IT’S NOT EASY TO LOOK…

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….

“I had to get them all to ease up on their attitudes first. Suddenly I remembered something I loved that Trungpa Rinpoche had once said. I grabbed it and ran with it. ‘So,’ I said, ‘none of us in this room knows exactly where this class is going or if anything will make sense, but my Buddhist teacher once used an analogy for embarking on a journey into unknown territory. “We’re in a plane, our parachute strapped on our back. Then, we leap, and as we start to fall, we pull the cord and the parachute doesn’t open. We’re just plummeting through space. But the good news is . . . you want to hear the good news?”’ I looked around and could see I had their attention, ‘”The good news is, there’s no ground.”’ I finished and waited.

“After what seemed like forever, Kenny said, chuckling, ‘That’s some crazy shit. What’s the bad news?’ They all began to laugh. Whether it was relief or just nerves, it didn’t matter; they had relaxed.”

In her very readable account, the process of finding her seat as a teacher of dharma in a prison setting also becomes a contemplation of her own path, and a strand of her path as she walks it through the uncertainty going on in her life.  She chooses to teach the group lojong (Tibetan: “mind training”), a practical series of “slogans” meant to give you something to remember and guide you as you deal with your life, “in ways that didn’t keep opening the same wound, didn’t keep escalating situations until someone got hurt.  Or, as in this case, incarcerated.”

Having taught a class on “Drive all blames into oneself”—giving up in an argument on having to be right—the challenging nature of practicing the dharma and applying it personally had gotten through to one of the inmates:

“After class, Matt came up to help me stuff the cushions in the black garbage bag to store in the chaplain’s office. ‘You know, I thought this class was going to be just a way to relax, but this shit is hard,’ he said to me. ‘It’s not easy to look at your own shit. But I like it. I’ve never run from a challenge.’

“I smiled. ‘Good to hear,’ I said.

“’It’s not easy to look at your own shit.’ All the way home, his words reverberated in my head….”

Thus, it got through to the teacher as well.  Though it’s to some degree true, I suppose, of teaching classes in anything, there’s a journey the teacher takes with the class, and when it comes to dharma and inmate students, teachings like these can land as an antithesis to the mentality of the school of hard knocks going on around them.  When the “Don’t ponder others” advice comes to them, they have to find a way through it:

“’Don’t ponder others,’ [Luis] read, and looked up.  ‘What the hell does that mean?’ he asked.

“’It’s too deep for you, man,’ Matt said, grinning.  Luis slowly put the book down and glared at him.  The air was suddenly thick with tension.  It was clear Matt’s line had not landed well.  I held my breath, waiting to see if I would have to intervene.  Then Matt said, ‘It’s all right, man.  I don’t know what the fuck the word means either.’  We all let out our collective breath.

“’I think it means there’s no point talking shit about people,’ Steve piped up.

“’It always comes back and bites you in the ass anyway,’ Kenny said.

“Luis nodded and, with a slight smile, wrapped up the conversation, ‘Maybe it means we can relax and not get into everyone else’s business.’  And just like that, everyone relaxed and the tension in the room eased.  I don’t know which slogan we had just witnessed in action, but it worked.”

(“Drive all blames into one,” perhaps?)  Here you see how the point of view of the dharma penetrates an all too familiar tendency in prison of interactions turning into aggression.  Ultimately, it’s not just aggression between people, but it’s a self-aggression and a sense of being trapped in your own ugly tendencies, something that’s not so metaphorical when a literal prison reminds you of it every day.  We have this cultural sense of felons as the scum of the earth, something regularly reinforced by demagogues using fear of criminals to play politics.  And to be sure, prisons hold a lot of deeply dishonest people and “master manipulators,” as you’re copiously warned about in the volunteer training.  But often you find something entirely else based on direct interaction and real work with the mind:

“Over the months we had been meeting, something open and supportive had developed in the group. It was hard for me to keep in mind the instructions we were given at the training: ‘These men are all predators. They just want to mess with you.’ My experience was that they were just people, people who had messed up, who were struggling with their regrets, their anger, their sorrow. All things I had no trouble relating to. We were all trying to change our attitudes and relax, somehow.”

The process of the group’s self-reflection becomes an element of self-reflecting in the teacher’s life, as she sorts through intractable interactions with her husband and considers her up-bringing and trauma and inspiration, Buddhist and otherwise, that took place in her life.  Her work in the prison comprises a thread in her story that winds in and out of everything else.  The students and the dharma become the teachers too, and maybe this explains some of what can be so compelling in doing this kind of work.  It’s meaningful to teach dharma “out on the streets,” of course, to teach it anywhere and in any circumstance, but the prison context can bring a poignant immediacy to transmitting the teachings.  In Victress’s account, you can feel what a human and humanizing experience that is.

The prison thread in her memoir comes to a climax with her leading a refuge vow ceremony, where some of the inmates formally become Buddhists.  It’s a fruitional moment right in the time of dissolution otherwise taking place in her life.  It’s interesting what paths we might walk and where we might discover our own truths, and the unlikely places a lot of them might show up.  In an early meeting, she tries to introduce some notion of what spirituality is:

“’What we are talking about today…what we began last week,’ I stumbled into the talk, ‘is what it means to change our view of things in our lives.  Believe it or not, that’s what being on the spiritual path is about,’ I said, and then I asked.  ‘Does that make sense?  Do you think of yourselves as spiritual people?’

“’I gave up going to church when I was seven. Made no sense, even then,’ one man answered.

“’I guarantee the spiritual path didn’t lead none of us here,’ another added, and the men laughed.”

Well, some kind of path led them there.  Sometimes what you find has nothing to do with what you thought you were looking for.