This is the true nature of our being, and in finally approaching it, we can contact this basic kind of sanity. We must see that there is something in us that wants to be befriended. We cannot medicate this pain away, we embrace it, and in doing so we establish a new relationship with our experience. If we are to heal, then we must allow our awareness to settle into and integrate with the pain and discomfort that we have habitually avoided. It is interrogating our bodies as an artifact of accumulated traumas and doing the work of processing that trauma by developing the capacity to notice and be with our pain. It is the courage to want to be happy, not just for others, but for ourselves as well. Healing is not just this courage to love, but also the courage to be loved. Often if we just listen, our bodies are telling us how they need to be healed.
LAMA ROD OWENS ON LIBERATION FREE
I eventually realized that what I wanted to be free from was the trauma of discrimination and devaluing that I had experienced my whole life - the pain stemming from the resentment of never feeling good enough. To do that meant that I had to negotiate this trauma in my body. I wanted to connect to my history, to my lineage, to that liberatory joy within the body - and to not connect, necessarily, to the violence or the despair in my past. In my early exploration of mind and body through awareness and mindfulness, I began to discover that freedom is really about remembering my body, and remembering that my body is the result of many people that have come before me: many decisions, many acts, and much love and celebration, but also much despair. After years of struggle with racial trauma and depression, I began to practice meditation and commit myself to experiencing liberation instead of simply longing for it.
Growing up queer and of color in the South left a certain trauma both in my mind as well as in my body. I have occupied a body that was not held so warmly by this society. I have been concerned with the idea of freedom for a while now.
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