QiGong Prison Ministry

Am I teaching the men coping skills so then can "go with the flow" of all the violence dished out at them -- by their fellow prisoners, by the nature of their confinement, by themselves, by the institution, by society?

Am I teaching skills to roll over, expose your belly and take all the treading upon with an inner smile?

QiGong practices will provide tools to endure the harsh, violent dehumanizing time of incarceration.  QiGong connects with a bigger field of harmonized energy filled with potential.

QiGong shifts the human body, psyche and soul in overt and obvious ways as well as subtle and subversive ways. To bring your body into a state of harmony and balance has consequences that you may not choose deliberately.  Ripples vibrate flowing out from the center of awareness we cultivate, shifting our essence and relationships and surroundings.

I teach QiGong in prisons as a process essential to my personal journey.  As I learn to serve those who seem so different from me, I know them as essentially the same as me. The ability to be change, to be peace, and the motivation to change violent behaviors, institutions, traditions arise from an internal place. When we know personally the place where peace and change dance as brother and sister.

When the impulse to become an instrument of change, and instrument of peace, comes from that core connection with the root of all life – with moving stillness – it is emerges from a source much greater that the self – then our service rolls out on the flow of God’s love and reaches amazing places.

Revolutionary change, such as what is needed to turn the prison system and cycles of human violence and alienation inside out, will not come from anger or fear– even though anger at prison conditions and fear of violence is a natural response. It will come from insight into the nature of human violence by those who have been there, someone who can see the path out, because they have suffered inside the belly of the beast.

Someone like Victor Frankle who in watching his comrades in concentration camps loose their sense of purpose quickly die, while those who founds scraps of purpose, stayed alive in their souls, and could live off moldy crusts of bread.

Someone like Nelson Mandela who could lead a nation through tribunals of reconciliation because he knew, and yet could see beyond, the poison of human hatred that had held them captive for years.

One of the highest visions I hold is that my coming, and the tools of movements of balance that we share, will quicken (catalyze/nurture/stimulate) such leadership – and the comradeship and internal support essential for systematic change as well as personal change.

I trust that as we cultivate balance and harmony within the chapel, it does not begin and end with our class. There are thousand sparks of divined light in any prison – God flows on the human kindness that operates even clandestinely undercover.

The truest revolution is a revolution of the heart. The healthiest change is one that happens from within, organically seeking the greater potential we all have as our human birthright.

QiGong moves us into a state of fluid participation with universal energies of a greater wisdom, love and harmony than our own. As we move our various dimensions of being into harmony we emerge transformed.  This deeper level of participation with the life force that knows nothing of lockdowns, cell bars, guards and gates, and will carry us towards a time when prisons are a thing of the past.