About three dozen men file in to a drafty room, quickly taking seats in wooden pews. A chaplain, dressed in a flowing brown robe and a gold sash, draws their attention from the front. He begins instructing them on how to breathe, focus and empty their minds. When it is time to meditate, the room falls silent. They lower their eyes with the chaplain. Like him their heads are also shaven - not because they are Buddhists or men of any particular faith, but because they are inmates of the notorious Men's Central Jail in downtown LA.
At first meditation can seem like a paradoxical thing for violent offenders to engage in, but when understood it is, in fact, an ideal match. And not just for prisoners too; this ancient self help course can, in fact, benefit anyone experiencing agitation and suffering.
Meditation is not meant to help us ignore the pains and stresses of life. It is, instead, all about actually immersing ourselves into them. The real place where our pain burden sits is within our body. By sitting still and just being with it, we allow it to roam free within ourselves. The anger or aggression that prison inmates, or any of the rest of us for that matter, feels no longer needs to oscillate between forced suppression and explosive eruptions, but instead it can float untied within us as we give it the time and space it needs to work itself through.
Meditation is my ultimate self help course. When I do it, all sorts of emotions and feelings arise that have been down there for anything from days to years. If I wasn’t able to meditate and feel them within, no doubt, through some – largely unconscious – route or other, I would have expelled them into the world, and so inevitably further added to my own pain and that of others.
Meditation is about being the observer - watching what’s inside and not judging it. Through it we will increasingly come to accept who we are and that, by definition, will make life better each day. What more would you ask from any self help course? If it can work for the inmates of an infamous LA jail, it can work for you too.
Dr Russell Razzaque is a practicing psychiatrist based in London, England. He earned his medical degree from the University of London, he is a member of the UK Royal College of Psychiatrists and in 2009, after several years of clinical development, he launched SILEOTHERAPY - an innovative online self help program...
www.meditation-therapy.net
Sileotherapy is a unique synthesis of meditation techniques and Internet therapy, and this new approach to personal development is the basis of an ongoing series of articles in this blog.
