book came right on time for me, especially the pieces around learning to embrace our anger, how repressed anger can become harm toward ourselves or others, and disembodiment as a state where internalized oppression can thrive.
I really appreciated the race analysis and specifically the acknowledgment that Black people's anger is policed and punished, Most of all, I enjoyed Lama Rod Owens' writing and honesty about his own personal experiences, in large part because I could relate so much with his experience of slowly rebuilding a relationship with anger.
I've been able to put some of his exercises and lessons into practice even in just the past week while reading this book to better understand the source of my anger and identify my needs, which equips me to set boundaries.
There are some pieces in here that didn't really resonate with me, but I appreciated that Owens wrote from the first person rather than writing in generalizations.
Some favorite lines:
"The practice is to stay with what I am feeling in my body and mind while trying to articulate what I need, first to myself, and then to the person I am in interaction with.
"
"Without agency of the body, we have no agency over emotions and thus we lose a vital tool not just for the disruption of oppressive systems, but we lose a strategy that can support our mental health.
"
"Boundary setting is born directly from our ability to consider ourselves worth being cared for, When we value care for ourselves, we can understand what forms of emotional labor are appropriate for us in a given moment, "
"I noticed in my practice that internalized oppression continued as long as I remained disembodied, The work of embodiment was the work of reclaiming my body, healing and managing my trauma, and embracing agency over my own body, " I picked up this book with the goal of experiencing and transforming my anger into some healthy activity, and this book gave me a lot to think about.
I'm not a Buddhist, but so much of what the author discusses here is just good sense,
Quotes:
"What would it look like if we formed our activist communities around joy, not the suffering or the anger, as a basis for our change work"
".
. . if we don't do our work, then we become work for other people, "
"Any being who is not about the reduction of suffering and violence is not welcomed around me, "
"You need space around anger and all of your emotions in order to be free, Instead of saying 'I am angry', you can say instead, 'I am experiencing anger', When you identify an experience, you are allowing there to be space, because you know an experience is not inherently who you are, "
" disembodiment is the primary strategy through which oppression is maintained, "
"To be a spiritual person means to be always willing to be in communication with things as they are, not as we wish them to be.
"
"When I am speaking out against serious issues in my community that so many others are silent about, I feel the weight of the labor I am doing for so many others.
This is the risk we take when standing up against systems that others feel so disempowered against, It seems we are both fighting the system while shouldering the emotional needs of others we are doing labor for, "
"I have to let myself be sick in order to have the space to start working toward being well, "
"When I am loving, I am practicing acceptance and when I am being loved, I am being accepted, "
"Loving my anger means that I allow it to be there without judgment and without shame, I accept it. Moreover, loving anger disrupts its power over me and allows space for me to be in power over my anger, "
" it is within our discomfort that we're being taught how to make different choices about how to take care of ourselves, "
"I have often experienced the relationship between trauma and anger as the tension between feeling wounded and needing to take care of myself, and how frustration as anger arises out of that tension and gets stronger when I do not know how to care for myself.
"
"Our complexity never excuses harm, "
"People think becoming a renunciate is somehow avoiding the world, along with our instincts, appetites, and desires, That's not the case. You're actually moving deeper into the nature of these instincts and desires, "
"To be free, everything must be loved, even what is unlovable, If we are really serious about freedom, we must learn to love both our pleasure as well as our displeasure, "
"When I say I am sex positive, I mean that we have a right to do with our bodies what we will, but we also have an ethical responsibility to limit the harm, to decrease harm that we do against ourselves and others.
"
"With all this apocalypse talk, people think it's about the end of the world, It's not about the end of the world it's about the end of a way of thinking, a way of believing, and that's painful to let go of.
"
"There is great violence when we avoid our pain, because we become trapped in reacting to it as we target others as the reason for our hurt.
This is why our anger and rage are dangerous, It is not the experience of anger itself, but our intense reaction to it, "
"The path of healing is the practice of embodiment, to return home to all of our bodies and to do the very hard work of loving the trauma, and in loving it beginning to set it free from our bodies.
"
"I often say that the violence we experience is highly ritualized, If that is the case, then our selfcare has to be even more ritualized and methodical to meet this violence, "
"I learned to understand love as the wish for others to be happy and free, and I want to bring that to my romantic loving.
"
"We want to be in power with each other, not having power over or not having power under, but be in power with, " I've watched many lectures on Youtube before picking up and working with this book and am currently enrolled in aweek course by the same name.
He's the first spiritual leader, in my experience, who calls bullshit on bypassing difficult aspects of our personalities and challenging feelings, I've been in therapy and recovery groups for more thanyears, and eventually, all roads intersect words like, 'forgiveness' and 'kindness' which is the new woke positivity.
And of course, the amputation of certain feelings and thoughts righteous anger is a luxury we can't afford, Lama Rod, using his meditation technique SNOELL pronounced snowel, shows us how to hold multiple truths by giving them all a lot of space to exist.
As a biracial American woman who practices Tibetan Buddhism, I've come to view Lama Rod as a teacher, Though I don't know him personally, I attend his online practice sessions weekly whenever possible, His powerful call to bring authenticity into how we in the west practice Vajrayana Buddhism has changed the way I relate to my personal practice, This is not a form of Buddhism that allows you to sit comfortably on your cushion, do your prostrations and chanting, and bypass all the uncomfortable feelings and truths you carry around with you trying not to see.
It is a spiritual practice that invites you to look at your shit, acknowledge it in all its brilliance and ugliness, and level with it straight on.
The first time I heard Lama Rod speak, it felt like what I'd been waiting to hear from a teacher for a long time nowsomeone deeply learned in the traditional form of the religion who also calls for us as Americans to look at ourselves with eyes wide open to our personal and societal baggage.
"Love and Rage" is, in keeping with Lama Rod's teachings, extremely personal, with Lama Rod laying himself bare, It was in these waters that I vacillated in how I received the book, On the one hand, I felt it to be both profound and radical that a teacher was placing himself on the same level as all the rest of us.
He is refusing to sit high and holy on his dais, preaching to us as if he is above the struggles we all face every day.
He is here in the muck of it all, doing his best to walk the talk, sharing what he has learned as a tool he has found helpful to confront his demons.
That is both fucking deep and courageous, and my respect for him is boundless,
On the other hand, that same approach occasionally left me a bit tepid, The practice he shares in this book is a highly practical approach to spirituality, which is exactly what a religion should offer to its followers, Yet that very groundedness in the personal and everyday made me miss the dizzying heights of the transcendental, This isn't to say that the mystical doesn't lay inside the practices and stories that Lama Rod shares in this book, It is the difference of looking at the ground from up close, versus standing atop a mountain and viewing the entire range, We need this connection to the earth on which we stand, and to not get lost in the abstractions, We as a society will not confront injustice without our feet firmly planted in the everyday, and I will not deal with my bullshit while my head is in the clouds.
Still, I missed the vistas,
All in all, this is a wonderful addition to mindfulness and Buddhist texts, Lama Rod has powerful medicine for American Buddhism, and his teachings are much needed at this time, Five on that alone, I've read and reviewed this book three times now, but every time I reread it Goodreads erases my previous records,
It's a great book, My bible. " cont from last When i am rooted in love, anger reveals itself as trying to point us to our hurt and when i am taking care of my hurt and loving at the same time, the energy of anger becomes an energy that helps me to cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to be done.
the great activism needed today entails bridging our personal grieving with the grieving of our communities, our anger arises over our pain and is only pointing back to our pain, to hold space for our pain is a way that we begin to take care of our pain, taking care of our pain softens our hurt as we do the work of empathizing with ourselves, empathizing with ourselves makes it easier to empathize with others around us, this empathy is at the root of the love and compassion that will begin to disrupt
the systems that create harm, " p/chThis is the kind of richly thoughtful book that I read very slowly, rereading passages, setting it down to process the truth amp choices it contains, or suggests.
If I had the paper book, I'd leave it in the bathroom amp take several months to absorb it, I had the ebook, which is perfect because I love to highlight amp return to strong talk, On this "reading," I only had time to read half the book amp I'm waiting for it to come back to me, What I got out of half the book was so heavy positive, intimate, radiant that it counts as a book for me amp I trust the second half will too.
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