I started practicing like my hair was on fire. I spent a lot of time alone in my cell at night, reading dharma books from nine until twelve and then meditating until I went to sleep at two. I'd get up again at seven for a full day teaching school and doing hospice work.

Once a year they gave you a week off from your prison job, and I would get some food from the commissary that I could heat up in a microwave, hole up in my cell for nine or ten days, and do a full-blown intensive retreat. This was twelve to fourteen hours of practice a day. About four or five days into my second retreat—this would have been 1991, six years into my sentence—I was suddenly in that luminous world again, the world of the guru's mind, that fluid contiguous relationship with the rest of reality that I had experienced in Peru. But this time there was nothing in my surroundings to support the experience in any way. My guru had been dead for four years.

The only thing that was giving me access to this space was the practice, and it was an incredibly powerful moment when I realized that. It confirmed everything my teacher had ever said. When we would try to psychoanalyze his practices and teachings and figure them out, he often told us, “Hey, just do it. When you get into that Cadillac or Mercedes or Porsche, you don't have to be a master mechanic to turn it on and enjoy the ride, right? Just do the practice. It works.” In that moment, I saw the reality of those words. I had rediscovered what I'd been looking for my whole life.

The prison environment is hellish, but the deepest pain is that you've managed to get yourself torn out of your life and away from your loved ones. Sometimes when I was alone in my cell, I would suddenly be flooded with the absolute, excruciating reality of not being there for my son. It would just hit me like a blinding, searing light.

One night I was at the point of starting to bang my head on the wall. I think I was standing up at the time. I was really about to beat my head into the concrete, but for some reason I just stayed with the experience, kind of holding it. A space started emerging around this white-hot ball of pain and despair. And my awareness of this space grew and grew until suddenly the pain just dissolved into it, and I went through the other side into a kind of ecstasy. I felt ashamed, like, “How dare I?” But I just found myself landing on the other side of that experience in the elation of my own being. This happened in the midst of looking at the stark reality of being in a shit-hole hell realm of a prison full of aggression and violence and abuse, and the pain of not knowing whether you're ever going to get out.

If you bump into somebody in prison, you have to clean it up real quick and say sorry or they come back and knife you. There was a big African-American guy who had just come from Leavenworth, a very tough maximum security prison where you walk around with magazines under your shirt to keep somebody from knifing you, and people are killing each other all the time. And he picked a beef with me over something completely stupid. I came out of my room, he was mopping up, and he accused me of screwing up his floor. But the floor was completely dry—he was just grandstanding for a couple of buddies.

Normally, I would have sucked it up and said, “Oh, yes, hey, I'm sorry man, it won't happen again.” And that would have been that. I did that hundreds of other times. But for some reason I just wasn't in the mood for it. So I told him, “Man, get off it. If you want to entertain your buddies, go somewhere else.” Looking back on it, it was a very crazy thing to do. He started getting pretty ugly and intense, and eventually he took off. But I knew this was a very dangerous situation, and it wasn't going away. I knew it had to be dealt with.

So I went looking for him, and I found him in one of the large bathrooms. He had gone back to his bunk, and he had gotten a knife. He wasn't holding it, but I found out later that he had it on him. I walked up to him and got in his face and really laid into him. It was almost like an out-of-body experience, because it was so unlike the way I'd ever dealt with stuff in there. I was completely winging it, confronting him on his bullshit. We were nose to nose, and it was going to come to blows any moment.

There are very intense racial issues in prison. And you know, I worked hard not to buy into any of that, even though most of the other white guys around me ended up hating the black guys. It's kind of this cross-cultural clash that happens, and people just end up hating each other. But I was determined not to absorb any of it. In actuality, I spent my life in the prison school every day taking a lot of risks teaching primarily African-American guys to learn how to read, to get their GEDs. There's a big thing in prison about everybody being equal, and you cross a lot of boundaries being a teacher, because anybody that tries to act any different than anybody else tends to get called out. I spent two or three more hours every day doing hospice work with this guy's brothers, wiping their butts and holding them in my arms when they cried and wailed and died. So I just didn't feel like I needed to take a lot of shit off him. I was the white guy, you know, it was that kind of thing.

So I told him that. I said, “Wake up. This is not just another white guy you're going to push around. This is who I am. Relate to me.” I took a chance. And you know, he finally settled down. He even told me that he was instinctively operating out of fear, in his Leavenworth mode. He admitted that he had gone and gotten his knife, and he thought that I was going to do the same thing, because that's what you do in Leavenworth. We didn't exactly become buddies or hang out, but we did end up in a friendship of sorts.

I think there's something magic about being committed. When you commit yourself in a certain direction, the universe begins to cooperate with you. You're willing to take risks that ordinarily you wouldn't take. You throw yourself into a situation and you do what has to be done.

I could easily have died in prison. Hospice work was very much a confrontation with my own mortality. I had a patient named Lyle who had come to the hospital from another prison for AIDS treatment. He got involved in the meditation group I was running, and we became friends. Later, he was transferred back to the prison he came from, but eventually he got very ill and they brought him back. I hadn't seen him in almost a year. He was lying there shriveled up on his bed, completely emaciated, and he had tuberculosis. Because they thought he might still be contagious, they had him in an isolation room, and I had to wear a mask to go in. They closed the door and locked me in there.

As soon as he saw me, he wanted to get up. He was talking about how he had developed such a strong practice at the other prison, and how he felt so bad that he couldn't meditate now. I kept telling him, “Just lie down, lie down,” but he wanted to sit up and meditate. He wanted to meditate with me. So we sat there knee to knee, him on his little bunk and me in a metal folding chair. Our faces were only eighteen inches apart. At first it was fine, but then the thought started creeping into my head that I was basically exchanging breaths with this man—my dear friend—who might have active tuberculosis. My surgical mask was starting to get wet with my breath, and I knew they were only good for about fifteen minutes. Once they get wet, they don't really work.

I tried to dismiss it, but the fear just kept building and building. I started thinking, “Where is the chaplain? He said I could only stay for fifteen minutes, and I think I've been here for at least twenty. When is he going to knock at the door?” Finally, I panicked and asked my friend to lie down, told him I'd be back up later that night. I'd been doing hospice work for a long time, but I hadn't gotten over my fear of death. I had to knock on the window to get the chaplain to come and let me out.

“Grab your stuff. You're going,” the guard told me. “Where am I going?” I asked. “Just go,” he said. “You're going down to R&D.” That's where they take people who are getting out. When I got down there, they gave me some street clothes to wear, and they took me upstairs, got me $50 from my commissary account, called a taxi, opened the door, and said, “You've got three days. Don't be late.”

I was going home for my father's funeral. They wouldn't let me see him before he died except with a full guard escort, in shackles and leg irons, and I refused. I didn't want to bring that shame into my family's world. Then when he died it was the same thing—I had to have four guards, so I refused. The warden came and talked to me, saying I had to go. “I'm not going that way,” I told him. The next morning the guard came and woke me up at five o'clock and sent me out alone.

So there I was, standing outside. I hadn't been out of that building in thirteen and a half years, and there was a brilliant blue sky. There were flag poles in front, and the flags were fluttering. I was just flooded with grief over the death of my father. Years before, when I was in prison and Trungpa Rinpoche died, I expected it to be utterly depressing. But instead I woke up every morning in a kind of bliss, and when I would go outside his presence was everywhere, the whole sky was him. He had this oceanic mind that would just hold you. And on this day again the whole sky was him, and it was my father; it was devastation and bliss and joy all mingled together.

The taxi came, and I went home for three days and then came back. Five months later, I got out of prison. I could barely deal with the speed of the world; I was actually afraid to cross streets. It took me about a year before I sped up to it and became a maniac again like everybody else.