Thomas Hübl: My name is Thomas Hübl and I’m the convener of the summit, and I’m very delighted and happy and curious to be sitting here with you, Lama Rod. So a warm welcome to our summit this year.
Lama Rod Owens: Thank you so much for having me on.
Thomas: Yeah, it’s joy. And I’m really curious also to learn from your practice, your background too. And also I think we both share maybe from different backgrounds, but we both share passion around spiritual practice, deepening liberation, and also maybe what’s in the way. And since the Collective Trauma Summit deals with collective healing and also the collective pain, let’s start a little bit first, maybe you can share a little bit your own story. How did you get on the journey to study so deeply and practice so deeply? And what’s the motivation behind your own journey? And so that gives us a little bit access to your own life first.
Lama Rod: Yeah, thank you. Well, I think from the very beginning as far as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in all these questions, particularly the questions about everything that I’m not seeing that I know are there. And that’s really driven me. It’s been this underlining hunger my whole life that I am just beginning to articulate for myself. And I grew up, I was born in North Georgia, which is the ancestral lens of the Cherokee, Muscogee, and Creek people. And that history was really very strong growing up, Indigenous history, Indigenous caretaking of the land that was always really strong with me. I grew up in church, particularly in the United Methodist Church and the Black church in general. My mother is a minister and she became a minister in my early teens.
And having grown up in church and then growing older, having a mother who was a spiritual leader, it all felt very familiar to me. But at the same time, also really underwhelming too. I just felt that church and Christianity wasn’t actually answering all the questions that I had about the phenomenal world, both the seen and unseen world. And at the same time, I was also really invested in community service and activism, and advocacy. So I was really, that work of just helping people has always been really at the heart of who I am. And I’ve been working on many different issues and doing many kinds of organizing since I was a teenager moving through college. But in college, it was really the first time I began to articulate my dissatisfaction with Christianity. And I really consciously split from actively engaging in Christianity and believing and studying and so forth and reinvest in my energy and into activism.
And activism really began to shape my life moving from my early twenties into the rest of my twenties. But most notably for me, my activism led me to an intentional community where I lived with other activists and we just tried to help people. We did organizing and activism on the streets. We offered food programs and housing and clothing programs for folks. And that was really the first time I began to feel a deeper spiritual call that I felt was trying to unite my activism with a deeper spiritual practice. And I was really fortunate to be living in a community with serious Buddhist practitioners and serious meditators along with other folks who were practicing different paths at the same time. But Buddhism was the strongest tradition in the community, and I was even more so fortunate to be with Buddhist elders who were also very strong activists.
So my first real introduction to the practice of Buddhism was through the lens of socially active and engaged Buddhists. And that really, of course, excited me. And that led me into exploring meditation. And after really getting grounded in meditation, I realized that this is what my life’s path would be was to integrate Buddhism with social activism, and to create paths of practice for others to engage with.
Thomas: It’s beautiful. It warms my heart. There are so many parts of myself I recognize when you speak, I love this giving, this service aspect that you described. I love your deep spiritual impulse, and it’s lovely, it warms my heart when I listen to you. And so you are with many people that are practicing, and so I would love to bring in the aspect of our wounding, of our pain, of our individual pain, but also our collective pain, which often trauma is a way to turn away from overwhelm because we can’t process it at the time. But then the spiritual practice is about turning towards and creating a much deeper intimacy with life and unifying life. And so, maybe you can speak a little bit to how you encountered it in your work and with people that come to you with their practice and their residues and how can we look at that? And maybe one part is what is actually the impulse, the decision that’s made somewhere from looking away to looking towards, what is that moment where something opens?
Lama Rod: Well, for me, when I began to really take on Buddhism as a path, it was also because of its focus on suffering and pain. Because I was suffering and I was in pain and I wanted to deal with it. I wanted actually to take care of it. And I was looking for something that really was helping me to develop a real relationship with my pain instead of trying to bypass it. And I felt like and I still feel this that Buddhism was really kind, was actually extremely loving initially because it started with suffering. It’s like you’re suffering, right? That’s the first teaching, there is suffering. That was the first teaching of Buddha ever gave after his awakening. There is suffering and living and life. And I just felt like it was such a relief to find a tradition that wasn’t trying to bypass what I was experiencing every day. And then getting deeper into those teachings, it was like, yeah, you actually have to turn toward the suffering and the pain in order to experience liberation from that suffering and pain. And for me, the liberation was the awakening of space, spaciousness that actually holds all of this phenomena, especially the pain. I just didn’t have any space because pain was just one thing that was happening in my life, there were other things that were happening, but I just didn’t have the space to focus on those other things because I was so consumed by the pain itself. And that’s really the key lesson, the key teaching for me, and this is what I share with everyone, is that liberation is about moving into and leaning towards not running away. The more we run away, the more the pain and the suffering just grows even more intense. You keep pushing it away and it just goes off and grows.
And then finally when you turn back towards it’s this huge mountain of pain, but it’s still possible to work with. I just feel like the pain and our suffering is full of so much data and so much information that’s actually trying to help us, and we just don’t necessarily have the support sometimes to really show up and to hold space for the teachings that our pain is trying to share with us. So, meditation, for me, meditation early on, for example, was nothing but pain. Now, meditation wasn’t painful, but it was the act of paying attention to all this stuff that I’d been trying to push away that felt unbearable. And it took me a while to get past that, to understand that I wasn’t creating more suffering for myself. I was just actually for the first time paying attention fully to the suffering and how overwhelming that felt.
But there are many other ways that we begin to take care of our pain. Paying attention is the first piece of that. But then there are other practices that we call in that actually helps us to metabolize the pain in general. But it takes so much courage to do that. And I understand why our cultures and our societies run away from pain, and we build and create these really sophisticated methods of avoiding the pain, which, for one hand, leads to multiple kinds of addictions and other kinds of experiences based upon avoiding the pain.
But for me, so much of what has supported me to work with these Buddhist methods of working with pain is that I just really began to trust early on that turning towards the pain was the way, because I was beginning to feel that all my other methods weren’t working, it’s just nothing disappeared if I distracted myself from it, it just stayed there. And I was like, finally, I just need to name this and to see this and to take care of it through practice. And, of course, that decision has transformed my life completely. And both as an individual and as someone really concerned about the collective, I know that I have to do my part in metabolizing my individual pain in order to do work on behalf of my collective to metabolize collective pain and trauma as well.
What we would traditionally call loving kindness or meta practice is extremely important. And meta practice is really about really cultivating a deep sense of care for ourselves. That also becomes the basis of care for others. And I really believe that we have to deeply care for ourselves enough to want to be free from the suffering, from the trauma. We have to deeply believe that we deserve not to suffer in order to deeply engage in these practices. So I called in meta practice, which has been really important for me for many years now, but also for me, yoga was also an important part of my practice, just the work around inviting my body into liberation, asking my body to participate in this project of not just movement and asana, but just the ways in which our bodies hold so much trauma and so much suffering.
Now, for me, yoga became a path of moving the stored energy in my body and loosening it and just allowing it to flow more freely and my body as well as all of our bodies must be a part of our liberation work together. There’s no liberation without the body just as there’s no liberation without the mind. Both mind and body must be in collaboration. So yoga was teaching me early on how to be with my body, and how to notice what my body was holding, and how to release that energy from my body as well.
Thomas: Yeah, beautiful. In the trauma work, we would say pretty similar things and how the trauma can only be released through the body and we can just think our way through the trauma, but we need all of the aspects that you said are an interplay and it’s beautiful. So I heard you say, okay, there is the work that we do individually, on ourselves in order to heal ourselves to a certain degree, and then only then we are able to engage in the collective dimension of trauma or pain or wounding or past. So how do you see, what’s the vision for dealing with our collective path? So, let’s say many of us do our individual work, and I think many people are doing that in different modalities. How can we move or create the movement towards the collective healing process or the collective liberation?
Lama Rod: Yeah. And I think for me, it’s really been about abolition. It’s really being deeply invested in the abolition of any system that perpetuates harm and violence for us. And that’s really the source of collective trauma as well as individual trauma. We live in a situation where we’re being governed and dominated by these systems that restrict or unfairly give access to certain resources for people. And we have to disrupt that and say, “you know what? Everyone deserves the resources that they need to be safe and well and happy.” Not to have more than what you need, but definitely not to have less than what you need just to have what you need. And for me, that’s abolition the dream of a liberated future where we all have access to exactly what we need to be well safe and happy, and free.
So we have to start investing in that kind of work together. But another thing too, we have to start really understanding the collaboration of both the seen and unseen worlds. And more specifically, I think it’s really important that we return to what I often call an Indigenous worldview. A worldview that really takes into account that we’re living in a sacred ecology that connects all of these kinds of realities, both form and formless realities that connect to different kinds of beings across dimensions and timelines and planes of existence. There’s much more happening than what I can see or sense or feel. And so everything as we would say in Buddhism is interconnected, there’s an interrelatedness. And for me, sacred ecology is remembering that interrelatedness and that I have to learn to remember and to practice all these different levels of being. I think specifically for western cultures, particularly cultures that are rooted in colonialism, we have to return back to the natural world.
We have to return back to a really respectful and loving and caring relationship to the earth, to the land, to the beings connected to the land, both seen and unseen. There has to be much more of a collaboration with the earth instead of a domination of the earth. And we’re seeing the results of centuries of domination of the earth in terms of climate change. Living more simply with the earth, but also ancestor practice has been really important for me. I think ancestor practice helps us to heal and to disrupt these karmic patterns of trauma that are passed through our familial lineage as transhistorical trauma, as well as intergenerational trauma. And we don’t really think about that, but I think ancestral trauma plays a huge part in how we are experiencing trauma as an individual and a collective, but it also plays a huge part if we want to actually liberate and heal from trauma.
We have to also take into account the trauma of those who’ve come before us that’s still present, and that I think we are called to become sources of healing. To liberate our ancestors, but also to liberate our future descendants from these same cycles of trauma as well. And so many of these practices have been completely disrupted by colonialism and imperialism. It’s the othering of indigenous practice that we actually have to return back to in a really authentic and sincere way if we want to really see a different future for ourselves.
Thomas: Yes, very much so. It’s beautiful to listen to you, it’s like a meditation, it’s lovely. I so much agree also, but ancestral dimension of healing is so important, and how that has been excluded in our Western cultures and how we return to the power that this gives us and gives our societies back. It’s beautiful. Now when we move a little bit to New Saints, your latest book, I think it’s coming out in October, if I’m not mistaken. So, maybe tell us a little bit, what’s the passion, what’s your passion and what’s the message of the book and what do you wish for the book as a social impact or social spiritual impact?
Lama Rod: Yeah, I think the book is really encompassing everything that I’ve shared. I just really strongly believe that we need new visions for the future and new ways to think about our practice. And so for me, New Saints, first and foremost came out of the ways that I was seeing so many people wake up to the reality of crisis in the world and the questions that they were beginning to ask about how do you move forward? And of course, I began to think about this during the quarantine of 2020, particularly during the uprising or rather the reemergence of the movement for Black Lives after the murder of George Floyd. And seeing people really out in the streets and really organizing and thinking more critically about racial justice on top of the ways in which these systems, particularly capitalism, were really being disrupted by COVID.
And just looking at particularly some of the young people who were really coming forward as change makers and leaders, I just thought, “Oh, I really want to offer them something from my own experience” because I’m beginning to identify as an elder. And I just feel that eldership is really about imparting the wisdom that you’ve learned back to younger folks, to younger generations. And so I’ve seen New Saints as a way for me to offer the wisdom that I’ve gained back to young leaders who are emerging right now, who are trying to actually figure out the future. I think our younger generations, generation Z, and I would say millennials, I’m right in between millennials and Gen-X, so I don’t know where I’m at half the time, but I think our younger generations, particularly Gen-Z, are really taking on the fight of trying to figure out how to survive.
And I think they’re one of the first generations, perhaps the first generation where this is a real issue. It’s like we have to do something if we want to be alive in the coming years. And for me, that is the work of saints. I think saints have emerged throughout history to offer a vision of how to survive into the future, particularly spiritual saints. How do we connect to the experience of the divine in order to shape our lives, to live more authentically, to live much more in harmony with the phenomenal world? And I think there have been other saints, social change, saints who have come forward to show us how to be in the world, how to live in community, how to live through or how to live beyond systems of violence as well. And so, in the book, I said, “you know what? This is the age of new sainthood.”
I think there are new saints emerging, and I want the new sainthood to be a collaboration between social justice and spiritual enlightenment, and which is work that I’ve been doing for years. But this New Saints, it’s a brand new articulation of the Bodhisattva tradition in Buddhism. And the Bodhisattva is the Buddhist saints. But I wanted to make it really contemporary. I wanted to use language that younger folks could really get into and take on. And I also wanted to offer the practices for people to really engage in that I feel are imperative to bring about a more liberated future. In general, it’s a spiritual abolition text. And I think I wanted to take on the challenge for the Western convert Buddhist community to write a spiritual abolition text to really get us thinking about, again, the integration of spiritual awakening with social justice.
Thomas: That speaks deeply to my heart, obviously too. And so I think it’s very powerful. Maybe you can speak a little bit more about what you said before, you want to speak to young leaders, young activists, people who take on social or ecological or whatever environmental issues and really want to bring some change into the world, but also face challenges. So how do you work with them? What are they facing? And I’m sure here, this conversation, maybe many will listen and say, okay, yeah, I am that, I’m an activist I’m facing issues when I engage with the world, I feel sometimes, I don’t know, depleted, burned out. I am not sure how to do things. I’m not sure how to go forward, it’s hard. What’s your relationship to that difficulty that we’re facing when we want to change something?
Lama Rod: Yeah, I think you’re speaking to sometimes a hopelessness that many people experience as well as a despair. I think those become really heavy experiences that lead to a disembodiment and numbness. And so in that state, people feel really inactive. They feel really disconnected, exhausted, overwhelmed. These are some of the things that people experience. And so, for me, again, so much of this work is related to the ways in which colonialism really has disrupted so many of us from a deeper connection to the unseen world, because the unseen world is always trying to get us free, the unseen world’s always showing us how to get free. And so much of this work that I’m doing, and particularly in The New Saints, is actually reconnecting to the experiences of Gods and deities and spirits and ancestors of other sentient beings who are actually really invested in our liberation as well.
And for me, connecting to the unseen world, connecting to the resources of the unseen world has helped me to again, first understand that I am not alone, we’re not alone in this work. There are beings who care deeply about this world system who are here helping, and we can collaborate even more closely with them. But also for me, it’s understanding that this world is just an experience as well. And of course, these teachings come directly from my own ancestry, from Black Liberation Theology, which was a theology that arose from the experience of slavery that my ancestors endured and survived. But so much of Black liberation theology is first that yes, God is on the side of the most oppressed. And secondly, this world is just an experience, it’s not our real home. This is something that we’re passing through. So yes, we have to be concerned with the relative world and also have this relationship to the relative world where we’re not so fixated and so deeply invested in it as something that’s real and tangible. Because if it’s too real and tangible, then there can be no hope.
There can be no deep belief in change. If this world were super, super real, and material, nothing would change, but things do change. My people are no longer enslaved. So that feels like a change that’s come about through a lot of work, a lot of spiritual practice as well as activism, but it has changed. And again, I think the movement for Black Lives was a continuation of that work where we said, the world is workable, malleable, and if we can get invested in work and remembering who we are and really deepening our capacity to experience love and care and wisdom, then we can actually change our situation. And all of that for me is what keeps me really dedicated to the work, it keeps me really attuned to doing what I can to bring about this liberated future. Again, I’m not alone, and I could only write New Saints through and with the collaboration of so many beings around me, all of my ancestors, all the deities that I practice with, all of the guardian spirits of the lands and the elements that I practice with, it’s a collaboration freedom work.
And liberation is a collaboration, not just an individual process, an individual experience, but it’s a process that we do collectively with other humans and as well as unseen beings. So taking all of that into account, we get real hopeful, and there’s a lot of joy in that as well. There has to be joy in liberation or else it just becomes this overwhelming burden of suffering that no one will survive. And that’s why we choose joy when we need to. That’s why we practice gratitude, to remind us that there’s always something to be grateful for, even though things are really hard. So, these are just some of the practices, again, that you call in to your work that supports the work and really helps us not to be consumed by the labor. It helps us to remain really spacious and fluid.
Thomas: It’s beautiful that you remind us that state of contraction or that state of separation from Mother Earth beings, higher beings on different levels is actually a result of the pain and the trauma that we carry that created that state and experience. But actually there’s much more and then actively reconnecting to that much more. Maybe you can for our listeners speak a little bit to, okay, if somebody doesn’t have much experience with connecting to beings, ancestors, other dimensions. So, for some people that might be very close, and for some people maybe they hear this for the first time and say, okay, even if I want to try, even if I’m open, so how can I get some experience that shows me okay, yes, it opens the door for me to get access to the world that I don’t see. And some people maybe are on the edge of tapping into that world, but don’t have any reference experience or not much reference experience. Maybe they do in some way. So maybe you can speak a little bit to somebody like that.
Lama Rod: Absolutely. And before I get into that, there’s another piece I think will lead us into that question, which is for me, when I talk about trauma, trauma, for me, this general experience of trauma is really the experience of having forgotten who I am. And I think in Buddhism, that’s a trauma analysis that I think is present in the tradition that we forgot that we were already awakened free beings, and then we got distracted by something other than space and emptiness and energy. And that’s led to these cycles of suffering with the deep motivation to actually remember who we are. And so I think when we talk about trying to reconnect to the practices that I’ve been mentoring, it is really, so much of this is rooted in remembering and remembering that the world is fluid, that it’s complex, and there are so many experiences that many of us are having, but we don’t have the communities necessarily or the mentorships to really cultivate or understand these experiences.
So, for me, an example for me, when I began to really get serious about ancestor practice, I was inspired by friends who were doing ancestor practice. It was never anything that I had any desire to do, but I was in relationship with people practicing with ancestors, and their relationship began to influence me. I begin to think, oh, they’re doing something really important and it looks really powerful, and I wonder if that can be the case for me. And so for me, it was just a slow opening to the possibility. Well, that’s actually not true. I did believe in ancestors, my whole life I’ve believed in all of this, but I wasn’t practicing any of this, it was just a belief.
And so when I began to really practice ancestors, I just began to open my mind and to consider, okay, there are beings around me, what does that feel like? And I also began to talk to my ancestors, just verbally talk and just trying to establish a communication with my ancestors. And at the beginning it was very slow, but it began to speed up to a point where I feel very connected to my ancestors, very much in alignment with ancestors. And that’s also not just through my own efforts, but also being in community with others who are practicing as well. These are the two basic things that I think we have to really take seriously. You really have to explore communities or perhaps other teachers or mentors who can actually support this questioning and experience that you’re becoming interested in. As well, of course, reading, just reading the experiences of others has been extremely important for me as well.
So it’s like you have to take a step. You have to step out into the space that doesn’t seem like there’s anything there, but is actually quite a powerful gesture to even wake up one day and just say, you know what? There are ancestors. I’m a part of an ancestral line, and I wonder how I can connect to that. And if you put that question now, the ancestors will start connecting through many different ways, through dreams, through visions, through insights, through perceptions, and so forth, and just begin to pay attention to what those signs are.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. I love what you said. You make a step out into an unknown space, so we need to risk something in a way, and that’s beautiful. And when you risk something, there will be a response. And I think that’s a beautiful invitation for all of us to see where is the next level of our risk? Even if you did already some things, there’s always a more subtle layer, there’s maybe some other unknown territory.
Lama Rod: And I would say that’s the thing too. It’s that we have to risk something, and the big risk is that you will change in the same way I had to change, right? You’ll definitely let go of the person you thought you were, and that’s a lot of risk. There are so many people around us who depend on us staying the same, and when we change, that disrupts them, and so we have to deal with the consequences of that. I think that’s what really keeps a lot of people from engaging in this transformative work is this threat of change. But again, if you really want to get free, this is the choice that you’re making. And I am beginning to realize, as I talk about quite a bit and New Saints, is that we’re surrounded by people who actually don’t want to get free even in our spiritual communities.
Spiritual communities can be full of people who aren’t actually interested in freedom, they’re much more interested in comfort and happiness and stability, and those are very limiting experiences because when we begin to really work for ultimate liberation, we will experience all of this, absolutely. But if you just stop at happiness and comfort, then that’s as far as you’re going to go. Liberation isn’t about being happy, it’s about transcending the dualities of suffering and pleasure. And this is transcending all dualities actually to a state where those dualities do not exist and therefore suffering does not exist. But it’s heartbreaking to realize that once you begin to choose freedom, you will alienate so many people around you even if they are spiritual practitioners because then they’re not doing it to get free, they’re doing it for other reasons. And you just have to deal with it, you have to tend to that brokenheartedness, and then you will also find others who are dedicated to liberation. Then you begin to form new relationships and communities with those folks.
Thomas: That’s very beautiful. In our work, we call this the second test. The first test is you’re risking something and changing, the second test is that the reality that you were a part of before will call you back in a way so that it strengthens your liberation. And then the second step will ground and embody the change. And it’s beautiful. It’s lovely because it’s so resonant, and I love what you said, it’s a beautiful sentence. You risk to become a different person. That’s very powerful. You’re not risking a life by making a step off the cliff, you’re risking a change, but you’re also in a way sacrificing stagnation for movement. So, you liquefy something in your life, and that’s really beautiful. So you become more part of the ever-changing movement that is way happening. It’s beautiful how you said that. And so I love that.
And maybe you can speak a little bit to that moment because I think that’s a very powerful moment when we say, okay, we make a step into the unknown, the universe or the divine, or however we call it response to that. And there’s through some kind of confluence, there’s a change. And then when that happens that we feel that some people will not be happy, some people will maybe be very happy because they were waiting actually for us to change. And so how can I be with that, that it’s uncomfortable to change and that I find a way to be in that? And maybe you can speak a little bit to that part.
Lama Rod: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that I learned to do was to choose discomfort. And so of course people think, why do I need to choose discomfort? I’m already uncomfortable. But the thing is, we have a very strong aversion to discomfort, which drives all of our avoidance tendencies. And so when I say to choose discomfort, what I’m actually trying to do is cut through all that aversion, all the pushing away, and say, here you are. I might as well let you be here. And when I let my discomfort and my suffering have space, then I get close enough to it to figure out what it’s trying to teach me about how to move through it.
I can’t learn the lessons from my suffering if I’m always pushing it away. So as we take this step into risk, as we move into the space, it’s like you just have to say, yeah, and this is going to be uncomfortable. This is just going to be another experience of discomfort, and that’s okay because this discomfort is really coming from the ways in which I’m not clear about the choices that I need to make about getting free. And so when I’m in this discomfort, I’m actually learning how to make different choices about how to alleviate this discomfort because I’m making choices that are about spaciousness and clarity and fluidity and so forth. So it becomes necessary. Our suffering is necessary. It’s not a burden, it’s not a punishment. It is something that’s there that’s trying to show us a different way of being.
Suffering just helps us to understand that there’s this balance or there’s something out of balance, that the choices, the right choices aren’t being made about liberation. And so suffering is just telling us that, okay, you actually need to do something different, and as long as you keep making the same old choices, I’m going to live with you. And which again, we’re discomfort and suffering avoidant, absolutely. And for me, it’s always important to differentiate between suffering and pain within the Buddhist lens. Pain is something that we’re always going to experience. We’re embodied beings. We have a physical body, there are sensations with the body that are just difficult to be with, to hold space for. That’s always going to be there. But on top of the sensation of pain is suffering. And suffering, as we say in Buddhism, is something that we’re choosing and suffering becomes really the experience of aversion, of pushing the pain away and the tension of pushing something that’s present away, that tension becomes the suffering that we’re trying to cut through.
And again, this is why I say you have to go into the suffering to choose suffering itself, because that helps this tension of aversion to dissipate, and we get to the actual pain itself. And when we get to the actual pain itself, then we often discover that it’s not what we thought it was. Our relationship to pain begins to change as well. I’m not saying it completely goes away, but I’m saying our relationship will change and it’s going to make the work of liberation a lot more clearer when we’re in a relationship with pain like this.
Thomas: It’s very much congruent with when you look at how to approach trauma and to create a different relationship to that, which was too much and we needed to push it away. But then as children or when it was too much in a traumatic moment, life says here, in space and time, it’s not good for me. So not being here and now in this present moment is intelligent in traumatic moments for people to protect themselves. But as I hear you, is creating a different relationship with it. It helps us to optimize it, take it back, integrate it, and grow. And maybe my last question, because for me, the integration of trauma or pain or suffering, so the liberation that comes from this, I think is the first step. And then I often say, but the step underneath is that we create a relationship to the ethical transgression or violation that led up to the traumatization in order to unify the fabric of life, to reactivate the self-healing mechanism of life.
So that, what I would call “the Divine Law”, the law of life, that we act out of integrity, wholeness, however we call that. I think the work to integrate trauma leads to some ethical growth individually and collectively. When I say that, I’m curious in your response and how you look at it in your work, and then maybe we round up our conversation.
Lama Rod: Yeah, absolutely. And for me, the work that we’re doing, the work around liberation and working with trauma is ethical work primarily for me, because I do this work not just for myself, but for others. The more I experience healing and freedom, the more I’m able to offer that to others around me. I often say that if I don’t do my work, I become work for others.
Thomas: That’s beautiful, beautiful.
Lama Rod: But I think the collective trauma that we’re experiencing, it’s not that everyone is actually experiencing the same kind of trauma individually, but it’s more like there are so many people who don’t have the capacity right now to work with their trauma. And the rest of us who are really engaged in this work, we find ourselves taking on not just our work, but this bigger piece of collective work that other people are not able to do right now. And for me, that takes deep care and concern for others, not just for myself, but for everyone for me to choose to do that. And for me, that enters me into this profound healing as you were just talking about. There are these, when I feel like I belong to a collective and that my work is really alleviating the suffering of the collective, for me, that helps me to remember who I am. That I am this being who is here to love and to experience love, and that my number one goal or responsibility in this life is to reduce harm and suffering for everyone, including myself. And that expansion really helps me to decenter the sense of ego and I, and begin to make this space for us. And that for me has been really one of the key things that I have done to cut through this intense suffering based around super individualism, hyperindividualism. The I is me, it’s not just me, it’s us, and we’re helping each other to get free. We’re walking each other home.
Thomas: That’s so beautiful. We’re walking each other home. I think that’s a lovely line to close our conversation. And everybody can look at their lives, how that’s present in every one of our lives, how we walk each other home. I want to tell you, Lama Rod, this was such a beautiful and flowing and subtle and deep and lovely conversation that for me feels very, very resonant. I resonate with everything you said, and I love the transmission, the calmness, and also the depth of your own practice that you transmit as you speak. And I feel deeply resonant and grateful to have this time with you and to hear your depth. And also I’m sure everybody who’s listening here can take something away for their own lives. So, thank you. And I love the last line. We are walking each other home. Let’s remember that.
Lama Rod: Thank you so much.
