In SeattlePI.com
I DIDN'T HAVE the full scoop on Dow Gordon before I dropped by his office in the Central Area on Friday.I knew he had dealt heroin -- and got hooked on it. He also served time behind bars in Canada, Texas and Washington for trouble with guns or drugs.
Find out more about Dow Gordon here.
Gordon, who has a buzz cut and a goatee and looks younger than his 63 years, extended a welcoming hand inside the brown building with red trim where he works for the Freedom Project. The Seattle nonprofit helps prisoners change their lives.
I was interested in speaking with Gordon because the message of self-improvement that he has brought to hundreds of convicts in the state began, humbly enough, with his own transformation.
What he has to say has value for a society that is eager to lock up prisoners but offers too few keys to help them behind bars -- or after they've been released.
If prisoners can better themselves during incarceration, that could cut down on prison fights -- fights that can be deadly or lengthen sentences for those committing the violence. And who ends up paying the price tag for those longer prison sentences? Taxpayers.
But here's another thing: If prisoners learn to think about the consequences of possible courses of action, and corral anger, they can make wiser decisions when they return to life outside of the joint.
Maybe -- just maybe -- that will help reduce the odds they'll reoffend. Isn't that something everyone in Seattle and throughout the state says they want? Less crime?
Gordon helps society's "throwaways" realize their potential inner wealth. He uses a Zen toolbox -- teaching meditation, mindfulness and nonviolent communication.
The approach is making such a difference that top state administrators have noticed. This week, Gordon received the Volunteer of the Year award for his work at Monroe Correctional Complex. He's one of the first -- if not the first -- ex-felon to receive that honor.
Monroe Correctional Complex
"It's not a panacea," Gordon said of his roadmap for change. "Nor is it the only way. But it is a way to help people get to that place of self-awareness and nonviolence."
When Gordon, a self-described "white guy from Houston," was in the criminal world, his fuse was, well, short: "I was full of anger at the world. I deliberately chose to strike back by living as far outside the social norms as I could by deliberately committing criminal acts."
Name a drug and he trafficked it -- hashish, cocaine and heroin. In 1995 he was nabbed selling drugs to undercover agents with a regional drug task force.
While in jail before going to prison someone recommended that he try Vipassana meditation, which offers transformation through self- observation and introspection.
Gordon did. Slowly and unexpectedly, the meditation took root. "I started to know myself," he said. "I always thought I was a hard-ass, a tough guy. I wasn't. I was just scared and angry."
In 1999, while Gordon was serving time at Monroe, people doing prison outreach came to the prison to teach nonviolent communication. When what they were saying soaked in, Gordon had an epiphany: "Every heart yearns for the same thing -- safety, love, community."
After leaving prison in 2001 -- the meditation exercises transformed him into a model prisoner and shortened his prison time by years -- Gordon knocked on the door of the Freedom Project, a group that for nearly a decade has put into practice what had been preached to him.
Now Gordon is on the project's paid staff, though he volunteers untold hours beyond his shift, going into prisons to spread the secular word. "I call it sharing emotional intelligence," he said.
He hungers to show men and women how to transform the violence, anger, shame and judgment that clouds their thinking and denies them a chance at what he's experienced: change, from prisoner to peacemaker.
Looked at another way, he wants to free people from a prison much worse than a cellblock -- the prison of a desperate, limited mind.
"You have to look at anger a different way," he told me. "Anger is caused not by others, but by what I think about others. If I choose to get angry, I'm at the world's mercy. We choose how we act or react."
He recognizes that he harmed lives through his drug-dealing and criminal ways and expresses remorse.
He also knows the man he was back then is not the man he is now. He's sober. He's accountable. He's no longer a prisoner to what holds so many people down -- a negative state of mind.
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