Building and Repairing

 

        “It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.” 

-       Frederick Douglass

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I’ve always felt an interest in and loyalty to the people with whom I have walked along the path together, no matter how long ago or how far we walked. If I’m in physical shouting distance of them, I often make a point to meet up, be it for a lunch or home visit or walk in the park. Lately, I’ve found myself re-connecting with many from all the different corners of my life. A SF School alum who I taught 50 years ago, an impressive musician I met once at a workshop in St. Louis, an old Orff colleague I hadn’t seen or heard from in the last 45 years, an old friend from Vancouver I’ve stayed in touch with since we met camping in Big Sur in 1971. I’m about to visit a school in Portland to sing at a school where two old college friends’ grandkids attend, have lunch with someone I met in a village in Kerala, India in 1979, drop in on an old alum teacher in Washington and yet more. 

 

All of this a prelude to a short visit I had with James Fox, an old SF neighbor I hadn’t seen in the last 25 or 30 years. Our wives had met at a birth class, our daughters were born a month apart and were friends as little kids until we both moved away. Back then, James was a marketer for Augsburger beer, but his life took a sharp left turn and he founded the Prison Yoga Project, first in San Quentin and now spread to scores of prisons in 12 different countries. Impressive work!

 

It became immediately clear that we were both in the same healing profession, but at opposite sides of the field. My work with children is to get it right the first time around, to build their strength and resilience and curiosity and sense of belonging and feeling welcomed. His work is to try to repair the damage done to children who didn’t get any of that from their family, their school, their church, their neighbors, their culture and grew to adults vulnerable to belonging to gangs and becoming known by the damage they could do. For the most intolerable things are to be invisible and alone. If you can’t be known from the good and beauty you create, the second choice is the hurt and harm you can inflict on others. And I’m not just talking about the folks robbing the local corner store, but the people in the top echelons of our government. And if you can’t belong to a nurturing community, then you are likely to join a gang, be it in the local hood or on Wall Street. 

 

Through yoga, the prison inmates learn to re-connect with their body and breath and a more spiritual version of self. They learn to pause before impulsively reacting and take control of their choices. They learn the power of sitting in meditation with a group of people who become allies in the hard work of nurturing a better self. It works. 

 

But, as James said with a sigh, mostly about 50% of the time. As the book The Body Keeps the Score testifies, these childhood traumas are lodged deep into the cells/ muscles/ bones of the psyche and it is an enormous amount of work needed to rearrange the circuits of the brain and the pathways of the heart. Always with the danger of slipping back into the default setting that the trauma carved into the body and mind. Which some of the people he met and worked with and grew to care about deeply later did when they were released and are now back in prison.

Without the benefit of neuroscience and the testimonies from the healing professions, Frederick Douglass saw this clearly. A thousand times better to get it right the first time than try to repair what breaks when you don’t. Not only better for the collective health of our population, but also better economically. Over 180 billion dollars was spent on prisons in the U.S. last year, money that could be funneled into creating more humanistic and nurturing schools. It could be used for training teachers into their most compassionate selves rather than paying prison guards and wardens. 

 

But meanwhile, here we are. So people like me do what they can from one end of the matter to cultivate caring school communities and build strong children and people like James work from the other end to make prisons places of authentic rehabilitation and healing and do what they can to repair broken men and women. 

 

And then all sit down together and drink a refreshing glass of Ausburger beer.