The Prisons of Our Own Making

I was asked during a workshop recently what I stand for – what I am committed to that is bigger than my own individual experience. For several years now, through the building of Illuminate, that stand has been about helping people to connect to their own light, their own wisdom, to mine within themselves all of the intelligence needed to make the next right choice in their life path and for the world. That has not changed, but I think it is also asking for some refinement, some illumination, for even deeper clarity and focus.

This has been a year of expansion and growth for me, particularly due to two pivotal experiences I had. The first was a journey deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle for 12 nights living with and learning from the teachings of the indigenous Sapara and Achuar peoples. Insights from this journey will undoubtedly come out in further writings, but to call the experience voluminous, awe-giving, and interconnected, are inadequate attempts that only ballpark the deeply sacred experience that it was.

The second experience shortly after, was a month-long training in Shakespeare for Social Justice which included working via drama therapy and Shakespeare with men incarcerated at San Quentin and Folsom state prisons in California. Both were deeply transformative experiences, the fruits of which are only beginning to evidence themselves.

As we wrap up 2023 and allow for the doors to open on 2024, the timing feels right, for many of us, to crystallize or illuminate what we stand for now and into the next year. The Enneagram Prison Project, an organization I’m honored to have begun training with this year, has a mission to “free people – all over the world – from the prisons of our own making.” I honestly can’t think of a better stand for myself and my work going forward and I would like to officially make it my stand here at the inflection point of a new year. To do my part in helping to free people - all over the world - from the prisons of our own making.

What are the prisons of our own making? In large part, they are the beliefs and stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about each other, and about our world, that keep us trapped in suffering and stuckness, that prod us toward “othering” – (seeing our fellow beings as less than, more than, or other than), and that trap us into seeing our world and planet as either hopelessly careening toward destruction or as an infinite resource that can be extracted and mined to meet our insatiable “needs”.

I ponder this idea of story often, both professionally and personally. And I’m becoming hard-pressed to determine what is “not” a story in our human experience. Aside from the times we might achieve a state of conscious presence wherein person (and therefore story) dissolves, it seems that most of the time we are living out the story we are creating at any given point in time. How often is this story one of lack? Scarcity? Victimization? Fear? Despair?

While at San Quentin State Prison this summer, I was as much a student of the men I was working with as a facilitator. These men were imprisoned by any definition of the word, stripped of daily freedoms most of us never take notice of. They aren’t given the option to decide what to wear, what to eat, what to do, where to go. And yet what no one could strip away from them, and what I saw in spades, was resilience. Despite unfathomable childhoods and decades of incarceration in some cases, resilience was the quality I experienced in the room every time I visited. Resilience to get up another day, show up to class, show up to work. Resilience to break through the stories that they, others and society had put on them and continue to tell about them. A huge part of that resilience I witnessed is due to the emerging, new stories they are telling themselves about who they are and what is possible. It is one of the few things they can control that no one can take away.

In the workshop I mentioned at the beginning, I experienced first-hand the physiological and psychological impact of a pivoted story. In one exercise, we were asked to tell a partner our historical sob story around money with all of the drama and victimization we could muster. This went on and on with accompanying shame, embarrassment, and sadness at our “lack” and misfortune. Then a day later, with another partner, we were instructed to tell the story of our life in all of its sufficiency and enoughness – down to the sun in the morning and the butterfly on the railing. We were the same people with the same history but a vastly different story about it. For me, the first was a visceral experience of vacancy and smallness while the second was an overflowing fount of power, gratitude and incredulity at the provision of life. Same person, different story. The experience only served to reinforce my commitment to help myself and others break free from the stories that keep us imprisoned in misery.

Do they have to be true? I guess that follows with the question - what is true? My teacher Martha Beck always said that “truth tastes like freedom”, meaning that when we know something to be true, deeply know it, every cell of our body feels light and free, as if in flight. While a lie makes us feel dark, small, constricted. There’s no question in my mind which I’d rather feel personally and which I’d rather be in community of others feeling and living.

How about you? Can you feel the difference? In what ways are you imprisoning yourself? Might 2024 be the year you finally dismantle the stories that hurt you, others and your world?

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Viktor E. Frankl