two here.

The full transcript of this interview is posted below, lightly edited for clarity and flow.

Bio

Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist minister, author, activist, yoga instructor and authorized Lama, or Buddhist teacher, in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism and is considered one of the leaders of his generation of Buddhist teachers. He holds a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is a co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, and Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger.

Lama Rod will be hosting a seven-week online course and practice group based on his book “Love and Rage.” It starts on February 15. Sign up here.

lamarod.com

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Episode notes

* Making sense of these times. [02:30]

* How “Love and Rage” fits in this moment. [04:20]

* Meditations on silence and power. [06:55]

* The evolution of activism and dharma from when Lama Rod first began. [11:18]

* How class, race, wealth and justice intersect with Buddhism today. [12:35]

* Sexual abuse in dharma spaces. [26:56]

* Drawing boundaries between the teacher, student, dharma and social life. [29:38]

* Seeing the teacher as a mirror to your own wisdom. [32:58]

* Understanding mental health from Buddhist, western and Indigenous perspectives. [40:00]

Interview transcript

Lama Rod thank you so much for joining us. Welcome. Tashi Delek!

Thank you so much.

Where are you speaking from?

I am speaking from Atlanta, where I just relocated to. This is traditionally, historically the land of the Muskogee people and the Cherokee people. But I am originally from Rome, Georgia, so this is like returning home.

And how are you doing at this moment?

I’m ok. I’m a little tired, but for the most part, mentally I’m feeling clear, open and fluid which is really wonderful.

Has it felt like lately there has been a much more ramped up conversation or discourse about existing and how to make sense of these times?

Yes, oh absolutely. I think last year the beginning of quarantine and the pandemic really forced people to do intense discernment about exactly what they were doing in their lives. 

The beginning of the quarantine reminded me of my years in my three-year retreat where everything just kind of shut down and I was just really holding space in one place for an extended period of time. That kind of holding space for me always triggers this deep kind of contemplation and discernment about what my work is. Last year, I think a lot of folks just started waking up and realizing that they had to start making different decisions and choices about how they were living their lives. And of course, on top of that, the world continues. We continue to live within systems and institutions that are creating violence for a lot of different people. So we were having to negotiate racial injustice, economic injustice, climate instability [while] at the same time negotiating a pandemic. A lot of folks started waking up to the reality of these harmful systems.

When you first started [Love and Rage], you wrote that there was this moment where you were giving a talk with your co-author of Radical Dharma [Rev. angel Kyodo williams], and there was this Black gentleman who spoke about anger, and that was kind of the genesis which started your writing of Love and Rage. When was this around?

2017. Before that I was really avoiding writing a book on anger. I wasn’t really interested. But at that event, where this young Black man was just like, “What do I do with anger? How do I choose happiness?” I really realized that this would be an important teaching to offer. 

When you locate yourself back to that time in 2017 and how things just unfolded from that point on—understanding of course that so many of the injustices and violent things that we’ve witnessed and experienced have already been happening for many decades—and then this year has been such a collision of all those injustices. And then of course we have the pandemic. As I was reading through the book now, so many of those things were almost prophetic in some ways. Was that a realization that you had to also reckon with?

I will say this: my experience as I was writing that book was an experience of feeling as if I—it’s hard to articulate. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I felt like I wasn’t talking about what was happening in the moment of writing the book. And this is why I didn’t really think the book was that interesting. When I wrote it, I was like who’s gonna actually resonate with this because I don’t think it’s actually talking about anything that’s happening now. On top of that, the book was supposed to be out much earlier than last summer [2020]. It was supposed to be out the fall of 2019 and I couldn’t meet the deadlines for getting the drafts in. I kept missing all these deadlines. 

Classic writer’s dilemma.

Exactly. Finally, my publisher was like, you have to get it in at this date or we have to push it back like a year. And so I made that deadline and when the book finally was published a year later, then it kind of landed within this current… well, apocalypse.

June 2020.

Yeah, I had no idea. Absolutely no idea that 2020 was gonna be the way that it was.

Silence, which I know has been an important piece in your practice, is a recurring theme in the book. It also coheres with how many of us have lived in isolation throughout this pandemic. Is that something you’ve meditated on length and spoken to others about?

Yeah absolutely. For me, quarantine was something that I knew how to do because of retreat. And quarantine was something the majority of folks didn’t know anything about so I just felt like I was coming home to an old practice. For me, silence is also about stillness. A lot of folks didn’t have the privilege of being in the space that felt still and quiet. Many folks were kind of bound together in family units and other roommates and other kinds of living arrangements where it felt very crowded and intense and stressful. But even in that kind of stress and crowdedness there’s still this incredible way we can touch into this stillness within all that movement and constriction. So I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on silence itself and trying to understand what silence is. I’m really influenced by the work of Audre Lorde; she talks about silence and the transformation of language. For me what I began to understand is that silence helps me to understand language and all the different ways we communicate.

If I may quote a passage from [Love and Rage], you say, “The transformation of silence into language is the migration from captivity into freedom or even the migration from invisibility into visibility. However, freedom and visibility come with the burden of confronting all those who don’t want you to be free or seen.”

What I read from that, and understand from you, is you also wrestling with the complexity of silence and how that can also be weaponized on those who are oppressed into being silenced. Can you please expand on that?

I think about another quote from Zora Neale Hurston who, among many things, also wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and she has this quote where she says, and I paraphrase, if you don’t speak, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it. So that weaponization of silence is really about how silence is used to erase people and then to replace that erasure with a narrative that’s much more comfortable than the true reality of things. And so, I was doing two things: I was trying to figure out how to move into language as an act of liberation. And secondly, I was trying to figure out in my practice how to use silence to communicate as well. That’s where we talk about the weaponizing of silence. It’s like, yeah we silence people but in my practice I wanted to be empowered in both silence and language. I wanted agency to choose the best way to be in the moment. I think silence, when we’re conscious, intelligent and aware about it, can speak even louder than words or language.

I think that’s a very keen insight, especially when you pair silence with power and the notion of agency as well. You cite specific examples in your book of how silence can just be another form of abuse. You also make it a point to mention your root guru Norlha Rinpoche and how all that episode played out. How even in those insta