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    Finding Freedom: How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart
    Finding Freedom: How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart
    Finding Freedom: How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart
    Ebook175 pages2 hours

    Finding Freedom: How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart

    By Jarvis Jay Masters and Pema Chödrön

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    About this ebook

    There are many forms of liberation—some that exist at the mercy of circumstance and others that can never be taken away. In this stirring and timely collection of stories, essays, poems, and letters, Jarvis Jay Masters explores the meaning of true freedom on his road to inner peace through Buddhist practice. He reveals his life as a young African American man surrounded by violence, his entanglement in the criminal justice system, and—following an encounter with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche—an unfolding commitment to nonviolence and peacemaking. At turns joyful, heartbreaking, frightening, and soaring with profound insight, Masters’s story offers a vision of hope and the possibility of freedom in even the darkest of times.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherShambhala
    Release dateJul 14, 2020
    ISBN9780834843028
    Finding Freedom: How Death Row Broke and Opened My Heart

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      Book preview

      Finding Freedom - Jarvis Jay Masters

      SANCTUARY

      SANCTUARY

      When I first entered the gates of San Quentin in the winter of 1981, I walked across the upper yard holding a box called a fish-kit filled with my prison-issued belongings. I saw the faces of hundreds who had already made the prison their home. I watched them stare at me with piercing eyes, their faces rugged and their beards of different shades—all dressed in prison blue jeans and worn, torn coats—some leaning against the chain fences, cigarettes hanging from their lips, others with dark glasses covering their eyes.

      I will never forget when the steel cell door slammed shut behind me. I stood in the darkness trying to fix my eyes and readjust the thoughts that were telling me that this was not home—that this tiny space would not, could not be where I would spend more than a decade of my life. My mind kept saying, No! Hell no! I thought again of the many prisoners I had seen moments ago standing on the yard, so old and accustomed to their fates.

      I dropped my fish-kit. I spread my arms and found that the palms of my hands touched the walls with ease. I pushed against them with all my might, until I realized how silly it was to think that these thick concrete walls would somehow budge. I groped for the light switch. It was on the back wall, only a few feet above the steel-plated bunk bed. The bed was bolted into the wall like a shelf. It was only two and a half feet wide by six feet long, and only several feet above the gray concrete floor.

      My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by the time I turned the lights on. But until now I hadn’t seen the swarms of cockroaches clustered about, especially around the combined toilet and sink on the back wall. When the light came on, the roaches scattered, dashing into tiny holes and cracks behind the sink and in the walls, leaving only the very fat and young ones still running scared. I was beyond shock to see so many of these nasty creatures. And although they didn’t come near me, I began to feel roaches climbing all over my body. I even imagined them mounting an attack on me when I was

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