Lama Rod Owens on necessary change
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Lama Rod Owens on necessary change
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Many of us are enduring a painful new awareness of the conflicts that underpin our social relationships. For Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens, this is the beginning of a revolutionary path to our liberation - a necessary upheaval that will rebalance us forever.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Hi, welcome to How We Live Now. I'm currently raking leaves in my garden so I thought I'd share the process with you. My next door neighbor has a beautiful, very mature ash tree that hangs over my garden. I love it, I'm so grateful for it, I hope she never cuts it down. And once a year, in the autumn, it seems to just drop all of its leaves in one go on my garden. It's so funny, you turn around and everything's under this complete duvet of leaves and it seems today to have dropped half of them. So, I am raking them up and putting them over my garden, ready to mulch it, really, for the winter.
I haven't got any plants in there at the moment, I'm working through a process with it, it's very difficult. I am not the world's greatest gardener and I always feel like I should be and the dog digs everything up. Anyway, I've stripped it down to bare bones again and I'm planning another kind of a garden which probably I'll tell you about next year if it ever happens. I'm feeling very sad with myself about it right now but this is good. Brushing some leaves over it, ready for the winter, putting some nutrients into the soil, it won't do any harm at all. So, I needn't feel too sad, I don't think.
So, today I have a fantastic podcast conversation for you with Lama Rod Owens who is a Buddhist teacher who talks so eloquently about how we can liberate ourselves from many of the thought patterns we're fixed in. His most recent book is called Love and Rage which is one of the reasons why I wanted to bring him onto this podcast because anger, I think, is one of the huge issues for us in terms of keeping us apart right now. And what he had to say, I think, has closed a bit of a loop for me in many ways that our anger isn't wrong, it isn't bad, it's a very rational response to challenging times and to times where conflict is perhaps inevitable.
Anyway, maybe have a listen, I don't want to tell you too much about it. But I, for one, feel maybe a little bit comforted about the conflict room. I'm going to pick up some more leaves, I'll see you a bit later.
Lama Owens is an authorized lama or teacher of the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. He's also the co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation and the sole author of Love and Rage, the Path of Liberation through Anger. Lama Rod, welcome so much. It's great to have you here.
Lama Rod Owens:
Thank you so much.
Katherine May:
So, this season we've been focusing on the question how do we come back together again and you sprang to mind immediately for me because of your incredible work integrating rage and anger into our, I don't know, our practice as humans. But before we talk about that, I just wondered if we could touch briefly on your journey to becoming a Buddhist Lama because I think that story is actually really informative for what you'll tell us about this. So, how did you get to where you are now? What's the pathway?
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah. Well, I started really just wanting to be free and that's been a passion of mine since as long as I can remember. And so, I started very young with community service projects and volunteering in church and the community and then furthering that service work in middle school and high school where I really engaged in a wide range of issues from, really, substance abuse to sexuality and sexual assault as well. And of course, that took me into college, university where I continued to engage in those areas. After graduation, I moved into an activist community and that's where I really began to experience what I identified at the time as severe clinical depression and that really opened the door to getting curious about how to take care of that experience.
I tried therapy, nutrition, exercise and so forth but what was really calling me was a deeper understanding of the mind and of our emotions and so forth. And so, I started, really, just opening up to meditation. Of course, that led me deeper into developing a meditation practice and working with a local healer who supported my practice. But after a time, I really began to feel a lot better and I really started focusing more on the teachings of Buddhism along with deepening my meditation practice. And after a bit, I realized that this was what my path was because I was beginning to understand ultimate liberation and that was how do we experience freedom from our thoughts and our emotions and really how our thoughts and emotions inform how we perceive the phenomenal world.
And I began to understand, through the Buddhist teachings, that I was already free and that the labor was remembering that freedom. And I thought it would be really powerful to link these teachings with social liberation teachings and work. And so, I dedicated myself to the path of training to be a teacher which required that I spend over three years in retreat, in silent retreat with a total of about five years living in monastic community as well. And that was my training and, after my training, I was authorized as a Lama and Lama means teacher in the Tibetan tradition of Buddhism.
Katherine May:
I'm so curious about loads of this. What was it like to approach that initial three years of retreat? That, to me, sounds incredibly daunting but maybe, if it's the pathway you're seeking, maybe it's not so much.
Lama Rod Owens:
Right. I knew I needed to do it, that I had to do it and it was this opportunity to divest from a lot of, I don't know, distraction and violence in the world. I knew that I needed to do significant healing work by turning inward and this was at the end of my 20s. So, I spent the last three years of my 20s and the beginning of my 30s in this retreat so it was really a formative time for me to be doing this and I was really grateful to be ending my 20s, which were a really chaotic period for me, decade for me, in this experience of just moving really deeply into my internal world of mind and body, yeah.
And so, yeah, it felt daunting but I knew that this would pass like everything passes and that I would regret not having done this but I would also, having done it, look back and understand that this was probably one of the most important things I could ever do with my life.
Katherine May:
It's that real sense of mission and service, I think, that comes across. From devoting your life to activism initially and then to going into this greater, I don't know, greater commitment, complete commitment, absolute commitment to becoming a teacher, that comes from a really embedded sense of service, I think.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yes.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Lama Rod Owens:
Well, it comes from really being serious about what you want to see happen in the world. And I think there are a lot of people who are very serious about changing the world and some of that labor is very violent and destructive as we see over and over again. And some of it is very positive and beneficial but you need the passion and you have to use that passion to guide what you're willing to do to bring about the change you wish to see.
Katherine May:
And you write in Love and Rage about the way that you realize, as a late teenager, I think, about your relationship with anger and how toxic that was becoming for you. But also, that there was an issue with holding anger that it was dangerous for you to express on the outside, that you were constantly having to suppress it in public so that you didn't look like an angry, young man. Angry, young, Black man specifically.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, absolutely. I think many of us experience different privileges around the expression of anger and, for those of us who are most oppressed, our anger is always read as violence or as threat against dominant cultures. And so, I, of course, knew that in an early age growing up Black in America. So, for me, I think my anger really turned into passive aggressiveness where I could hide my expression of anger. But by the time I got into my 20s and started doing this work around understanding my mind and body, I really began to understand that it just wasn't a healthy expression of anger. I needed to learn how to experience anger.
And to experience anger doesn't mean that I had to react to the anger and I think this is a really subtle instruction in contemplative studies and definitely in Love and Rage where I want people to understand that you can experience anger but reacting to anger is a choice and that we have to train to disrupt that habitual activity. Because if we're just habitually reacting to what comes up in terms of anger, then, often, it will be really violent, it could be really scary for people to see it. I see this all the time but what I trained to do was to move from a space of reactivity into a space of responsiveness.
So, I choose to respond to my anger now and that's the way I take care of the anger. And of course, that's the way that I get to take care of the hurt beneath the anger.
Katherine May:
Yeah, because anger is, you're going to say this way better than me and I'm about to phrase it very badly, but anger is the emotion that whirls up in response to things like hurt and dislocation and loads of other very [inaudible 00:12:22] emotions that are ongoing and that are often so present in us particularly when we're younger.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Can you phrase that better than I did, though, because I think I did a terrible job?
Lama Rod Owens:
Well, maybe another aspect of this too is that, yeah, I think that we're all just deeply hurt and we're not often taught how to take care of that hurt and anger arises as this secondary emotion that's actually alerting us to the fact that we've been hurt. But we've forgotten about the hurt, we've been distracted from the hurt and now we're just pissed off and being pissed off with no context as to why we're really pissed off. We're not pissed off because someone's done something bad to us, that's really not why we're pissed off, we're pissed off because we've been hurt. We have to name that. I know it's a very subtle practice but we can't assume that, when we're talking about anger, that we're also equally talking about the hurt beneath the anger. I just don't believe that we're doing that.
Katherine May:
Well, hurt is a very vulnerable thing to express, isn't it, whereas anger is a little tougher and a little more defended.
Lama Rod Owens:
Right. It's a lot of energy and that energy makes us feel powerful because that anger arises out of a tension and that tension is arising between being hurt and wanting to take care of ourselves but not knowing how to do it. So, that tension is a frustration, actually, and then we get swept up in the tension and frustration and that's when we start experiencing anger.
Katherine May:
And we might learn an angry response from other people around us as well, that might be what we're educated to do. I think about this a lot on social media that, actually, we're almost directly told that anger is the correct emotion and, if you're not enacting anger, then you're not engaged enough somehow. It often strikes me that that's actually quite a dangerous idea to put about because of the very toxic effect of anger on the body, I guess.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Our reactivity, the anger, is overvalued in many cultures. And really, what our activism is, it's saying that, actually, the real work is learning how to use anger to show us where hurt has happened, where boundaries have been crossed and to hold people accountable and to disrupt further violence, not through reacting to the anger, but by embodying love. I am disrupting whatever harm that's happening, not because I want you or others to hurt, I want people to be free from suffering and this is what I'm choosing to do to free people from suffering, including myself, in this moment. And that changes, that's a response to anger when we're choosing love to actually respond to what's happening in the moment that we perceive as being part of our experience of being hurt.
Katherine May:
So, how do we practice that in a real situation? Say we've become incredibly angry with a member of our family for saying things that we think is offensive or that ... Sorry, that's a passive aggressive way of saying it. Just for saying things that are offensive, that are objectively offensive, anger rises up in us and, I think, for lots of us, we either react very strongly in that moment or we exit the situation as quickly as we can. And both of those, I don't know, both of those responses create a situation that's very hard to go back on. And I guess what's left when we've left that room is that sense of hurt because of love, because specifically someone we love has said something that we find violently offensive. What's the practice? What do we do?
Lama Rod Owens:
Well, when we're talking about working with really strong emotional energies like anger, the practice in the moment has to be supported by a practice that we're engaging in when we're not in that moment. So, a lot of people, it's really not the case where you can just do these really advanced practices in the moment without having practiced it or without having created space where you're regularly doing these supportive practices so that, when you show up in the moment, you've trained to use these methods right. And so, in the moment, my ethic in any moment is to reduce harm and to experience safety and wellness. That's what I'm trying to do in every moment.
So, if I'm in a situation where there's a lot of anger, maybe I've been triggered or maybe I've triggered someone else, if I can't figure out how to reduce the harm or the escalation, then we have to walk away and that's boundaries. Walking away is a boundary that we create to reduce the harm that may continue to happen. And I know, people, we have this idea that we have to stay there and we have to engage.
Katherine May:
Duke out kind of thing.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Lama Rod Owens:
I want to win this argument, I have to hold someone accountable but, if you can't do that from a place of space and love, then, more than likely, you will actually be expressing violence and that's not going to help, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah, sure.
Lama Rod Owens:
So, this is why I encourage people to develop a practice that they're doing something every day, a couple minutes of practice a day where they're working with meditation, they're learning how to experience anger so that they can remember what that experience is in the moment where anger is really awakening for them. But again, it's the hurt and so, so much of the practice, before getting to that moment, is actually learning how to experience our hurt and our brokenheartedness. And I often say in my work, it's really learning how to mourn the discomfort. And mourning is just, for me, in my work, is a method that I engage in to really experience the discomfort of sadness or despair or however hurt is arising for me in the moment and to learn how to experience and to let it go.
Katherine May:
It's something that comes up a lot in my work. I've written a lot about how meditation has helped me to, well, to actually deal with a whole lifelong pattern of having suicidal thought that were always my default response to absolutely every situation, honestly. And I found that what meditation gave me was, not the ability to escape, but the ability to sit with those thoughts and to almost enter a space where they were present, that was a place where I could meet them and meet them as separate from myself, if that makes any sense whatsoever.
And nothing else really ever worked for me except for coming back over and over again to that as well. Not solving it, not curing it but entering into a lifelong commitment to working with it, a space. And I just know that loads of people listening now will be saying, yes, but I can't do that because I can't sit with those feelings, they're too unbearable or I can't sit still. I know you hear this all the time, tell me your response to that, speak to those people.
Lama Rod Owens:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yeah. Well, first of all, you don't have to sit still. Because when we talk about meditation practice, meditation practice isn't just about sitting still and quietly in a corner somewhere. We think about movement practice and walking and yoga and asana, these are practices that we can use to channel this energy that feels really difficult to just hold. And when I use the term hold, what I mean is that we're not reacting to what's arising but we're feeling, we're experiencing what's arising and that experience is going to be completely different for everyone because we all have different levels of trauma. And so, we have to rely on supportive practices and methods to support experiencing.
So, again, movement is one of those practices. In Love and Rage, I talk about a practice called the seven homecomings which is just this experience of feeling love and care, just feeling that I am not alone as I am attempting to experience this really uncomfortable energy. The earth is one of those things that we take refuge in, that we connect to as a supportive element in our practice. But really, practice is about starting somewhere. I think that many of us have it in our mindset, if we don't do it perfectly the first time, then it's not worth doing and that's not what practice is.
So, I encourage people to think about something that they've learned that has taken time to learn and the practice that we've had to develop to learn something. And that's the same effort that we put into working with our minds and thoughts and emotions, it's we do a little bit as much as possible but the-
Katherine May:
And we chip away at it.
Lama Rod Owens:
Exactly, you chip away at it. And again, the moment is not the best time to just start practicing. I'm not saying that you won't get lucky, I'm not saying that there's something that won't be beneficial but I'm just saying that, if you really want to see transformation happen in the moment, you have to start thinking before the moment happens. I guess you have to start planning and strategizing.
Katherine May:
Laying down a foundation.
Lama Rod Owens:
Exactly. So much of my training has been just imagining how to practice in certain situations and then bringing that imagination and that material into a practice where I'm just working with, it's like role playing. How am I going to show up? How am I going to practice if this thing happens?
Katherine May:
It's interesting, actually, for me that, I think, what I came to realize was that the biggest pain for me was being caused by trying not to feel those difficult feelings. That actually feeling them was much easier than constantly trying to escape them but also that my brain was trying to rehearse better ways to do things and I was seeing that as catastrophizing. And I actually think it's a process of exactly what you're talking about that your brain will go to these worst case scenarios and, actually, that gives you an opportunity to think, okay, so what happens then? What do I do if this arises? How do I meet it?
Lama Rod Owens:
Right, exactly, exactly. And we have to be willing to go there and I think that's how we prepare ourselves for the future. I know many people are really afraid of the future but, if we think about it and strategize, I think it becomes a different experience. But it is, again, I just want to always emphasize it, yeah, this is hard.
Katherine May:
Yeah, exactly.
Lama Rod Owens:
When we start working with something like anger or rage or even despair and hopelessness, these are really intense energies. Anger can make us feel really powerful but it's trying to contain a tidal wave sometimes. Whereas, these more roots, primary emotions like sadness or despair, those can feel really draining. But anger and sadness are still very strong emotions that we have to offer different practices to.
Katherine May:
[inaudible 00:26:02].
Lama Rod Owens:
But again, a piece at a time, one piece at a time. One piece of advice or practice instruction that I often give is for people to practice in times where sadness or anger seems to be really at its weakest in strength and this happens throughout the day. Today I went to the store and they were out of something, something really basic, and I was frustrated and so that becomes a time to practice. I wasn't enraged, I was just annoyed, right?
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lama Rod Owens:
So, that's an entry into trying to experience an emotion that's not too strong. It didn't ruin my day, it was just the moment of expecting to get something but not getting it and I was like, "Fine, whatever. I'll get something else." And then I was able to practice and to hold space to experience that frustration just to let it go and said, "Oh, this isn't a big deal. Who cares?" This is not going to be consumed by this because it's really not consequential or it's inconsequential right now for me. And so, start doing that more and more and then you build the capacity to work with stronger experiences of these emotions when they come up.
Katherine May:
That makes so much sense. And what so often comes up for me in your work is this sense of how hard it is to live in this flesh, how unpleasant it often is and how often we rail against it and hate our physical bodies and struggle to accept them. I think it's so refreshing to talk about that honestly. From a spiritual position, how difficult this embodied life is.
Lama Rod Owens:
Right, right. And that's the struggle for all of us. We're occupying bodies that have the capacity to experience sensations and those sensations can be quite painful. And so, this is why I think developing ... For me, developing a meditation practice was life-saving because I needed a method to deal with the fact that my body can be really frustrating and how my body is perceived and how boundaries are crossed with my body, all of that. I needed a way to take care of these daily traumas that I am accumulating, how to experience and release continually over and over and over again. And then, in that releasing, connect to the joy and part of the joy is understanding that there are ways that I can experience pleasure in the body.
But even from a more orthodox Buddhist context, so much of my joy is derived from understanding that I am not my body, that my consciousness or my soul is this expression of intelligent energy that transcends these experiences of suffering. And that's what I train to connect to more and more, deeper and deeper every day, my ultimate self. And holding all of that together and just saying, "Oh, I have this body, this physical body and all these sensations but I will have to die and I will get a chance to connect to my ultimate self which is an expression that transcends suffering."
Katherine May:
I read a really beautiful thing today that I think you'll like too which was from the monk Bede writing in the medieval period and he was writing about the introduction of Christianity to the UK and he described life without a spiritual framework. He compared it to a sparrow flying into a great hall from winter outside and he briefly flipped through this beautiful warm hall and then out into another winter and he said that's all that human life is. If you don't have a sense of the before and the after, just a brief period flitting through a warm hall before you hit the next winter, I just thought that was so beautiful.
Lama Rod Owens:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
I don't know how that really fits but I just wanted to share it.
Lama Rod Owens:
That's really gorgeous, yeah.
Katherine May:
It's gorgeous. We are all that sparrow at the moment and we are still finding the hall difficult even though we don't understand the winter's either side.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, yeah, because we get wrapped up in the moment and we lose this connection to what's coming next.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And I think it's so important to talk about joy when we talk about suffering. On one hand, we are so angry and frustrated at the perceived other side of humanity who we're feeling constant opposition to. But at the same time, I think we don't spend enough time talking about our joy and talking about what is worth keeping, what's the stuff we treasure. I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of autism because, quite often, I'll come online, I did it last week and talked about a really difficult part of my experience as an autistic person in the world and how overwhelming I find everything.
And I'm so, so conscious that that needs to be counterbalanced with the sheer joy that I get from my different mode of perception and I'm feeling an increasing responsibility to make sure that my advocacy touches on that at least as much as the problems. Because otherwise, I think, we problematize ourselves to ourselves. I wondered if that was something that you respond to too.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, it's pathologizing ourselves as often that there's something inherently wrong or there's something that I can't overcome. And this is why the self-compassion and self-love is really important. This is something I offer myself when I begin to feel too critical or when I feel that I am trying to over assimilate into situations that were not created for my wellbeing.
Katherine May:
They weren't designed to be welcoming to you?
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, yeah, and that's what it means to survive in dominant cultures. Whereas, if you find yourself really not aligning with the expression of the dominant culture, we find ourselves really struggling to be well. And that's where, for me, again, the kindness, the gentleness or I'm saying, "You know what? It's okay, I'm not the only one." And what I committed to doing is also working to create spaces and places for people like me to feel like they belong. And this is why I show up in the way that I show up because I want people to really understand that you don't have to be a certain way to practice spirituality, to practice a path. It's about being yourself.
Katherine May:
You can bring yourself to it, yeah.
Lama Rod Owens:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
I wanted to ask you about the idea of moral injury because I feel like that's coming up a lot at the moment. It's quite a new term for me, I have to admit, I think I've come to it very late but are in morally injurious times, I think. And for so many people, just showing up at their work is becoming a moral injury. I'm thinking about, in the UK, the people working in the NHS at the moment who are unable to give the level of service that they know that they need to give, that they know people need from them and there's nothing they can do about that because, in an underfunded system that's vastly understaffed, you are paralyzed as a person, you are just covering the basics and then facing your own burnout. Is that a rising thing or is that a constant throughout the world that will always be there?
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah. Well, yeah, to an extent. There's always going to be some experience of suffering. And I think, when we talk about moral injury, moral injury comes from the ways in which we have these expectations or we have these beliefs that get disrupted and that can result in a lot of struggle to trust, to be inspired to connect after the thing that you've been really trusting and then connecting to it has revealed itself not to be what it is. And we work with that just by always being honest about what's happening instead of always trying to delude ourselves, it's how ourselves' narratives to make ourselves feel better. I walk into situations, I go into situations or connect to situations with a lot of openness and curiosity and that's been really helpful for me. And to know that we're struggling in human systems and human systems are really impacted by a lack of clarity.
Katherine May:
We don't get to really read them.
Lama Rod Owens:
Right.
Katherine May:
In the way we'd like to, at least. Or the way I'd like to, certainly.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
This, for me, is linking to the part in your book where you talk about learning to grieve for things that aren't necessarily people, for ideas or for things that you have to let go. You give the example of learning that one of the teachers that meant a lot to you turned out to have been abusive to other people and the complex process of coming to terms with that. Grief is a bigger thing than just a response to death, I think.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, grief, grief is about change. Something's changed and now my sense of self is trying to figure out what it is again because our sense of self or our egos use the world around us and the illusion of stability to create a sense of self and identity. So, if something changes, then the ego's a little bit disrupted and we feel that pain. Who am I now? Now that this person or this situation that I've relied on for so long has shifted, has gone, has disappeared, whatever it may be, something's changed. And it's always going to be the case, everything's always changing.
Katherine May:
And it's a process to deal with it.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Once again, it's another thing that is not solved in one simple step if only you could get it right. And that leads me, finally, to ask you about the apocalypse which I-
Lama Rod Owens:
Mm-hmm, right.
Katherine May:
It's maybe not the most cheerful subject but you address the idea of apocalypse in your book and talk about it as a huge societal change. And you engage with the idea that, perhaps, the massive disruption we're experiencing and feeling at the moment so intensely is part of a necessary process of change that, perhaps, this is almost what has to happen. Can you outline how Buddhists would see the idea of apocalypse, first of all, maybe?
Lama Rod Owens:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, the idea of apocalypse is ... I'm influenced by theology's understanding of apocalypse which it means unveiling, it means truth telling. And so, what we're experiencing is our lack of capacity to avoid the truth any longer. The truth about the climate, the world and politics and so forth, capitalism included, all of that. We can no longer distract ourselves because these systems and these situations are no longer responding to our manipulation of them and so things collapse. When we understand that they're not helping us but they're creating more suffering then there's a tension that arises for us.
And often, what I see in terms of this tension is we are so desperately fixated on these systems that, at the same time, are being revealed that they're not actually helping us at the same time. So, we're in this intense, I don't know, this holding, this gripping, this death grip that we know that something isn't helping us but we're desperately holding onto it and that's going to be nothing but pain for a lot of us. And so, that's what people are experiencing, really. Just how do I let go of this and then turn into a future that, really, I'm not so sure about.
Katherine May:
I think we grew up expecting an upward striding of society, things getting better and we are facing a very different reality. And I do wonder if a lot of our conflict comes from different levels of acceptance of that reality. It seems to me that that's often what we are fighting over. We're thinking about fake news a lot and that idea that we are not in a truth telling age but, as I'm speaking to you, I'm thinking, "Well, maybe that's just a response from some people who find this too painful to face this change that seems so inevitable to me."
Lama Rod Owens:
Right. It's the narrative that we told ourselves coming into conflict with the truth of things and it's hard, it's hard to reconcile. And so, again, we were talking about grief and the ego, this is the same thing. I've built this sense of self and identity based on these systems and now these systems are disrupted and so I feel disrupted because I'm so self-identified with these systems. I'm so self-identified with capitalism in the ways that it creates hierarchy and status and privileges and, once that gets disrupted, who am I without the status that capitalism offers me.
Katherine May:
And I think, also, a whole patterning for your life that we were offered within the capitalist system that now we are forced to unpick. That patterning wouldn't even work for us anymore, not in terms of work or gender or sexuality or wellness, being actually healthy within the system that we were offered, it seems, to me, impossible. And so, we are confronting this enormous uncertainty. And on one hand, that's an opportunity and it's exciting and it's a way that we could produce joy again but, on the other, it's absolutely starkly terrifying. And I think some people have got greater capacity to face that uncertainty than others.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah, exactly, right. And that capacity to hold that uncertainty, it comes with practice. It's I have to do something to begin working with the fear, the fear of the future, the fear of who will I become when I let go of these old ways of being.
Katherine May:
Thank you. I'm going to stop there because that was just wonderful. And yeah, I think it's so lovely to take us all into a place of uncertainty. I don't think we do anyone any favors if we're pedaling more full certainties. This is about developing a skillset for the apocalypse that we are in.
Lama Rod Owens:
Exactly.
Katherine May:
It's quite a painful thought.
Lama Rod Owens:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Lama Rod Owens:
But if you come from histories and cultures and ancestries of struggle, then this is just another thing that we do, we struggle. If we want to see something different, then we struggle to make it happen. And again, a lot of us don't understand what that means. We may understand what individual struggle may be like but some of us don't really understand collective struggle and what our communities and families and cultures have had to do to survive and to thrive and dominate cultures.
Katherine May:
So, I guess that that's a new generation of leaders rising who, through suffering and through generational trauma, have actually got the skill set for this age.
Lama Rod Owens:
Right, right.
Katherine May:
No wonder some people are feeling so threatened.
Lama Rod Owens:
Mm-hmm, and other people are feeling really excited.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Lama Rod Owens:
Yeah.
Katherine May:
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Amazing. Thank you so much, that was just a wonderful conversation. I'm so glad we could connect, I know it's really difficult.
Lama Rod Owens:
Oh, absolutely.
Katherine May:
I'm still raking leaves. I love that sound of the leaves swishing along the ground. And as I've been raking, I've just found the remnants of the summer. I've just found a drinking glass with the lime garnish still in it that was obviously a nice little drink I had at the bottom of the garden in easier times. It's all very wet here today. And I've also just found the remnants of last winter, too. I've found my Christmas tree stand and I found a sledge, which is optimistic, seeing as we never get any proper snow here. I think I like to keep one just in case. One day, one day it'll work. I think I have used it once.
So, I hope you enjoyed that conversation. I feel like it was really nourishing for me. I have so enjoyed recording this podcast season. I've loved the experience, I guess, of focusing around a question and of having that really clear direction to go in. But I think what I love most of all is to be in contact with these extraordinary thinkers, these people who are so wise and so clever and being able to ask them what's on my mind. And unlike a lot of other podcasters now, I still always record with video off.
I know that it's a big thing to be able to put your podcasts on YouTube and things like that and I do respect that. But, for me, the quality of those conversations that we have when the video is turned off is just so different. Perhaps because I'm an eye contact avoider, that might be true but also because there's something very intimate about two voices speaking in the dark together and it changes the experience for me. I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope to hear your views and I'll see you very soon. Bye.
Show Notes
There’s a guiding question of each mini-season of How We Live Now, and this time around it’s ‘How can we come back together again?’ I posed this question to some of the world’s most important thinkers in this field: political journalist Ece Temelkuran, radical Buddhist Lama Rod Owens, digital native Emma Gannon, gathering expert Priya Parker, spiritual teacher Simran Jeet Singh and ecological writer Jay Griffiths. Each of them offered something thoughtful and fresh, and each of them changed the way I think about this current - often divided - life.
Many of us are enduring a painful new awareness of the conflicts that underpin our social relationships. For Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens, this is the beginning of a revolutionary path to our liberation - a necessary upheaval that will rebalance us forever.
In this profound, perspective-shifting conversation, we are urged to stop looking for short-cuts and panaceas for our suffering, and instead to engage with the deep, transformative work of change.
Join the conversation! We’re also inviting your thoughts on each episode from now on click here to join the conversation. Answers, challenges, ideas and further questions are all welcome - there will be a further episode in a couple of months focusing on your voices.
Links from the episode:
Other episodes you might enjoy:
Season 2: Zeba Talkhani on surviving online abuse
Season 3: Sara Tasker on hyperfocus, exhaustion and finding the new normal
Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!
To keep up to date with How We Live Now, follow Katherine on Instagram and Substack
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Enchantment - Released March 2023
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
