Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

Working in prisons, I get to see the results of "bad"
karma up close, although it's hardly any different
outside the prison walls. Every inmate has a story of
one thing leading to another. After all, that's what
stories are. One thing leading to another. Many
hardly know what happened to them, what went
wrong. Usually it's a long chain of events starting with
parents and family, the culture of the streets, poverty
and violence, trusting people you shouldn't, looking
for an easy buck, soothing the hurt and dulling the
senses with alcohol and other chemicals which cloud
mind and body. Drugs do it, but so do history,
deprivation, and arrested development. They warp
thoughts and feelings, actions and values, leaving
few avenues for modulating or even recognizing
hurtful, cruel, destructive and self-destructive
impulses or cravings.
And so, in one moment, which all your other
moments led up to, unbeknownst to you, you can
"lose your mind," commit an irreversible act, and then
experience the myriad ways in which it shapes future
moments. Everything has consequences, whether we
know it or not, whether we are "caught" by the police
or not. We are always caught Caught in the karma of
it. We build our own prisons every day. In one way,
my friends in prison made their choices, whether they
knew it or not. In other ways, they didn't have