Category Archives: Freedom from the Inside

Our life experience, as individuals and as a society, is largely driven by our actions. Our actions shape our immediate or future life experience.

One of the key messages we share in our meditation & mindfulness classes is that it doesn’t matter which side of the wire you may be on, many of us were prisoners before we were put into jail. Prisoners of greed, anger, fear, desperation, lust, loneliness, isolation, bigotry and prejudice and many other negative things.

True freedom is not changing my physical location, but becoming free – to not be enslaved by these emotions or feelings which are drivers for destructive behavior. To be free to make good choices in life. We call our program Freedom From The Inside.

Freedom from the Inside

01 – Meditation & Mindfulness in Prisons

For the past year or more, some friends from Meditation New Zealand and I, have been running Meditation & Mindfulness programs in Auckland’s maximum security prison at Paremoremo.

People ask, “what’s it like working with criminals?”  I find it very disconcerting how we, as a society, tend to ‘dehumanize’ criminals. Even our justice system tends to do this. Creating an ‘Us and Them’ mentality.   Can we do better? Yes!

Crime deserves punishment but prisoners also need reforming otherwise we pay the price.  Currently, prisons serve as ‘criminal higher education’.  When people leave prisons they have often been trained in criminal behavior, feel some anger towards society for their treatment under the penal system and often are more hardened.

Is there anything that we can or should be doing to make it so that the recidivism rate for released inmates is dramatically lowered? So that we are creating a safer and more humane society?

In this series, we will be exploring this subject and looking for real ways to achieve this.