Ven. Robina Courtin spent decades spearheading the Liberation Prison Project, visiting inmates on death row and teaching prisoners. I asked her how she benefited from the prison work. Is there something she learned from the inmates? Ven. Robina Courtin: "Yes, when your back is against the wall, when you know there is nothing you can do to change your physical situation, then you know that the only thing you can change is your mind. Prisoners who practice really get that. We think we’re free, but with all our delusions – our attachment, our anger, our jealousy, depression and fear – we’re actually not free. We might as well be in prison. We feel locked in our misery, blame everybody and feel hopeless. Arturo, this young man who first wrote to us, is in his cell 23 hours every day. He is only allowed the inside of a pen because he could use the outside part to stab his cellie. He is given only Koolaid to drink because he could harm his cellie with a hot drink. He can have ten books, but only paperbacks, because he could use a hard cover as a weapon. And you can’t imagine the noise. He said it’s like being in a rock concert all day. He has no fresh air, no sun, no window, and he is allowed to exercise for only one hour in another, bigger, cell, walking up and down. Now, that’s a pretty intense prison, right? So it’s quite shocking for us to hear Lama Zopa’s response to Arturo when he wrote to him: “Your prison is nothing in comparison with the inner prison of ordinary people – the prison of attachment, the prison of anger, the prison of ignorance.” We don’t think we’re in prison, but this is Buddha’s point: the deeper suffering that he points to in the First Noble Truth, the suffering of the delusions. And Arturo and my other friends in prison know this. They know they can’t change their gross prison, but they can change their minds. That is why I am so inspired. They learned to have happy minds in these garbage dumps." #DakiniPower dakinipower/ven-robina-courtin/
Posted on: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 20:07:44 +0000
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