Love and Rage Quotes

“If we don't do our work, we become work for other people.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“There’s something about our identity as activists that is so closely related to the anger that we experience. What would it look like if we formed our activist communities around joy, not the suffering or the anger, as a basis for our change work?”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“Sometimes it’s okay to think that our anger is trying to protect us. However, it is more truthful to think that it’s actually protecting something else that’s a little deeper than that. It’s protecting our hurt. It’s protecting our broken hearts. The work to turn our attention back to the woundedness is this really intense, profound path of transformation, which doesn’t feel as good as just responding to the anger, because the energy of anger makes us feel powerful.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“I have had to learn to invite my broken heart to dine with me at the table. It is meaningless to run now. My broken heart is not a judgment or a crime. It is a detailed record of how I have tried to meet the violence of the world with as much openness as possible.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor E. Frankl”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“I believe anger is like a controlled fire. We do controlled fires in forests to create room and space for new growth and to fertilize the soil. But that fire can get out of control if there aren’t any skilled people there controlling that fire. For us, if we have no wisdom, then our anger gets out of control, and it starts burning up everything. I see so many people burning up everything.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“the body will always tell the story of our wounded was in a language so direct and simple that it can be too much to bear witness to. as protection, the mind pulls away and keeps itself isolated from the body. the most radical project we could ever engage in during our lives is the project of embodiment. this is the most radical act because there is no liberation without the union of mind and body.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“and the thing about white colonist fear and rage is that i have nothing to do with it but my body still becomes a receptacle for this unmetabolized woundedness. at the end of the day i find myself hauling not just my trauma but also the trauma of whiteness.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“The body tells the truth regardless of if we speak its language or not. ... Often my practice has focused on trying to meet my body where it is, instead of constantly trying to get it to meet me where I am.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“To begin with, this is not a mindfulness book on how to bypass anger and focus on happiness. Nor is this a book about using any other spiritual path to transform the nature of anger into something more profound or transcendent. This book is about facing our anger and welcoming it as a teacher and friend so it can help us to benefit ourselves and others.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“The great activism needed today entails bridging our personal grieving with the grieving of our communities. Our anger arises over our pain and is only pointing back to our pain. To hold space for our pain is a way that we begin to take care of our pain. Taking care of our pain softens our hurt as we do the work of empathizing with ourselves. Empathizing with ourselves makes it easier to empathize with others around us. This empathy is at the root of the love and compassion that will begin to disrupt the systems that create harm.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“You need to call from the inside the thing you want to liberate. —Sister Sadada Jackson”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“if we don’t do our work, then we become work for other people.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“trauma may make it difficult for us to be in our bodies because of pain. Therefore, it can be hard to trust myself, and it is hard for me to know what I really need.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“Those of us who have not been allowed to be openly angry have often reverted to passive aggressiveness to express our upset without being punished.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“It is hard to let go of our ways of being in the world, because we simply do not know who we will become after we let go of our old selves.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“In activist communities, our relationship to anger is immature, ill informed, and overly romanticized. We manipulate anger as a false source of energy and inspiration. Many of us have no idea how to really use anger to see the changes we need to see in our communities. Our relationship to anger is a reactive and compulsory one. We feel the anger and respond.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger

“To sink beneath the anger or to move through the anger was to recognize the anger for what it was: an indicator that my heart was broken.”
― Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger