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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Sheff
Read between
September 27 - October 6, 2020
The officer no longer thought about taking his own life; instead, he embraced the life he had.
I’m not a Buddhist, but as I learned how his faith helped him, I discovered how its tenets and practices can help others—believers and nonbelievers alike. I learned that people can change and how but also that transformation comes in fits and starts. The journey forward isn’t linear but cyclical, and it’s hard. I learned something else that was even more profound: that the process and goal are different from what many of us expect. Instead of working to change our true nature, we must find it. Instead of running from suffering, we must embrace it.
Set in a place of unremitting violence, insanity, confusion, and rage, Masters’s story traverses the haunted caverns and tributaries of loneliness, despair, trauma, and other suffering—terrain we all know too well—and arrives at healing, meaning, and wisdom.
Sometimes he even looked forward to death. It would be a relief.
“Your true self will always arise and open your heart. I know you’ll be mad at me again—there are hard times coming—it’s a hard and scary case. But if you stay committed, I will. I will never let you down.”
He told her to meditate on the experiences from a safe distance and imagine them unfolding before her eyes. He told her to repeat the meditation often. “Over time, the memories lose their power,” he promised.
“When those thoughts come, gently push them away.” Jarvis tried that technique. He had a literal image of pushing the bad thoughts away. “I don’t need you,” he said as he swept one aside. “I don’t need you,” when another came. He made it through five minutes.
“When you begin to panic, picture the upsetting events and feel the uncomfortable feelings from a safe distance. Instead of being inside them, you can watch them come. If you watch them come, you can watch them go.” The teacher had said to remember that “fear is a thought, and thoughts can’t hurt you. Thoughts can’t kill you.”
“Remember, Jarvis. None of that is today. Come back to now. You can control your mind.”
Throughout his life, he’d been taught to take punishment and give it while silencing his conscience, concealing his fear, and suppressing his will. But now he was engaged in an utterly different type of mental training, and he was starting to feel its effects.
said he was discovering mindfulness, a form of meditation. “You become fully present in the moment. Experience it. When your mind wanders, return to your body, what you sense outside and inside you, and breathe.”
It’s not a secret when horror lives and exists in the mind.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. —C. S. Lewis
“We all live in a prison, and we all hold the key,” Chagdud Tulku wrote.
The key, the teacher said, was practice. Jarvis should meditate at least twice a day, even when it was difficult. He
“Yes, it’s hard, but it can save you. Meditation is hardest when we’re most afraid, because it forces us to face our fears when all we want to do is run from them. But it’s the only way out of our misery.
She acknowledged that rituals, parables, and symbolism in Buddhism—touching your throat, repeating syllables in a language you don’t understand, imagining a Buddha with a fiery sword—seem puzzling and possibly silly, but they share a purpose: to help us break free of lifelong patterns in our thinking that cause our suffering. They help us understand more about ourselves and the nature of existence. And they help us suffer less by revealing our purpose. They open our hearts and ultimately lead to enlightenment.
“I said you are fortunate. As hard as it is to accept, this is where you have to be now. You may not see it, but you are fortunate to be in a place where you can know humanity’s suffering and learn to see the perfection of all beings and yourself. Learn to see their perfection.”
‘Working with Negativity’ by a Tibetan Buddhist master, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. Before that, I’d tried different
He was saying there was nothing wrong with me for feeling so badly—that is, the negativity wasn’t the problem. The problem was the way I spun off from the hurt and sadness.” Jarvis asked, “What do you mean ‘spun off’?” “Telling myself stories about what I’d done wrong, how I didn’t know how I’d cope,
“I’d attributed the pain I’d felt when my husband left to the loss, but I realized it was fear. I was unmoored—groundless—free-falling without a net. Groundlessness is what it is. Groundlessness is terrifying, but it’s an opportunity.”
But now Pema challenged him to go back to the worst memories and fears again—to intentionally meditate on them. She said not to push them away, not to try to transcend them, not to run from them, but to go toward them. Jarvis said, “You’ve got to be kidding.” “It isn’t a onetime thing,” Pema said. “It’s a process. We chip away a piece at a time. To free ourselves, we have to keep going, to go deeper.” Jarvis felt weary and afraid. “Deeper?” He shook his head. “That is not something I want to do.” “I know,” she said. Then she counseled, “It feels like going back to the pain will kill you, but
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And here’s the thing: if you sit with those feelings, it doesn’t feel good, but it feels honest and true.
“Go back and meditate on the experience. It’s scary, and you think you can’t survive if you go there. But there’s always a break in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s just the way our minds work.
That’s the pain you have to face and finally feel. Go to your body and feel it there. Your body is always there for you. Your breath. Only when you feel it will you free yourself, and yes, the pain will be great.”
It doesn’t help your victims or anyone else if guilt and shame drag you down. Instead, continue to leave behind your self-obsession and free yourself from your past and go forward. Continue facing your pain, because the more you free yourself from being held back by your past, the more you can focus on others.
voir dire
“This is where I am today.” The question: “How will I use it?”
Jarvis grasped how well when he was on the yard one day and an inmate who’d heard about his conversion asked, “How can you be a Buddhist in this shithole?” Without thinking, Jarvis responded, “The question for me is ‘How can you be in this shithole without being a Buddhist?’ ”
Rinpoche led Jarvis forward in other ways. He’d given him permission to take from Buddhism what helped him and reject his own and others’ preconceptions about what a Buddhist should be. He showed Jarvis that Buddhism is replete with paradoxes and contradictions because life itself is. And he pointed him toward the central paradox of the faith: that the more one accepts suffering, the less one suffers.
There was something to celebrate: their teacher’s life and the lessons that had changed him. We’re all doing time. We’re all in prison. We’re all on death row. And we can all free ourselves.
“You have a different sangha now,” she said. “I think of it as people who are evolving, searching, kind, respectful, sensitive, supportive, and loving.”
what his cell was like, which he described as a dorm room at a university he’d never applied to.
“Jarvis,” she said, “there’s no protection from pain and grief. It’s a fantasy to think we can be protected. You wouldn’t want to not feel grief when someone dies. What kind of person would that make you? A very coldhearted person.”
Zen koan
The monk was clinging desperately to his Buddhist practice because he needed it to keep him afloat in the world.
Buddhism meets you wherever you are and lets you take what you can from it at that moment. In fact, it was unlike other faiths in that there weren’t rules, and even its most fundamental precepts were infinitely flexible. But in spite of all that, he still envisioned the Buddha as a kind of deity sitting on a mountaintop, having transcended suffering.
He wanted Buddha to lift him up out of San Quentin onto that mountaintop, high above his suffering—to save him. That’s the Buddha he had to kill—the illusion that anything outside ourselves can save us. What he learned is that Buddha can’t save us. Jesus can’t. Allah can’t. Only we can save ourselves.
We have spent a lifetime developing responses to pain and difficulty. Changing these old habits is like trying to reverse the momentum of a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. It requires great effort, skill, patience, perseverance, and no small amount of courage. —Lama Shenpen (Lisa Leghorn)
“generosity, kindness, enthusiasm, discipline, wisdom, patience, and most of all, compassion, not only for yourselves but for all beings.” She said, “The most important thing is for you to be kind to each other.”
we change in fits and starts; there’s no rushing it.
“Buddhism teaches you there’s always another way.”
“Listen. I hated all this Buddhist shit—all the talk about suffering, death, facing your shit. The thing is, the shit chases you until you face it. Meditation helps you face it. That’s all it’s about.
Think about the fact that you want to change your life and realize that you can.”
“That pause gives you a chance to look at what’s happening. When you do, you interrupt it. Recognize the feeling.
We are going to take this on. No judgment. It happens. It’s a bear.
samma-sati, which involved mindfulness meditation “to develop complete awareness of oneself, feelings, thoughts, people, surroundings, and reality.”
there’s progress and regression, and regression can be progress and vice versa. As Pema told him, “It’s not like we learn something in Buddhism, pass a test, and move on to the next state of being.” We can regress because of the internal process of changing and awakening; we may grasp a profound idea and then lose it. And sometimes it happens that life throws a wrench into our practice.
He observed that some Buddhists and Buddhist writings talked about the path to enlightenment “as if it was the destination on a road map, and the road goes to the top of a mountain, above the clouds.” But, he continued, “That seems to contradict everything I’m learning about Buddhism. You’re supposed to be in the middle of suffering, right in the nasty, ugly, filthy swamp, and not turn your back on it.” “That’s not enlightenment,” Pema explained, “at least not the way I think about it. Yes, enlightenment is often taught as going to the top of the mountain, but then what about all the suffering
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Compassion isn’t about looking down on someone who’s in worse shape than you and helping the poor person. It’s about a relationship between equals. You understand their suffering. You’re completely in their shoes. It comes from softening our hearts, opening up to our own and others’ pain. To me, that’s enlightenment.”
