Nikayla Jefferson: So, Lama Rod, when we talk about freedom today, what are we talking about exactly?
Lama Rod Owens: Well, there is freedom in the relative sense as having access to the necessary resources to be well, safe, and happy: food, water, medicine, housing, and so forth. Relative freedom is also about having as much choice and self-agency as possible over the direction of my life. Freedom here doesn’t necessarily mean I get to do whatever I want to do. Freedom means I live in relationship with others and create community that centers care for one another, caring in a way that supports people in making the choices that are good for them and their well-being.
Sensing into relative freedom is about sensing into power, hierarchy, and questioning it.
Then there is freedom in the ultimate sense. It’s about the remembrance of what I am and the nature of everything, including my mind and body, as an expression of space, emptiness, and energy, which is inherently liberated.
So my work is about trying to bring both of these freedoms together into one kind of embodiment and practice. I’m working to get free relatively as I am trying to remember my freedom ultimately.
Nikayla: Social movements use the word freedom in the relative sense. Dharma spaces use the word freedom in the ultimate sense. I’m wondering how the paths of these two concepts of freedom relate and interact with each other?
Lama Rod: When we bring discussions on the relative and ultimate senses of freedom together, there is going to be a really interesting contradiction. Often I say, “We’re going to get free before we get justice.”
For me, this means recognizing that if I do the Buddhist path, I’m going to awaken before there is a real and overwhelming sense of justice here in the relative. The relative, or samsara, isn’t actually based on justice or liberation; it’s based on delusion or lack of clarity. To change samsara is only to change samsara from one’s perspective. Yes, samsara is collective, but it’s really driven by the individual. It’s my own lack of clarity that drives and is a part of this collective production of delusion. So when I get clear and begin to reawaken to my ultimate self, that doesn’t mean samsara ends for everyone. It just means samsara ends for me.
Love will change our organizing. It changed mine.
“We’re going to get free before we get justice” means that I’m going to get to this ultimate awakening before many other beings are experiencing this, and before I see the justice I want to see.
But to live at the intersection of this relative liberation work and this ultimate liberation work is what I call titration. I’m titrating the pursuit of the ultimate and awakening of the ultimate into the ways that I’m moving relative. Titration helps prevent me from bypassing the relative for the ultimate.
Another way of saying this might be to experience liberation in this moment by being held and inspired by the ultimate view, which is emptiness and fluidity, openness and clarity, and to allow that inspiration to be slowly titrated into how I move through the relative world.
Nikayla: At times, I’ve heard the path of nonviolent direct action spoken about as this kind of titration, the ultimate view informing a strategy for bringing about systemic justice in the relative. What’s your relationship like to nonviolence?
Lama Rod: I’m more about harm reduction than I am about nonviolence. I think if you look at really important movements in contemporary history in the past 150 or 200 years, there is always violence. In the Civil Rights Movement, you find violence. Dr. King used violence to force white people to sympathize with Black people and asked people, mostly Black people, to receive violence so it could be showcased and broadcasted.
With nonviolence, you’re not the one doing violence. You’re the one willingly receiving the violence. To me, this is still using violence. In nonviolence, harm is still happening, and in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, this harm was inflicted mostly on Black folks.
So when it comes to my personal relationship with nonviolence, I’m certainly not going around attacking people, but I also have a right to protect myself. I have a right to protect the people I love. It’s complicated, but we have to name the complexity.
When you push away the complexity, you don’t know how to tend to violence when it arises. We all have and will have the capacity to create violence, to engage in violence, especially if it is for something we love. We are all perpetrators and victims of violence. This is why harm reduction is such an important philosophy for me. I want to be aware of the harm that I create and reduce it as much as possible, while knowing that I’ll never reduce it one hundred percent.
This is a complexity that people, particularly Buddhists, need to spend more time sitting with. I think it’s important to reflect on: “Why would I fight? What would I fight for? Could I fight not to create harm, but to create boundaries, to send a message, to push back and say, ‘This is not okay’?”
Nikayla: I had an experience recently of sensing into the separateness we construct between the spiritual and political, and feeling this separateness dissolve. We talk about the work of spiritual freedom and political freedom as if they are different from each other, but it was quite something to experience them, if only briefly, as just one work.
Lama Rod: I think the work does become the same thing when you have a really expansive ethic around what freedom, what liberation, really is.
On the political side, we can become restrictive around who gets to be free and who doesn’t because, even in our political organizing, there is a carceral culture. On the spiritual side, with ultimate freedom, it can feel too abstract. When you bring these two senses of freedom together, the spiritual and the political, they begin to balance each other out. The titration of ultimate liberation begins to seep into our organizing. Space begins to open up, we see more clearly, and frankly, you begin to question your allegiance to certain systems as a path toward liberation.
This is why I was drawn toward abolition. We need a different world. We need to create and dream something different instead of trying to reform something that never intended to allow us to be free.
The usual means of political change, in a way, feel safe. We know how it works. We know the rules of engagement. We know who to point to as the enemy or the antagonist.
When we start pouring in the ultimate view here, one consequence, among many, is that who we perceive the enemy or antagonist to be will change. We use anger as a motivation, but when we bring in the ultimate, we see that love is actually where we need to go.
I think we’re afraid to trust love. I think we’re afraid that we can’t sustain the effort of real social liberation through love because it doesn’t feel carceral enough. I think we believe that love isn’t enough to hold people and institutions accountable. I think we don’t understand what love actually is, so it feels risky to open ourselves up to it and the ultimate sense of things. Love will change our organizing. It changed mine.
Nikayla: As you’re speaking on this thread, I’m feeling a tug to bring the Earth into this conversation.
Lama Rod: I think it’s all rooted in disembodiment.
Colonization as a system absorbed people from all these other harmful systems and brought them to this land. The process disconnected people, communities, and cultures from the history, beliefs, and magic rooted in the land. Colonization severed people from the land. When we’re severed from the land, we’re severed from our bodies. The pain and grief of this severing is stored in the body, and if we don’t know how to hold the pain and grief, then we become disembodied. This disembodied experience is the colonized experience.
And this goes back to freedom. We have to understand what freedom actually is for ourselves. So much of the rhetoric I hear around freedom is actually about privilege. “I want the freedom to do this or that, but I don’t care if this other group has the same, or I don’t want this other group to have the same.” It’s a very individual and privilege-based understanding of freedom. This loss of collectivity around freedom is a loss of empathy. There’s a loss of empathy because we’re disembodied. It’s hard to feel empathy when we’re dissociated from our bodies. Another way of saying embodied is tethered to the Earth.
When we’re disembodied, the mind creates narratives and stories that have nothing to do with the lived, moment-to-moment experience of the body, which is attuned to how we’re actually feeling. When we don’t have the body getting in the way, offering a different narrative, we can become untethered from what is real.
When we say something like, “We all deserve to be free,” and we’re in our bodies, we’re going to run up against all the ways we don’t think particular people or groups deserve to be free. We’re going to see how we think we benefit from carcerality as a safeguard. So long as we have the carceral state that we can weaponize against people and groups, there is no real freedom.
There’s real discomfort around asking, “How do we take care of people if we can’t rely on the carceral system?” It means I have to get involved in the care, safety, and freedom of my community instead of just relying on these systems and institutions. A lot of people don’t want to do that. They want to just be able to call the cops instead of mediating conflict, instead of rethinking systems and services that work at the root of why people do what they do.
Nikayla: I’m recalling Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until we’re all free.” I’m also hearing you say, “Getting free is our individual work.” Both can be true. Both are true.
Lama Rod: Yes, as individuals we have to be clear about what we mean by freedom and our commitment to freedom. I see some people trying to live vicariously through other people’s commitment to freedom, but at the end of the day, you have to take refuge in your own commitment to a liberation rooted in love and healing. When it gets hard, because it gets really hard, what’s left is this choice. The choice is one of the most important things about liberation. We have to choose it. The choice itself is consciousness.
Now that I’ve made the choice, I find myself coming into community with others who are making the same choice. Collective liberation happens when we’re, relatively, all on the same page.
Nikayla: How free can you really be as an individual doing the work?
Lama Rod: Well, there is freedom of the body and freedom of the mind.
We live in societies and countries where our bodies are, for the most part, legislated. For example, if you try to leave the country, there is a whole process of passports, visas, and so on. I could give many examples here. We’re physically limited.
I think what’s more important is understanding that we have the capacity to free our minds, in a sense, to decolonize our minds. We can start practicing divesting from these narratives around control and carcerality, and reinvesting in practices of cultivating love and care. We focus on the mind because everything flows from the mind. Through freeing the mind, we can be free in an unfree world. We can live in a world of delusion without believing in it. Until we begin to think, imagine, or dream differently, we find ourselves still participating in these carceral logics that trap or bind the body.
The political is the realm of liberation that Black folks have been struggling in for centuries, so of course we’re going to take the Dharma there.
Freeing the mind opens up a clarity to experience things as they are, not as they are presented to us. And of course, we come back to embodiment. When we’re at home in the body, we have the capacity to really feel into things beyond what we can experience through our senses.
Some people say, “Oh, this is systemic collapse. This is the apocalypse. This is Armageddon.” I see healing. I see things falling apart so that we can get back to real liberation, freedom, and healing.
Nikayla: Over the last few years, I’ve heard, “This collapse is inevitable, and through this collapse there will be the creative birth of something new, something better than this.” This, whether or not true, whether or not wise, is a story, is it not?
Lama Rod: We can create narratives from the heartbreak, but often those narratives are just further expressions of the heartbreak. When you’re in a relationship with the heartbreak, you’re trying to hold the heartbreak, to be aware of it and respond in a caring, liberatory way. That response is what starts to open up a liberated narrative.
If you’re in a relationship with heartbreak and you’re consumed by it, then the only thing you’re going to create is more heartbreak. Instead of surrendering to the heartbreak or reacting to it, I can be aware and offer care to the heartbreak. Heartbreak is somatic, and to feel the heartbreak is a practice of embodiment. I find myself getting closer to the Earth because I want groundedness, something to hold me, when I’m experiencing the feeling of heartbreak. Holding heartbreak is the work of mourning.
I can let the mourning be there and at the same time ask myself, “What could my life, the world, be like if we made different choices?”
Nikayla: So I’m hearing an important distinction here. There’s a story you can tell yourself about the heartbreak, and there is a story that can arise from the practice of being with this heartbreak.
Lama Rod: In a storyline about the heartbreak, it’s easy to fall into the narrative and to say, “I am this,” when in fact it’s just an experience. When you start developing narrative storylines from the heartbreak, you might say, “This is an experience, and it doesn’t have to be the primary experience.”
There are other experiences present alongside this heartbreak too, like joy. How do I lean into the joy knowing that I’m also experiencing heartbreak? Heartbreak can feel very meaningful, very strong. It can feel like the most important experience.
The heartbreak is full of data, but it’s not necessarily telling you the truth.
Nikayla: My seeing of things is very clouded by a sense of brokenheartedness about the way things are right now.
Lama Rod: And when we find ourselves in that place, it’s about offering the heartbreak a little more space. Sometimes a lot more space. Maintaining an altitude that offers the perspective that this is just an experience. From there, I do think there’s a natural kind of shifting into a “What else is here beyond the heartbreak?”
When more space opens up, we’re actually able to start dreaming into something different. We’re able to open up to possibilities for our lives and the world. We’re able to consider choices that aren’t reactions to the heartbreak, but arise from a place of fluidity, openness, joy, and care.
Nikayla: Also holding that there is no perfect mourning process, no end to this heartbreak either. We’ll need to hold heartbrokenness and joyful action at the same time.
Lama Rod: Mourning is constant. If we included mourning in our daily life, I think a lot more space would open up for us to think, dream, and act toward different things. I think the next phase in our collective experience is mourning. I think this is how we release and let go of the past in order to start collectively leaning into this new world. I think we’re going to need to rethink mourning as a positive, as a process of healing, and do it together.
Nikayla: Sometimes, I confess to you here, I think the movement leaders at the front of the room are a little delusional because they haven’t mourned. Mourning, and the letting go that comes along with it, changes the way you see this moment and the wise course forward. It’s hard for me to trust the vision or strategies of leaders who aren’t actively in touch with their heartbreak.
Lama Rod: Yes, just like a lot of other folks, I think many activists and organizers haven’t done this intense mourning. I think sometimes we push away the heartbreak and just keep working and working when, in fact, the heartbreak is telling us how to do the work. Without the mourning, you’re not opening up to everything and letting the entire experience, including the suffering, inform how you make choices.
When I transitioned out of direct activism and into this practice and training, I did in part because no one was doing this emotional labor. We were just angry and depleted. I was like, “Where is the love? Where is the mourning? Where is the care?” If people were struggling, then you were seen as a weak obstacle. There wasn’t time to talk about our feelings because things were going down. We needed to be in the streets. But I really began to ask, “Isn’t this care work a part of the sustainability of direct action?”
You have people leading who don’t understand this and are just replicating a kind of overreactivity to urgency. It’s depleting and harmful. It reveals that they’re not doing this inner work of being with their own brokenheartedness and disappointment.
Nikayla: And so unable to see a more creative path forward.
Lama Rod: Yes. It’s hard to be creative when there is a rigidity around pushing things away to stay focused on the work. It doesn’t work. I think the nature of organizing and activism is changing because there is beginning to be a recognition around this.
This systemic collapse makes us look back and remember who we were before these systems. There are important things that we have forgotten that we’re now trying to remember and bring back. Real collective care is a big part of that. To really care with compassion and empathy, you’re going to have to deal with the anger, the heartbreak, and the rage.
Nikayla: To round things out here, Lama Rod, you’ve spoken about how Buddhism, when it meets who we are today, on this land, in these bodies, within this cultural context, it changes. I’m wondering how Buddhism changes when it meets the Black radical, Black prophetic traditions?
Lama Rod: Well, Western contemporary Buddhism, in threading with this culture, also threads with anti-Blackness. So that’s our starting place.
When this practice meets the Black radical, and even more specifically the Black prophetic tradition, then it is going to be, and must be, anti-racist. But more than that, it’s going to be about everyone getting free from the systems and institutions that created, and still create, the violence. I find myself understanding how the great leaders and changemakers in the Black community were themselves Bodhisattvas.
Political organizing and social movement work is a Bodhisattva, a Bodhicitta expression. The political is the realm of liberation that Black folks have been struggling in for centuries, so of course we’re going to take the Dharma there. The Dharma becomes political. This can be uncomfortable, but that’s the nature of things, isn’t it?
It’s the people closest to not just individual suffering but collective suffering who really understand the Dharma, in a way. The Dharma is rooted, historically, in collective liberation, of course through individual practice, but absolutely for collective liberation.
That’s why we have the Mahayana, Bodhicitta, the Bodhisattva. It’s about us getting free together. If it’s about us all getting free, then we’re sensitive to what keeps all of us from getting free, whether ultimate or relative. I think Black liberatory Dharma is actually about getting rooted, holding the space, saying anything that gets in the way of relative or ultimate liberation actually has to be abolished. White supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, all of it.
Dharma begins to take on this expression of Blackness in the same way it has taken on the expression of Tibetanness or Sri Lankanness. That’s what the Dharma does. It takes on the culture of where it’s moving into and creates a particular flavor of Buddhism.
The Dharma is rooted in collective liberation …
We already know that the major project of Black liberatory Dharma is the confrontation of anti-Blackness. This confrontation means we have to hold the impact or the projection of anti-Blackness, which we already do, but the Dharma gives us even more tools to hold or cut through this negotiation. I’ve been able to do this more and more over the years of practice because I’ve felt a deeper kind of restoration of self-love. Anti-Blackness is meant to deplete. Self-love restores, holds, and protects.
Nikayla: For any fellow seekers who are resonating, any tips on confronting anti-Blackness in Dharma spaces?
Lama Rod: Well first I ask, do we really have to continue to return to the spaces where we’re not seen, heard, or taken seriously? Second, I think we can over-romanticize Western convert, American, or even Asian heritage communities. The world is driven by anti-Blackness, no matter where you go. I think we have to let go of the idea that these systems are not operating in the Dharma hall.
Coming from activism and Black radical traditions and moving into Dharma spaces where I was often the only Black person, the anti-Blackness never really phased me at all. I was just like, “Of course.” I was able to continue telling the truth and hold it as spiritual beings having a human experience.
I think this is why we need to seek out, and if it doesn’t exist, then create, BIPOC groups. I think it’s an important part of our healing. You want to go into the meditation hall and just practice, but then you run into the same anti-Blackness, and it’s a total distraction. While I never advise becoming a teacher just to create an inclusive sangha, I think we need more teachers of color.
And compassion is always an antidote. Compassion doesn’t mean I let people do whatever they want, but it means I keep the softness very present as I move through these spaces. Beyond that, people really have different capacities in confronting anti-Blackness. I have friends who are called to be the DEI or inclusivity person, who want to create committees and have accountability meetings with the leaders. Personally, I feel more interested in being an innovator, not a reformer.
My project right now is figuring out, “How do you create a real inclusive community?” Not necessarily a solely BIPOC community, but an inclusive community where we can practice getting free together.
