This moment is asking us to confront the reality that we can no longer continue to live like we have in the past.
We are being called to truth—truth about ourselves, our inner pain and our systems of violence, our inner lack and our economies of scarcity. Most profoundly we are being called to truth about our relationship to death and dying, and to face our grief, anger and rage.
Over the course of six weeks in this practice and study group, Lama Rod Owens will guide us through the core meditation practices from his newly released book Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. He will lead us in an exploration of our relationship with anger and our individual and collective trauma, inviting us to deeply and unashamedly come to know our rage and to accept it -- and learn how to use the wisdom contained within anger as ground for our liberation.
Course Themes:
Understanding Anger and Rage. This course will introduce a new understanding of rage, how to notice and call anger to consciousness in order to better identify our emotions and foster a liberatory relationship to our anger.
Embodiment. We will discuss how to work with pain and how trauma impacts the body. Lama Rod shows us how to hold space for our discomfort and ways to release it. In this way, the body can be a point of liberation when we work with trauma and identifying pain within the body.
Grief Support. Both individually and collectively we need a lot of support around our compounded grief. We need ways to metabolize grief and hold space for it. This course will introduce practices to help us move from fixation on pain to skillful mourning.
Happiness and Acceptance. Together we will explore how to access happiness and acceptance in the midst of the pandemic and the reemergence of the Movement for Black Lives. We will focus on cultivating a deep acceptance for everything that arises in and around us while learning to love our anger. This sets the ground for us to have a restorative relationship to the great challenges we face collectively in the pandemic and the greater social political climate.
Self-Care as Self Preservation. Lama Rod will offer his personal inspiration and thematic overview of how he structures his self-care practice. In addition to presenting a new framework for understanding our relationship to self-care, he will offer concrete suggestions for ways to incorporate self-care as a form of self-preservation within our lives and work.
What You Will Learn:
- Compassion-based processes to manage cumulative trauma
- How to deepen the radical practice of emotional labor for self and others
- What self-care really looks like
- Somatic practices for stress management and healing
- How to work with anger and rage for transformation and change
- Non-judgemental acceptance of what life presents
- How to be loving, open and vulnerable... but still fierce
Other Benefits:
- Opportunities to join weekly live group sessions with Lama Rod
- Over four hours of recorded video that help integrate the teachings into everyday life.
- Opportunities to connect with others and discuss these issues on the community platform.
- A 35% discount coupon for Lama Rod's book, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger (both e-book and paperback formats, shipping is limited to the US).
- A place of refuge to work with the difficult emotions arising from the circumstances of our time.
Course Curriculum
About the Teacher
Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist minister, author, activist, yoga instructor and authorized Lama, or Buddhist teacher, in the Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. He is one of the leading voices in a new generation of Buddhist teachers. Lama Rod holds a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School and is a co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation and author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger.
This course is closed for enrollment.
But we would love to stay in touch and update you on future offerings by Lama Rod Owens.
Click here to join Lama Rod’s mailing list at the bottom of this page: https://www.lamarod.com
We will send first announcements and invitations to people on the mailing list. Please stay tuned for updates!
"I have been longing for Buddhist teachings, or any really any teachings, that didn’t just bypass anger as unskillfulness when I know there’s a power in our rage that can remake the world. So grateful and excited for this offering from Lama Rod Owens.”
- Prentis Hemphill, author
"Love and Rage gives us a deep dive and courageous view of what it means to be radically alive and present to everything that makes us impossibly human. From staying awake to the rawness of personal experience, to our communal disappointments and fears, and our historical and ancestral traumas, Lama Rod holds nothing back. He teaches crucial techniques and meditation practices that allow us to celebrate joy as well as disrupt systems of anger, and helps us see that anger and rage make us human and not spiritual punching bags. This book wakes us up and reminds us what it means to live fully.”
—Joanna Hardy, Dharma Teacher and author
"Lama Rod Owens takes us beyond the spiritual harm of unconsciously repressing, exiling, and indulging anger, opening a courageous path to its vigorous transformation. Here anger is not the enemy to be assailed, but an energy that when held with loving attention becomes a powerful and indispensable discerner. In a time and a nation where unconscious trauma continues to threaten the well-being of so many precious lives, we desperately need to be guided past shallow harmonies to the honest conversations that deliver the possibility of authentic love.”
—Kosen Gregory Snyder, Dharma Teacher, Brooklyn Zen Center, and Senior Director of Buddhist Studies, Union Theological Seminary
“Lama Rod Owens’s voice is a distinct coming together of streams of identity that pour forth an ocean of wisdom that is relevant to anyone that has ever experienced anger. He speaks with a rawness and candor that is both disarming and invitational, creating space for the whole of who you are to enter fully into—regardless of race, religion, sexual identity, body type or ability. Drawing equally on the endless suffering of peoples and bodies marginalized and oppressed, and the timeless wisdom that lies beyond identity and circumstance, he asks that we fiercely honor and hold the complexity of it all to heal ourselves to become the ancestors in training we are meant to be. His language draws from Buddhism, experience from Blackness, and he beckons toward a wide path of Love that has room for everyone.”
—Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Sensei
"These teachings are a great inspiration to the protests that we have been organizing. Reacting with love, compassion, and now reactivity to our anger, rage, and frustration. Providing a space to come to an awareness of it, embracing it, and through grounding, allow nonviolent compassionate action to manifest."
-Anonymous