Robin Beck: Welcome, Lama Rod. It's such a pleasure, such a delight to be in conversation with you today. You are an international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist studies from Harvard Divinity School, with a focus on the intersection of social change, identity, and spiritual practice. You describe yourself as a Black Buddhist southern queen whose teachings center on freedom, self-expression, and radical self-care. You are the author of several books, most notably Love and Rage: The path of Liberation Through Anger, and your latest book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors. And you're also co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, which is how I was introduced to your work.

I feel like many people would describe your work in the world of Buddhism as novel. You've been called a leading voice in a new generation of Buddhist teachers. Before we dive in, how would you introduce yourself and the spiritual work that you're engaged with?

Lama Rod Owens: I would say that I am someone who's really interested in freedom, and by any means necessary I'm going to get there. And that means if Buddhism is where it's at, then that's where I'm at. If it's somewhere else, that's where I'm at as well. So any medicine, any practices that are about getting free, I will be exploring it and incorporating into my personal practice and teaching.

Robin Beck: The theme of this interview is activism. I resonated with your work when I first read Radical Dharma, which led me to Love and Rage. In that book, you say “I come from activism”, and that you've been doing the work since you were a teenager. And activism work is also the work of getting free, collectively instead of individually. What drew you into activism initially, and what was your trajectory into the Black radical tradition that you participated in?

Lama Rod Owens: At the very beginning, as early as my earliest memories, I just felt as if I was supposed to be helping. It was really the most exciting, interesting thing was to help – to figure out how to be of benefit, to figure out how to share, how to distribute what I had. Even as a young child, I always felt like I wanted to give away things. I wanted to make sure people had what they needed, so I had that at the very beginning. And, of course, being born into this body, being born into a Black community, a Black southern community in particular, it was very clear that we had to protect each other from the impact and the violence of anti-Black racism. We lived on land that was, first, the site of genocide for Cherokee folks and Indigenous communities there. And then secondly, we were living on land where my ancestors had been enslaved, had been held as property.

So that was all very clear; there was no escaping the history. And as I began to really understand that, I really felt deeply upset. Like, just pissed. That we had to survive that kind of violence. And so coming into that understanding, I opened up to reading and studying anything that could help me to contextualize and explain why things were happening in the way that they were. In my early teens I was reading Malcolm X and W. E. B. Du Bois, and listening to and paying attention to the civil rights leaders that were active here in Georgia in the eighties and nineties. So I just absorbed all of that. I just felt like this learning was going to be important for me as I grew older, because I knew that I was going to be helping in some way.

Robin Beck: How did that manifest in your working community as a young man getting interested in activism?

Lama Rod Owens: I wanted to be an agent of disruption for the systems that kept me from being free. I was deeply interested in HIV and AIDS awareness and education, and homelessness and hunger. I was interested in sexual assault advocacy. I was interested in undoing patriarchy. I was interested in anti-racism and anti-Blackness, and undoing that. Those interests led me into organizations and groups that were doing this work, and that led me into formal training. I learned how to be a sexual assault advocate, and how to advocate for policies, both locally and statewide, to bring about the laws and so forth that could be of benefit for people. I just went into any space that seemed as if it was doing real education work and real change work.

Robin Beck: During this time, who were the elders and mentors that influenced your relationship to activism and liberation? And how did this inspire your trajectory into Tibetan Buddhism?

Lama Rod Owens: My mom had a huge impact on me. I saw her doing what she could to help, you know? And when I was about 13 or so she entered into the ministry. She joined the Methodist church, and was able to become a minister to local congregations in the city I grew up in. Her ministry was very much about community uplift. It wasn't just about preaching and pastoring – It was about community organizing. She was always creating initiatives, like mentoring on girls’ health and education. And not just her congregation, but for our whole community as well.

The ministers and preachers that I had growing up also had an impact on me. Especially the ones who had that deep, kind of Black, prophetic expression that was always about how this world is not our home, and that we're trying to get somewhere else. And that resonated with me because I deeply felt that the world was just not where I was supposed to be, and that sense was always deeply rooted in me.

Growing up in the Black church really helped me to focus my practice towards freedom, liberation, and activism. But it didn't actually answer all of my questions about the unseen world. And so I put the spirituality work on hold and just went into a lot of intense activism and organizing work. And that led me into a catholic worker community in Boston called Haley House. We weren't super traditional catholic workers, but it was still a community that was deeply focused on social liberation. And in the spirit of the catholic workers, there was a deep intention around spiritual liberation as well. It was a community of people coming from everywhere, and it was the first time I had experienced that level of diversity.

But it wasn't just diversity, it was grace as well. You had people doing all kinds of work, but who were there because we had this common aspiration to help others get free. And that taught me how anyone from anywhere can choose freedom. I learned that with liberation as an aspiration, it can become the foundation for a real progressive, radical community. And so that started reawakening my interest in spirituality, and the dominant group in the community were Buddhists. The founder of the community had converted to Buddhism from Catholicism, and so there were a lot of radical Buddhists. My first relationships with Buddhist practitioners were Buddhist activists, which is very unique. I didn't meet people in the meditation hall because I was interested in meditation. I first met people who were on the streets disrupting, and using their practice to create a liberatory and abolitionist rhetoric. That gave me this insight into Buddhism that I don't think many people get initially, and it really helped me to start practicing.

In terms of elders, the founder of Haley House, Kathe McKenna, was the one who really took me on. There was never any pressure to become a practitioner, which I also loved. It was more like an understanding that she wanted me to be free from suffering. Meditation became one of the things that became accessible for me. But there were other elders in the community who were very skillful in directing me towards the real work. That work early on in my practice became the basis for my book Love and Rage later on.

Robin Beck: In Love and Rage you talk about how you were struggling with a severe depression during this time. You were just beginning to recognize the potency and the power of your anger, which can be a very unsafe emotion to express in a Black body in our country. You describe pushing that anger further away from your identity and your experience. But you also talk about how fortunate you were to have this anger, and that it initiated the search that led you to a spiritual teacher who was willing to help you, and make choices that would save your life.

I think that many of us find it difficult to connect to anger. And you came to view this anger as a teacher, and even talk about cultivating gratitude for it as the catalyst for a new relationship with the divine. How do you safely encourage others to work with their anger as a tool for liberation?

Lama Rod Owens: I was very fortunate early on for my elders to point out my anger. For most of my life I had repressed it, because, of course, my expression of anger in this body is considered very dangerous by our society. You know, I'm a big Black man. I knew that early on, and so I repressed it. And that repression of the anger really turned into passive aggressiveness, which is not great. I lost connection to the energy of anger, and it became invisible to me. And that invisibility helped me create a narrative that I just wasn't angry. I thought I wasn't angry – that nothing angered me. The anger was there, but I couldn't name it. And my passive aggressiveness became quite manipulative. I was creating a lot of harm by being ambiguous, and not telling the truth. I wasn’t setting boundaries – I just wanted to be everyone's good Black friend. I wanted to be agreeable and nice, and I didn't want to be in trouble. I didn't want to create more attention, because my anger was out of control.

My elders in the community saw that. They would sit me down and say, “you're angry”. And that really began this effort to work with my anger, because I take my elders seriously. So I began to really look at it, and understand that my anger was pointing me towards the real work around my broken-heartedness. I started to see the despair and loneliness covering up all these experiences. Because I was so interested in liberation, I knew I had to get beneath the anger. And that's what really began my formal practice. My anger was asking me for attention. It was asking for love and care. It was asking for space. And I understood that my anger wasn't the problem – it was my relationship to my anger that was the issue. It was my reactivity to my anger, and I had to transform that relationship, because anger was actually trying to teach me who I was.

I began to see and understand that I was incomplete without incorporating anger as a partner, as a teacher in my life. And I know this is really difficult for people, because anger is full of energy. As Audre Lorde teaches us, it's full of data. And that data is expressed partially as intense energy. I began to understand that in my activist community we had this immature relationship with anger. We were using anger as fuel to get things done. But anger is a hard energy source to stay connected to, because it always has the potential of getting out of control. Many of us have not been taught to respond to anger, so we habitually react to it. Everyone was just reacting to anger. We were pissed off, and we reacted, and we hit the streets, and we were actually being depleted because of that. So when I began this practice with my anger, my anger told me, “you have to love.”

Love is how we get things done. Change happens through love. Anger is there to motivate us, to show us what's wrong, to alert us. To an extent, it can motivate us and inspire us, but we can't rely on anger. Anger is like a fire – it's out of control, but the love helps us to create the parameters for that fire. A wildfire is what happens when that fire gets out of control. It creates a lot of damage. But a fire contained in a fireplace can be used for warmth, and to light your way. To love is to want people to be free – to be free from suffering, and from the causes and conditions of suffering. My anger is always letting me know when things are out of balance. And it shows us what we need to pay attention to – like the hurt that we experience from harm and from systemic injustice.

Robin Beck: I really relate to this relationship with anger and activism, because I isolated and marginalized my anger for most of my life. And in my early activism, the anger found this wonderful outlet into work and change-making. And while it could be this really powerful motivator, after some years of organizing I began to realize that the fetishization of anger and outrage in my activist communities was really toxic. I saw that even if we achieved our goals and changed the world for the better, I was destroying myself in the process, and corrupting the foundation from where the change-making was supposed to be arising from.

In Love and Rage you talk about avoiding responding from a place of anger, so that we can maintain a sense of agency, and cultivate a relationship with the hurt. At the same time, you're very clear that you're not interested in getting rid of anger. You talk about leaning into anger, to find out what we're avoiding, and find that path of liberation through the anger.

So what does a healthy relationship with anger look like, in the context of activism and change-making?

Lama Rod Owens: First of all, this is about agency. Liberation is about having the space to choose to get free. We're not talking about habitual reactivity – that’s not going to help. I want to be in a responsive relationship to everything. In Buddhism, we say that it's not the “thing” that's the issue. It's our relationship to the thing that's the issue. For example, substances aren't the issue, right? It's our relationship to a substance. And so our healing, our treatment, has to be about relationships. It has to be about the ways in which I have to restore myself, and come into this place of wholeness in order to begin to shift my dependency.

The same thing is said about anger. Anger is an expression of my fullness, of the complexity of what it means to be human. I'm not trying to get rid of anything – I’m trying to develop the agency to choose my relationship to my anger. To be able to feel and experience anger, and to notice what anger is telling me about what's happening. With that data I can choose how to respond to what I need to respond to.

You can't get all this data if you're just reacting to everything. Many people who swear that their anger is important to them have never actually felt their anger. They’ve never felt anger first as a physical experience. They've never felt the biochemical experience of anger or many other emotions, and they don't understand the way in which the mind and consciousness begin to label and shape these experiences of energy that become emotions. They haven't done the work to unlock that process. And once you are able to train to hold that process, then you cut through the reactivity and you say, “okay, okay, this is what this is.” And then you have the space to welcome in a real ethic of love. Yes, I am experiencing anger. And I want people to be safe, free, and happy, including myself. That's how anger should be held, is within that ethic of love. But some of us don't want to get into that ethic, because it feels too good to be angry. We feel powerful, we feel invincible. But that feeling is extremely depleting as well.

There is so much more power in love. And anger is a secondary emotion; it's not even the main event. Anger is just an expression of a deeper hurt. So when we get lost in the hurt, we're not doing the real work of getting to the roots of anger found in the hurt or the disappointment. To get to the hurt and the disappointment is to get to a place of deep, generative vulnerability. To say, “yeah, I'm angry.” But the real statement is to say, “no, I'm experiencing hurt. I'm hurt, I'm disappointed, I'm sad.” To say, “I am angry” actually feels very rigid and carceral. It feels very constricting and controlling and policing. But instead we have to say, “I'm experiencing anger.” Anger is an experience. Everything is an experience that opens up the space for me to figure out how to respond. It's hard to respond to something we think we are, habitually.

And that's going to start freeing us there, in that moment. Say, “yeah, anger is just an experience,” and you're already well on your way.

Robin Beck: You were incredibly fortunate, it sounds like, to be surrounded by many elders who had a good understanding of this other kind of motivation for making change in the world. This motivation that comes from a place of love, and a deep respect for life, and the desire for us all to be free. These values are at the very core of Buddhism. In my activism work, I found myself surrounded by people who were really tuned into the outrage.

Lama Rod Owens: Right?

Robin Beck: The outrage is a motivator: the need for critical mass to turn out people, in order to make the change. This individualistic mindset that often, at least in our national discussion, relies on this sense of outrage and anger as the primary motivator. And so it's compelling for me to think about revisiting this work in a more mature, sustainable relationship, with love as this foundation.

I'm just curious to see if you have any advice for communities that are aware of this tension between anger and love, and are trying to make that foundational transition. To move into an activism motivated by right intention, grounded in love?

Lama Rod Owens: The first thing that we have to understand is that we're going to have to slow down and do this foundational work of opening into an ethic of love. Once we choose this, we also are choosing self-care and self-love, and that's a place that many of us choose not to go. And this is why I had to transition out of the activist communities that I was a part of, because no one was interested in self-care and self-love. There was deep woundedness that people were bypassing through anger. They were displacing what they needed in order to center the anger, and trying to help others, and dismantle and disrupt systems at the same time. Yes, that was good work, but it was also bypassing what we needed. And so we would become the problem after a bit, because we weren't doing the work to dismantle these same systems within our own experience.

That kind of transition takes a lot of time to do. I remember when Trump was first elected, and we might be getting a repeat of that soon. And all of the sudden, everyone was an activist. And particularly in the Buddhist community, everyone was an activist. We had already put out Radical Dharma by then, and everyone was jumping into forming affinity groups and doing demonstrations and disobedience. And that was also when I was convinced that I had to write a book about anger. Everyone was coming into this activism space, and I started doing a series of workshops, really trying to do the same work we've been talking about here. Like okay, you're angry, you're pissed off, but let's talk about what real liberatory love is, because that's the activism that we have to ground ourselves in.

I began to see how people weren't interested in that. People were just pissed, and acting out of that anger. And there was no ethic there; the ethic was very self-centered. I heard a lot of “I’m scared, I'm afraid, I'm pissed off. And so I need to do something.” But they didn’t ask, “how can I do something to actually benefit all of us?” There were many groups and communities doing this activism and organizing and training for decades, and they were being bypassed and pushed out of the way.

I used my platform to point that out. I wanted these communities to recognize how they were expressing another kind of colonialism by coming into this space and displacing the people and the communities that have done this work. Instead of supporting them, you just want to create something new that centers your particular needs around class and race and ability and gender and so forth. I would just have arguments with people over and over again, and it was very clear that phase was going to die out. It wasn’t sustainable.

And look where we're at now – we’ve gotten right back to Trump, because the organizing wasn't rooted in love. It wasn't rooted in a real kind of abolitionist framework. It was about getting comfortable again, instead of dismantling a system that actually can elect a person like Trump to begin with.

Robin Beck: It plays so nicely into this politics of outrage that initially brings people into activism. It tends to organize folks around that sense of anger. Tapping into these organizations that have been doing this work for a long time is a much bigger ask, especially when it requires you to slow down and listen. That’s hard to ask of someone in a state of trauma and anger – to slow down and listen.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah. You know, it's the hardest thing to communicate. There's this urgency. There's an immediacy, absolutely. But we don't have what we need to respond, so we react. And then you come back to this moment right now, where still people aren't willing to root themselves in love, and to actually entertain the idea of what a different system of collective care and liberation could look like.

Robin Beck: I feel like young people are starting to really understand this. The young people I’ve talked to have no illusions about the state of things, it's just what they were born into. I feel like they’re listening a little more deeply than my generation did initially. When I was organizing in the 2010s, it felt like there was still time, and hope that we could avoid a lot of the worst effects of global warming and unchecked planetary exploitation. As time dragged on, I fell into a place of nihilism. And I think that a lot of younger organizers aren’t experiencing that same disenchantment, because they have the tools to speak to each other, express what they see, and support each other.

They know it's going to take time, and deeper convictions to change an entire system. There’s a patience, and an understanding that this isn’t just about which President gets elected.

Even with the optimism I feel looking at a lot of young organizers, I can simultaneously imagine that the situation might feel even more critical now than it did for me. I mean, we're not just trying to stop this train from rolling off a cliff. It's clear now that it's going to fall straight off, and maybe even without slowing down.

Lama Rod Owens: Yes.

Robin Beck: And in the context of this critical situation, that sense of hopelessness that can arise. What perspective or what medicine would you offer today’s activists, particularly young ones?

Lama Rod Owens: Systems have to crash before they're rebuilt. And we still hang on to this kind of reformist mentality, like something can be saved. You know, you can't save something that's continually producing the levels of violence and domination that we keep seeing. This system perpetuates itself. We see it in Palestinian genocide, and continued imperialism across the world. America is linked to this, to the disruption and destabilization of many, many countries and political systems. This is the scariest part about abolition: things have to fall apart. And we have to be careful about the ways in which we're self-identifying with the systems that are collapsing. If you're that self-identified with patriarchy, then the disruption of patriarchy will seem very personal, and it will feel like a literal death. And if you feel like you're dying, then chances are you're going to react in a way that's going to be violent.

This is why we have to disrupt self-identification with systems. And this is why I keep telling folks, especially young folks, you have to figure out who you are. And that isn't dependent on a system.

For me, ancestry work is the path. I need to remember who my people were before for these systems came into existence, and there are beings ready to help us remember that. White people need to remember who they were before whiteness was invented. And that means we have to journey. We have to do the work to go back and reconnect to early ancestors who are waiting to say, “okay, we're not white, we don't know what that is, but this is how we lived. This is how we created a community, this is how we relied on the land, this is how we thought about the unseen world.” We have to go back and reclaim our indigeneity. And this is the work I hope young activists can really get into. Let's go back and reclaim everything that gave rise to colonialism and imperialism.

And yes, it takes work to reclaim these roots. But tangibly, it starts by centering relationships over materialism, and mutual aid over mutual exclusion. Beginning to empathize, instead of marginalize. It comes back to this ethic of love. How can we really, really start loving? And knowing what's going to happen is going to happen, but that doesn't mean it's the end of the world. That's the courage and the support that I grew up with in my community, from my elders and ancestors. They understood what it means to push, fight, and organize through this. My ancestors lived through the end of the world multiple times. They survived from the middle passage, to slavery, to Jim Crow and lynching, and the continued expression of anti-Blackness in the world. We continue to survive.

So this is possible, but it also means that as organizers, as activists, we have to recenter the voices of Black and Indigenous organizers. If we're talking about this land, it's about Indigenous and Black leadership and vision now, right?

Robin Beck: That's the work of remembering, and not allowing those stories to die. You know, sitting with you, a big part of your work centers cultivating relationships with ancestors. And you see this as a mutually beneficial relationship. You're not just asking for protection and guidance from your ancestors; you're also engaged in the practice of freeing them from suffering.

Lama Rod Owens: Exactly.

Robin Beck: Why do you emphasize this part of ancestor work, and what healing or medicine have you been able to offer to your ancestors?

Lama Rod Owens: My ancestors are trying to get us free. So many people feel isolated and alone, and I think there are ancestors who are like, “Listen, I'm here. I'm trying to step up, but you don't believe you're connected.” I believe there is an obligation to my ancestors. They are the reason I am able to be in this life, in this body, with access to the resources that I have. They endured and worked and dreamed, and brought about a different reality for me to come into. And so there is a debt. As they have offered this resource, I remember that I have this amazing capacity to offer resources back. As living, physically embodied people, we have this energetic connection to ancestors. When we get healed, that healing is naturally, automatically transferred to them as well. As they get healed, I get healed. So there's a reciprocity that's happening. What I do impacts them; what they do impacts me.

When you get on the same page as the ancestors and commit to mutual healing, then you begin to see this incredible awakening. There's incredible healing and uplift, and you begin to heal those ancestors who still create a lot of issues for us in the living world. This shamanic, Indigenous worldview is deeply influenced by my early Dagaaba ancestors. This worldview is helping me to understand that the unseen world, or the spirit world, has a direct impact on the physical world, and vice versa. In this view, we can begin to understand political disruption in someone like Trump, and MAGA in general. There's a connection to the spirit world, and that connection is to beings who are still holding onto this kind of hate.

But again, beneath the hate is the hurt. So really, they're hurting, but they don't know how to deal with that. So it's expressed as this violence that gets transferred energetically into the physical world, through people who don't know how to resist that transference of hate and pain from their ancestors. It gets transferred through opening different pathways or portals, which invite this energy to take form in the physical world. That understanding is incredibly important in my role as a shaman. A Lama is a shaman, but no one really gets that outside of the Tibetan tradition. I'm calling myself a shaman. I've been identified by other shamans as a shaman, but I’m taking on this role as a shaman at the intersection of mindfulness. For me, it's a part of decolonizing work to say yes, we need to return back to some of these or beliefs about the unseen that have been disrupted by colonialism and colonization.

Robin Beck: I’ve been fortunate to sit with you and be guided in ancestor work, and the process initially involves calling on the benevolent ancestors who can support you in your own liberation. Then, when you are mature enough in your practice, you offer that healing back to the ancestors that might need it. Your intention is to heal the intergenerational trauma that perpetuates systems of violence and oppression, which manifest in movements like Trumpism.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, and to understand that, it's also very ancestral when we identify that we need some healing work. I've noticed in my practice that there are things that I'm working to heal that actually have nothing to do with me. Some of my healing is an expression of my ancestors that I have the capacity to heal. It's easier to work on healing as an embodied, physical, living person than it is as a spirit being.

That’s another benefit of ancestor work. We can get a lot of work done while we’re embodied, and so we have to take that seriously.

Robin Beck: It's particularly powerful, because being able to work on healing in this lifetime is very counter to the pervasive worldview that centers individual responsibility for our own actions and responsibilities. We often blame ourselves for what we experience. So when intergenerational trauma arises in us, we find ourselves asking, “Why did I do this? How am I responsible for this pain, this suffering?” And the popular forms of therapy and healing invite us to figure out what childhood trauma could have created this suffering. This experience of feeling wrong, or shame, or like we don't belong.

I appreciate that you point out a deeper lineage – that there's a deeper connection to the earth, and ancestors that are also giving rise to these experiences of emptiness, loneliness, or purposelessness. I'm encouraged by the idea of cultivating this relationship with the unseen, which is so counter to the predominant paradigm of individualism. This work is inviting us back into relationship with ancestors, which helps further this mission of liberation for all. Of us all getting free.

Lama Rod Owens: You know, it's also a return to magic. I do believe magic and science can live together in culture, and I'm excited about that, because that's the new phase of my work. This year I’m working with scientists on understanding how Indigenous practices are more than just superstition.

And, of course, if you take someone's magic away from them, you can control them. That's one of the projects of colonization – you displace people from their core beliefs. And that was done with my ancestors in a brutal way. My people were kidnapped from their homeland and thrown into the bottom of a ship with no orientation to anything. And that creates a kind of psychic trauma that gets passed down as intergenerational trauma. It creates this intense, traumatic wave that disrupts people’s sense of who they are. And then you can easily assimilate them into a condition of servitude. For me, decolonization is about remembering who my people were before that trauma. And the more I remember, the more I begin to heal. We all have trauma work to do, because we all come from historical and intergenerational trauma.

Robin Beck: Being in a white body, I’ve noticed how whiteness and colonialism have purposefully disconnected me from my lineage and my ancestors. It’s a perfect tool of oppression, because I don’t have any connection to the people that came before me, and therefore no responsibility to my ancestors to remember the trauma and injustices we experienced, and perpetrated. Disrupting that cycle calls us into healing work with Indigenous communities, and with our Black kin. And this is one of the most powerful messages you have. You offer an invitation to us all, that we all get free. Not just in the sense of equality, but in how you insist that we’re all in this together. That until we’re all free, none of us are free.

There’s a beautiful throughline here between the traditions of Buddhism and Black liberation, which is a nice introduction to your new book, The New Saints. In it, you describe the two essential practices of the New Saint. First, the practice of awakened care. And second, the practice of developing the capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity to what arises.

For the uninitiated, how do these practices distinguish the New Saint from the traditional saint archetype?

Lama Rod Owens: I think the saint can be too mystical. When people think about a saint, they have this idea of just praying enough, and getting access to supernatural capacities, like these abilities to walk in water and to heal. And I'm not saying that that's not possible, because it is. But that seems so far away for people. As I was thinking about The New Saints, I asked, okay what are these people actually doing? And the first thing I noticed was that they just care. It's love. They're rooted in love, and that’s what connects them to reality. Like, it's the love. And that feels like an expression of deep, radical care, which I began to call awakened care in the context of the saint.

After that, I noticed the agency these beings have. People are choosing to awaken. They're choosing to be in relationship to certain things that help them experience the divine. And you can't get there until you learn how to divest from what's distracting you and reinvest into what is spacious and focused.

So that radical capacity to say no, or yes, at will is incredibly important to our liberation work. I have to be able to let go of what is no longer useful, and bring in what is useful in terms of getting free and remembering what we are. When you bring both of those together, then you're doing the work of the saints. Whatever fantastic capacities we associate with saints, when they begin to awaken it’s because of those two primary capacities. Because of awakened care, and the ability to choose.

Robin Beck: That makes the work of the saint sound achievable, and attainable for us to practice. Regardless of whether you gain the notoriety and distinguishment of sainthood, that's not really what you’re pointing to.

Lama Rod Owens: Exactly, the point isn't to be recognized. The point is to get people free and to get yourself free at the same time. When you really start practicing awakened care, it’s going to start de-centering the sense of I. So that you recognize that it’s the work that’s important, not the recognition of me doing the work. A lot of people want to be recognized, and that's why they won't get free. Because freedom and liberation work is often very invisible work. You know, just sitting here, you don't see the labor that I'm doing to stay with what's arising for me continually. To continue to be aware, and continue to choose what I should be leaning towards in each second. It doesn't seem like I'm doing anything, but I'm doing a lot of labor that leads to this outward expression of liberation that I'm engaged in all the time.

Robin Beck: You’re reframing and reclaiming the language of the saint. And it draws this throughline between the bodhisattva and the New Saint. The bodhisattva can sound like this unattainable, ultimate expression of Buddhism. And the traditional prerequisites required of the bodhisattva place the work out of reach for a lot of practitioners. By centering the work of the saint on these two primary actions, you make the practices of the saint personal and simple. Return back to this moment over and over again, and recommit to liberation right now.

Lama Rod Owens: People want this to be super sexy and glamorous, and at the end of the day it often gets monotonous. It's boring, and you're misunderstood. In the book I talk about the seven sorrows of the New Saint. You're going to have to deal with the work being different than you expected. We want the work to be fun and exciting, and you have to let go of wanting to be entertained. You learn how to rest, and learn what it feels like for liberation to start opening space up for you to be your most authentic self. That's the most exciting thing. And once you start connecting to that, you don't always have to be entertained. It’s an incredible place to get to. To be yourself without fear, without policing, without any of that. To be yourself, rooted in love. That's the point. And once you get there, then all of your work, all your activity, is just naturally medicine for people. That's why I'm trying to get people into.

Sure, there is a lot of work and practice, absolutely. But we're trying to get to this place of just being, and that's where the real liberation is happening. I'm just gonna be. I don't have to react to everything. I can begin to tune into the nature of things, and that's when I start remembering my liberated self. Right? In this liberatory state, you naturally began to radiate liberation to everyone around you. And at that stage, it stops being work, and you give other people permission to be liberated too.

Robin Beck: You mentioned how this work often isn’t sexy. It can feel very normal most of the time. And with the proliferation of spiritual content online that we're seeing right now, a lot of space is being taken up by influencers that are engaged in a kind of performative goodness. I think of it as a modern incarnation of spiritual materialism. And this trend has felt really toxic lately, especially in American discourse around the oppression of Palestinians and the denial of their right to life.

You make it very clear in your book that a New Saint isn't necessarily a good person in the eyes of the public, or anyone that's unable to see the full scope of their work. Can you talk about the calling of the New Saint for practitioners navigating this unforgiving landscape, where the work of liberation and abolition could get you canceled?

Lama Rod Owens: It can get you canceled. It can get you killed.

I think first, the wisdom is that you have to put your life on the line to get free. That's the first lesson of the abolitionist struggle. If you look at anti-slavery abolition, everyone involved in that movement was at risk, white and Black folks alike. As an abolitionist, you knew what you signed up for. As a conductor on the underground railroad, you knew that this could cost you your life. But at the same time, you knew that it was worth it. It was worth putting your life on the line to get people free from chattel slavery. We have to return back to something like that. And you don't get to that place unless you have a deep belief in the unseen. The abolitionist movement was a spiritual movement, and this history gets erased quite often.

And this is why my current work is about reestablishing that focus. I assert that people were actually quite connected to spirits, and to all kinds of beings that had the capacity to protect them. They just weren't lucky, you know. They didn't just miss the slave catchers and police squads coming after them. They were being guided. They were being directed. They were listening to the land. They were listening to other beings. So when I think about the work that we have to do now, I think we have to remember this. It's going to be really hard to make the right choices unless we know we're being held and supported by these unseen forces.

The ways in which goodness becomes performative are a way we experience validation. This way of getting seen comes from a depletion of self-worth and self-love. If you depend on other people's validation, you’re really longing for your deep broken-heartedness to be tended to. Influencer culture is about trying to hover above that experience of brokenness. Because once you get in contact with the broken-heartedness, you won't look good. You won't be celebrated.

The real change makers in the world are people that can be very difficult to be around. I've had that experience, that pleasure, that privilege of being around these people who just assert that this work is about getting free. They are really direct, and a lot of us don't have the capacity to hear truth like that. As I get older, I'm realizing that I'm becoming like these elders that trained me. And I'm getting to a place where I point out that either you're about getting free, or not. If you're not about getting free, then I don't know how we can be in a relationship, because you're going to completely misunderstand everything that I do. So much of influencer culture is really geared towards the most privileged anyways. And it's hard for the most privileged to choose liberation, because pleasure is so accessible in their experience.

This is why the Black liberation struggle is incredibly important work in the world, because it's the people who are closest to the suffering who are going to get us free. Because they don't have to be reminded that they're at the bottom. And when we start lifting from the bottom, everyone gets lifted out of the density of violence and suffering. Right now, I see a lot of people who won't choose the real work, right? And that's fine, because we've never been in a situation where everyone has been on the same page. Anti-slavery abolition wasn't popular. It was a minority of really dedicated people who didn't give up. It’s important to remember that this work won’t ever be popular. Choosing liberation and freedom isn't popular, and you will lose stuff and relationships. But that's okay, because look at what you're gaining. And when you come to the end of your life, you will know and understand that what was most important to do in this life was to get people free from suffering.

Robin Beck: We are entering into an intense time in this country, and in the world. What prayers and what medicine would you offer to activists as they navigate the upcoming election year, and the immediate aftermath?

Lama Rod Owens: First is understanding that this has to happen. What we're facing is part of the healing. That individual and collective healing is painful. Healing is painful. To return back to a more Indigenous, liberated future means that these old systems of violence have to crash, and there are a lot of people who won't activate until it crashes.

By going through this we’ll see more and more people coming online, recognizing the work that we have to do now. We have to start relying on each other more, and less on any president, or some other father figure. We have to rely on community now. It's a hard lesson. But it's an important one.

Robin Beck: Thank you so much for your perspective and wisdom, Lama Rod. This was such a healing conversation, and it's been a privilege to sit with you today.

Lama Rod Owens: Thank you.