Spiral: Misery * Madness * Meditation

The riveting true story of one man's extraordinary transformation from bank robber to meditation teacher and award-winning artist.

Troy Bridges was born in South Carolina to poor, abusive, alcoholic parents who rarely stayed in one place for long. He tried to escape this chaos by joining the Marine Corps at 18, but a final betrayal by his parents left him believing he had to go AWOL. Feeling he had no one to turn to and nowhere to go, he began drifting through a series of increasingly bad life choices that ultimately led him to robbing banks.

Troy never used violence or carried a weapon. Instead he would dress in a thrift-store suit and hand the bank teller a note. Fleeing the bank, he would discard the suit and live a life of leisure for weeks or months-however long it took the money to run out. When he was arrested he'd escape and repeat the whole cycle, until one day he happened to find a book abandoned in a prison corridor that changed him, and he began to ask himself why his life had ended up the way it had.

And he began to meditate.

Filled with vivid characters and unflinching honesty, Spiral is the story of how Troy not only transformed himself from recidivist criminal to model prisoner, but found redemption through service to others and became a messenger of peace in the midst of an often brutal prison system.