How We Live Now: Lama Rod Owens on necessary change
Hello,
In between my fortnightly musings, I’ll be writing to let you know about new episodes of my podcast, How We Live Now.
This week, I talk to Lama Rod Owens on necessary change.
Many of us are enduring a painful new awareness of the conflicts that underpin our social relationships. For Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens, this is the beginning of a revolutionary path to our liberation - a necessary upheaval that will rebalance us forever.
In this profound, perspective-shifting conversation, we are urged to stop looking for short-cuts and panaceas for our suffering, and instead to engage with the deep, transformative work of change.
Links from the episode:
Lama Rod's website
Lama Rod's books
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From the transcript
Katherine May: I wanted to ask you about the idea of moral injury because I feel like that's coming up a lot at the moment. It's quite a new term for me, I have to admit, I think I've come to it very late but are in morally injurious times, I think. And for so many people, just showing up at their work is becoming a moral injury. I'm thinking about, in the UK, the people working in the NHS at the moment who are unable to give the level of service that they know that they need to give, that they know people need from them and there's nothing they can do about that because, in an underfunded system that's vastly understaffed, you are paralyzed as a person, you are just covering the basics and then facing your own burnout. Is that a rising thing or is that a constant throughout the world that will always be there?
Lama Rod Owens: Yeah. Well, yeah, to an extent. There's always going to be some experience of suffering. And I think, when we talk about moral injury, moral injury comes from the ways in which we have these expectations or we have these beliefs that get disrupted and that can result in a lot of struggle to trust, to be inspired to connect after the thing that you've been really trusting and then connecting to it has revealed itself not to be what it is. And we work with that just by always being honest about what's happening instead of always trying to delude ourselves, it's how ourselves' narratives to make ourselves feel better. I walk into situations, I go into situations or connect to situations with a lot of openness and curiosity and that's been really helpful for me. And to know that we're struggling in human systems and human systems are really impacted by a lack of clarity.
Katherine May: We don't get to really read them.
Lama Rod Owens: Right.
Katherine May: In the way we'd like to, at least. Or the way I'd like to, certainly.
Lama Rod Owens: Yeah.
Katherine May: This, for me, is linking to the part in your book where you talk about learning to grieve for things that aren't necessarily people, for ideas or for things that you have to let go. You give the example of learning that one of the teachers that meant a lot to you turned out to have been abusive to other people and the complex process of coming to terms with that. Grief is a bigger thing than just a response to death, I think.
Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, grief, grief is about change. Something's changed and now my sense of self is trying to figure out what it is again because our sense of self or our egos use the world around us and the illusion of stability to create a sense of self and identity. So, if something changes, then the ego's a little bit disrupted and we feel that pain. Who am I now? Now that this person or this situation that I've relied on for so long has shifted, has gone, has disappeared, whatever it may be, something's changed. And it's always going to be the case, everything's always changing.
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Amazing conversation. Thank you for this.
Go ahead and be OLD. I love your take on reveling in it!