QiGong Prison Ministry

I wander free, freely.
Engaging in the vitality of the forest, the dance floor, the garden.
Engaging the Qi, as I am inspired, as I choose, as I am chosen.
I have been chosen to engage with the Qi in a very special place.
A special place called Folsom Prison.

There those that I practice with, those that I teach have a way of living and viewing the world
as different from mine as Yin is to Yang.  (And then at times I find there is absolutely no difference at all.)

For all that my life is filled with creative vibrancy, theirs is filled the sterile and the mundane.
I live with people who love to experiment as they cook with fresh imaginative ingredients.
It is easy for me to eat as I choose organic vegetarian. The men inside must swallow the same o same o pre frozen meals bounteous in their cheap starches. No fresh veggies from the garden for them. 

I live with art and spaciousness, people I have chosen and love dearly. My friends inside might have chosen their cellmate, or maybe not.  Their “house” is tiny, sterile, harsh and hard with concrete or granite walls and the prerequisite bars.  The locks on the doors are on the outside, mine on the inside.

I get to love my family and play with my grandchildren, engaging with them spontaneously as my longing to connect picks up the phone.  Their families have to pay through the nose for collect calls

I wear what I want -- colors, styles of my choosing that compliment how I want to look in the world.  They must wear ill-fitting smocks of blue polyester with PRISONER printed loudly across the legs and backs.

This is all as prison is and who could expect differently? And today, my heart opens to the absence of the natural world in their lives.

When I wander in the forest I see them everywhere:  the young tree struggling to grow out of a rock; the multi-topped tree trying new ways when the old life was cut off; the piles of thinned out trees waiting to be burned; the valiant who survive anywhere, somehow, and the those who crowded life and have been cut down for it.

They are never far from my thoughts, for they are a piece of who I am, a piece of my consciousness.  We engage together in the fundamental stream of life force energy.  The vitality that under girds yin and yang, the yin and the yang harmonized, the new flow created when yin and yang play fruitfully together.  We have surfed together on the energy that carries us towards our highest potentials, danced with the pull of the moon, the stars and the sun; and drawn from roots of our humanness sustained by the grace of the earth. 

We fumble, we partake, we reject and we embrace.  Together we are moved and deliberately move into a field of awareness that sustains all life.  As we have these experiences, they shift who we are, they shift the nature of our physical energy, our psyche and our spiritual energies.

The consequences of our experiments can not be left at the door; can not be left inside the prison chapel; are not relegated to just our hours together on Wednesdays or Thursdays. 

For me the energy that sustains these men, sustains me, and that energy travels with me in the forest, garden or on the dance floor. It is fundamental, and as such I cannot shake it.  Many times I find myself gathered into their story when I should like to focus more clearly on what is at hand, my family, the forest, the weeds of the garden.  I used to shame myself for not being able to control my thoughts better. 

I am coming into an understanding now that because of the depths of our practicing together, especially the depths of intention that I hold for us to know and experience the universal vital nature of harmony; in that field of communion, where we move together deep inside the play of yin and yang, of prisoner and free volunteer; we have a binding, a sincerity of energetic connection that has become an integral part of how I experience life at a fundamental level. 

The colloquial way of saying this might be that “they have gotten in my blood, or under my skin.”  Not in a way that has to do with the specifics of who they are, although those with greater Te or sincerity, integrity play forward in my mind often. Not in a way that threatens my vow to the institution to avoid undue familiarity.

They are a part of the ground of my being now, inside any deep experience of communion I have away from the prison setting when I have invoked the holy within me and have surrendered to the holy around me and dissolved the distinction between the two.  Then, in that field of energy that grows the garden, melts an old tree into the ground, or inspires a composer to a great dance beat, I find myself at the ground of our beingness.  While we each may describe this place somewhat differently or take different paths there; it is the same vast field of primal source energy, balanced harmonized Qi, the source of life, the source of inspiration. And there they are, my traveling companions.

So now as I sit inside an old hollow stump of silver and char writing on the ridge top, I remember them, and I pray that the energetic field of consciousness that binds us will transfer this bounty of green, this beautiful map of the cycle of life in the forest, the howl of the wind and the strength of the sun, in some way to them.  Inside their depths, from the roots up…and when I practice with them next time, may this quality of knowing the field together, activate in not only the subtle realms, but also in the more conscious realms of our awareness.  Together may we explore the possibilities that extend both into our life paths and those that carry us no matter where we life or what label we have across our backs.