What does Wildmind do in prisons?
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Saturday Study
On the meetings we have every other Saturday, the feeling is very different. We meet at 9 AM and everyone arrives a bit more rested and relaxed. After a very brief check-in we get straight down to studying some Buddhist text as part of a formal course of study. Our discussions are open, frank, and confessional, and conducted with complete friendliness and respect. I’ve often thought that if I was to end up with a group of people like this in, say, an adult education class I was teaching at a college, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
Buddhism Behind Bars
Some of the men in our two groups, and men in other prisons across the country, are writing for a publication called Buddhism Behind Bars, which you can read about elsewhere in this section.
Material Support
Two of the inmates in the Concord group make meditation benches in their spare time. Wildmind for a while purchased these benches for sale on our online store, and this helped the individual inmates and the entire group. We passed our online retail activities on to a friend, and so that source of material support continues.
Wildmind has also donated copies of books to the group’s library, and thanks to the generosity of Taiwanese Buddhists has a large selection of books available free of charge to inmates.
Guided meditation audiocassette
Wildmind has made a guided meditation cassette for inmates. You can read more about that here.
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