Anger as a Tool, Rather than a Weapon
Lama Rod Owens on "the practice of remembering who we really are... by allowing the universe to point us back to our most basic, truest selves.”
About a month ago, there was a campaign on social media encouraging people to buy books by Black authors in an effort to flood the New York Times bestseller lists. One of the two books I purchased that week was Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger by Lama Rod Owens. Owens makes clear in the opening pages that he’s not interested in writing a touchy-feely book showing you how transform your anger into something positive. Instead, he discusses “facing our anger and welcoming it as a teacher,” directly engaging with it, and changing your life around that engagement.
People tend to have a reactive, defensive relationship with their anger—they feel it, and then they lash out at whoever or whatever it is they think made them feel that way, assuming that this will mitigate their own pain. When I was a teenager, John Lydon, the former lead singer for the Sex Pistols, had something of a minor hit with a song called “Rise,” in which he would periodically chant, “Anger is an energy,” the idea being that this energy, the rage and alienation, was the fuel that would push us past our pain, help us make our way through a hostile world.
But that’s not how it works—what we need to do, Owens says, is follow our anger back toward our pain. Suss out why you’re angry, and you’ll understand what is hurting you; once you understand what is hurting you, you’ll be in a better position to do the uncomfortable work of healing yourself… or learning to live with the pain.
Owens draws heavily upon his Buddhist training throughout, and he also speaks frankly about how, as a Black man, Western/American society had conditioned him to be ashamed of his anger, taught him that expressing his anger could be one of the quickest ways possible to get himself killed. Suppressing that anger (and the anger that came from the hurt of being treated the way this society treats gay men, and overweight men) left him profoundly cut off from his own life—but now he’s able to create a space where he can identify the pain that provokes his anger, and when he can’t heal that pain, at least he’s prepared to acknowledge it and carry it with him.
As I read, I was looking for ways to connect what Owens was saying with the experience of writing, and about halfway through I found a clear distillation of the idea I’d been groping toward. “The practice of spirituality,” he writes, “is the practice of remembering who we really are beyond our suffering by allowing the universe to point us back to our most basic, truest selves.”
Unless this is your first time reading my newsletter, you’re probably familiar with my emphasis on a writing practice as a means of discovering what matters most to you and developing your ability to share those concerns with the world.
It’s easy to write from within your anger—to lash out instinctively at the thing that makes you furious, aiming to deal it a wound at least as deep as the one it gave you, trying to find comfort in making someone else feel pain like the pain you’re feeling, or at least simply imagining them feeling that pain. I know I spent a lot of time in my youth writing that way, especially on the Internet. As someone once said to me, about twenty years ago, “Ron, do you find ridicule an effective means of communication?” To which I replied, because I was often a huge asshole then, “When I wish to communicate that someone is being ridiculous, yes.” Some people thought that was funny, which was bad, because it encouraged me to keep doing that sort of thing far longer than I should have.
(I’m not as huge of an asshole these days, but I look at my Twitter timeline and I recognize that I’m not entirely immune to that impulse, especially where the Trump regime and its supporters are involved.)
When you’re able to use your writing to step outside your anger and examine it, though, the way that Owens uses meditation practice, and you work to identify why you’re angry, you’ll likely learn that the source of that pain is something you’re trying to protect, something you’re trying to shield from hurt. It might be a memory, it might be an ideal, it might be a relationship with another person. Whatever it is, it matters deeply to you. Lean into that. Put the anger down, pick that thing up, and get to know it better. What might your writing look like if you were working to advance that thing, rather than simply trying to defend it?
Take it further. What might your life look like?
Owens has a powerful question that he uses to think about the influences he makes space for in his life: “What do I rely on to reduce delusion and increase clarity?” It’s a question you can apply to your writing practice. Do your influences and inspirations steer you toward the truth? I don’t just mean that they tell you the truth, but they make it easier for you to perceive the truth as well. Do they help you realize how amazing you already are, and how you might be able to give expression to that?
If not, maybe it’s time to look for better inspirations.
I have exciting news to share! Belt Publishing and I are collaborating on Our Endless and Proper Work: Notes on Starting (and Sticking With) Your Writing Practice, which pulls together what I hope are some of the best insights from the first two years of “Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives,” with our eyes on the spring of 2021. (Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives did not strike everyone concerned as a title that immediately said “creative writing!” to the potential reader, and then it turned out that Will Oldham’s former touring drummer had already snagged it for his memoir, but I like the new title a lot.)
I’ll talk more about this in the months ahead. For now, I’ll say that Anne and I both see this book in a constellation with her own upcoming book, So You Want to Publish a Book?, which grew out of her Substack newsletter, “Notes from a Small Press.” And if you’re interested in becoming a published author, that’s one of the newsletters you definitely need to have on your radar.