“I don’t want people to be punished for the harm they cause me or others. I want people to be free from the suffering they experience and the suffering they cause others.” ~ Lama Rod Owens 

Spiritual abolitionism is more than a critique of power and how social systems work to grant and deny people resources that they need to survive. Spiritual abolitionism means that our entire ecology must be liberated. The Heart Sutra is one of the tools available to us in this work of liberation.

The Heart Sutra teaches that all phenomena are just expressions of the essence — this includes the sacred duality between form and emptiness. The Heart Sutra is nothing but a contradiction. Therefore, sacred duality is a contradiction because ultimately, there is no duality as there are no phenomena. 

Dualities generate a tension that, through practice, we can ride back into the essence. The tension keeps us activated, which in turn keeps us from sinking into a lull or numbness from which it is difficult to break out. Using dualities like this expresses another theme of the Heart Sutra, which is the potential of liberation through contradictions. 

We will explore how we can embody and live out these contradictions in our daily lives, in service to our collective liberation for ourselves, others, and the unseen ecologies of ancestors and descendants. We have to do the labor to get ourselves free, and that is the same labor we offer to our collectives. 

Join Lama Rod for this exploration of how we might abolish anything that prevents us from being in direct, honest, and compassionate relationships first with ourselves and then the communities we belong to.