Now. Prison Yoga Project. Now.
I'm in Hawaii. Just did a Vinyasa class almost next to the beach with a wonderful young male teacher, whose soothing voice just contributed to my overall peacefulness today. The sun is shining, and I'm back at my friend's apartment, listening to some good jazz by my newest musical discovery named Melody Gardot. Her voice, just like the yoga teacher's voice today, has an effortless quality to it. She doesn't strain to show us her vocal range, like so many singers these days do. She just is. And so, with the verbal and musical encouragement of these two individuals, I just am. Just am. Just be.
This concept of just 'being' has been manifesting itself further and further these past few weeks. For most of my being, I have always lived my life in an unapologetic way. Being an artist, not knowing where my next paycheck is coming from, where I'll be traveling to next, whom I may admire and love in one instance, while having to work on not hating someone else the next... this predictable unpredictability of life has made me appreciate the now. But as much as I'd like to claim this yogic enlightenment for myself, if I'm completely honest... I haven't gotten there yet. I learned that this last weekend, as I tried to put myself into the shoes of a group of people am never exposed to: Prisoners.
In a sense, we are all our own prisoners, and yoga and meditation are tools to set our inner prisoner free. However, I'm talking about prisoners in the physical realm. The ones who are incarcerated behind bars, who have committed crimes so heinous that being locked up and isolated from the rest of the world is the only solution society can think of. I joined the teacher training for the Prison Yoga Project, and spent two intensive days in New York listening to James Fox and Anneke Lucas and my other classmates talk about their experiences working with the prison population. Lectures didn't feel like lectures. In fact, 8 hours felt like one second. Both nights, I'd leave feeling more alive, because I got to spend time practicing something fundamentally emphasized in many spiritual and religious teachings: To be compassionate.
Compassion is something most of us lack, and I often times struggle getting over myself and my own ego to be truly compassionate. But I felt like that weekend, I got a good push into the right direction.
There's a difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is to understand another person's feeling. To be able to relate to a peer. But compassion... that is informed empathy. It's to be able to sit with someone else's pain, instead of recognizing it and escaping it immediately. So there was I was, listening to classmates, many of which were former victims of some sort of abuse, and had now turned to yoga for healing and to the prison project for redemption, and for the first time I forced myself to imagine living behind bars. To have my rights taken away from me and to have no one else but myself to blame for it.
How many monsters would I have had to ward off in my life (and fail at doing so) before turning into a monster myself when committing a crime? How little self discipline and how much abuse would I have had to go through in order to become an abuser myself. How would I have done without a support network of loving and smart family members and friends? What would it take for me to become a violent offender?
A lot. Too much to even fathom. Too much to imagine.
A criminal behind bars is a victim of trauma. No doubt about it. It doesn't excuse his actions, but it helps explain why she might have walked down that sinister road. It's easy for us yogis to preach that our mistakes don't define who we are, and that our pain body is something we can strip away with hard work to reveal our true self. But how would that go for murderers and rapists? Can we "civilians" ever be really accepting of those extreme "sinners", and get over our own fears and our own egos? After this training weekend, I really believe it's possible. That with hard work on oneself even the most violent unsettled soul can be rehabilitated. The road is just that much longer. And that much harder. But just because it's harder, doesn't make it impossible. In fact, those who do come out stronger on the other side are the true warriors of light.
I've been called an optimist more than once. In fact, someone just called me that three days ago. The word "optimist", while intended to be a positive force, always has the "unrealistic" "dreamer" vibe to it. My ego takes offense to it sometimes. But I know that most people either only believe in God or in science. Faith based on self analysis and your own gut instinct is something we often times don't trust. "Maybe one in a million will do that. Maybe one in a million will rehabilitate." An arbitrary, maybe overinflated or underestimated number, meant to push my optimism further down. Instead, it fuels me to to continue to believe. To believe that one single man or woman out there, can feel true remorse for the criminal actions, and become a loving and functioning member of society through hard work, dedication, and the foresight of knowing that with rehabilitation often times involves relapses.
So why do I want to teach yoga to the prison population? It's not to safe or fix anyone. It's to help facilitate recovery to anyone who wants to recover. And on a personal note, because serving others is part of my own healing. It can't just be contained to only those we deem fit, but must include the ones we don't feel initial affinity to. That's the only way we can learn not to judge others, and instead be inclusive of everyone.
And in the end, I believe it will make me learn even more what it means to live in the 'now'. Because tomorrow really might not happen for me. If I can facilitate alleviation of pain and stress, and help them escape their trauma even just for the duration of class time, then it will be all worth it. The Prison Yoga Project and all its participants has been the most rewarding workshop to me so far. And I thank James Fox and the heavens for this teacher training program. Or as PYP likes to call it on their facebook page I thank the program "for cultivating agents of change."
A fancy title, which I hope to earn my badge for in the very near future.
In the meantime, I'm going to go and enjoy my privileged freedom of Hawaiian sun, more jazz, and friends and family.
Peace, Love and Light. I bow to you all. Namaste,
