Check Out Gary Allen’s Story
voyagedenver.com/interview/check-out-gary-allens-story
Voyage Denver • June 4, 2024
Denver’s Most Inspiring Stories
The first time I was introduced to the idea of meditation in prisons was through a Ram Dass book circa 1980. He went into prisons to teach Eastern spirituality and suggested using a prison as a monastery, which made sense to me at the time. You are in uniform, (supposedly) celibate, living according to institutional forms, etc.
However, prisons aren’t monasteries. There are quite a lot of things that monasteries usually aren’t–for instance, enormously loud and discordant, violent, divided by racial tribalism, filled with sociopaths who don’t want to be there, and so on.
Anyway, while I was a graduate student in Writing and Poetics at Naropa University in 1990, we had a one-credit class designed to take us out of the academy into places in the larger world where we could teach creative writing. This idea or interest in prisons came back to me, and so the teacher arranged a two-day writing program at Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City, the oldest prison in Colorado. It still has those huge cement walls surrounding it.
Niwot organization offers peace of mind
www.lhvc.com/story/2019/09/11/news/niwot-organization-offers-peace-of-mind/4223.html
Left Hand Valley Courier • Sept. 11, 2019
by Vicky Dorvee
Note: September 12 is National Mindfulness Day, a day set aside to promote and explore the physical and emotional benefits of being present and regulating emotions and behavior. Nearly 2.2 million individuals are incarcerated in the US, according to The Sentencing Project organization. Within those populations 80,000 to 100,000 people are being held in solitary confinement. Some of these prisoners have discovered a Niwot-based nonprofit program that moves them toward a sense of peacefulness and control, and prepares them for a new life outside of prison.
The Mindfulness Peace Project (MPP) was founded by Niwotian Margot Neuman in 2004. Ten years before the formal organization came about, Neuman worked with one prisoner she’d been introduced to through a mutual friend. Requests for the knowledge she imparted grew and gradually she developed a study course. Now there are several programs under MPP each with the core goal of supporting veterans and prisoners who want to find and follow a path toward sanity and composure through mindfulness and meditation.