Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Meditation in Prison (We are all prisoners--of our mind)

There are two well-know videos about meditation in prison - one in India is called Doing Time, Doing Vipassana, while the other is about an Alabama Prison called The Dhamma Brothers. The man responsible for both of these is S. N. Goenka, who passed last year at 88 years old. Here is a quote from him in an article in National Geographic in 2005.
"We are all prisoners--of our minds," says Satya Narayan Goenka, an 80 year-old Burmese businessman turned meditation teacher who has spearheaded the vipassana resurgence in India.
"Where better to recognize this than behind bars?" Indeed, in prisons around the world, meditation groups now meet regularly. Practicing these techniques, studies show, prisoners ease their own suffering and inflict less on others.
"I am not teaching Buddhism,"  Goenka tells me emphatically, when I meet him at his home in Mumbai. He's a big but graceful man, with a booming bass voice. "I am interested in converting people from misery to happiness, from bondage to liberation, from cruelty to compassion.
"There is no mystery to it," he continues with a chuckle, his ample belly shaking. "Vipassana means to see things as they really are.' After watching your breath for a few days, you begin to pay close attention to your sensations. You realize very quickly that you are obsessed with cravings--food, warmth, all sorts of desires-and aversion to unpleasant things. Then you realize the impermanence of it all. Everything changes. From these simple understandings, discovered by each person starting with Buddha himself, an entire doctrine eventually unfolds."


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