When you picture an ideal place to meditate, what comes to mind?
Chances are, it’s not a prison cell . . .
. . . and yet mindfulness is making inroads in several areas of the prison system.
After discovering a widespread history of trauma and neglect among the female inmates he works with, one practitioner started introducing them to mindfulness practice.
So how have the women responded?
Just click below to find out in this short video. While the video quality is spotty in parts, the story is compelling so we wanted to share it with you.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve shared stories from practitioners about how they’re integrating mindfulness into their work. If you’ve missed them, you can find them on our blog: How to Make Mindfulness Work in Your Practice and Mindfulness and Bipolar Disorder . . . A Life Transformed.
And coming up, we’ll give you another look at how mindfulness is transforming people’s lives in ways and areas you might least expect.
But in the meantime, we’d like to hear from you. How have you applied mindfulness in your work with patients? Please share your comments below.
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Thanks for every other informative blog. The place else may I get that kind of information written in such a perfect way? I’ve a project that I’m just now operating on, and I’ve been at the glance out for such information.
Mindfulness is a proven technique for many , it should be embraces better by all.
This is so inspiring – Thank You! It’s wonderful to have these examples of how M is being used to such good effect and how it is reaching people to whom it is natural, but who would ordinarily not have access to this part of themselves.
I would like very much to share this video on our Clear Mind Institute site. Is this at all possible please?
Great video. Please check out our websites for more info on mindfulness in prisons:
Prison Mindfulness
Mindful Corrections
I think we are just beginning to see the incredible benefits ancient practices can bring to modern therapy. I am delighted to see more and more research coming out demonstrating the positive outcomes that yoga and mindfulness offer to those who suffer. One day we may get to the point that a person’s first stop in mental health healing is not to a pharmaceutical peddler but to a therapist trained in meditation/yoga (I know I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one…..).
I went through a 15 week training in Mindfulness as part of my own Cognitive and Behavioral Rehabilitation from a near-fatal car accident. What a transformative, healing, personal and group process. And I say this having a meditation practice for close to 40 years and meditation combined with sitting meditation as highly yin yoga. Having practiced it; having taught it. Always learning.
The profound significance of being wholly engaged myself, as student/learner in all that I teach/offer/transmit in whatever form has been exponential really.
The ‘noticing’ – ah, the noticing – which I received such amazing learning from in my Meditation and Highly Yin Yoga Practice all those now 42 years, blossomed into another layer of being. I went on to lead a Retreat (34 people, ages 17 – 79, 5 mornings entitled: Embodying Spirit – wholely inhabiting and loving your body . . . your very be-ing.
I wove the Mindfulness Process throughout the entire process of leading them into relating with themselves through Qi Gong, Acupressure/healthy nourishing educated touch, Movement and Sound as Play; Movement and Sound as Healer, Writing, Group Process, Art. Clearly transformative process for the Participants. Enormously so.
And at the end of 5 days – one has the experience of a truly, wholly nourished and conscious nervous system which I believe we will one day call ‘normal’ .
Recently, I completed a study on the use mindfulness practices including yoga and self-compassion with uninsured and/or low-income patients with depression and/or anxiety. Pre- and-post methodology was used to measure depression, anxiety, self-compassion, and general well-being. Results indicated that depressive and anxiety symptoms were decreased significantly from pre to post, and self-compassion and general wellness were improved significantly in participants from pre to follow-up conditions.
How can MINDFULNESS work for those who have defaulted to the primitive vagal system?
My best guess is to attempt to breathe and think about thinking! But it takes minutes to *come back* when you’ve dropped into the lower vagal branch.
Prison is a state of mind. And mindfulness unlocks the prison no matter where we are!! The key is in being your true heart!!
That was fantastic. Thanks for sharing your story!
I have worked with Sex offenders and “mental patients” in a maximum security psych. hospital and in my local county jail with excellent results with mindfulness meditation, Qui Gong, and Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. The meditation and Qui Gong has been effective in helping people to be more aware and present and be less reactive or volatile. The Nonviolent Communication has made a major impact in supporting the folks in getting in touch with their precious basic human needs and finding strategies to meet those needs while also considering the needs of others as just as precious. I see it as being able to be more compassionate with one’s self and others, a technique I have found to be very healing.
Website is HumistonWellness.com
1987-89 working as a physician on Rikers Island (NYC’s 5-county jail, 15,000 inmates) I taught mindfulness in the limited opportunities I had; it helped, but other staff utterly disinterested.
1990-93 working in Albany, OR with convicted sex offenders on probation/parole, had great results; terminated when local probation office said it was “unscientific” and therefore unacceptable. Published 6-page report can be read on our website.
What is the website link? please send to my email?
yogaHOPE (www.yogahope.org) is currently running a 16 session curriculum combining discussion, breathwork, yoga and meditation at the women’s prison in Massachusetts and is collecting data. yogaHOPE researchers will be presenting to the Symposium on Yoga Research and to the American Public Health Association. If anyone is interested in the data, please contact me.
Hi Rhonda, I would be interested in your data. We are looking to expand our services to various sectors of community, including local jail
Thanks for intrnduciog a little rationality into this debate.
In Houston there is the Hostel of Santa Maria, a residential substance abuse treatment center for Mothers with their children. Teacher yoga for one hour a week we would practice a quiet time during the hour, either at the beginning, middle or end. It was a chance to close their eyes, focus on their breath and stop thoughts from intruding.
Some women relished this time and looked forward to their weekly yoga. Others, mostly those that were recently joining the group, were very uncomfortable..
My hope was that for those who came and enjoyed the practice – that they continued during their treatment and placed a moment in their daily life for quiet time.
Since the webinar with Jack Kornfield, I have been having conversations with people about self compassion as well as working with self compassion myself. it is amazing how often we will laughingly notice how critical we become in criticizing our self compassion! It brings up fear, guilt and doubt. This has been a very useful conversation.
I really apiaecprte free, succinct, reliable data like this.
November 8, 2012 at 12:21 pm I do like the manner in which you have faermd this particular matter plus it does supply me some fodder for consideration. However, coming from what precisely I have observed, I really trust as the actual responses pack on that men and women keep on point and don’t embark on a soap box of some other news of the day. Yet, thank you for this superb point and though I can not concur with this in totality, I respect your perspective.
Hello all,
As a volunteer from the Zen temple here, I have been teaching meditation to female inmates and see how powerful it is. Of course they volunteer to be in my class. This means that they already have an intention to receive help. A lot comes up when we sit quietly. I realiized very quickly that I needed to help them deal with what arises then. So, I do some basic education about life process, emotions, ways our bodies cope. I also teach tools such as Breathwork, mindfulness, Tapping and Focusing to help out. They soak it up and keep me inspired and motivated in my own life prcess.
Grateful for the series I was able to attend with you and hoping to be able to avail of more training.
Joya,
I was excited to hear you have been teaching Tapping. what a great idea! I will start doing that as well. As that works on Meridians and Accupressure points I think you may also like using Qui Gong which also brings in energy through the meridians in the body.
Wonderful Albert,
Peace to ourselves, our clients and then it spreads out into relationships and the world.
keep up the good work!
Peace,
Susan
Finally – my dream come true! I remember decades ago sitting in front of a large double-page newspaper with a list of death “penalty” people. I looked each of them in the eye on the photo, in an attempt to humanize them and asked quietly: “What happened to you, to that innocent baby?” I am fully aware that these people, like the Boston boy, are traumatized and very dissociated, which makes their presumed wrong-doing almost dream-like to them and a message from their traumatized unconscious. Are we continuing our inhuman penal system, further increasing that dissociating with brutal punishments or are we doing what the man Christ told us to do, “forgive them for they know not what they do”? Are we brutally and stupidly “punishing” them (lynching, enemy projecting tribal mentality) or helping them to learn what they didn’t get in the first place – presence? Tell us when you find a way to spread this all over the prison-system. Only yesterday I signed a petition to stop solitary confinement from a mother who lost her child-boy to suicide from the pain of that. Don’t we know from POWs how incredibly cruel and stupid that is to sensory human beings – worse than death? I had the doubtful privilege to “enjoy” a 5-day coma while remaining conscious and happy outside the body and an ensuing full paralysis and aphasia, which was brutal but the “re-programming” even more so sensitized me to the cultural programming we all fall prey to. Get it already! We are all better or worse “bundles of programs” falling prey then even more so to loose voices of the dark while dissociated and need to look at that rather than severely punishing these people for an obviously a normal human dynamic!
Many thanks
.This video is fantastic .
Am a member of Townsville Mindfulness Network promoting mindfulness practice among allied health practitioners. Found practice useful with incarcerated indigenous youth & community clients experiencing high arousal and avoidance – has helped ground, centre, calm, dissipate feelings of anger – simply through observing, labeling, and accepting & of course breath awareness skills
Congratulations on your work. I’ll pass your name on to another psychologist who is working with Indigenous males.