Finding freedom in confinement
[Music]
[Music]
you
are as free as you allow yourself
to be i wonder if you
agree or disagree with a statement
the question is how free
do you want to be
freedom is often seen as something that
we fight for
we strive for and people have even
killed for it
how many people run away on a holiday
saying i want to get away from my work
and my home is so stressful
it’s too much i can’t cope and head off
on this journey
to go and rest and recover
and then they come back home again to
deal
with the music and to all truth
they have to come back to themselves to
you
you can’t escape yourself you cannot
take a vacation from yourself
because you are stuck with you from the
day you’re born
to the day you die
there’s one thing i do know for sure is
that if you treat
a freedom like an external pursuit
you’ll be chasing those mirages in the
desert and you’ll never
quench your thirst you’ll be thirsty for
your entire
life we have really been indoctrinated
and conditioned from a very young age
what we believe what we think a lot of
the time has been taught to us
and we believed what we’ve been taught
that was our normal
we didn’t ask too many questions we
lived our life
according to the way others lived or the
way we saw our parents to live
and then add to that one very important
thing that there’s nobody in the room
has escaped from
either discrimination or abuse or
bullying
or scorn or hurt or harm
that’s a given what else is a given is
the fact that
everyone in the room has been hurt by
somebody
and everyone in the room has hurt
another person
that’s the truth you see we can’t really
escape
what others are ever going to do to you
it’d be lovely if we had control of the
entire universe wouldn’t it
but if there ever been a pandemic
lockdown if we chose not to
but sometimes we just don’t have the
choice
what i want to ask you about is what are
you going to do about those situations
those uncomfortable messy situations
in your life are you going gonna keep
running or are you gonna face them
i really grew up in a
less than perfect kind of family i’d
like to say i don’t think many of us
grew up in a perfect family
was interesting i grew up in a middle to
upper class family
and from the outside it looked picture
perfect the white picket fence
the great role models it was all looking
fabulous my friends at school and
everybody around me said
you know i want your life i want to be
you
and i thought hell yeah you just don’t
know what’s going on
behind the white those four walls
was a very different picture playing out
as youngest of three i was
constantly at the mercy of abuse
anger being the scapegoat i was the
black
sheep i wasn’t particularly the favorite
at
all
and what happened is i started playing
that externally
so from the age of six already there
were problems
i was already in a psychologist’s room
by eight years old
what was wrong with this child came from
a picture-perfect
family but look at this child as a
monster
it’s playing out aggressive beating
things up going crazy
and that was the 1970s children were
meant to be seen and not heard
and that is where i started my journey
of realizing that i had to find my own
coping skills and strategies
because i didn’t have them at that age
and there was no way
of gaining those strategies
there was a big elephant in the room
and the adults were turning a blind eye
and pushing it under the carpet
they were not wanting to see the picture
it got such a bad degree by my early
thirties
that this pain this anger inside
not even ball sport was making it right
i could hit
a squash ball 20 times against the wall
but still
that anger remained and it was getting
worse and worse
i turned to martial arts i went from one
studio to the next looking for full
contact
until i found cage fighting cage
fighting was
the best find almost that i could ever
find
here i was role model therapist by day
at night cage fighter
my clients thought i was fabulous i was
having city clients a day
great therapist what they didn’t know
was i was cracking on the inside
i was screaming for help but that mask
was so good
that job well
i was living alive by nighttime it was
my only way of releasing that pain
that anger was building up inside and i
was addicted to it
every strike every smack i got
cut bruised i wore with a badge of honor
i like the emergency room i got
attention
and for those split seconds i felt i
felt like i was seen
i felt like i was real i felt like
something mattered i could feel again
then one day in the middle of a wrestle
on the floor with my fellow fighter
something happened i woke up
what are you doing what are you doing
i got off the floor left outside off
that got off that wrestle
and i left outside that room never to
return ever
to a studio ever again what i realized
at the time is i was at this
massive crossroads if i’d carried on any
further there was no return home
and if i got out now i had a chance of
redemption
i was addicted to pain i was stuck in
abuse
cycles and pain and drama cycles
i was not free and i needed help
right now remember going for a technique
and i thought you could help me
i’m a fighter no one’s gonna help me
and then i walked into this room
and it was a technique in short called
emdr
that stands for eye movement
desensitization
and reprocessing that’s a rapid eye
movement that they create
with a side to side movement that the
therapist does with their fingers
and that opens up all those suppressed
memories
that are coming and you what you’ve been
suppressing and the traumas in your life
what i didn’t expect of the six sessions
guess what
my sesh that all my abused sexual abuse
came flying out at me
like a whirlwind tornado and just ripped
through my life
i was left absolutely
raw vulnerable scared and alone
i’d absolutely know where to turn at the
time i decided
i’m gonna go for counseling or if i went
and i picked up the emdr textbook
on the first page is that a quote by
jean paul
sartre freedom
is what you do with what’s been done
to you
freedom is what you do
with what’s been done to you
i said to my therapist a time yeah this
thing makes no sense
what the heck is written here freedom
doing
whoever someone’s done wrong they must
go to jail they must pay the price
they’re bad
finished i want retribution and she said
to me lusanda
one day you’re gonna work this out
well the one day only took close to 20
years
i think you can say i’m extremely slow
luna
and from that i started doing qigong
that is a chinese
ancient chinese form of martial art
it was a way to find peace and balance
in my life
and i met up with my master and he said
to me lucinda
will you assist me
in the men’s maximum sentence prison
with qigong classes
i kind of didn’t want to but i knew this
man must know what he’s up for
what is about as we got to the prison
that day
he said to me that just two things i
want you to remember huh
two things just remember this
don’t judge show compassion
and show each man look at them
with soft eyes
and number two remember
it has hurt people
that hurt people
see the light see the good
and these offenders we got to the open
entrance
and the what if started what if i’m
raped
what if i’m hurt and i don’t come out
but i carried on into that first
corridor
the corridor was dark like this room
right now and there was a light
flickering
the floor was cold and concrete it was a
very very deep stench of testosterone
sweat
and my lungs they burned
and as i walked through i saw these
these cells were overcrowded
and i knew it was no place for a woman
to be
and then the cat calling started
you come to daddy
and many other below the comments we
shall get into tonight
and so we carried on we were swallowed
into balls of the prison
and led into this the gymnasium where 15
muscular men stood they wanted none of
this qigong
master or his woman’s sidekick
the sessions were over six weeks one
hour a week
only and from the start
i watched these men soften before me
what i knew is that one hour wasn’t
really
enough they had to go back to their
cells and they had to face
the abuse from their fellow offenders
and then also the wardens
and there was one young man that came up
to me right in the beginning of that
first session and he held my hands
and he said to me thank you
for believing in me
that was a day i’ve never forgotten
because i realized that believing in
somebody no matter how bad or how wrong
you think it has been
sometimes those people are the people
that need that the most
they just have got slightly off the
program
for now and so
my sessions continued and then they
asked me
but how do we find freedom in
confinement
i went back to my therapy the skills the
tools i had
and i created a three-step process
acknowledge assess
accept acknowledge comes down to
they had to accept that they were
offenders
there’s no running away from it there’s
no use trying to
numb the pain take the drugs available
in the prison
and distract yourself like we all know
how well we do that
in life they had to face the music
and they had to be accountable for what
they did
the second thing was assess they got
there for a reason
what did they do wrong where could they
have corrected it
and go through the facts the positive
the negatives
where had they got unstuck
number three acceptance they had to
learn to love themselves
no matter what no f’s no one’s perfect
in this room
and neither were they and they had to
sit
not with the knowledge knowing that
they’ll hurt and that is why they’ve
ended up where they are
they’ve got a past and they need to
start working on their past
and they need to stop moving forward
what were they going to do
about where they were
and so by the end of the time of six
weeks
i had a group of men who knew you
are as free as you allow yourself to be
they made a decision that they were not
going to feel the trap of the physical
confines and they
realized the mental confines were way
worse
now this is what happened in lockdown
famous
pandemic lockdown that affected almost
the entire world i wonder where you were
in march 2020
i know where i was i was on the road
doing what i do well
distracted driving around being busy
being a great person out there with a
heck of a schedule
and i came home all alone and i had to
face the music to my
life for the first time there was no way
out
it was me what we thought was 20 days
became
many many months and i came back
and that is what i faced i looked in the
mirror and i said
so who’s going to live here are you
going to
make it or are you going to fall apart
and so when the external world shut down
my internal world woke up
now why is there some importance to you
is because
every one of you’ve got a story every
one of you has been hurt
every one of you has faced conditioning
indoctrination the most important thing
my question to you is what are you doing
about it are you gonna let it destroy
your life
are you gonna bleed out on other people
are you gonna hurt the people that never
hurt you in the first instance
not even that you’re doing it
intentionally
but what are you gonna do starting today
you don’t have control over the outside
world i’m sorry tell you can’t control
our governments
you can definitely not control the
people around you
you can’t control the drivers on the
road the many factors every day
and if you want that control you need to
go home and lock the doors and not leave
but we’re living a big world here and i
believe in turning things around
and as my master said to me it is hurt
people who hurt people
you can remember that always
you will realize that when somebody
hurts you don’t take it personally
it’s because they need help and they
need
love and they need somebody to believe
in them
i truly believe in this world
that so many people
are actually trapped in their own trap
and they created it
every time you had a blow a breakup in a
relationship something happened someone
hurt you what you did is you went into
confinement
and now is the time to change
that exact story in your life
take your life the remote of your life
in your hands
you have way more power than you even
think
and i want to leave you with one last
thought
you are as free as you allow
yourself to be
you