Spiritual Gangster: The Buddha’s Lesson on Fear and Dread

These days, I’m far from what would be considered a gangster.

My life is pretty comfortable, and I live modestly within my means. I own a duplex in a quiet neighborhood and I drive an affordably responsible Toyota Prius. I’m married to the love of my life, and I take regular trips to Walt Disney World. Not a lot of parallels you could make between Tony Montana and me.

But if I’m going to be honest, my life takes me to some pretty gangster places.

Last week, I sat in my car outside the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center, a women’s prison named after a distinguished correctional administrator with the Tennessee Department of Corrections who was tragically killed in the line of duty. I was preparing to go inside because I serve as a spiritual advisor to Christa Pike, a woman on death row whose execution is scheduled for later this year. As much as I want to, I can’t change her circumstances, undo the past, or fix what is coming.

But I can offer my presence.

I sat there longer than I needed to. I’ve been in this prison many times, yet I was still nervous. Anyone who works around suffering knows this feeling. That moment before walking into the hospital room. Before stepping onto the stage. Before having the difficult conversation. Before hearing news you don’t want to hear. Before saying goodbye.

The moment before.

As I sat in my car, I committed to a ritual I’ve started using to help me face the fear of these intense situations. I take a breath and whisper to myself, “Everyone wants to be a gangster until it’s time to do some gangster shit.” Usually, I laugh when I say it, which helps ease the tension, but I also mean it. It’s time to do some gangster shit.

And I don’t mean gangster shit the way it’s usually understood. I don’t mean violence, intimidation, or pretending to be tough.

I mean a spiritual gangster.

It’s pretty gangster to be willing to walk toward suffering rather than away from it. To meditate with those carrying trauma, rage, grief, or decades of shame. To remain present in places most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

That’s gangster.

It is also extremely scary.

The Buddha’s Forest

Whenever I find myself in places like this, I think about the Buddha. Long before he became awakened, Siddhartha Gotama deliberately practiced in frightening places. He sought out remote forests and isolated thickets where fear naturally arose.

In the Bhayabherava Sutta, the Discourse on Fear and Dread, the Buddha describes entering the terrifying wilderness alone at night, the forest-thickets and isolated places most people avoided after dark, where fear was expected to arise. There were wild animals, isolation, vulnerability, and no separation between spiritual practice and the raw realities of survival. “I would stay in such awe-inspiring and horrifying abodes that would make your hair stand on end, such as orchard shrines, woodland shrines, and tree shrines.”

Most people avoided places like these. The Buddha practiced in them.

The Buddha had his forest.

I have prison gates.

We all have a place we’d rather not go. A place where reality becomes difficult to avoid. A place where our usual distractions no longer work. The Buddha describes spending nights alone in these places and being confronted with waves of terror. He says:

When fear and dread came to me while I was sitting, I would not lie down or stand up or walk. I would keep sitting until I had subdued that fear and dread. 

When fear and dread came to me while I was walking back and forth, I would not stand or sit or lie down. I would keep walking back and forth until I had subdued that fear and dread. 

When fear and dread came to me while I was lying down, I would not sit up or stand or walk. I would keep lying down until I had subdued that fear and dread.

Radical Responsibility

There’s a radical responsibility the Buddha is showing us. Fear is an extremely active emotion that can be very helpful when we need it. There are plenty of situations where fear is a completely appropriate response. Still, it shows up in moments when we want to face what is in front of us rather than run, in situations where we no longer want to be hijacked by our external environments.

The Buddha shows us that we can subdue this fear in a simple yet counterintuitive way: by pausing and remaining present. When we pause and bear witness to fear, we gain a radical responsibility. Fear will tell us it lives in prisons, forests, hospital rooms, stages, or difficult conversations. But fear doesn’t live somewhere outside of us; fear abides within.

Fear is an inside job.

It is extremely empowering to no longer place the responsibility for fear on external conditions. When we take responsibility for our emotions, we can respond of our own volition. To put it simply, responsibility gives us the ability to respond.

React vs. Respond

It’s often said the Buddha taught only suffering and the end of suffering. But I appreciate how many modern Buddhist teachers, such as Stephen Batchelor, redefine this as suffering and the end of reactivity. This is because there are obvious forms of suffering in the external world that cannot be changed—death, loss, aging, and sickness—but there is a layer of suffering that can be avoided. It’s the suffering that lives inside us, namely reactivity.

When we are impulsively obedient to fear, we lose our freedom and autonomy. We become trapped in automatic reactions that often lead us to familiar avoidance behaviors, such as addiction or remaining stuck in unwanted relationships and situations.

This becomes our default setting, and we’re caught in a harmful cycle of avoiding fear.

We reactively lose our ability to stop ourselves. But when we pause and turn toward fear, we gain freedom. The freedom to be afraid without reacting. The freedom to choose our response. There’s a famous and widely shared quote attributed to Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, but dammit, isn’t it perfect? He states:

“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.”

When we pause with fear, as the Buddha did, there is a spaciousness in the pause. There may be constriction in the chest, tightness in the body, and scary stories in our minds. But when we pause, we gain space through the full expression of fear, not despite it. When we sit in the company of fear, we gain the freedom to respond with care.

There’s an unfortunate misconception that the opposite of reactivity is repression. That we can push down fear, hide from fear, and repress fear through force or avoidance. That is not an act of a spiritual gangster; that’s just meeting reactivity with more reactivity.

The gangster thing to do is to look fear right in its eyes and say to it, “My dear friend Fear, I’m here for you, and I love you.”

Entering the Gates of Hell

So, I sat in the parking lot in my unimpressive 2013 Toyota Prius, with its chipped paint and stock stereo. I looked through the windshield. The prison stretched across the horizon behind aggressively tall chain-link fences wrapped in coils of heavy razor wire that shimmered in the Tennessee sun.

Off in the distance, I could see the entrance to the prison. A portal to the gates of so many people’s Hell realm. Those whose entire lives have been defined by their worst moments. This massive prison built on the memories of broken homes, years of trauma, systemic injustice, untreated mental illness, and the torment that gave birth to the horrible crimes they committed.

I sat, feeling the pressure to start walking toward the home of those society has rejected. I’m here to witness a dear friend in the Dharma face the final weeks of her life. I’m here to meditate with a woman who has been labeled evil, demonic, and satanic by the media. I’m here to listen to her cries, hold space for her frustrations, and be honest about the truth of death.

I don’t want to create a prison within myself in the way society has for the residents of the Debra K. Johnson Rehabilitation Center. I don’t want to reject parts of me because they are scary. I don’t want to lock up this fear in me.

I sat and thought about what it would be like to free this fear from imprisonment. That’s when I became intimately aware of the waves of sensation living in my body. The weight in my gut, the fire in my arms, the sweat on my palms, the tightness in my shoulders. It was all absolutely free to be there. That’s when I turned off my car, put on my “religious services” badge, opened the door, and began walking down the asphalt walkway of the parking lot, lined with those absurdly giant chain-link fences.

I stood up straight, with my head held high, and whispered to myself, “gangster shit.”

 

 

*If you would like to learn more about Christa Pike, her case, and the efforts seeking mercy on her behalf, visit: mercyforchrista.org

 

Mikey Noechel (he/him) is a Buddhist teacher empowered to teach in both the Theravada and Mahayana traditions. He holds a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and serves as the guiding teacher at Wild Heart Meditation Center in Nashville, TN. Known for blending timeless Buddhist wisdom with modern psychology, Mikey brings meditation into treatment centers, prisons, retreat halls, and beyond. Currently, Mikey is the spiritual advisor for a woman named Christa Pike who has been on death row since 1996 and is facing execution on September 30, 2026. 

 

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

Were you inspired by this? You may also like:

My Bodhisattva Vow: I’ll Do My Best to Stop Your Suffering

Writings from Prison: A Righteous Indignation.

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