One December morning, I made myself a cup of Folgers coffee and peered out the bars of my prison cell. My cellmate had gone to the yard and I had some time alone. Watching an armed guard walk past on the catwalk outside, I pondered life.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me it would hurt this much?” I asked myself. I was twenty-seven years old, recently sober, and barely two years into a fourteen year prison sentence. Things were actually getting better, though it was hard to see at the time.
It hadn’t always hurt that much. It had started out as fun.
Growing up, there was always a case of cheap beer inside the fridge in the garage. It was there mostly for guests since neither of my parents really drank. I was eight years old the first time I stole one of those beers and drank it in the back yard. It was cold and crisp and left my tiny body feeling quite wonderful. I would remember it later.
I was part of the “Just Say No” generation. My youth is filled with memories of DARE classes, Nancy Reagan admonishments against drug use, and commercials with eggs crackling in a frying pan. I had ideas about what my brain would do on drugs.
I was a curious kid with a natural distrust of authority. When I was told not to do something, I tended toward trying it at least once. Just to be sure. My attitude toward drugs was no different.
At twelve, I first tried weed. I’d stolen it from a babysitter and smoked it from a pipe made of tin foil. When none of the terrifying things that were promised me in DARE classes developed, I came to the erroneous conclusion that my parents, teachers, and first lady had all been lying to me about drugs. Within short order, I was smoking pot from water pipes with other latchkey kids, spending the hours after school and before our parents came home experimenting with our new form of entertainment. It was actually just fun.
At thirteen years old, the fun started to subside. I was arrested at a school dance for possession of marijuana and subsequently suspended for a week. I had always been a good kid and a good student. I’d never been in any serious trouble at school. This was a first for me.
When I returned to school after my suspension, I swiftly realized that people treated me differently. I got attention from kids that normally wouldn’t have paid me any mind. Teachers started treating me like an adult. I’d always been smart but too rough around the edges for the nerdy kids, and I’d always been too nerdy for the jockish crowd. Suddenly, I’d found a role that fit me: the smart kid with a wild streak. If the role didn’t fit me well at first, I made sure that I fit myself into it.
High school was a bit of blur. Drug and alcohol use that started out as recreational transformed into daily ritual. Booze and weed eventually included hallucinogens. Cocaine and crank were added to the cocktail. Finally, I found crystal methamphetamine.
I did meth for the first time during my senior year of high school. Something was different about this drug. I felt invincible, I felt like a god. I became a near-daily meth user from the start. Meth became a swift wrecking ball in my life. Within three months of use, I had dropped out of high school and was stealing as a way to support my habit.
When I first started stealing, I tried to have some semblance of ethics about it, ridiculous as that sounds. I didn’t steal from individuals. I didn’t steal from cars. I didn’t steal from homes. But my willingness to cross boundaries with stealing followed a similar progression as my willingness to try increasingly harder drugs, and I eventually found myself stealing whatever I could get my hands on. At eighteen, I was arrested for a string of burglaries and sentenced to more than five years in prison. I paroled at the legal age for drinking.
During my time in county jail, in prison, and on parole, I was introduced to recovery. Twice, I stayed in 30-day residential treatment facilities and was exposed to Twelve-step programs. I went to meetings and superficially did what was asked of me. Even though it looked like I was in recovery, I wasn’t actually doing recovery. My goal was not to stay sober but was, instead, to look good for parents, judges, and parole agents. Though I had decided that I would never use hard drugs like meth again, I had no designs on staying completely sober. I wanted to drink and smoke pot when life circumstances would allow for it.
I started drinking again while I was on parole and, as soon as my state supervision ended, I started smoking pot. I used “successfully” like this for a couple of years. I was going to college and doing well. I had a great job. Relationships with family were mostly restored. I had nothing to be concerned about.
Around this time, I took an Eastern Philosophy course in college and was introduced to the teachings of the Buddha. I read about the Four Noble Truths and the three characteristics of existence and felt a great sense of familiarity with them, like they represented a truth that I’d known all along but had somehow forgotten. I just knew the Dharma to be true but, at the same time, I decided that I wasn’t suffering enough to worry about it just yet. I would get my chance.
A couple of years after leaving prison, one of my closest childhood friends committed suicide in a very violent manner. It was the closest death had come in my life thus far and it shook me. I felt like the world was crumbling in on me, that I’d been emotionally and spiritually shaken from a foundation. I didn’t know how to cope with the way I felt and I didn’t have the inner resources to ask for help. I became a daily drinker and relapsed on methamphetamine a few months later.
I started stealing again and my life snowballed in the same way it had seven years earlier. Overwhelmed with sadness, beset with remorse for the harm I was causing yet again, and burdened with shame at the thought of seeking help, I considered suicide but got loaded instead. An imperfect solution, the drugs saved me from myself.
Yet again, I was arrested for a string of burglaries. I found myself facing many centuries in prison under California’s three strikes law. In the county jail and without the option of getting loaded, my suffering was inescapable. My sadness was inescapable. My remorse was inescapable. My shame, my suicidal ideation, everything, was inescapable. I was forced to look everything square in the face.
There’s a reason that the first Noble Truth is about suffering. No transformative path begins without it. Convinced that my life couldn’t possibly get any worse than it was at the moment, I decided upon two things. First, that I would try my hand at recovery. The worst thing that could happen was nothing. And second, recalling the Buddhism I’d encountered in college three years earlier, I’d give meditation and the Dharma a try.
That was in 2005. There was no mindfulness or Buddhist-based recovery available, so finding recovery and following the Dharma started out as separate paths. On one hand, I started going to Twelve-step meetings in the county jail, found a sponsor on the streets, and began the process of writing inventories and making amends. On the other hand, I started meditating as best as I knew how. Without a teacher, the internet, or a sangha, I relied solely upon the books that family would generously send me.
I completely misused meditation when I first started practice. Instead of using meditation as a method for meeting reality, I used it as an escape. In this way, meditation served as a substitute for the drugs I no longer had easy access to. I do not judge myself for using my practice this way in the beginning; in so many ways, it was exactly what I needed at the time. I would eventually develop the skills to face my reality more squarely, but it would take time.
After a year and half in the county jail, I accepted a plea bargain of fourteen years in prison. By the time I arrived in Folsom State Prison later that year, I’d been clean from drugs and alcohol for nearly two years, I was prepared to start mentoring other incarcerated men in recovery, and my meditation practice was becoming consistent.
At Folsom, I finally sat in meditation with other people. Two nights per week, I met with Sangha in the fabled Greystone Chapel. Facilitated by volunteers from the outside, these groups were where I really came to understand what mindfulness practice was about. I finally had fellows on the path, and I finally had teachers. Both were absolutely necessary to the flourishing of my meditation and Dharma practice.
Every afternoon during count, loud buzzers would sound off in the cell block. So, every afternoon, half an hour before count time, I rolled up a blanket and sat on the floor of my cell. The prison would be my timer. My meditation changed dramatically. No longer was it a method of escape; instead, it became a method inquiry. In the beginning, it was simple. What was it like to breath? What was it like to sit on my rolled-up blanket? What was the nature of the sounds in my cell block?
With practice, I started to see that the present moment wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. In fact, the present moment, when I wasn’t actually thinking about it, was mostly neutral and oftentimes pleasant. This was a bit of a breakthrough for me, because some part of me was convinced that I was supposed to be miserable in prison.
Yes, being in prison was awful. Yes, being away from friends and family was awful. Yes, washing my clothes in the toilet was awful. Yes, yes, yes. But, in time, I came to realize that these things were only awful insofar as I found myself mesmerized by my own narratives about them. My stories about my life were the problem, and I had a lot of them.
Prison, I could not escape. There was no freedom from prison while I was living there. There was, however, freedom from my story about it. I did not have to take prison personally. This insight carried me through the remainder of my prison sentence and into the outside world.
I paroled after seven years of incarceration. There was still no mindfulness or Buddhist-based recovery, so I continued to do in the free world what I had done inside: attend recovery meetings and meditation groups separately. Though I was immensely grateful for the recovery program I had, I nonetheless translated a great deal of the Twelve-step program into Buddhist terms and practices which better aligned with the way I moved through the world. Finally, after ten years of renunciation from drugs and alcohol, a Buddhist-based path of recovery was developed and I helped to establish it in my local area. This program eventually became the Recovery Dharma of today. I no longer needed to translate my program of recovery.
Since coming home, I have found that six things have been integral to my continued growth in recovery and as a human being. Meditation. Meetings. Study. Service. Friends. Teachers.
I meditate every day and try to participate in a minimum of two silent retreats every year. I regularly attend recovery meetings and other Buddhist meditation groups. I study the teachings of the Buddha in order to develop deeper understanding of ways to implement them in my life. I take on service positions in my Recovery Dharma groups and share the message of recovery and of the Dharma wherever I can. I maintain friendships with people who nurture and support my own growth. I regularly meet with both a mentor and a Buddhist teacher in order to navigate difficulties in practice and continue to move forward on the path.
My life has been both challenging and beautiful since coming home from prison more than a decade ago.
I have completed state supervision and graduated from university. I have completed a five-year trade apprenticeship and become an elected union official. I have gotten married to a wonderful woman in recovery and become a homeowner. I’ve traveled to Buddhist pilgrimage sites in India and participated in extended meditation retreats at home and abroad. I have received lay ordination within a Buddhist tradition and started teaching the Dharma to people in California prisons.
I have also navigated complex PTSD and started to unlearn prison survival strategies that were no longer useful to me. I have been present for death when it sweeps through and survived life-altering heart surgery.
Mindfulness, heartfulness, and community are what made and continue to make all of these possible. As one of my teachers has said, Dharma practice has the capacity to transform the very nature of suffering. Awakening might not come in the form of sudden moments of revelation, but instead may entail the gradual digestion of pain and trauma. Over the years, I have progressively come to see the good that has come from past suffering and I try my best to carry that perceptive in the present moment, reshaping it with wisdom and love.
One line from Recovery Dharma’s dedication of merit stands out to me: “As we have learned from practice, great pain does not erase goodness, but in fact informs it”. This isn’t just a platitude. Its a promise.
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This story was published as part of the 2nd edition of the Recovery Dharma basic text. Recovery Dharma offers a trauma-informed, empowered approach to recovery based on Buddhist principles. For more information, please visit recoverydharma.org
