Three Mile Island Woman
By Judith Trustone
March 28, 1979

Home again
sparkling kitchen
shag carpet hiding
paranoia … breathed
dreamed just around the edge
of every moment.
She stares at the glass
In her hand eyes searching for atomic
particles swallowing
fear she drinks
water.
Dust dancing in sunbeams
looks menacing.
Afraid to breathe eat sleep
she covers her swollen
belly with sweaty hands.

See http://patrickmiddleton.wordpress.com/

In the backyard of the Pennsylvania Department of Correction’s Central Office sits one of the most brutal and inhumane restricted housing units (RHU) in the entire Commonwealth. Having recently spent over a hundred days there, I witnessed staff brutality and DOC policy violations on a daily basis.

It blew my mind to watch some inmates being denied meals for one and two days at a time, all because they were guilty of talking out loud or being child molesters. At every single meal I watched someone getting burned because he wasn’t standing at the precise angle in his doorway when the food cart passed by, or he wasn’t dressed properly, or he’d been observed having a conversation with his neighbor. Once a prisoner who’s been denied his meal shouted out this passage from the DOC Inmate Handbook: “Denying food will not be used as a form of punishment.” The hateful guard shouted back, “This is Camp Hill, fellow. We do what we want here!” And they surely do.

At ever shower period on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, mean are denied showers on a whim. First, the guards scoff at any prisoner who asks for a shower during his first week. Then if a man is in the RHU for violating some infraction against a staff person, he is further punished by being repeatedly ignored when he asks for a shower. They rake nine men to the showers at one time. If there are eleven prisoners on a tier or section who want to sower, two of these men are going to be burned. They’ll enter the cells and find some graffiti on the wall or some other excuse to deny men a shower. Then there’s the matter of the water temperature – it’s determined by the particular mood of the guard in charge that day! One day it might be scalding hot, the next day ice cold. If any man is heard uttering a word once the water is turned on, everyone is punished – they cut all the showers off, and everyone is forced to go back to his cell lathered in soap. Finally, when a holiday falls on a Monday, there are no showers that day.

Another violation of both PA and federal laws comes in the form of denying an hour of daily exercise. The exercise cages are all there, but no once in my hundred plus days was I afforded the opportunity to go out in the exercise yard. When I asked a lieutenant why they don’t allow yard, she said, “That’s preposterous. All you have to do is sign up.” My sister called the prison one day to inquire about my yard, and she was told that the log book showed I’d had yard that very day. That was a vicious lie. (A couple men did get to go out in the exercise yard while I was there. These men were, I was told, on long term administrative custody status.)

Once I watched two guards enter the cell next to mine and beat a fellow until he couldn’t cry out anymore. All the while, a female lieutenant stood on the tier watching. When she said “Okay, that’s enough fellows,” one of the guards shouted back, “We’re not done yet, LT.”

The sickness doesn’t stop here. I personally saw them handing out confiscation slips to an inmate whose mail included a newspaper mailing or two. Once this same fellow was denied mail that was labeled “legal” and “religious materials.” All of this confiscated mail was places in his property. What about phone calls? Well, here’s another blatant DOC policy violation.

In the words of the RHU’s Program Review Committee Chief. “We don’t do phone calls.” What about additional commissary items for men on long-term administrative custody status? “We don’t do that either.”

At every turn Camp Hill’s RHU is designed to break a man’s spirit in every way possible. A building without air conditioning, the place is a festering hot box in the summer with temperatures reaching 115 degrees at times. The walls of cinderblock cells are covered in sheets of metal which serve to keep the heat intense. Men who try to write letters in this sweltering heat find themselves dripping sweat all over the paper. Thus, we learn to write in the middle of the night when it’s not as hot. During the day those who have been there long enough have learned to flood the floor and lay in the cool water in an effort to bring one’s body temperature down and make things a little more bearable. Then there are the cockroaches and waterbugs the size of matchbox cars running around interminably. Once I was awakened in the middle of the night to find one of these giant bugs crawling in my hair and after that, I made a habit of sleeping with a towel over my head. Throughout the day you can hear several times in every hour the slap! Of men’s shower shoes as they kill bug after bug and curse like sailors in the process.

Every single day I spent in the RHU, I thanked my lucky stars for my loved ones who kept me grounded in hope and restraint. There were days when mail came to my door and I cried with gratitude, just for the reminder that I was loved. Feeling that love was the perfect antidote for the hatred and rage I’d built up inside of me all day toward these vicious guards. I have always believed that my spirit could withstand the harshest treatment and conditions that could come my way. I don’t believe that any more. As vigilant as I was, I couldn’t shield myself completely from their brutality. They confiscated a piece of my mail almost daily and placed it it my property, sending me a confiscation slip with an explanation that the envelope was too big or it contained religious materials. Twice, too, they came in my cell on shower day and denied me a shower after they found someone else’s scribbling on the wall.

No. The oppression prisoners are subjected to in the RHU would crack the toughest human’s spirit. On those days when would watch my fellow prisoners being physically and mentally tortured, I cried for them and thanked God it wasn’t me. I was torn and dejected nevertheless.

After observing these guards for all those weeks and months, I came to realize how truly self loathing they are. Treating prisoners cruelly is the way they validate their own existence, it’s the key to their power.

What amazes me more than anything about the brutality and the inhumanity that continues to take place in the RHU is that it is condoned by high level staff. All of these men are aware of what is taking place there, and each has his own spin tactics for denying the truth. These men are professionals and they’re good at what they do. When they sat brutality and inhumanity don’t exist in their back yards, who’s to argue with them? And who cares anyway?

Words fill the air,
fall into drinks,
get bitten and eaten,
melt on mouths,
fly free, go kerplunk,
dazzle, disintegrate, dance
(both ballroom and modern),
bounce off walls,
fall on carpets,
get lost in bodies, sizzling on skin,
drift lazily on smoke
or speed like bullets,
wounding, tearing,
torture words, teasing words,
transforming words, tiny words,
tremendous words, titillating words,
tantalizing words, trembling words,
touching words, words of wisdom,
words spoken into mouths or lip fuzz,
whispering in ears, laughing words,
words that taste delicious,
words that humble, grumble, mumble,
zinging instead of zapping,
words that just don’t give a damn.
words that melt in mouths
words that shake like a thunderbolt,
soft words and screaming words,
hunting words and words of prey,
that skip and stroll and slide,
street words, bedroom words,
choking words, crying words,
personal words and political words,
trying words, buying words,
words that slide into snores,
swim with smiles, call from dreams,
drift gently on lover’s breaths,
oooh words and aaah words and
yes, yes words and maybe words
and sorry words and no never words
and but if words
and why me words and who me words
and why not words and lonely words
words of fright late at night
words that ramble, scramble.
fumble, tumble,
sad words, happy words,
suspicious words, mistaken words,
proper words, bad words,
man words, woman words,
winter words and words of spring,
first words and last words,
eaten words and fighting words,
blunt words and sickening words,
inviting words, leaving words,
foreign words, delighting words,
declaring words, responding words,
enlightening words, trusting words,
praying words and playing words,
loving words and
words of wonders
that words cannot describe.

Never a boring moment in this magic garden

When I was young, whenever I’d see an older person watering or weeding their garden, I’d think, “How boring. Why don’t they get a life?” Little did I know that I, too, would one day succumb to the magical lure of a garden.

Now, decades later, my house is for sale and I’m condo bound. This will be my last garden.

I grieve to say good-bye to the lilac bush grown from a cutting from my mother’s garden. Next to it is a red leaf maple from one of the seedlings we gave out at my mother’s funeral 11 years ago. The azalea one of my sons gave me for Mother’s Day glows with pink next to a clump of fragrant lillies. Strawberries from a friend’s backyard have covered mine with succulent fruit. The rose bush cuttings from my aunt’s garden fill my house with sweetness and beauty well into November each year. The irises and violets from my late mother-in-law’s garden in the Berkshires have special meaning. Last fall, I planted 30 yellow tulips around the yard, and they sprang into a sunny symphony of color this spring. Hardest to leave are the hyacinths, 30 years of Easter gifts from my four sons and their children.

As I sit in the garden, I feel the power of the earth as my tensions drain away to the serenade of songbirds. How this piece of earth has changed me. Weeding becomes a metaphor for my life as I pluck and pull and persevere despite protesting knees. As I dig, I have imaginary conversations with friends or family, get ideas for stories, and hum fragments of songs. Creating space for flowers, I also blossom in this outdoor classroom. Insights flow into me as I clear away debris makes me happy as I imagine the thirsty blooms drinking it in. The cycles of the garden keep me aware of my own cycles as I follow the sun, watch rosebuds ripen during my breaks from writing, and bathe in the moonlight. I am at one with nature.

As I work in my patch of paradise, I wonder what the young people going by think of me and my rapture. Maybe they think how boring my life must be.

2. Explore why does PA have more juvenile lifers than any other state and efforts to change?

3. Peruse the DOC budget and look for ways to reduce the cost; speak out!

4. Identify individual prisoners’ causes, their websites and blogs, and select one or more to support.

5. Identity activist groups and give your time, energy and/or money to help them.

6. If you are a member of a church, synagogue or mosque, start a prison ministry.

7. Volunteer to assist an aspiring writer in prison through editing, and preparing for publication where possible.

8. Visit elected officials and ask them their positions on alternatives to incarceration; if they maintain a tough crime position, then educate them and tell them as a taxpayer you don’t want to continue funding an expensive, ineffective system that threatens public safety and cuts down on funds for education and health care.

9. Research PA law on mandatory sentencing and connect with groups proposing reform.

10.Make generous contributions to organizations whose goals you support such as CURE, PA Prison Society, Sagewriters and Global Kindness Revolution, Women Who Never Give Up, the Ray of Hope Project, Stop Prison Rape, the Philadelphia Innocence Project, Thresholds anti-death penalty and other worthy groups.

11. Speak out and write letters when a comedian or cop show uses the threat of rape to elicit a laugh or force a confession. Make the truth known — according to the Department of Justice statistics, there are a reported 88, 000 Americans raped in prison every year, 1/5 within 24 hours, by staff or fellow prisoners.

12. If you’re a lawyer, volunteer to help prisoners needing representation. Sagewriters has a few cases mentioned in Celling America’s Soul. There are thousands of others.

13. Arrange related film screenings and book signings at your church or organization.

14. Look for ways to support prisoner’s families through organizations like Women Who Never Give Up and CURE.

15. Approach editors of mainstream media about giving more voice to prison issues and outstanding examples of transformation by prisoners.

16. Support efforts of Lifers at Graterford who want to organize a public rally about life without parole in the spring of 2011.

17. Hold all people in prison and their families in your meditation and prayers.

18. Provide mentorship/ jobs to those with skills coming home from prison.

19. Suggest that your book club read some of the excellent writing by prisoners.

20. If you haven’t already seen them, check out movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “The Green Mile” to see how not much has changed.

21. Subscribe to prison publications like Graterfriends and the CURE Newsletter.

society’s venom of vengeance,

an arrow aimed at ravaged veins

by a bureaucrat in a crisp white shirt and tie,

a political appointee, a civil servant

for this most uncivil of acts.

Does he sleep at night,

dream, or sedate himself

with alcohol and sports?

Does he talk with his children

about his job?

Are they proud or ashamed?

Does he pray and to whom?

Does he think about killing

while making love to his wife?

Nearby on a lumpy mattress

in a cheap motel with tired pillows,

a grieving mother ignores

the press pounding on her door

as she waits for her condemned son’s spirit

to be ripped from her,

releasing them both

from decades of unbearable anguish and agony.

Years of hot tears have burned

deep furrows into her brown cheeks

like dry arroyos in a vast wasteland.

She wears her constant fatigue

like a dusty, gray cape wrapped tightly

around her hurting heart.

Sadness and poverty are all she’s ever known.

He had only been a squirt of sperm

to his father,

dooming him in the womb.

His siblings turned away long ago,

weary of his endless appeals

and brief spurts of hope.

His grandmother blissfully smiles

at her memories of him as she tiptoes,

a tiny step at a time to the other side.

She knows he will be waiting for her.

Where are the “pro-lifers”,

the religious zealots, friends of fetuses

who care so little about life once born?

His birth became

a one-way ticket

to the silver needle.

At the nod from the warden

with the pale, frozen face,

the chemical switch is thrown,

and a tidal wave of poison,

the politicians’ kinder, gentler murder

ravages cell by cell as it rushes

to his battered and bashed heart

that never had a chance

to beat with the fullness

of love

except from his Mamma.

No matter if he’s innocent as so many are.

His crime is being born poor and having

black skin in a country that hates him.

A violent and deliberate death

gallops around the arterial bend,

closer and closer to its target,

suffocating his last breath

while watchers struggle

with the impulse

to vomit.

Justice weeps beneath her blindfold,

her naked breasts shrouded

in a six thousand dollar drape

by men fearful of being distracted

from their imperialistic wars.

Now freed from his tortured body,

his soul hovers briefly above the fishbowl,

then rises above the demonstrators and TV crews outside,

pauses for a moment over the no-tell-motel

where his mother weeps dry tears,

until angels surround him,

gently lifting him upward ,

away from his tragically short  life

to a place of final peace,

leaving us to just ask

WHY?

Yet, contrast this concern for canines to the article buried on page 17 of its August 26 issue citing the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics report that 88,000 adults held in U.S. prisons and jails are sexually assaulted each year. One in five prisoners are raped in the first day of incarceration, by both staff and other inmates, with woman more likely to be victimized.

Every day without standards is another day of anguish among prison rape survivors, risking public safety and the costs of medical treatment, investigations that could have been avoided.

Because we dehumanize people in prison, we accept this Rape Culture as justified no matter the crime, injustice or possible innocence. Yes, there are very bad people who need to be locked up. But 70% of those behind bars are non-violent offenders.

Rape in prison is the stuff of comedians, and cop shows regularly threaten suspects with prison rape. A journalist told me editors believe that 90% of Americans feel harsh treatment and rape of prisoners is justified, so the media is not interested in exposing the horrors of this system, which is structurally and systematically toxic to all. Nor are editors interested in prisoners who, despite the environment, manage to transform themselves, which I learned early while promoting Sagewriters’ books. To allow them a human face would mean we’d have to come out of denial and do something about it. Recently, while advocating for a prisoner who was being psychologically tortured, I was told sarcastically by a DOC staff person, “We have over 40,000 prisoners and we don’t have time to think about their humanity!” A retired DOC administrator once told me, “Just because we run prisons doesn’t mean we believe in them.”

So does keeping our moral (and financial) blinders closed about the 2.3 million people behind bars mean that each year we taxpayers are funding the rape and torture of 88,000 victims, our fellow Americans. What does this do to our souls? Are people in prison not human?

Of course puppies are much cuter…

I live in constant gratitude for all that I have in my life in freedom. Whenever my mind starts to whine and worry, I remind myself of the remarkable people I’ve met across the country who are attempting to create a positive life and good relationships behind bars between guards’ glances and camera angles. My respect and often awe at their survival despite daily attempts by a system designed to crush their spirits in a multitude of built-in, dehumanizing ways inspires me to keep on working for tiny crumbs of positive change in the face of a system that hasn’t worked since its inception.

But it is the way we advocates, whether or not we have loved ones behind bars, are also dehumanized, and it is the sharing and outward-appearing necessary acceptance of a humiliating and toxic system that no one except the unaware believes in. Years ago, a high-level administrator told me, “Just because we run prisons doesn’t mean we believe in them.” In his chilling book, The Lucifer Effect: understanding how good people turn evil, author Philip Zimbardo shows how this dysfunctional system systematically dehumanizes all who enter. In his landmark report on the study he attempted at Stanford back in the ‘70’s, Zimbardo tells how he had to stop the experiment after three days, for the volunteer student guards became so abusive to the volunteer student prisoners that they were traumatized. Yet we continue to spend more and more of our precious tax dollars on prisons and war while cutting back on school budgets, health care and the destruction of a safety net for the poor. We expect the same child struggling to learn their ABCs while dodging bullets to and from school to flourish as well as the nurtured capitalist’s kids who will not be programmed to attend the College for Criminals.

The average $47,000 a year we spend to incarcerate one prisoner could pay a teacher’s salary for a year, and the $100,000 we can spend on lifers without parole could fund two teachers for a year. We are a rich country that tolerates high levels of poverty while supporting an increasingly harsh criminal justice system that incarcerates the poor, especially people of color, usually creating jobs for rural America where most prisons are built.  This fits in nicely with our militaristic culture, for as long as we’re at war, human rights, especially for the incarcerated, are kicked to the curb, and the thin veneer holding everything together becomes increasingly frayed by fear of the “other” as exemplified by the unspoken racism behind the teabaggers, who see white people as losing control, losing their majority status. This cannot be restored no matter how many people of color are incarcerated and no matter how many Americans are doomed to a life of poverty.

Yet to do our work requires us to pretend that this system functions in a way that helps keep us “safe” from “them” no matter the financial, spiritual and psychic costs, and despite the fact that 700,000 of “them” return to our communities each year, more than 40,000 to Philadelphia, where they all face the same demonization, in the lack of jobs, housing or health care which is the lot of the formerly incarcerated. How many of those returning from prison are afflicted with PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder? We see the effects of this psychological plague in soldiers returning from war.

So we say nothing despite our outrage when guards in visiting rooms harass elderly women whose necklines are a little low, or treat visitors rudely as if they too are prisoners.

It’s like trying to keep our lawns mowed and our gardens weeded while living next door to Abu Ghraib and ignoring the screams coming from inside its’ walls. When violence and torture are so frequent it becomes the norm and we as a nation become desensitized to the daily psychological and too often terror that is the world of Shadow America. No wonder taxpayers don’t want to know the truth about our corrupt and broken criminal justice system, for it’s too horrible to contemplate, for the image of all “those people,” no matter how innocent, rehabilitated or treated unjustly, coming out of prison doors scares them. It’s too horrible to contemplate, something politicians grab onto with their “tough on crime” stances. Many say off the record that they know the system is broken but that it would be political suicide to support anything progressive having to do with prisons, like introducing a bill allowing parole for lifers in Pennsylvania.

As long as we as a culture continue to dehumanize prisoners, their loved ones, families and advocates so we don’t have to care except in a Law and Order entertaining kind of way, nothing much will change and in fact life behind prison walls just gets worse and worse. Those attempting to improve the system end up getting worn out, or with poor health, the price of this country’s denial of the humanity of more than 8.8 million Americans.

As long as poverty is acceptable so will be the prisons that house the poor, returning them back to communities already ravaged and withered by being unable to catch those pieces of the American Pie that were supposed to trickle down to them.

What, if anything, can be done? After five decades of human rights work, the past 17 years working to give voice to the voiceless in prisons, I’ve concluded that we have to add an energetic level to our work through the Virtual Kindness Circles, the distribution of Kindness Cards and the informal setting up of Kindness projects through the more than 2,000 people in prison I’ve worked with through the years, who are now calling themselves “Warriors of Light.” The instructions for how to participate are on one side of the Kindness Cards as follows:

Why Join Our Virtual Kindness Circle?

Every Saturday from 4:00-4:30 pm eastern, sit in silence, alone or with others. Imagine what scientist and philosophers call the Web of Life, an energy field that surrounds the earth. We are all dangling by strings of light from this Light of Kindness. Draw down this Light into the top of your head; let is spread throughout your being, renewing, recharging, soothing and nurturing you until you feel wrapped in Light and filled with Light. If you’re with others in a circle, now connect your hands, sending the Light around the Circle, in your left hands, out right. Then, one at a time, keeping connected, each participant sits in the center of the Circle while the rest send zaps of Kindness to them for one minute. Then the next one, until all have had a turn. If you are alone in a hospital bed or in a prison cell, once you’re filled with the universal Light of Kindness, fill the room with Light, then slowly spread it out to the rest of the building, then let the Light roll out like a carpet, sweeping towns,  states, countries, so that if you were an astronaut looking down on earth, you’d see the planet glowing with the Light of Kindness, touching everyone, those at war, those suffering in hospitals and prisons, children, the elders, and your loved ones as we penetrate the culture of cruelty and diminish the violence and incivility that has gripped the planet. Draw down the Light often, especially on Saturdays as  part of planetary sprinklings of Light as we all become Warriors of Light joining forces against fear & hatred!

Contact us for information and other ways you might become involved.  Join the Global Kindness Revolution & and make an energetic difference. Be Kind All the Time!!!

Why do I think Kindness Circles work? For ten years, as a member of the Bear Tribe Medicine Society, I led Healing Circles around the country and observed first hand the power of working in Circles.

When people do something kind, it raises their serotonin levels (the happy hormone) as well as raising the levels of the recipient, observers and those who read or hear about it. When meditators sat weekly in high crime areas of Chicago, the crime rate went down. When they moved to another neighborhood, the same thing happened. Scientists studying monkey behavior on three Pacific islands not visible to each other, came by boat each day to dump a load of bananas. On one of the islands, one day a monkey washed his banana in the sea before eating it. The next day another one did, and then another. When the 100^th monkey on that island washed his banana before eating it, simultaneously on the two other islands, ALL the monkeys washed their bananas even though they had never seen it being done. British biologist, Rupert Murdoch, calls this a “morphogenetic field.”  Then there’s String Theory in Physics that postulates that there are eleven different dimensions to reality at any given moment, helping to explain why we think of someone and the phone rings and it’s them.

It’s clear that in addition to all of our advocacy efforts we include a new approach, working on an energetic level to create a different “vibe” in prisons, but also to help us de-stress and enhance our own health and spirits so we can fight for positive change as Warriors of Light. Won’t you join us?

The mainstream media, which shapes and contaminates our minds, does all it can to cow the citizenry into fear and mistrust, especially of those with dark skin. This has had tragic consequences, especially in communities of color already enduring centuries of siege by a white supremacist patriarchal structure, a system now crumbling in a dangerous way, polluting the planet with toxic masculinity. Prisoners (and their families) are demonized, our Thrownaway People.

A couple of years ago, I was awarded “Peacekeeper of the Year” by the Delaware County, PA Peace Center for my work with over 2,000 prisoners nationally. Accepting, I said, “My vision for peace is that one day, maybe Martians will land, and simultaneously, all over the earth, men will put down their guns, go home and pick up their babies and learn to raise their children for however many generations it will take to breed the war out of them, while we women attempt to clean up this mess.”

Which brings me to Kindness. A couple of years ago, I taught creative writing or what I call “Healing with Words” at the Philadelphia  Prison, one class for men and one for women in a successful JOBS re-entry program that the city has since stopped funding. One week I brought in two packs of  Thank You” notes that I’d discovered in the wilds of my desk. Their assignment was to observe fellow prisoners and staff for acts of Kindness, then write on the card, “Thank you for your Kindness” and report back to the class what happened. The next week when I returned to the classes, the guards, all females, came up and hugged me, telling me what a difference those simple thank you for your Kindness notes had evoked. They were practically in tears, both the guards and the prisoners, as they described the change in the vibe of the prison, however short-lived.

Later, when I mentioned this to members of the Public Safety Initiative at Graterford PA Prison, they thought spreading Kindness on both sides of the walls as an antidote to violence was a terrific idea. Together we started the Global Kindness Revolution, and created Kindness Cards; more than 50,000, have been distributed globally. Some of the anti-violence prisoners of conscience gathered informally in small Kindness Circles, made posters about being kind, and did all they could to change the toxic vibe of prisons. Now we are redesigning the cards so we can get more of  them into prisons, for there is a ban on postcards for some reason, and we are still awaiting a response from the DOC as to what would be acceptable (if anything.)

Realizing that the response to the Kindness Revolution was so much more enthusiastic than responses to my attempts to give voice to prisoners’ writing, I decided to shift my focus to the hearts and minds of voters by creating Kindness Circles, and they are growing each week. .People are curious about the anti-violence prisoners who are part of the Circles. I’m even leading free Community Kindness Circles on the 2^nd Saturday of every month in Swarthmore, PA’s town hall, right above the library, administrative offices and the police station. Those who can’t attend are invited to join our “Virtual Kindness Circle” at the same time, 4:00 pm on every Saturday for about half an hour. Those behind bars might find a group of friends to gather with quietly, or even just one other person. Or, join us by yourselves. We CAN change the vibe behind prison walls. Please join us, and spread the word. Step outside your comfort zone for just a little while.

HOW TO CREATE A KINDNESS CIRCLE, WITH OTHERS OR ALONE

Sit in silence either with a small group or by yourself. Imagine that deep within the center of the earth is a giant ball of light, the “Light of Kindness.” Let this Light rise up through the many earth layers, into the building beneath you, into the room where you are, spreading slowly…up your legs…up past your knees…into your torso, flowing up your spine… surrounding each vertebra with Light… letting the Light flow up through your head…and out through the top like a whale spout…wrapping you in Light…then, if possible, connect hands around the circle…and let the Light flow from your right hand into the left hand of the person next to you until the whole Circle is humming with Light…then, one at a time, each participant sits (or stands) in the center and gets zapped with the energy of Kindness…for about a minute each…then bring into the Circle those who dwell in Spirit, acknowledging the ancestors…expressing our appreciation…asking them for assistance…do the same for family members or those with loved ones in prison…

Then imagine the light of Kindness flowing from your tiny Circle to every jail and prison in the country…raining down the Light of Kindness…penetrating, however briefly, the culture of cruelty.

Next let the light roll out in every direction like unrolling a carpet of Light around the entire earth…see yourselves as Warriors of Light…Knights of Kindness…look down upon the earth as if you were an astronaut…seeing the earth glowing with the healing Light of Kindness everywhere…now draw the Light back, gently and slowly back into the circle…filling each with Light, healing what needs healing.. and, giving thanks…let your hands disengage and look at the others with Kindness and caring.

If you are alone, imagine yourself dangling by a thread of Light from a web of life surrounding the planet.

Do this as often as you can, and let me hear from you about how it went or what questions you might have. Kindness raises serotonin levels, the “Happy Hormone” in those who do a kind act, those who receive it, those who see it and those who hear about it or read about it. It reduces stress and promotes peace.

Years ago, scientists studied a mediation group that spent a few weeks meditating in circles in high crime areas; the crime rate dropped in each area that was carefully studied. Another group of scientists studied monkeys living on three islands not visible to each other. Each day, they dropped a load of bananas on the beach of each island and the monkeys scrambled to pick them up. One day, one of the moneys on one of the islands washed his banana in the sea before eating it. The next day, another one did the same. Each day more and more monkeys washed their bananas before eating. On the day that the hundredth monkey washed his banana, simultaneously on the other two islands, every single monkey washed his fruit before eating it even though they’d never seen it done. Good vibes are contagious and as String Theory is physics has shown, there may be as many as eleven different levels of reality going on at the same time, so through the Kindness Circles we are tapping in to an energy level that is an antidote to violence.

That’s why we need a Global Kindness Revolution. KINDNESS IS A STATE OF MIND. BE KIND ALL THE TIME!  Won’t you join us?