Voyage Denver • June 4, 2024
Denver’s Most Inspiring Stories
https://voyagedenver.com/interview/check-out-gary-allens-story
Today, we’d like to introduce you to Gary Allen.
Hi Gary, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
The first time I was introduced to the idea of meditation in prisons was through a Ram Dass book circa 1980. He went into prisons to teach Eastern spirituality and suggested using a prison as a monastery, which made sense to me at the time. You are in uniform, (supposedly) celibate, living according to institutional forms, etc.
However, prisons aren’t monasteries. There are quite a lot of things that monasteries usually aren’t–for instance, enormously loud and discordant, violent, divided by racial tribalism, filled with sociopaths who don’t want to be there, and so on.
Anyway, while I was a graduate student in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University in 1990, we had a one-credit class designed to take us out of the academy into places in the larger world where we could teach creative writing. This idea or interest in prisons came back to me, and so the teacher arranged a two-day writing program at Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City, the oldest prison in Colorado. It still has those huge cement walls surrounding it.
I didn’t know what to expect, and it was unlikely that I would have tried it on my own without the teacher making all the arrangements. I remember pretty well the first hour of those two days, as I tried to feel out who I was talking to–maybe about a dozen felons in a small room with some tables and chairs. It dawned on me at about 45 minutes that I was sitting in a room with a bunch of guys. They may have killed or raped or robbed people, but they weren’t doing that right now!
In fact, they were sitting in a place surrounded by guards with many consequences for getting caught for bad behavior. So, I realized that their criminal histories weren’t so important. Instead, what mattered was that they got treated like human beings and got to do something entirely human: write creatively. I saw that this raised them up, made them use other parts of themselves, and got them to be someone different than the caricature prison easily reduces you to.
That was a watershed experience for me. I could feel how it made a difference to their humanity. I taught creative writing a few more times in prisons, but fairly quickly, it morphed into meditation as this was even more to the point about who you are, what goes on in your mind, and how to come to terms with that in a meaningful way. I found a group meeting in an FCI–a federal prison in Englewood–and I became a teacher in that situation for a few years. That was where I got started.
Can you talk to us about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Prisons are not safe places for any number of reasons. Most of what we do is through the mail, and you’d think that would be straightforward, but it’s amazing how much mail gets lost in prisons or what this prison will accept and that prison won’t.
In both cases, it could just be a book on meditation, but one place finds a book on meditation coming from a nonprofit as no big deal, and another place won’t allow that at all. I could go into a long list of things like this, but it comes down to there being all kinds of rules that differ between states and systems (and whether they’re even following their own rules), and so that’s something you have to negotiate and deal with constantly. It’s boring and frustrating, but it comes with the territory of prisons.
In terms of visiting prisons, you could have gone to your inmate group every Thursday night for five years in a row, and then you come in, and somebody behind the desk will tell you that they have no record of you, and you can’t come in. This kind of thing has happened to me more often than I can count, and often, it’s at the end of a two-hour drive to reach the prison. So I always wonder if they’ll let me through or if there will be some big, unanticipated problem, which usually amounts to the person behind the desk not knowing what they’re doing.
Actually, meeting with the inmates has never been a problem in all these years (around 30 now). They’re the easy and fun part. Whether or not you get entangled in something on the way is another matter.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’ve been teaching meditation and Buddhist spirituality since the 80s. My early work with prisons involved all volunteer work, but I managed to involve some other people from my community in it at the time. In 1995, I moved out of the U.S. to South Korea, where I lived and taught English for five years. When I returned, some had put together an office to give some support to this kind of work. In 2004, it became a nonprofit that we now call Mindfulness Peace Project (https://mindfulnesspeaceproject.org), and around then, I got a paid position, and that’s the work I’ve done ever since.
I’ve had various kinds of jobs, like the kind you get in your youth working in restaurants (I washed a lot of dishes), and then various English teaching gigs, but this is where I landed the right job for the right person. The people who write us really do want what we have to offer. I could stand in front of an English class who had only tepid interest, if any, in learning about it. Here, I can give someone something vital to their lives, and it matters what I say to them and how I say it. So here, my writing training has come in handy, as I have to write a lot of personal letters to people in harsh situations.
It’s also led to me writing several “secular mindfulness” books. The first (Discovering Sanity) was written for people in solitary confinement. If you can imagine living alone under fluorescent lighting 23 hours a day, you can also start to imagine why it drives people crazy. Ironically, it’s meditators who know how to cope with that situation and even flourish in it. It certainly has nothing to do with the institutions that put people into this kind of radical isolation.
So, I wrote the book to be maximally helpful to anyone who wanted to meditate in that situation. Then I tweaked it a little for prison life in general, and we put out a different edition, but it’s almost the same book.
Then, I rewrote it radically for military veterans (Warrior’s Heart), who have a very specific set of needs and come out of a strong socio-cultural experience that indelibly stamps them. I got a lot of veterans with meditation experience to contribute their thoughts to the book. We’ve published all these in-house and send them out regularly around the world, and we have study courses on the books you can take to help you develop your understanding and meditation experience.
I also didn’t give up on being a writer, and I’ve put out five books of poetry at this point, most recently Transmigration Suite (Antarabhava Press). What’s been interesting and somewhat unusual, perhaps, is that the spiritual and artistic interests have informed each other.
I have a fairly unique job of teaching meditation for a living but transmitting it into harsh circumstances. I’ve continued to teach it as well in the community at large, and I feel like I’ve been given a kind of unusual perspective on how to use words and how they might find good soil to grow in, in lives beyond my immediate concerns.
Can you share something surprising about yourself?
I’m a total Taylor Swift fan. I realize I don’t fit the expected demographic. I don’t especially care about who she’s dating or anything, but I recognize artistic quality when I see/hear it.
There’s a writer who always crystallizes and vividly captures whatever she writes about and does it consistently at a high level.