Many people think that meditation is about serene, peaceful people with clear minds contemplating soothing thoughts while sitting in silence.
Well, think again.
Because Jessica Pimentel is here to shake your shit up.
Pimentel, who plays Maria Ruiz on the Netflix original series “Orange Is the New Black,” and fronts the extreme metal band, Alekhine’s Gun, is an avid practitioner of Buddhism and meditation.
At the core of Pimentel’s meditation practice is compassion—an understanding of another’s pain and the desire to somehow mitigate their suffering. Pimentel has found that, to be compassionate, one has to persistently and rigorously wrestle with the darkest and most disturbing parts of others’ experiences, as well as her own.
And in talking with Pimentel, I came to a simple conclusion: Compassion can be brutal.
Pimentel began her career in music as a classically trained violinist and eventually went to Fiorella H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she studied both music and acting. Eventually, Pimentel then found her way to heavier forms of music; namely, hardcore punk and heavy metal.
“I was really drawn to the New York heavy metal and hardcore community because it was a community, a scene. And the music wasn’t this fantastical, whimsical thing,” Pimentel told me. “It was about life now in the world we live in—expressing frustrations of urban living. It was the first music that I heard that addressed social issues.
“It wasn’t about riding dragons somewhere.”
Though heavy music and meditation may sound incompatible, Pimentel actually discovered Buddhist meditation in part through listening to hardcore bands that explored different Eastern spiritual practices. “You get this Krishna consciousness that starts pervading with bands like 108 and Cro-Mags. And that started piquing my interest,” she said.
Pimentel soon began exploring Buddhism and Buddhist meditation with a focus on compassion. And the first step in compassion for others often means letting go of our own selfish point of view. Part of being able to do so is realizing that a self-centered viewpoint limits our ability to be happy.
“You have to let go of your selfishness. And it’s ingrained in us. We want to protect ourselves,” she explained. “We have this self-grasping ‘I’ that always makes ‘I’ the center of the universe. And when ‘I’ is the center of the universe, you will never be happy. We feel slighted or angry because we are only considering our own needs, as compared to the needs or perspectives of others.
“Fighting hate with hate is like fighting fire with fire. Everyone gets burned. There’s a great saying of the Buddha: ‘Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else,’” Pimentel said.
“You are the one who gets burned.”
Once we let go of our self-centered perspective, we can then start to focus on others and start the path toward compassion. “The problem with being selfish is that, oftentimes, we are not in a position to understand why someone may have done something to bother us,” she explained. “My meditation practice, which is mostly practicing compassion and the Tibetan practice of lojong mind training, teaches you how to put yourself in the place of others consistently as a daily practice.”
Pimentel feels that we can be in complete control of our emotions by choosing to focus not on our feelings of hurt, but on understanding others and not assuming that their intentions are bad.
“You realize that most of the time when you’re angry—actually, 100 percent of the time you’re angry—it’s coming from your side. The reason you’re dissatisfied is that you’ve put yourself in the position of ‘This person did this to me,’” Pimentel said. “But when you do things to change your point of view, and see things from another person’s point of view, you realize they are doing what is making them happy, or what they believe is making them happy. And when you realize that is what that person did to make themselves happy, it becomes a protective shield.
“And you feel compassion for that person.”
Pimentel described another form of meditation, tonglen, which takes things a step further—experiencing the pain of others. “Not only are you seeing things from another’s perspective, but you take the suffering of others and try to feel it as your own. And in return, you give them positivity,” she explained. “And this means understanding your role in the interaction and making changes yourself, rather than imploring others to do so. How can you change? You can change through your actions. You can change through your words, your behavior—if you come at them with love, if you come at them peacefully.”
To be sure, compassion meditation is not a simple or easy process. “The hardest thing about Buddhism is that there’s no innocence. You’re always part of the problem—the cause, the effect. We’re all intertwined—all outcomes. That’s a fine line. Because if we talk about karma or destiny, then you say it was this person’s karma to get murdered. Which is a very bleak, dark way to look at things,” Pimentel explained. “But the reason some things happen comes before we knew what we were doing. The pattern of abuse doesn’t just fall out of the sky one day. It comes from two people that meet. And they have the common causes and circumstances to create that environment. One or both may have low self-esteem. One or both may have been abused as children.
“These are things we have to start thinking about now and breaking for ourselves.”
But Pimentel makes it clear that taking responsibility for one’s situation does not equate to passivity in the face of abuse. “It is OK to fight back. Compassion and forgiveness do not mean becoming a doormat,” she said. “And if you see someone who is in danger, if you are a Buddhist at the bodhisattva level, part of your vow is to defend them.”
Compassion meditation is also hard work, as it requires a constant exploration of one’s own experience and the experience of others to grow and develop. “People say ‘I’m meditating. I’m not thinking about anything.’ Quite the opposite: You’re working and thinking very hard in different types of meditation. You have to look at the negative and take care of it,” she explained.
“Keeping that focus and drive—one of the perfections is called the perfection of effort. And effort is to strive to be better, to strive to fix the negativity. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s like churning dirty water. If you let it sit still for a long time, you think it’s clean. If you’re a meditator—a yogi or yogini—you’re constantly churning that water.
“And you realize it’s filthy in here.”
A dark time in her life that reinforced her commitment to meditation came in 2012, when Pimentel experienced several losses and an episode of depression. “2012 was one of the worst years of my life. I was in a bad relationship. I had a tonsillar abscess. I almost died. A close friend of mine committed suicide. I lost my job, lost my musical equipment, band merchandise and artwork and rehearsal room in Hurricane Sandy as did many of my friends and I couldn’t go home for days. So there was a constant depression and mourning,” she recalled. “My aunt said, ‘You have to understand that there’s beauty in the darkness.’”
In addition to Pimentel’s regular meditation practice, she thinks that one of the ways of exploring her own experience and the experience of others is through her music and acting, as both enhance very particular compassion skills.
Pimentel described how she prepares for her Alkheline’s Gun performances so as to be able to explore various experiences. “So I was going to do something that was going to shake people and dedicate it to dharma as much as I could. And dedicate it as much as I could to other beings and reaching out and touching them and bonding with them,” she said. “So, before I do a show, we clean the room Native American style and Tibetan style. We do Native American chants, Tibetan chants and Sanskrit Mantras before a show and I paint my face and body with various powerful symbols (some hidden some open).
And I do a meditation where I can envision myself in whatever form I need to be in order to convey a message and connect with the audience.”
Interestingly, while many people feel that extreme heavy-metal music causes anger and even violence, research suggests that for people who are heavy-metal fans, listening to heavy metal actually reduces anxiety and irritability.
Pimentel discusses the effect heavy-metal music has on her. “I feel like metal was a real healing- and happiness-bringer in life. But people said, ‘You listen to this depressing music. It’s depressing.’ It was the opposite—it was comforting,” she said. “Because you felt that you weren’t alone in the world. Someone is telling the story of your life for you, and music becomes your best friend.
“There are some songs I love more than people.”
And in acting, Pimentel experiences a type of mindfulness. “You have to be keenly focused to remember your lines and actions. And in order to get a good performance, you have to be keenly aware of what the person you are acting with is doing,” she explained. “Your body language has to match the other person…That requires a lot of focus—not only on yourself, but also every single thing that’s happening in the moment.”
And it’s a two-way street. Pimentel’s acting informs her meditation, but also her meditation informs her acting. She is able to conceptualize the complexity of her characters more clearly, which allows her to give her characters depth.
She described how she engages in this approach with her incarcerated character on “Orange is the New Black.”
“No one is straight good or bad…So it’s my responsibility as an actor to take those roles that seem one-dimensional and give them dimension,” she explained. “If you treat that convict as a loving mother, who we don’t know what she’s done yet, one who’s physically abused, protecting herself and her family—and focus on that more than the prisoner part, you’re going to get a totally different feel of that same character.”
Over time, Pimentel has seen the differences in terms of how she feels, and how others react to her. And she says that she has become more compassionate, and that negative emotions tend to fade away, starting a more positive personal and interpersonal cycle.
“Things like anger, depression, frustration, jealousy, desire for accumulation, for notoriety, go away in time,” she explained. “Someone cuts in front of the line, and you say, ‘Wow! Something is wrong. They’re tense or stressed out that they felt that they had to be mean.’ And the more you see things that way, the easier it becomes to say, ‘Let this person go ahead of me.’
“And people become relaxed around you.”
And so Pimentel will keep churning dirty water, continuing to explore her own experience and the experience of others to build compassion. And while she knows this process will be difficult, she doesn’t appear too concerned.
“Sometimes losing yourself is good.”
Photo credit: David Williams
