Tara Empowerment in MDC Brooklyn: The First in Federal Prison {Part 1}

 

By Nicole Daedone

Miriam had been taking on more in our meditation groups.

Rach had given her the response  handing out the refuge prayer cards. She was diligently reading the first book in the meditation teacher course we’d built. I wanted her to receive the empowerment—so when we got designated, she could hold more.

I asked Diamond if she’d be willing to translate. “Wow, yes, of course, I’d be honored.”

I told her we’d give her the translation so she could practice. “I can’t wait,” she said. “This is incredible, thank you!”

“No, thank you,” I said, wanting her to know. She smiled and ran off, calling Yilan’s name to tell her.

We were preparing for an empowerment—a Tibetan Buddhist ritual transmission, and an authorization to take on the higher practices of Buddhism. Those past months I’d been teaching meditation in the dorm. The practice had shifted life in the dorm with this slow way. Tara had come more recently.

Green Tara is the female buddha of compassion in action. She is called the swift one  because she arrives before fear has finished forming.

On a phone call a few weeks back my lama had paused for a moment, “I think it’s become a good time for the women at  MDC to receive an empowerment. We can get you the materials you would need. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a Buddhist empowerment in a prison before; this may indeed be the first.”

The excitement grew as I shared this with the women.

Diamond called her family. Her dad had kept Buddha statues in all colors—sitting, standing, lying on his side in the lion posture—all over the house her whole life. He kept a large gold one in a glass case by his bed with a little water  fountain next to it. Since Diamond had been incarcerated, he’d been making offerings to it almost daily.

“My family is so excited that I’m translating,” she said. “They can’t wait to hear all about it.”

And Diamond’s father wasn’t the only one. Walking back from the gym that evening, Emunah  told me she’d called her father, a well-known Orthodox rabbi, to tell him about the  empowerment. “He kept saying he couldn’t wait to hear more, and how glad he was that this is  happening and I get to participate.”

“I’m happy this is happening as well,” I said, beaming back at her as she leaned over and gave me a side hug.

It was 1 o’clock on Sunday, April 26. We were in what (in liberal terms) is referred to as the gym: institutional gray speckled linoleum, an institutional blue inlay of a “track,” white cinderblock walls, windows covered with cage-like metal. There were 33 chairs, 30 beige, plastic ones for the participants, and three blue fancy ones for the translator, Rachel, and myself. The square plastic table in front of us we’d transformed into an altar, the “cloth” made of yellow  construction paper.

Three metal bookends snagged from the library held images pasted to cardboard. The middle with three photos—my lama and the Dalai Lama facing the camera, another of them in the classic Tibetan pose of heads touching, and a final photograph of my lama, my drupon, and myself. We were in a cave from the pilgramage to the holy sites of Nepal I had  joined them on only months before my indictment. The second bookend held a particularly artful image of Green Tara and the third, a conventional image of the 21 Taras.

Rach is a very good negotiator and somehow managed to get a few women to give up their precious fruit for the table.

She’d made the drum out of a spice bottle, painted it brown with tempera, and added painted yellow seed syllables on it. Sunshine would not be deterred by the fact that we  were in a Federal Detention Center and needed a feather. She snuck into the craft locker, pulled  together 10 or 20 feathers from an Easter display, and glued them to the pencil so finely  that the Dalai Lama himself would have been proud to use it as the implement to sprinkle the consecrated water from “victory vase.”

Emunah gathered women, oblivious to their “opps” declarations, charming her way through the dorm informing them that their regular scheduled programming of 24-hour Law & Order: SVU would be interrupted for this historical event. This would be the first time in history an empowerment had been given in a prison anywhere in the world.

“Duh. Obvi. You want to be there!” she said. And they did, with record turnout. There were 33 out of the 37 of us in the dorm. This was unheard of at MDC, unless compelled by officials.

Months prior, as Miriam moved steadily into her role as head of duty, I’d suggested she was ready to shed her common refrain of, “I don’t like people.” Women gathered on her bed or yelled, “Ma!” to her from across the dorm. They followed her around like a holy water buffalo mother hen. Her old refrain had been rendered obsolete. MDC had done its job.

As I sat down to tell her what my Lama had suggested, “okay, this may sound weird, but it’s a big deal,” Miriam returned the favor, with one eyebrow arched high. “Girl. I think we are all ready for you to drop the may-sound-weird bit. Have you not noticed? We are all in that gym meditating together. If you’re weird we are all weird. I might be strange, but I ain’t weird,” she chastised.

That alone was worth the price of admission.

Topeka told me the story of a woman telling her on her first day at Danbury, “Don’t worry, you’ll find your kind. You  want the jocks? The gangs? The religious women? The druggies? Don’t worry, you’ll find your kind.” Thinking back to when I first arrived at MDC, I couldn’t have imagined what I would find.

Now, almost a year later, I can definitively say we found our kind, only our kind was most of the dorm. My kind was these women—the insubordinate but secretly ordered. MDC had done its  job on Rach and me as well.

“Your weird happens to be the most real and beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Miriam continued. “You can take that to the bank. I don’t read books, you know that. The last thing I wanted to do  was teach. But you’ve got me reading and teaching because I want other women to get what I  got.”

I demurred. That’s friendship—someone who can knock the obsolete protective barricades off. I felt newly naked as I told her that my Lama was so touched by how the women had responded  to Tara that he was going to write out a specific empowerment unique to us and to me.

“Miriam?” I said, voice shaking. “I don’t know if you know what an honor this is. It’s a big deal” wanting to convey the gravity in my heart without sounding over the top.  “Well then, I’d better fix my do for the day,” she said, touching her hair, which since she’d undone her braids had risen into the vertical, electrified shape of Don King’s signature standing on-end afro.

Now was that time.

I sat in the gym, transformed into an entirely different space, in front of those women, my script before me. It was an “all for this” moment. From the first moment of my spiritual journey at 28 years old reading Madame Blavatsky on the Mahayana arc, to years of teaching OM, years of building OneTaste, years of practice and investigation, weeks of trial, months of being forged at MDC—-all for this.

To be sitting in front of 30 women, Dakinis in prison camouflage. Rach on one side, Diamond on the  other. Miriam front and center. My lama and the tradition behind me.

“This is a historic day,” I began. Tamara put her hands in prayer. Janiya did her best impression  of attentive student. Emunah gave me her best shep nachas, so proud of you, expression. And then I breathed for the first time since my lama off-handedly suggested this empowerment.

More honestly, maybe ever. I breathed from a location far beyond the body. When I exhaled it was like wind that carried my shaky voice and tears.

It’s well known in the dorm: I’m not the crier. Rach is. I’m who you come to when tears flow. I hold until I’m held, until I can speak to my lama, so I can hold those around me. But now we  were profoundly together, embarking on something unknown to each of us, held by something larger.

“I would be honored to even be invited to an empowerment, much less giving one. Much less with you women that I love.”

And there it broke open a bit more. A few tears started. And when I looked up, as if we shared one nervous system, almost every woman in the room had tears streaming. Miriam let tears come but sat straight—her whole posture communicating her new refrain—”we got this.”

I began.

“The Dalai Lama said it would be Western women who saved the world.” I always bristled when he specified Western women, until someone explained: Western women have the resource of time, we have the will, and we will go and get our sisters. I would add: it might just be incarcerated women who will save the world. Not just because we have time, though we certainly do, but because we hold a certain power. When I asked my lama what practices to  share, he offered the most advanced. After years of this practice—see for yourself, trial and error—I’ve learned he’s usually right.

“But you all are, shall we say, head-strong,” I noted, as a knowing few chuckled from the  audience. “You are most certainly not your typical meditation practitioners. And again, he was right. You took the practices like nothing he’d ever seen and ran with them. Some talent that works in the streets works for meditation. You’re willing, like the Buddha, to go against the  stream. And your hard luck—that in itself is Tibetan Buddhism. Poison to medicine. The  transition begins here.”

“I took his declaration as an assignment. Maybe I’m not to play this part, but the people I had to  fight the hardest were women.” They all laughed. Every woman in that room knew, in stark  relief, how far we will go to protect our own power and make it as difficult as possible for anyone  to see it. But these women were sapped down in such a way that they couldn’t help it and that power was popping out despite their best efforts.

I didn’t have to convince anyone.

They didn’t  give me a blank doe-eyed stare. Sunshine served a course of Mmm hmm. But I play her Mmm  hmm back to her — her pride in being insubordinate, not recognizing that’s exactly what I love  about her. “I’d almost lost hope until I got here, and realized they were keeping you all in hiding.”  The room went silent. Their faces softened. They had been spotted. Recognized.

“Now, the Dalai Lama gives empowerments to 350,000 people. We will be doing ours with thirty.  I suspect ours could have just as much import.” Carrie looked up with an “now I heard that” expression. “So you know what we’re doing here: an empowerment is how a deity practice gets  passed down. The lama opens a door — to Tara, in our case — and once we step through, the  practice is ours. We can call on her. We can work with her in dream. We can, in time, give her to  someone else. We are inside the lineage.”

“But first, I have to thank a few people.”

In prison, stripped of identity, one of the ways women identify is by who they’re against, whether it is each other, the others, or the institution. There are women in here who only know to try to get their dignity by sending in endless complaints to the unit team. Until they learn that the pain, and the fact that it’s at screech level, is a  blessing, a pressure they need, they will keep suffering.

“The term Buddhist translates roughly to insider, meaning. You’ve discovered that happiness is an inside job. There’s no one to blame for your pain, and no man, no bag, no lifestyle that’s  going to give you the happiness that knows no opposite. And it’s not lost on me that prison is  considered being locked up inside. What you may not know is that unit team alone made this possible.” I watched a few eyes reflexively roll. “They were excited for us.”

I left it there.

I didn’t tell them Miss Smith had been positively brimming when I asked if we could do this, and nodded with a reserved, “you got it, and make sure you tell me how it goes” as  she could manage.

“In fact, each of us has more in common with each other and the others and unit team than 99.99% of the world. If we can see our ecology and figure out how to do it here, I do  believe we can figure out world peace.” They laughed but also held it earnestly. Sunshine gave me a playful jut of her chin. “Okay, you got me, 101%”

“So I’m grateful to them. And to my Lama, who wrote out the empowerment specific to us at this time, in this place, and for me to give. You’ll see. It’s beautiful. My prayer is that each woman in  this room and in the world have someone like him in their lives. Someone who has your back in ways you never could have imagined.” I watched as hope come over their faces.

“And to each of you, who have given me and Rach the most accelerated training of our lives” (they all laughed) “and made us into the women we are today.” A wave of intimacy filled the room.

“Let’s start.”

 

 Part 2 coming soon

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

Nicole Daedone is a teacher, author, and spiritual practitioner with three decades of Zen practice and five years of deep study in Tibetan Buddhism. She is the founder of Orgasmic Meditation, a contemplative practice she developed and taught for over twenty years through OneTaste, exploring the intersection of sexuality, attention, and awakening. She is also the founder of Unconditional Freedom, a 501(c)(3) organization built on the belief that human flourishing is not a luxury—serving 250,000+ incarcerated participants, 140,000+ restaurant-quality meals to anyone who walks through the door, and giving a permanent home to the work of incarcerated artists. She is the author of Jailbirds in Flight: Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Enlightenment in Prison but Were Afraid to Ask, written entirely during her incarceration at New York City’s Metropolitan Detention Center, where she remains today. Over the past year she has led a thriving meditation community inside MDC—culminating in what is believed to be the first Tibetan Buddhist empowerment ever given in a federal prison.

 

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