Just One Question | Lama Rod Owens: How Can I Receive Love?

Chris: Today’s Just One Question, Mallory, is kind of open-ended. Okay, more accurately, I think the answer is open-ended, because the question is: How can I receive love?

Mallory: Okay. Yes. It’s a tough one.

Chris: It’s a tough one. And I think people think about — we always talk about giving love and being more loving, but opening ourselves to receive love actually takes some effort.

Mallory: Yeah. Are you any good at that?

Chris: No, I’m terrible. I’m terrible at receiving love.

Mallory: Me too.

Chris: Love and compliments — I can’t do it.

Mallory: Yeah, can’t do it. Can’t do it.

Chris: So this comes from an episode of Insights at the Edge with Lama Rod Owens, who’s a self-described Black Buddhist Southern Queen with a Master of Divinity degree from Harvard. He’s always wonderful when he’s on.

Mallory: Yeah, he’s really wonderful. And anyone listening, you’ve got to go check out his episode with Seane Corn — it’s such a great conversation.

Chris: Yeah, and in this episode he was promoting his latest book, The New Saints, and at one point Tami asked him to take us through one of the practices in the book about receiving love. So today’s going to be a little different. We’re gonna do a practice.

Mallory: Okay?

Chris: So there are gonna be some quiet parts.

Mallory: Just one practice.

Chris: Yeah, just hang with it, and get ready to receive the love.

Mallory: Okay. Here’s Tami asking Lama Rod Owens, “How can I receive love?”

Tami: You offer lots of powerful practices sprinkled throughout The New Saints. And one of them that I liked a lot — maybe it’s because it’s something that will nourish me, that I need — had to do with receiving love. And I wonder, could we just do that together right here, as a listenership? Could we receive love together? Could you take us into it?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, let’s —

Tami: — do it. Let’s receive some love.

Lama Rod Owens: You know, the practice in the book is just a very general practice that can be the root of any other practice you want to add to it. But when I began opening into and receiving love, first and foremost, I just develop an awareness of the seat under me, or the floor under me. Like, I just [want to?] feel supported, first of all [sic — transcript has “don’t wanna feel supported”; verify against audio]. So I’m sitting down right now, so I feel the seat rising to hold me, to hold my body. And even now, I can open to the care and the love of the seat — something doesn’t have to be conscious or alive for me to feel care from it.

So, as you’re moving through this, just experiment — what does it feel like to be cared for by the seat you’re sitting on, or by the ground under you if you’re standing or lying down?

And just tell yourself, “I am being cared for by the seat.” And for me, that’s so exciting.

To go even further, I reflect — and I invite you to also reflect — on a time in your life when you felt someone really loving you. So, someone or something. This can be a person, a pet — or, if we want to talk about the unseen world, sometimes we feel deeply loved by our ancestors, our guides, a deity, or even a Buddha. Just remember that experience of being loved and cared for. What was that experience? What was the moment?

That moment when someone or something really saw you — they were holding space for you, they were doing emotional labor for you, they helped you. You were in distress, and this person just showed up. What does that feel like, to receive that?

Sometimes I like to imagine that this receiving of care from this benefactor from our past feels like energy flowing down through the top of my head, down into my heart center. My heart center begins to be filled with this energy of care and love, and slowly that love — that care — welling up in my heart center begins to stream through the rest of my body, filling up my body as well as my mind with this energy of deep care and love from this benefactor.

And I just sit in this.

And for many of us, this may feel like a difficult experience, because this experience of love is really beginning to water and take care of parts of our experience that are just deeply neglected — old memories or traumas that have not been touched or taken care of by deep care and love.

So I try not to force anything in this stage of the practice, but just allow this expression of love and care to tend to these difficult experiences, and let these experiences be saturated by this love and care.

And to go even further — in my practice, I like to imagine that all the beings in the universe are loving me right now, that they want me to be safe and happy and resourced and free. And I try to hold as much of this care and love as possible.

And I do begin to feel a shift in my body, and in my mind. I feel more space. I feel as if the material of my mind — thoughts and emotions — is much more fluid. I feel everything as experiences, not as inherently who I am. I feel connected. I feel like I belong.

And there is emotional labor happening. For me, I feel as if this energy of love is really beginning to call forth some maybe deeply buried sadness. And I feel that sadness coming up — it has the conditions to arise, and I’m in a position where I can hold space for it, notice it, experience it, and then let it go.

So everything around me is loving me, [wanting?] me to be safe and free and happy [sic — transcript has “what do you mean to be safe and free and happy”; verify against audio].

And when you’re ready, shift your attention back to the seat, or the floor under you — allowing the seat, the floor, to rise, to hold you, to ground you — feeling the weight of your body really surrendering to being held.

And then, when you’re ready, begin to offer some slow, gentle movement back into your body — whatever feels appropriate — and maybe move through a few cleansing breaths, which for me means inhaling deeply through my nose and exhaling out my mouth. And as I exhale, just imagine releasing any energy that feels stuck or heavy or rigid, and bring life and movement back into your body.

Even though we’ve only been practicing for a couple of minutes, I think practices like this can really shift a lot of energy. So don’t just run out of the practice — take your time to warm up again, to stretch, to breathe, maybe even have a sip of water. That’s helpful.

This is such an important practice to do as much as possible, considering the overwhelming amount of vicarious trauma and grief that’s being radiated into the space around us. It’s easy to just keep absorbing this energy without having space to release it, and this practice can help you really release a lot of that energy.

Chris: Listen to the full episode of Insights at the Edge with Lama Rod Owens, titled The Path of the New Saint, wherever you listen to podcasts — we’ll put a link in the show notes for you. It’s also available ad-free on our premium membership platform, Sounds True One, which just had a massive update, so you should check that out at join.soundstrue.com. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Tami: The Sounds True Podcast Network.