The Healing Power Of Meditation

It's hard to imagine a more unlikely pair discussing politics at New York's swanky Mark Hotel last week: Moses Weah, a 21-year-old African-American from the South Bronx, currently residing in a Times Square shelter, with corn-rowed hair and a rap sheet longer than his untucked T shirt and, not 10 feet away, dressed in his saffron-and-maroon monk's robes, 68-year-old Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader in exile.

Surrounded in the hotel's small conference room by 17 former prison inmates, meditation teachers, State Department security agents, a film crew and actor Richard Gere, who helped facilitate the gathering, Moses held forth so passionately he half rose from his seat. "It's about making money, man. Uzis aren't made in the ghetto. Nobody in the hood's making money off the Dolce & Gabbana we're wearing. Prisons are about making money for the dudes building the prisons. They want us to fail. They want us to go back." His Holiness listened and nodded and replied without using his translator, "I too could be in this prison. That potential is inside all humans. But so is potential for transformation. You must keep on path for what is good inside you."

From the Dalai Lama's perspective, that path is intimately connected to meditation--the mindfulness and natural compassion that Buddhists believe arise when one is fully, selflessly, connected to the present moment. (Kundun, the Dalai Lama's name in Tibetan, means "presence.") Though it seems a no-brainer to offer people in prisons a healthy, inexpensive way to deal with anger and stress (if for no other reason than most will one day be out of prison), thus far there's been considerable resistance to it by most government agencies. For the past four years I've been teaching meditation classes in New York City youth prisons with a nonprofit organization called the Lineage Project. It's often a struggle to get inside, and though our group received the Mayor's Voluntary Action Award we get no funding from the city or from the Department of Juvenile Justice. Recognizing this and myriad other issues surrounding the American prison system, Soren Gordhamer, the founder of the Lineage Project, organized (through Gere's Initiatives Foundation) a three-day conference in Manhattan called "Healing Through Great Difficulty."

"We're trying to address a system that's not working," Gordhamer says. "Too often prisoners come out angrier than when they went in. Prison guards have a shorter life expectancy than most other vocations and often die shortly after retirement. Prison groups worry more about their paychecks bouncing than teaching. Our goal is not to make people Buddhists. It's about helping to calm the minds of prisoners and staff, and to support the human values of empathy and respect."

The New York conference, the first of its kind, which by design coincided with the Dalai Lama's 20-day American tour, began with panel discussions led by Western meditation teachers, including Jack Kornfield, a former Buddhist monk and author of the best-selling "A Path With Heart"; George Mumford, a sports psychologist and meditation coach with the Los Angeles Lakers; a feisty Buddhist nun from Australia named Robina Courtin, who labors to keep afloat her California-based Liberation Prison Project, which has donated more than 20,000 books to prison libraries worldwide; Fleet Maull, an ordained Zen priest who founded the National Prison Hospice Association while serving 14 years in federal prison, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, an author and scientist who has helped bring mindfulness practices into the mainstream of American medicine. Two questions the teachers wanted to address: What works? What more can we do?

The 18 former inmates--nominated by prison groups and halfway houses from around the country to attend the conference and offer answers--proved to be inspiring examples of the possibility of transformation through spiritual practice. Among many of the former inmates were two common denominators: tough, often abusive childhoods in broken families, and a fervent desire to give something positive back to their "brothers and sisters" still inside. "Meditation saved my life," said Ananda Baltrunas, who, released just weeks ago after two decades in prison, lives in a Zen monastery in Indiana and plans to counsel local inmates. Dylcia Pagan, a former Puerto Rican political prisoner who served 20 years for sedition, told the group, "Meditation enabled me to find that sacred space within me in the madness of prison life. It allowed me to learn forgiveness for myself and for my jailors." Luz Santana, who works with emotionally disturbed women in the same New York state facility where she was locked up for 11 years, tearfully explained, "It was acts of kindness that helped me survive in prison, and I'm now trying to pass that on, to give a little bit of love to those who never experienced it."