The New Saints Quotes

“Systems of dominance have co-opted the work of goodness to keep people from disrupting systemic violence.”
― Lama Rod Owens, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors

“we are not experiencing the end of the world, but we are experiencing the end of some provocative and desperately enduring lies we have told ourselves. With the end of lies comes the awakening of truth. And so we are living in a period when we are confronting truth — truth about ourselves and our relationship to death and dying, to systems and institutions of violence, to transhistorical trauma, to the health of our planet, to capitalism, and, ultimately, to the fact that we can no longer continue living like we have in the past. Real truth is unrelenting, like the sun piercing the clouds on an overcast day, and it doesn’t go away just because we can’t handle it. Truth uncovers everything — all the shit that we have spent our lives running away from. And when something is uncovered, even if it’s the most intense individual or collective trauma, it demands to be taken care of.”
― Lama Rod Owens, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors

“Choosing aloneness doesn’t mean that I disconnect from the experiences of others, especially their suffering. I don’t think I will ever have the capacity to forget the suffering of others. But what it does mean is that I can notice and hold space for others’ suffering without trying to absorb it into my experience.”
― Lama Rod Owens, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors

“Choosing aloneness reminds me that though I belong to others, I still belong to myself, and because of this belonging to myself, I am accountable for my own healing.”
― Lama Rod Owens, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors

“Even liberatory self-care remains difficult for many of us because we don’t believe that we deserve care to begin with. I often say that the world is trying to care for us, but we keep sabotaging that care. I frequently sabotaged care from others because I believed that I wasn’t good enough to be cared for. I also believed that I didn’t deserve care because there were so many other people in the world going without it.”
― Lama Rod Owens, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors