[“Anger is actually trying to tell us something. Anger is confessing that it’s not the main event. There’s tension arising from my unwillingness to be with this deep sense of being hurt. When I begin to look at that, one of the hardest things that I could ever admit to myself was that I was just hurt, that I wasn’t just pissed off. I wasn’t pissed off because of racism or homophobia or something else. I was actually deeply, deeply hurt. I was deeply in despair because of the situation. This realization just made me feel weak. And never in my life had I ever been told and ever been supported in touching deeply into this woundedness. I call it heartbrokenness.
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. When I allowed myself to experience my heartbrokenness, my activism began to change. I wasn’t out there in the streets any longer trying to do stuff because I was angry. I was out because I was just really hurt and I wanted someone to recognize that. I wanted someone to recognize that for the first time my struggle wasn’t to get people free or to disrupt systems. My primary struggle was to embody and communicate that I was not okay, that I was struggling to be happy, and that I wasn’t, above all, being distracted by the anger. I suppose, in other words, my activism was to first give myself permission to be free to feel deeply into my experience so I could enter into change work more myself and in deeper attunement to other people’s struggle.”]
lama rod owens, love and rage: the path of liberation through anger












