From Picking Fights to Pausing: One Man's Walk Through Navigating Conflict with Buddhist Wisdom

A packet of assignment pages arrived at our P.O. Box recently, sent from a California state prison by a student I'll call John. He had just finished our Navigating Conflict with Buddhist Wisdom correspondence course, and his eleven chapters of answers — written in firm, sometimes hurried handwriting — tell the kind of story I've come to recognize. A man arrives at the first page one person and leaves the last page another.

What's striking about John's packet isn't that he learned the material. It's that he turned it on himself.

The Man at the First Page

When John started the course, he wasn't shy about who he'd been. Asked what his first impulse is when someone disrespects him, he wrote one word:

"Violence."

He named his thorn as greed — the rooster of the three poisons — and said it shows up whenever he's "not satisfied." He admitted he tends to react fast, to want to win, to prove he's right, to call people out to fight over small things. In one early reflection he described himself plainly:

"At times I tend to move and react too fast straight into the fire."

A lot of people would soften that. John didn't. He gave us the man he was, sharp edges and all, and then he started doing the work.

Catching Himself Mid-Reach

The shift you can feel as the chapters go on isn't dramatic. It's quieter than that. It's a man learning to notice the half-second before the fist closes, the half-breath before the sharp word leaves his mouth. He started reaching for what the course calls the Bell of Mindfulness — that internal pause that buys you enough time to choose something other than the old habit.

By Chapter Three, the same man who wrote "Violence" was writing this:

"I will be so powerful that no insult can shake me, I'll be grounded."

That's not a fantasy of toughness. That's a different definition of strength — one rooted in the Akkosa Sutta, where the Buddha refuses to "accept" the insults thrown at him and lets them fall back to the ground. John heard that teaching and wanted it for himself.

He started naming the practices that were helping. The mantra "this will pass." The compassion phrase he wrote in for the "just like me" exercise — five plain words: "This person makes mistakes." And the closing reflection on goodwill that I keep returning to:

"If I was to start using kindness wishing well for those I have a problem with or is the thorn in my heart, will eradicate that, and fill my heart with compassion instead."

The Hardest Mirror

The chapter where John's transformation really lands is the one on assumptions and projection. The prompt asks students to think of a time they felt disrespected, and what assumptions they made about the other person. John wrote about an ex-girlfriend who he believed had belittled him, excluded him, dismissed what he said and felt. He listed the feelings that came up — anger, sadness, jealousy — and then the thoughts of hurting her. He listed the story he'd built about her: that she must be cheating, that she didn't love him.

And then he did something most people never do, even with years of therapy. He wrote:

"I guess most were based on personal biases and a part personal experiences. Due to that, she was behaving and doing things that I did when I cheated in one of my past relationships."

That is a man holding up the mirror, recognizing that the worst things he was accusing her of were the things he himself had done, and that his accusations were his own guilt walking around wearing her face. When the chapter asks how pausing might have changed things, he writes:

"Honestly, if I knew what I know now, so much would have changed and definitely the outcome would be completely different."

You can hear the grief in that sentence. You can also hear the freedom.

Still in the Work

I want to be careful not to make this sound finished. It isn't. By Chapter Ten, John is writing about a friend on his unit who pushes every button he has — a guy who has to be right about everything, who responds with attitude, who turns every conversation into conflict. John doesn't pretend he's risen above it. He writes:

"Honestly I try and things get better, but then it fails when he responds disrespectfully, but I'll keep trying to use loving-kindness."

I'll keep trying. That, more than any single insight, is what tells me he's actually doing the practice. The work isn't a peak you reach; it's a direction you keep walking, even when the same person keeps disappointing you the same way. He even ends that reflection with the old saying — "kill them with kindness" — which made me laugh out loud, because it's exactly the right marriage of street wisdom and dharma.

What John Sees Now

By the final page, John is talking about karma not as fate but as cause and effect, as choice. He names the three teachings he's taking with him: cooling the fire, untangling the mind, and the four gates of speech. And he closes the packet with this:

"Breaking the chain, changing the things I used to do that always caused conflict, so I can now have different effects."

A man who began the course writing the word 'Violence' as his first impulse ended it talking about effects, about the choices upstream of every reaction, and about the possibility of choosing a different one. He's not claiming to be a peaceful man. He's claiming to be a man who has finally seen the chain and decided he doesn't have to add another link.

That is what this work does. Not a personality transplant. Not a tidy redemption arc. Just a man, in a cell, learning to slow down enough to recognize the moment when he could go a different way — and starting, sometimes, to go it.

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If John's reflections moved you, our work at the Prison Mindfulness Institute puts books, workbooks, and correspondence courses like Navigating Conflict with Buddhist Wisdom into the hands of incarcerated students across the country. Learn how you can support this work.