Mindfulness Peace Project

Ratna Peace Initiative | Veterans Peace of Mind | Solitary Confinement

OBSTACLES TO THE SCRIPTURAL GURU

It has gotten harder to do this job (bringing dharma into prisons) thanks to the ever more complicated restrictions prison systems are putting on mail. Arkansas, for instance, now digitizes all incoming mail at a center in Florida and has apparently banned books and magazines entirely. Texas, probably due to a heavy religious presence in the state, doesn’t ban our material as long as it’s religious. We can send that in directly.

We can’t do that in Missouri without some difficulties to get permission. We’ve got an inmate who has spent a lot of time there in solitary. It took us 6 months to get one of our courses cleared for him, and him alone for that particular prison. Then he got transferred to another prison, and similarly, we’ve spent a long time simply getting dharma books to him, with many obstacles. [Read more…]

VOLUNTEERING IN PRISONS

I don’t think I would have ever volunteered to go into a prison purely on my own, but I went in the first time under the auspices of my school, Naropa University, to teach creative writing. I filled out an application, I think, but the professor, Mary Stewart Kean, did the rest—getting us cleared, getting our schedule and so on set up, transporting us down there. We went into Colorado Territorial, the oldest prison in the state, that still has block, razor-wire topped walls with guard towers.

That’s maybe enough for the average person who has no reason to see what it’s like inside and doesn’t want to know, much less care about the people housed there.

And who are those people, other than felons: they robbed convenience stores, they got into arguments and shot people, they sold fentanyl, they sexually assaulted children, on and on. It’s a very long, very tawdry list.

If you tell someone you’re going into a prison to teach meditation, one possible negative reaction is that you’re “making criminals feel better.” They did something evil and deserve to be punished. Why do they get to feel better?

[Read more…]

IT’S NOT EASY TO LOOK…

In her account, A Tree with My Name on It: Finding A Way Home (Bold Story Press, 2024), Vicki Hitchcock enters one of those periods in a life where you find yourself in transformation, whether you were looking for it or not.  In the latter 90s, she moves to a ranch in the “Wet Mountains” in southern Colorado with her husband of 20+ years.  As she adjusts to her spectacular and very rural world populated with new characters in the form of animals and neighbors, her marriage starts to unravel, and she finds herself examining the life she led that brought her there.

As it turns out, a previous iteration of Mindfulness Peace Project heard about her move, got a hold of her, and asked if she would go to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Florence, Colorado, to run an inmate dharma group.  FCI Florence is an immense facility that contains within its miles of razor wire the full range of security level units, from minimum all the way up to the infamous ADX supermax, where the Timothy McVeighs and John Gottis get hermetically sealed in.  I taught dharma groups myself in that complex, at several security levels.

After an initial misfire at the medium unit, where a prisoner senselessly exposes his genitals to her during the group (a rare but potential danger to female volunteers in men’s prisons), she starts another group at the minimum camp.  Trying to get her initial group engaged at their first meeting, she introduces them to sitting meditation. “The tension in the room was thick…. [Read more…]

JOSEPH LYONS, 1945-2025

Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche & Joseph Lyons, Phuntsok Choling, Ward, Colorado

Recently a long-time student of the Mindfulness Peace Project died in his bed in Colorado Springs. Our relationship with him went back 20 or more years when he first showed up in our Buddhist group at Fremont Correctional Facility.

He had an interest in Buddhism and aspiration toward it for much of his adult life, which was not an ordinary one compared to most of us. He got a Julliard musical education in the early 1960s, as well as a degree in music theory from Queens College in New York. His trajectory landed him in conductor-training, and he eventually conducted many orchestras and choirs, including a symphony performing at Carnegie Hall.

The 60s revolution prompted him to walk away from the symphony world just as he had begun to establish himself as a director of note. Instead he took up synthesizers and keyboards of various sorts, training himself in their technology of the time, and performing concerts as “Dr. Space,” in an exploratory and imaginative mode.

This also merged him into computer programming, and eventually he decided to focus on making languages computers could use for music, which led to establishing some computer companies and brought him to Silicon Valley for a time in the 70s. He even worked at Esalen creating multi-media performances with children.

Having moved to Colorado, he became very involved local schools and public projects for the arts that earned him awards. He also faltered into a sex offense that got him 24 years in prison, where we met him.

[Read more…]

AFTER TEN YEARS, WE MOVE OUR OFFICE

The new office in progress.

Our original office was at the corner of Pine and 15th St. in downtown Boulder, right around the corner from the Shambhala Center.  I came on board as paid staff circa 2004.  Our sponsors, Cliff and Margot Neuman, owned the building but eventually sold it about ten years ago, and we moved into an office suite in downtown Niwot, a small town halfway between Boulder and Longmont.

I had a hard time adjusting after so long in the center of the action in Boulder, but eventually Niwot came to charm me.  Other than one Subway sub shop and a gas station, it’s—refreshingly—all local businesses.  It became my neighborhood: Garden Gate Café (classic breakfast place), Winot Coffee Company (down there for a large chai to get through the afternoon), Niwot Market (their soup makes a cheap lunch), and Niwot Tavern (when we had the pleasure to sit down for dinner).  I did a reading from my book Transmigration Suite at Inkberry Books.

I have a particular fondness for Niwot’s “Rock & Rails” concerts every Thursday night in the summer.  They have an open stretch of park space next to the railroad tracks along the Diagonal (the road between Boulder and Longmont) where they park food trucks and put quality local bands on the bandstand.  It’s a weekly town party, and everyone, from little kids running around and gossiping cliques of teenagers all the way up to senior citizens in wheelchairs, turns out for it.  The sun sets late over a beautiful vista of the Rockies, and everyone cheers when the train clanks by.

It has all lent me a sense of identity that you get from being in a location and feeling comfortable in it.

[Read more…]

CRIMINAL KARMA AND BEARING WITNESS TO GRIEF

It’s hard to get a purchase on the reality of nearly two million people incarcerated in the U.S. on any given day of the year. It’s an American reality, and if it’s got two million people directly in its grip, how many more people become affected when their brother or father or son (it’s mostly males), their friend or cousin or coworker gets hauled off. There’s a ripple effect on other people that’s got to far surpass two million.

For the person behind bars, that’s part of the grief of it. Often, if they have young children, they feel the pain of them growing up without their father being able to mark their birthdays or see them learn to walk or start to play Little League. If he does get to see them, he’s shocked at how much they’ve grown and changed without him really knowing much about it. He’s become extraneous to their lives, even if he can talk to them once in a while on the phone. On the other end, inmates get the phone call that says a parent has died, but they can do little but fret on their bunk about not being there. Part of the prison experience becomes getting ripped from the fabric of a life you belonged in and from relationships that mattered.

Sometimes families wholly reject the inmate, refusing even to talk on the phone to them. They become shunned and abandoned.

Now, of course, this is all the outcome of karma, by which I mean, understandable, right in front of your nose karma, where said inmate acted illegally, got caught, and now pays the price: cause and effect. In general, people aren’t forsaken by their families without a lot of bad behavior leading up to that. Prison institutionalization puts up plenty of barriers to staying connected that go far beyond the razor wire, not the least being how inmates are moved around the prison system, and often they’re sent quite far from their home, making it hard for their families to go visit them. Then the inmate gets a number of years to stew in his grief about what he’s lost, what he’s separated from, and maybe most bitter, if he can get to it, what he’s brought upon himself.

[Read more…]

A FEW REFLECTIONS ON PRISON AGGRESSION AND THE MEDITATIVE PATH

The Buddhist tradition gets regarded as pacifistic.  It definitely emphasizes not creating harm–not resorting to aggression in speech or physical violence.  But anyone who’s spent real time on the meditation seat knows that aggression often shadows thoughts in some form or another.  Over the decades you can see what a refined game it is.   Even pretty subtle thoughts can arise purely for the sake of dodging your direct experience and any raw feeling that goes with it.  There’s a fundamental aggression in discursive thought habituated to rejecting your own naked experience, and that tendency goes deep.

But then, when I consider what inmates routinely go through, unraveling your own subtle aggression seems like a boutique activity in the face of the very real possibility that someone will try to beat your face in because they don’t like your tone.  Or maybe they’re threatening to kick your ass if you don’t hand over your chocolate bars.  Whatever it is.  It can get a lot uglier from there. [Read more…]

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

I remember as a teenager plucking a book off the rack–-something you saw everywhere back in the 70s, almost as ubiquitous as fat James Michener novels. It was called The Prophet. I opened it randomly and felt struck in the face by what it said:

The murdered is not unaccountable for his own murder,
And the robbed is not blameless in being robbed.
The righteous is not innocent of the deeds of the wicked,
And the white–handed is not clean in the doings of the felon.
Yea, the guilty is oftentimes the victim of the injured,
And still more often the condemned is the burden bearer for
      the guiltless and unblamed.

Astounded, I’d never heard such an idea expressed before: it tied the criminal and victim together in a way that did not exalt the innocent and separate them from the crime and the criminal committing it. Instead it pointed to how the two were bound together such that even the innocent became culpable for the violation, and therefore…who really was innocent and who guilty? Where did one end and the other begin? [Read more…]

PRISON AS THE PATH OF PATIENCE

Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche

Probably 20 years ago now, MPP had an audience with Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche.  Back in our early days, we had one study course, The Myth of Freedom, based on Trungpa Rinpoche’s book and the resonant title.  What else should we be teaching inmates? we wondered.  I remember he looked up for a moment into the distance, and then said without hesitation: “The sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara.”

All right.  What’s in the sixth chapter of the Bodhisattvacharyavatara—“The Way of the Bodhisattva”?  It describes in considerable detail how patience is an antidote to anger.  In fact, it has quite a bit to say about anger and all the many reasons we use to justify it.  Shantideva, the Indian Buddhist master who wrote this epic poem as a commentary on the bodhisattva path, doesn’t seem to think that there’s really any basis or validity for getting angry about anything at any time for any reason.

Try and tell that to the average convict. [Read more…]

Some Thoughts on Prison as Spiritual Path

Gary Allen at Limon Correctional Facility, Limon, Colorado

SOME THOUGHTS ON PRISON AS SPIRITUAL PATH
by Gary Allen

I first entered a prison in 1990. Back then I was an M.F.A. student in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University. That semester the department offered a one credit course designed to get students teaching creative writing outside the academy grounds, and our teacher arranged for us to lead a two day creative writing program at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, the oldest prison in Colorado.

I remember coming up to the control room for the first time where you passed through the metal detector. The control room window was peppered with holes (as a matter of fact, I think it still is, some 34 years later), clearly from getting blasted with a shot gun.   I didn’t know what to expect from such a place, and I probably would never have tried to go into it without having my hand held, so to speak. [Read more…]

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Photo Credits

Many thanks to Tony Johnson, professional photographer, and the other photographers including Gary Allen, who have contributed great images to this website.