Healing Without Causing Harm | Featuring Lama Rod Owens

Lama Rod Owens — Black Buddhist teacher, Harvard Divinity School graduate, and author of Love and Rage and The New Saints — joins Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually takes to be in a healing role without causing harm. That question turns out to go deeper than most professional training ever reaches.

They start with a practice called the Four Naturals: an opening that moves through natural body, natural breath, natural mind, and natural self — an invitation to arrive without agenda, without performance, without trying to fix what's already present. From there, the conversation goes into Lama Rod's early years as a meditation teacher, when he was regularly activating people in practice and didn't yet have the framework to understand why. He stopped teaching breathwork entirely until he figured out how to offer it in a way that gave people genuine agency. He calls that period a blessing.

They talk about what keeps teachers and therapists from causing harm over time — not rules, but the internal structures that make accountability possible. Staying a student. Staying in relationship with peers and elders. Keeping a life outside of the role. They talk about the Calgon dynamic: the way people come to spiritual teachers and therapists wanting to be carried away from their suffering rather than supported in being with it — and why that fantasy is a setup for harm on both sides. 

And they talk about truth-telling: what it costs Lama Rod to be as open as he is, why he does it anyway, and what he believes it makes possible for the people who are watching him do it. 

Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.