This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series: Spiritual Care - lessons of freedom from within prison. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Kim Moore at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the first Buddhist Chaplaincy Speaker Series of the year. I’m so delighted to welcome Kim Moore, who’s joining us today. Kim is a former student of the Sati program, so I celebrate that. We were just chatting, and she told me she was here taking the classes 10 years ago. It’s the decade anniversary, so that’s something to celebrate.
I was looking at Kim’s bio on the website and realizing that she is with the organization Guiding Rage Into Power, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with, called GRIP. She first heard about it in 2014 while she was in the Sati program. She subsequently trained as a GRIP facilitator and then, five years later, became the executive director of the organization. She managed to expand the program into the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad in California, where she continues to facilitate today.
Other things that Kim has done is that she’s co-founded the Partners in School Innovation, one of the very first AmeriCorps programs in the country. She was the executive director of the San Francisco Organizing Project, where she worked with faith and community leaders to secure policy changes in affordable housing, healthcare, immigration, and violence prevention. Kim currently lives in San Jose, California, with her teenage daughter and “too many pets.” I’ll leave that up to everybody to decide how many is too many. I’ve got a pretty high bar for how many is too many.
So Kim, I’ll pass it over to you. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much. Yes, hopefully, my dog will not bark and interrupt our next hour and a half. My teenage daughter is doing an SAT prep tutorial session in the house, so hopefully, she’s not going to come out and have questions for me or anything.
Good morning. I am so grateful to be here. It feels like coming home to be in this space. I’m deeply grateful to Sati, the Sati Center, IMC, and this Buddhist chaplaincy community. Personally, I’ve grown so much through my engagement with this community, and I’ve received so much care here. So thank you for inviting me and holding the space for this community and this conversation.
It’s a virtual challenge, a speaker challenge. There’s the awkwardness of the screen, and the speaker says stuff when really, in spiritual care, we’re creating interconnection. If we were in person, I would want us to be sitting in a circle and maybe bow or shake hands with each one of you to make that connection. We might have a round of check-ins, and we would build a welcoming and supportive container to hold whatever might emerge through this engagement. So we’re going to do the best we can in this setting, which also has its advantages. We didn’t have to travel to come to this. There may be folks here who live far away, and we’re also keeping each other safe and healthy by doing this virtually.
Maybe we can take a moment, before I dive into talking about stuff, to create our virtual container. Imagine that we’re sitting in a circle and do a little bit of breathing and meditation together, grounding together. We can’t really see other faces, but maybe if there is a way on your screen to take a look at someone else, just appreciate yourself and anyone else you see for being here this morning.
Welcome again. Good morning. Let’s take a few breaths together. You can close your eyes if you would like to, if you feel comfortable, or you can rest your gaze however you feel works for you in this moment. Allow your body to rest in its seat and your nervous system to settle. Take a couple of long, slow, deep breaths, maybe inviting the out-breath to be a little longer than usual.
If the breath is a comfortable place to rest your attention, then go ahead and do so. Sometimes, especially in a prison setting where there’s a cultural norm of violence and trauma, focusing attention on the breath and the body can be difficult, even destabilizing. So I also want to offer you other places that you can rest your attention that similarly allow for settling of the nervous system and the development of mindfulness.
If your eyes are open, just become aware of colors in your environment. You can even quietly name them: green, yellow. If that’s helpful, maybe the shapes also around you. And if your eyes are closed, you can allow sounds to come into the forefront of your awareness. Rustling, a bird’s birdsong, the sound of my voice.
You can be curious for yourself what of the various options feel right for you right now to settle, to rest, to come into greater awareness of this moment.
Now, bring your hands together and rub them together to gently create some heat. When you feel some warmth, some heat between your palms, rest your hands on your heart and breathe the warmth in. Feel the warmth in your heart space and the connection between your hands and your chest. Maybe it’s possible for that warmth to spread a little bit in your body too. Feel the goodness of these moments that you have given to yourself and to our community here. Thank you.
I will take a few minutes to introduce GRIP, Guiding Rage Into Power, and the GRIP Training Institute, and then share a little bit about my journey to the chaplaincy training that I did in 2014. Then I really would like to focus more today on spiritual care and the Dharma in prisons, and the relationship between prisons and the outside community, more as an exploration and hopefully a conversation with you.
GRIP, Guiding Rage Into Power, is a nonprofit, community-based organization serving primarily people who have been incarcerated in state prisons for having committed serious and violent crimes. It’s a 104-hour intensive, 12 to 14-month program that has four elements: cultivating mindfulness, developing emotional intelligence, stopping your violence, and understanding victim impact. It’s a journey over the course of many, many months together.
There are 35,000 lifers in the state of California alone—people serving life sentences for having committed serious and violent crimes. It costs more than $125,000 a year to incarcerate one person, which means that California taxpayers are paying more than $4 billion a year to incarcerate just this population. Not only is this a huge number of people and a huge cost for society, but also when someone goes to prison, they get worse. They get pulled into prison gang politics, end up committing more violence, and taking on more antisocial behaviors and beliefs, and experiencing more trauma themselves. A typical lifer will spend 10 to 15 years up at a max-level prison, participating in a lot of violent activity just to be accepted or to stay alive themselves before they’re able to change course and begin rehabilitation.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of victims of violence are left to their own devices and resources to cope with the impact of violence that they and their families experienced and try to heal. The current system is costly and doesn’t make our community safer. Through more than 25 years of work in the state prisons, we know that there are better solutions. When we can create a caring and supportive community for incarcerated people who commit to do the work to heal and be accountable for the harm that they’ve caused, they can develop the inner capacities and skills of mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and understanding the impact on their victims. As a result, they will be safe, contributing members of their families and community. They will be found suitable for release by the parole board to come home to their communities and families, thereby reducing the incarceration rates and costs. And they can be key contributors to the healing journeys of survivors of crime and the prevention of further violence in their communities.
GRIP is a program that demonstrates that possibility. We have proof of concept. We’re in seven prisons, we serve more than 500 students a year, and have had—I can’t keep track of the numbers, we keep graduating more—so I think we’re at 1,700 or 1,800 graduates of the program over the last 12 years. Almost 800 of our graduates have been released, have come home, and our recidivism rate is less than 2%. And that to us is a low bar; that is not our definition of success. For us, GRIP graduates become peacemakers. They sign a pledge with vows to do no harm, to be peacemakers, and they come home and they contribute. They are providing services and supporting their families, healthy relationships, doing work with youth, doing work on the streets to support people who are homeless or struggling with addiction. So we know what works, and we know that there are ways to do this.
I first came to this work, as you heard in my bio, after I had been a community organizer and nonprofit leader. I had done a lot of work in the community, worked around policy issues and grassroots organizing. I struggled; I burned out at a certain point. I struggled with the extraordinary amount of trauma that people doing this kind of political activism and community organizing grapple with, and we didn’t have the tools to heal ourselves or create a healing community in our own movements. That’s what drew me to want to do deeper Buddhist study myself and ground myself in a deeper spiritual understanding and training. I had been practicing Buddhism, been a student of Gil’s for years, and he encouraged me to do the chaplaincy program.
I first learned about GRIP through Gil. There was a particular moment when some graduates of the GRIP program came and spoke at IMC. Their stories were incredibly moving, beautiful, and powerful. Towards the end, one of them, a gentleman named Terrell Merritt, looked into the group, into the audience, and basically said, “For anybody here in this room who has experienced harm, I want to, on behalf of those of us who have caused harm, offer you my apology. You did not deserve the harm you experienced, and I am so sorry for what you had to go through.”
For me, it was a moment I experienced as a genuine apology that I had never heard before and didn’t even know that I was longing to hear. That did something to me. It was like an example of the Dharma from inside prison coming out and offering insight to me on the outside—that there was a healing journey I needed to embark on for myself. I’m forever grateful for that moment. It also made me really want to get involved with the program. I did some work to get myself invited to become a trainee facilitator and join the GRIP team, which I eventually did in 2016.
The Buddha talks about care for self, care for others, and care for self and others. There’s a Venn diagram that we’re navigating as spiritual care providers. As people in chaplaincy offering spiritual care, there’s a dynamic that we’re constantly navigating. Even that language—”offering” or “providing” spiritual care, being a “spiritual care provider,” being a “chaplain”—creates separation and an identity that can become hardened or problematic.
There’s a story of the Buddha wandering around after his Enlightenment, and he’s radiating. He’s just had this awakening, and he’s walking through, and people begin to notice. They ask, “Who are you? Are you a god? Are you a man?” And the Buddha replies, “I am awake.”
I actually first heard that inside San Quentin. What I love is that it shifts to more of an action, to a verb: “I am awake,” “I am awakening.” It’s a movement. So maybe there’s a shift here too that I want to offer. Rather than thinking of myself as a chaplain or as a spiritual care provider, maybe I can just rest in “spiritually caring.” Spiritually caring for self, spiritually caring for other, and spiritually caring for self and other—the combination. That’s really relevant and important, I think, for anyone interested in being spiritually caring in a prison setting.
There’s a problematic triangle in the criminal legal system where people are put in boxes and identified as either victim or offender, and then there’s the judge. It keeps people separate, it creates a hierarchy—who’s superior, who’s inferior—and these can become hardened identities that get in the way of real healing and repair and transformation. Because no one is only a victim, no one is only an offender. One of the most powerful things that we can say at the very beginning of a GRIP circle is, “You are not your crime.” We see you for your full humanity, not only by what you did.
You can also replace the judge in that triangle. It can become problematic if you insert a “helper” in there. It can become savior-like. What am I doing going into prison to offer spiritual care? Is there a way that we can carry ourselves as the savior, the helper that makes it happen? We get caught up in the game of conceit: Am I better than, or less than, or equal to you? Part of what I have found in my own journey in this work is really about how to get out of that game of conceit entirely and to be spiritually caring, paying attention to the movement between those different parts of the triangle.
One important condition for healing and transformation to possibly arise is simply compassionate witness and being able to see someone fully for their humanity—their particular humanity, their story, their particular suffering, and the universality of the pain, the shame, the anger, the woundedness as part of the human condition. Moving between the particular of my story and self, and the particular of the other’s story and self, and then the dynamic that happens between us. Can I see myself in you? Can I see you also as a unique human being?
When I’m sitting in a circle with GRIP folks inside the prison, there’s a movement between these points in the triangle. I’m paying attention, and I’m a fellow traveler on this journey.
There’s a lot of Dharma in prison communities. There’s incredible healing and accountability work that’s going on. There are folks building safe spaces and community in the midst of really dark, violent institutions. Folks are seeking insight, healing, accountability, spiritual awakening, and they’re offering care also. The title of our course book is Leaving Prison Before You Get Out. There are a lot of folks that are leaving prison before they get out.
One of my early experiences, going into San Quentin before I started with GRIP, I got to sit in a circle and hear some men reading their stories. They write out these “unfinished business” letters or trauma pain stories and then process them with one another. I was hearing some that were so incredibly moving. The level of self-awareness and then forgiveness that was coming out was just extraordinary. I went up to one of the guys afterwards and said, “Oh my God, it’s so amazing. You guys are doing such incredible work. How can I support you? What can I do?” And he just looked at me and he said, “Yeah, I know we’re doing good work. We’re doing it here. What are you guys doing on the outside?”
Again, it was a moment of, “Oh, right. We got to do our own work.” They don’t need us to come in and bring the Dharma to them. There is incredible Dharma happening, incredible liberation happening in the midst of incredible violence in these institutions. We really are fellow travelers. When I go in, I am a fellow traveler longing for freedom myself. I am not geographically incarcerated, but there is the prison between our ears. There’s a shared dedication to a practice towards liberation that is a spiritual kinship.
I want to do a little Sutta1 study with you guys, using probably the most commonly used Sutta for prison ministry, which is the Angulimala story that many of you may know. I thought it would be fun for us to go through it. It’s been a powerful one that I have unpacked over the years. I find myself, the longer I do this work, that different parts of it emerge and I get insight. I’d like to go through three main parts of the Sutta and explore it together. I invite you to pay attention in yourself to where you notice yourself moving towards, where you identify, and also where you resist.
I’m looking at the Majjhima Nikāya2, the middle-length discourses, Sutta 86.
It starts with a bandit in the realm of King Pasenadi of Kosala, named Angulimala, who was murderous, bloody-handed, given to blows and violence, merciless to living beings. Villages, towns, and districts were laid waste by him. He was constantly murdering people, and he wore their fingers as a garland. That’s how he is introduced.
Many people are victimized by him or terrified of him. When the Buddha starts to walk in that community, many people stop him and say, “Don’t go down that road. Angulimala is this murderous, violent man. It’s not safe.” Over and over again, the Buddha is warned, but he continues on.
The bandit Angulimala saw the Blessed One coming in the distance and he thought to himself, “Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve been able to kill so many men, and now there’s just this one guy coming along. This recluse, it’ll be so easy. I can kill him.” Angulimala then took up his sword and shield, buckled on his bow and quiver, and followed close behind the Blessed One.
Then the Blessed One performed such a feat of paranormal power that the bandit Angulimala, though running as fast as he could, could not catch up with the Blessed One, who was walking at a normal pace. He’s trying to figure out what’s happening, so he stops and calls out to the Blessed One, “Stop, recluse! Stop!”
And the Buddha says, “I have stopped, Angulimala. You stop too.”
Angulimala then addresses the Blessed One: “While you are walking, recluse, you tell me you have stopped. But now, when I have stopped, you say I haven’t stopped.”
And the Buddha says, “Angulimala, I have stopped forever. I abstain from violence towards living beings. But you have no restraint towards things that live. That is why I have stopped, and you have not.”
Having heard this, Angulimala says, “At long last this sage, a great seer revered by me, has come to the great forest. Having heard your stanza teaching me the Dhamma, I will indeed renounce evil forever.” So Angulimala throws away his sword and his weapons, he drops to his knees in front of the Buddha, and asks to go forth. The Buddha, sage of great compassion, teacher of the world, says these words: “Come, bhikkhu.”3 And that was the venerable Angulimala’s ordination.
So that’s the first part. What’s happening here?
(The following is a summary of the Q&A session)
One person noted that something very different happened; the Buddha’s response was so different from what Angulimala expected that it created an opportunity for awakening. Another participant felt that a magical human connection happened. Another added that the Buddha truly saw Angulimala, instead of reacting with fear based on preconceived ideas. Finally, someone shared that the moment Angulimala turned away from harm, the Buddha welcomed him without resistance, recognizing his move toward wholeness.
The Buddha uses a kind of skillful means. He challenges Angulimala, breaks him out of his pattern, which allows for insight. The Buddha treats him with respect and dignity, seeing his humanity and not just the murderer, creating the possibility for him to become a bhikkhu.
Now, chapter two has to do with the king. On this occasion, crowds of people are gathering at the gates of King Pasenadi’s inner palace, crying, “Sire, the bandit Angulimala is in your realm! He is murderous, bloody-handed… The king must put him down!”
The king is getting pressure from his constituents. There are a lot of people who are hurt and afraid and angry, and the king needs to do something. So he goes looking for Angulimala with his cavalry of 500 men. He comes across the Buddha and pays homage. The Buddha asks what’s going on, and the king explains the situation: “I shall put him down, venerable sir.”
The Buddha says, “Great king, suppose you were to see that Angulimala had shaved off his hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and gone forth from the home life into homelessness… that he was abstaining from killing… that he was celibate, virtuous, of good character. If you were to see him thus, how would you treat him?”
The king says, “Venerable sir, we would pay homage to him… we would arrange for him lawful guarding, defense, and protection. But venerable sir, how could such an immoral man, one of evil character, ever have such virtue and restraint?”
The Buddha points over to one of the monks sitting there happily meditating and says, “Great king, this is Angulimala.” The king is frightened, alarmed, terrified. The Buddha has to reassure him, “Don’t be afraid, great king. There’s nothing for you to fear from him.”
The king goes over and tests him to see if it’s really him, and is satisfied. He then says, “Rest content, noble lord… I shall provide you robes and alms food.” The king goes back to the Buddha and says, “Venerable sir, we ourselves could not tame him with force and weapons, yet the Blessed One has tamed him without force and weapons. And now, venerable sir, we depart. We are busy and have much to do.” The king goes off and drops the whole thing of putting him down.
So what is happening here?
(The following is a summary of the Q&A session)
One person observed that the king was completely stymied; he recognized that the Buddha was able to do something through love and connection that he could not do with force. Another participant found it interesting that the king doesn’t mention any retribution or punishment, simply accepting the transformation. This raises the question of accountability versus spiritual redemption. Another person highlighted how the Buddha dismantled the “othering” of Angulimala, interrupting the narrative that he was only a murderer and instead highlighting his new reality as a monk. Finally, someone noted the immense respect the king had for the Buddha, treating him as a higher authority than the state. This points to the Buddhist emphasis on the present moment and the possibility of change, rather than being defined by the past.
Now for the last part. Before long, dwelling alone, withdrawn, diligent, ardent, and resolute, the venerable Angulimala, by realizing for himself with direct knowledge here and now, entered upon and abided in that supreme goal of the holy life. He became one of the arahants.4
Then one morning, the venerable Angulimala dressed and, taking his bowl and outer robe, went into Sāvatthī for alms. On that occasion, someone threw a clod and hit the venerable Angulimala’s body. Someone else threw a stick and hit his body. Someone else threw a potsherd and hit his body. With blood running from his cut head, with his bowl broken, and with his outer robe torn, the venerable Angulimala went back to the monastery.
The town’s folks see the murderer and they throw stuff at him and they chase him out. The Blessed One saw him coming in the distance and told him, “Bear it, Brahman.5 Bear it, Brahman. You are experiencing here and now the result of deeds because of which you might have been tortured in hell for many years, for many hundreds of years, for many thousands of years.”
The venerable Angulimala, going back to meditate alone in retreat, experienced the bliss of deliverance.
This story raises some fundamental questions. Is redemption possible? And when we hear this, what happens inside you? Do you believe that redemption is possible? Are there limits to it? Is redemption only possible for people who’ve experienced harm as children? Is it only allowed for people who commit non-violent crimes, but not a murderer? Or a sexual predator? Are there limits in your own mind and heart to what is possible for redemption?
It also raises the question of what the state should do. What is the state’s responsibility? Even if there is spiritual redemption, should the state still punish? Is there still something that is expected of state power, or is it okay to only look forward? These are difficult things to wrestle with.
And then lastly, what about the victims? What about the survivors? I noticed for myself a couple of years ago when I reread this, the piece that really got me was that Angulimala experienced the bliss of deliverance. I noticed for myself, I was like, “Wait a second. How come he gets it and I don’t?” I realized that I was identifying with the villagers. I was like, “Okay, Angulimala, great, he’s a monk, but hang on, he shouldn’t get more than I get. I never committed murder. How come I’m not getting bliss?”
It was an awakening for me to realize the limits of my compassion in that moment, and the ways that sometimes I’m playing the role of maybe the Buddha when I’m providing spiritual care, and sometimes I’m being the judge offering rehabilitation, and sometimes I’m the villager that’s restricting in my own mind the possibility for liberation for someone who’s caused harm.
So with that, I’m going to stop and turn it back to you. Thank you.
Sutta: A discourse or sermon of the Buddha or one of his close disciples. ↩
Majjhima Nikāya: The “Middle-length Discourses,” the second of the five collections (Nikāyas) in the Sutta Piṭaka of the Pāli Canon. ↩
Bhikkhu: A fully ordained male monastic in the Buddhist tradition. ↩
Arahant: In Theravāda Buddhism, a “worthy one” who has attained enlightenment and reached Nibbāna (Nirvana). ↩
Brahman: In this context, a term of respect used by the Buddha, meaning a holy or pure person, regardless of caste. ↩