A review by dashtaisen
Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger by Lama Rod Owens

adventurous challenging emotional funny hopeful informative inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced

5.0

The book is explicitly not about suppressing anger, or overcoming anger, or transforming anger into something else. Instead, it's about creating emotional space that allows us to engage with anger rather than simply reacting to it. In many ways this is a book about mindfulness, but not the trendy insipid "mindfulness" we often get in professional development workshops. Lama Rod takes an approach rooted in Buddhist meditation practice, and includes wisdom from many other practices and teachers, including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and RuPaul ("my goal is to always come from a place of love ...but sometimes you just have to break it down for a motherfucker"). He originally came across Buddhism and meditation through his experiences with the Catholic Worker Movement, and I appreciate his antiracist and anticapitalist approach to practice. I especially reading this book along with Emily Nietfeld's "Acceptance: A Memoir", where the author talks about her experience of radical acceptance being perverted in support of a "grit" mentality.