#12: Broken Meditation
A few years ago I was serving as the Executive Director of a meditation center when I got a call from a friend. He served as a Buddhist chaplain at a prison and an inmate, we’ll call him Greg, was being discharged. “Would you mind looking after him? He’s started meditating and could use some support.”
The son of a bank robber, Greg got into the family business early. He tried to stop once he was a grown man but his wife was interested in the career choice so they pulled a heist together. She was a first-time offender but he had a record. She walked; he went to jail for 20 years.
While in jail Greg learned meditation, a powerful tool for learning about and overcoming your habitual patterns. Once released, Greg began attending meditation sessions at the Shambhala Center regularly and we became friends. We would have tea and chat, and he told me his life story. He couldn’t emphasize enough how much the simple act of being led in meditation helped him back onto the right path.
One day I realized it had been a few weeks since I saw Greg last. I wrote to him a few times, tried calling him, but nothing. A month later the Buddhist chaplain sent me a video. Greg was on it, holding up a convenience store. He was back in jail. Habitual patterns are hard to overcome, even with the aid of friendship and meditation.
—Photo AlicePopkorn/Flickr
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About Lodro Rinzler
How sad. And also sweet. Thank you for sharing that story here Lodro.
Thank you Tom. I appreciate you saying so.
I like the piece =). What kinds of things help you when you get off track with meditation / spiritual practice?
Hi Joe. In my experience, the support of a sangha (community) helps support a regular meditation practice. In this case, I always felt a sense of failure in that we, Greg’s sangha, weren’t there for him more in this difficult time of transition.
Hi Lodro,
If this person is who I think it is, then I agree, he was much let down by his Sangha. However, despite his past, the problems he faced at that time, and all the other mitigating factors, ultimately his return to crime was his choice, and he completely owns up to that. He’s doing fantastic now, and while it may have taken him longer to “get it right,” I think he’s got it this time. Or maybe I know a completely different son of a bank robber (with a wife who also committed crime) who hung out at Shambhala before returning to prison. That would be possible, but statistically interesting.
Dear Kelly – I am guessing that we are thinking of the same person. I am so glad to hear that he is doing better now. Thank you for writing about this; it has warmed my heart.
Cool.
I sent you an email. He’d love to drop you a line. Funny old world, innit? 
When he returned to crime I wonder if his wife was an influence again… which is not meant to put down women but it seems like in the story he has people pulling at him in different ways. It makes me wonder how much of what men get done, for good or ill, is down to the woman behind them. I know it is a proverbial of course, “Behind every successful man….”
He got 20 years and she none. My understanding of these things, limited of course, is that women tend to be seen as the junior partner who has been cajoled into the path of evil by the man. In this case (well according to him at least) it was more the reverse. So the woman gets no “credit” when it would cost her, but it seems also when the partnership does well.
I was goggling some data on how likely female politicians are to be elected if they run for office the other day. Didn’t find much but I came across an interesting study about why women don’t tend to put themselves forwards in those situations. They tested how likely men and women were to try out for a competition as individuals and then again as part of a team of two. The result was that women were much more likely to throw themselves into the competition if they were in a team of two. It occurred to me that one reason why politically minded women are not becoming politicians so much might be because — from their point of view — they ARE becoming part of a team, a husband and wife team that together tackles the competition of becoming elected. But they get no “credit” for it. So we just see the usual “patriarchy” figures of men in power when there’s really a lot more women in power than we think.
And again I think about violence because of some stuff I read recently about guys who were (falsely, manipulatively) told by their girlfriends that they had been raped, with the objective of getting their man to pick a fight with another, perhaps to prove his love to her. The violence by the man is seen but the violence by the woman is unseen and so again she gets no “credit” when it comes time to collect statistics and we get a slanted and partial view of society that divides men and women and say men are like this and women are not.
While the recent NISVS that revealed that women rape men about as often as men rape women could be seen as something very negative, it could also be seen as another example of where — actually maybe men and women are not so different as they have been made out to be. The achievements that is. Good or bad. The means seems different although perhaps even that is not. I think of the well known answer to the gender wage gap myth, that explains the gap in earning between men and women is a function of marriage and kids. Single men and women earning about the same, while married men earn much more than single men, and married women much less. Maybe a better way to see that would not be gender at all but just single people vs “teams”.
Brilliant