What stayed with me from our chat was not anything about a better technique. But an insight that feels close to heart: How easily we offer compassion for others, but not for ourselves.

Elvira points to how fear often keeps us distracted so that we don’t really look at ourselves. Over time, so much of our inner ecology gets paved over. Many of those ignored parts become despondent that we’ve pushed them away and abandoned them.

She said it almost in passing: sometimes those things don’t need anything done to them. They just want to be acknowledged.

I hope you take a listen. And if you have questions about the upcoming fall cohort, drop me a line.

* Elvira talks about a book we sit with: Norman Fischer’s Training in Compassion.

Outline (paste under the audio)

A listening map. Times are approximate.

0:00 — Opening. Who I am, the two groups, and that this week is a conversation with Elvira.

0:43 — A slow summer. Letting what she doesn’t know exist as it is. Equanimity. And then: when she sits, her brain is everywhere.

2:06 — How she arrived. A friend invited her. She was revisiting the past for her work and it felt like a heavy load. The cohort came at the right time.

4:05 — Consistency. The urge to produce. Sitting is not fixing. What’s gotten her to sit more often.

5:01 — Training in Compassion. Norman Fischer. You have to sit in order to be compassionate. Transitions this summer. Compassion for others, none left for herself — then the anger, then the relief.

6:52 — The hardest recipient. Not other people. Ourselves. Turning away from the hard stuff until sitting makes it visible.

9:06 — They just want to be acknowledged. Lojong: a training in fearlessness, curious not aggressive. IFS: hanging out with the voices that sound scary.

11:18 — Not by yourself. Even though we sit alone, we do this with people. Elvira tried to build a sit for artists. The joy and the struggle of holding a room.

14:30 — New Orleans. Eight years there, originally Miami. A documentary following her mom. A creative retreat in the Bolivian jungle — no phones, strangers, the same kind of honesty we find in the cohort.

18:42 — The screening. March. People from the cohort showed up. Art as glue. Becoming a little more jelly. Breaking the mold.

21:27 — Not self-betterment. Meditation doesn’t make you a better person in seven minutes. It takes the blur off. You see someone else navigating a life that kind of sucks sometimes.

22:43 — Close. Can these words go out to the people who need them. The practice is always there. You come back.

The conversation turns to one important element, which is this idea of relationships. We come back to an often overlooked aspect of meditation, that it’s not meant to be done on our own, seen as an individual task, something that we do almost like by willpower. But in fact, there’s an energy that comes from sharing with others; we need one another. I didn’t always know that. For some time now, I’ve realized that meditation takes hold when the practice is communal, nurtured in a community.

Obviously, you have to take your seat on your cushion. But that shouldn’t be a lonely sit. It should be one that you know you’re being accompanied by others.

And that’s really the effort of this program that we’re doing, which is trying to sit together on the outside with the women on the inside. We do so through the heart, through the imagination, and through knowing that we are sharing the same kinds of experiences.

Take a listen, and if you have any questions about the upcoming cohorts, drop me a line.

Outline

A listening map. Times are approximate.

0:00 — Opening. Who I am, the two groups, and why this week is a conversation.

0:44 — Welcome. Aaron joins. We name what we have been trying to do: practice in a way that builds community, inside and outside.

1:22 — How Aaron came to meditation. Siddhartha in high school. The wish to be the riverboat ferryman who already had it figured out. Family finding their way into the same practice.

3:50 — Staying together longer. Why a small group, and more weeks, changes the room. Intention gets denser when the same people keep showing up.

5:21 — The third gem. Aaron on sangha: not small talk. A place where you can drop into what is actually happening, including the heavy parts.

6:30 — Intimacy on Zoom. We are in different parts of the country. The container still holds. Vocabulary is not the point. How we are living is.

8:36 — What surprised him. Aaron says he does not carry many expectations, so he is always surprised and never surprised. The gift is being able to talk about what matters.

10:04 — Walls that aren’t only walls. Literal walls between inside and outside — and still a way through. Aaron brings the Gateless Gate: the work is hard, and it is meant to be accessible. We pass through together.

12:34 — Same world, different pressure. Prison can make the buttons obvious. Outside, the same mechanisms hide in the volume of stimulation. Slowing down is a tool for both.

15:40 — The turn. The practices are not meant to be done by ourselves. Our culture trains us to go it alone. May all beings be happy is not the same sentence as may I be happy.

17:39 — I sat today. Aaron’s suggestion: a simple channel to report a sit. An emoji. A time. A small gem. Three minutes counts. Community helping each other return — which is the sitting.

19:37 — Weather with someone you love. A text with his mom. Not fixing. Just: what’s the weather like on the inside?

20:37 — Close. Come back to the cushion, the chair, the floor. Take three minutes if that is what you have.

We were talking about the frameworks we use — parts, the ladder, neighborhoods — and someone said what a lot of us have felt but maybe hadn’t said out loud: it’s too compartmentalized. Too many perfect little boxes. We can find a part pretty easily — frustration, guilt, the voice that says I hate myself — but the conversation isn’t really a conversation yet. It’s more like talking down when we meant to talk with.

What I’m carrying into this week is simpler than a better map. It’s one real sentence, spoken inwardly, to a part of you who may have been waiting — and letting your body register what happens when you speak it, instead of sorting it from a distance.

Hey — I’m here. I don’t know you that well yet. I want to care for you.

I’m a facilitator and fellow practitioner. If you’re in crisis, please reach for help where you are. This recording is not a substitute for that.

I’m answering them here without names. The same questions live outside the fence too — and for anyone listening who’s just trying to stay human.

I facilitate two groups who practice alongside each other: one inside, one outside on Zoom. The women inside don’t have access to this podcast; they receive the same audio on their state-issued tablets. Outside listeners hear it here.

We start with happiness on purpose. Someone had been looking for a snail for years — empty shells, empty shells — and then a friend ran up with one. That counts. Joy counts.

Then we walk toward what’s harder. A thought that won’t let go. Focus when the system is stormy. Fear for family. What happens in the body when something old takes over.

I’m a facilitator and a fellow practitioner — not a therapist. You’ll hear a few maps we use in class. You don’t need the jargon. Underneath is one question: What’s happening in me right now, and can I meet it with a little more space?

If something here feels too raw, take what helps and leave the rest. If you’re in immediate danger, please reach for real-time help where you are. This recording isn’t a substitute for that.

What’s one ordinary thing that lit you up lately?

— Carlos

The main idea is simple, but not easy:

The critic is not the enemy.

The manager is not the enemy.

These are parts that learned strategies.

In this reflection, I talk about what it means to notice a harsh inner voice without letting it run the whole system. The practice is not to argue with the critic, obey it, silence it, or turn it into another enemy. The practice is to make a little space around it.

A phrase we return to is:

Something in me is criticizing.

That small shift matters. It creates distance. It helps us remember that the critic may be loud, but it is not the whole of who we are.

This episode also introduces a simple four-part movement:

Hear it. Name it. Make space. Ask gently.

And underneath all of it:

Not obeying. Not attacking. Making a little space.

This audio is part teaching, part practice, and part bridge between inner work and the simple mindfulness we eventually learn to offer others.

If you found this through Mindful Letters and have no idea what a cohort is: I’m Carlos. I teach mindfulness inside a women’s prison and with a small circle of friends on the outside who walk alongside that work. This recording is a recap I made for people in that circle after our first session. You don’t need the readings or the Zoom call for it to be useful. It’s one tool, in plain language.

What happened in Week 1

We covered a lot — parts work, realms, agreements, new vocabulary. That’s a lot of words for one sitting. So this audio strips it back to one map: the ladder.

You don’t need to memorize Sanskrit. You don’t need the whole framework yet. If you take one thing from week one, let it be this.

The ladder

Five steps. Plain language. In order:

1. Body — Where did it show up in my body? Heat, tightness, hollow feeling — before the story starts.

2. Gut — Pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral? (I want this / I don’t want this / I don’t care.)

3. Story — What label did the mind put on it? Not a lie — but not the whole picture.

4. Urge — What impulse showed up? Defend, shut down, leave, explain. The urge is not the action.

5. Witness — Can I notice the whole sequence without being owned by it?

Memory cue: Body. Gut. Story. Urge. Witness.

The recording walks through each step and ends with a short practice you can do with something real from your week — something ordinary, not the hardest thing in your life.

Who this is for

• Outside friends in the summer–fall 2026 cohort — your weekly audio companion alongside the readings on Drive

• Anyone writing palancas who wants shared language without having to teach or fix

• Anyone listening cold who wants a body-first way to catch a reactive moment before autopilot takes over

Inside cohort: you’ll get this on the tablets too. Same recording. No extra homework.

One thing to try

Pick one slightly charged moment from this week. Run the ladder once. See if you can catch even one step you usually skip past.

That’s week one.

More on the cohort and the practice at carlosg.substack.com. Questions for those in the circle: WhatsApp or the Zoom hour.

I teach meditation behind a wall.

It is not really a wall — not the way we picture one in a book. It is barbed wire, fences, the electric kind of thing that keeps some people in and, in a different way, keeps other people out. Every Monday I sit in a room on one side of that line. This spring, my college students — about thirty miles away, on their computers and in classrooms I know well — kept asking the same question the women in that room often ask:

Does paying attention change anything?

That is the question — but attention is only the first turn. You have to look before you know what you are planting. One of our readings put it plainly. In Gaza in My Phone, drawn in real time while violence was unfolding, Mazen Kerbaj writes:

My dear silent friend / You will reap / tomorrow / the world you are sowing / today.

We wrestled with that all semester — how paying attention, sowing, and acting are chained together. Not as a threat, but as plain cause and effect: what Buddhists call karma in its everyday sense. Attention is not the whole harvest. It is what tells you what is going into the ground. What we scroll past, what we name, what we let blur into numbers — each is a seed. Something grows. And sometimes, if we stay with what we see long enough, we learn how to shape what grows in the modest way that makes life easier to bear — for others, and for ourselves. Not always on the timeline we want. But the chain holds: look, plant, act.

By the end of the term, three questions kept surfacing:

Do walls protect us, or do they hide the truth from us?

What counts as real action when we witness suffering and cannot fix it?

How do we stay present without going numb?

One student put the first question sharply: If walls make us feel safe but stop us from seeing the truth, do they protect us — or prepare us to fail?

These are not school questions. They are practice questions. And as I sit with them now, in the quiet after grades and deadlines, I hear familiar voices in them — and I hear myself. The fixer who wants to solve what cannot be solved, the one who looks away because looking hurts, the one who insists we must do something now when confronted with something as obscene as genocide — in Gaza, or anywhere violence is normalized.

In Internal Family Systems (IFS), a therapy and meditation map many of you may know, those voices are often called manager and protector parts. There is no tidy answer to offer them — and in IFS, that is partly the point. The practice is to listen: invite these parts into a safer inner space, let them speak to each other and to you, and recognize that the questions they raise, even when they cannot be resolved, often come from a wish to protect, not to harm.

Once those voices have been heard, even a little, another question opens: what would all of this feel like if it were held by what IFS calls Self — not another part, but the steady witness in you that can feel the tension without being hijacked by it? The wanting to protect. The wanting to fix. The not being able to. What if all of that could rest, even briefly, in a space of kindness — without the demand that we already know what to do? That is not the same as bypassing responsibility. The container is meant to hold action too — not replace it.

I do not know. I have a practice — and I mean that in the plain sense in which we say meditation practice: something we return to again and again, not to perfect but to experience, which quietly removes the performance of having it figured out.

That is easier to transmit in the meditation room than in the college classroom. College has its own enclosure: it rewards argument that wants a problem and a solution — a thesis. That is a different kind of barbed wire. When the subject is witnessing horror, the impulse to push back is not wrong. It is human. We explored that all spring. Still, I worry sometimes that what gets lost is the possibility of a larger container — one that can hold outrage and grief and paralysis without pretending any of them is the final word. The urge to fix, applied without listening, has a way of multiplying pain — often because the people being “fixed” were never asked what they actually need or want.

That container is what we practice on Monday afternoons. It is harder to grade.

My students are more linked to that work than a syllabus would show.

In fall and spring I teach writing at Miami Dade College. This past spring we read Gaza in My Phone, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and an essay collection by Omar El Akkad — all about witness, walls, and looking away. I do not use the same books every term; that cluster was this year’s. A student organization on campus — LEAP — has dedicated itself for years to addressing the needs of incarcerated women. I share what I can from the prison meditation community — carefully, without exposing what is fragile or naming every thread that ties these worlds together. What I can say plainly is that the attention my students brought to separation and suffering is not separate from the attention we cultivate behind the fence. Different rooms. Same question.

And the wall, I am learning, is not stable — not as a metaphor, and not in the body.

I have never been outside the wall in the way a teacher can pretend to be. Every week I walk through the prison doors carrying a sadness I do not fully resolve — perhaps cousin to anger, but not rage — and only a partial awareness of my own privilege, with blind spots I know about and others I do not. In class I offer texts and questions; the students do the seeing. I am not exempt from the enclosures I ask them to name: comfort, citizenship, the feed, the schedule, a city that runs smoothly in part because it extracts labor from the people it claims to welcome and deport. Sometimes the person enclosed is not the one behind the barbed wire. Sometimes it is the one who believes looking is enough. Sometimes it is me.

Naming that — my comfort, my complicity — is difficult, and it takes time. In the prison room it can unfold across months of returning to the same plastic chairs, the same questions, the same women. In a sixteen-week college semester I may never see a student again after the final. The naming there is thinner, more rushed — and still worth attempting. It is not the same as resting in Self, that steady witness I described earlier. But honest naming can be where practice begins — a loosening, a release, and sometimes action that does less harm than the reflex to fix or look away.

Every week in the women’s prison we practice noticing without turning away from what is here — rage, grief, boredom, hope, the long wait between visits. I will not quote what is said there. I will not name individuals or repeat what is shared in confidence. The container is closed for a reason.

I can say we practice Tonglen — breathing in suffering, breathing out relief — not as a magic trick that fixes the world by Friday, but as a discipline of attention. I can say I have come to lean on possibility over fantasy: not “everything will be fine,” but humbler questions — can anything shift here? How do I work with what is so difficult, or what seems impossible? How do I make enough room for human dignity when the machinery of punishment presses in? — with room for the answer to be no, at least not in this lifetime, perhaps not in the next. Even that honesty is sometimes enough to keep sitting, keep listening, keep showing up.

The same question my students asked on campus shows up there too: What is the point of paying attention if the world does not change by Friday?

I still do not know if it “works.” I know something shifts when I show up with an open heart — in me, and sometimes in the room. It may be small. It may be short-lived. For the time being, it matters.

The summer program is not a launch. It is a continuation.

This summer, a new program begins inside — and an Outside Meditation Cohort will move in parallel with it. The cohort connects people from around the country with the work of the mindfulness class inside the prison. You will not see or speak with the women directly. You will practice many of the same meditations. On Mondays on Zoom, we sit together — and, in an imaginative way, in community with what is happening in that other room. It is free of charge. If you are interested, reply to this post or email me at the reply address Substack provides for this newsletter.

The aim is a twenty-week training: eight weeks this summer, twelve in the fall. Participants inside — women who have taken the meditation class several times and know the basics — are preparing to become mindfulness facilitators in their housing units: simple sits, breath, noticing, gentle return. No jargon. No performance. On the outside, you do not need that background. You will practice the same core sits we use inside — and, if you stay for the training, maps for how reactivity shows up in the body and mind (we draw on Buddhist and parts-work frameworks, explained as we go) — in solidarity with the practice happening behind the fence.

The college is on summer break. Practice is not.

Mary Oliver asks: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

That question is not abstract for anyone paying attention right now. Everything has consequences. Silence sows. Attention sows. Scrolling sows. Numbing sows. None of us can step off the wheel entirely.

Octavia Butler, in Parable of the Sower, writes: All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you. The sowing and the reaping are bound together. You cannot stop the process. You can shape it — not always in the radical way the urgent part of you demands a fix, not always on a timeline you would choose, but shape it nonetheless.

So here is one invitation, if you want it:

Before you open social media today, take twelve breaths.

Or try one round of Tonglen for someone whose suffering you have been scrolling past: on the in-breath, imagine taking in their pain; on the out-breath, sending ease — even if you are only guessing. You are training attention, not fixing them.

Or name one wall you are inside — and notice what becomes visible when you admit it with gentleness and kindness.

I do not know what you will reap tomorrow. I know what you are sowing right now.

A couple of days ago I had a telehealth visit. I’d come down with COVID and hadn’t been feeling my best. The first question the nurse asked me was, “Are you sad?”

I was so taken aback. It almost felt ridiculous — and yet I understood why she asked.

But how could you not feel sad? How is it that you can move through a day without feeling sadness of some sort — some grief, some loss — either from your own personal life or from the lives of others you pay attention to? Can you walk through the day, paying attention, and not feel sadness? I don’t think I can. The nurses’ intake question was a little like the question are you alive?

Yes, I’m alive.

Yes, I also experience joy and love and goodness and all of the positive things.

But yes — I feel sadness.

The Prison Meditation Cohort

This gets me thinking about the mindfulness meditation cohort in the prison. In my seven years of practicing meditation with people in prison, I’ve experienced a deep sadness and a profound surprise at the possibility for love and hope to exist at the same time.

The work asks me to pay close attention to the situation the students at the prison are experiencing, and to myself as I witness life in prison. The prison experience has become a mirror to notice my own aches and fears, and to hold space rather than fix and change anything. This last part is not a surrender to despondency. It’s the recognition that fixing — that constant pull to rearrange and resolve — is often just another way of looking away.

Not everything can be fixed. Sitting with what can’t is its own form of presence, and healing, distinct from the agitation of reform or correction or activism.

There’s something about sitting in meditation with others, especially with those who are incarcerated, where you see yourself more clearly, where you see the situation more clearly, and where some of the gloss and glitter of what gets presented to us as the proper aims and goals of living kind of breaks down.

The prison strips things away slowly. And the longer I sit there, the more I notice what’s so visible inside: the way attention is policed, the way time becomes a kind of waiting rather than an experience of the now, the way release is held out like a promise that is always in the future and may never arrive.

Over time — and it’s taken years — the prison has become a familiar place to me. What once felt completely foreign, impossible even to imagine, now produces something more like déjà vu. I walk in and think: I know this. The prison isn’t as strange as I once thought. It feels like the school where I teach. It feels like the medical system when I enter it. It feels like the kind of work most of us do. The places are organized in similar ways, with similar premises about time and attention and who gets to leave. I don’t want to overstate the comparison or flatten the real differences. But there’s a way that much of contemporary life keeps us spinning, busy with the next thing, the next reward, the next release, and never quite arriving — and in doing so, it traps us away from the now.

Our practice doesn’t fix this because there’s no real fixing. To fix would be to engage in more wheel spinning and distraction – another project to invest in. Our community just opens a small clearing where we can notice ourselves and our situation — and in my experience, noticing is where something gentler and more interesting can begin.

This semester, our cohort included thirty women practicing inside the prison, twelve or thirteen people meeting on Zoom every Monday night, and a good number of Miami Dade College students doing their own form of practice through writing and connecting with the students at the prison. Altogether, we formed a little cohort of people exploring, una escuelita de meditación de cómo vivir.

Each week we sat together. We meditated. We worked with the short meditation slogans. And we exchanged palancas — notes of encouragement passed between the inside group and the outside group. That was the container: a regular, simple rhythm of meditation, writing, slogans, and palancas. Nothing fancy. No promises of bliss, stress reduction, or permanent inner peace.

Over the semester, certain teachings kept surfacing and meeting us where we were. Turn things around — the slogan that asks us to take whatever’s hardest in the moment, the thing we’d most like to push away, and fold it into our practice instead. The reminder, borrowed from the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, of “good enough practice” — and the relief of not needing to do any of this perfectly. And the distinction between relative and absolute compassion — the everyday kindness we offer to one person in front of us, and the wider, more spacious compassion that holds everyone, even the people we struggle to hold. These weren’t abstractions. People brought them to bear on a hard conversation, a sleepless night, a moment of conflict at work or with family. The slogans became companions.

But what made the cohort worthwhile wasn’t a bunch of special meditation practices. It was the people and community that emerged through them.

People reported feeling more grounded, more honest, more able to stay present with themselves and with each other. We moved — not all the time, but often enough — from reaction to reflection, from isolation to a kind of relational care. The cohort became a place where people could be witnessed, encouraged, challenged and shaped by the shared practices. And because the community crossed real differences — incarcerated and not, older and younger, with very different lives — that crossing itself became part of the formation and the practice.

In short, this wasn’t just a meditation class. It was a community of practice for learning how to live with tenderness, courage, and steadiness in a complex often painful world.

This Summer

In mid June, we’ll start a new meditation cohort for six weeks. It’s a short program, and I’m not sure how many people will join from the outside. I know there will be a good group on the inside. I hope there’s interest on the outside to join those inside — and maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you’re interested in connecting with, or experiencing, this little community of meditators who often write and share and listen with care.

Maybe like me, you too can’t answer the question “are you sad?” with a simple no.

If you are, drop me a line for details about the next cohort.

Her name inside the facility is Cloud. I’ve known her for five years, which is long enough to know that names chosen in captivity carry their own theology. Cloud. Something that moves. Something that can’t be held.

When I first met her, she was sitting in the back of a dingy classroom with her arms crossed, not having any of it. A friend had brought her. She wasn’t staying. And then she kept coming back, semester after semester, through whatever gaps appeared in the schedule and in herself, until she had taken nearly every class I offered.

Her release date, at the time I met her, was 2095.

Sit with that number for a moment. 2095 is not a release date. It is a way of saying: you will die here. It is the state removing a person from the ledger of the living while keeping the body technically alive. She had already been inside for twenty-eight years when we met. She would need to survive another seventy-one to walk out.

I often address hope in my classes. People attend hoping for some kind of result from meditation. Often, people feel it’s some sort of silver bullet, a magic pill. I encourage them away from this thinking. Most don’t expect this from me. I try to gently ground our practice in abandoning all hope of any kind of fruition.

Cloud was different. She wasn’t hoping, and I noticed it.

She was holding something else. I told her I wasn’t sure hope was a thing to hold onto. That resonated with her. I practice in the Buddhist tradition, loosely, imperfectly, but one of its persistent teachings is that hope can be a trap — a way of suspending yourself between now and a future that may never arrive, unable to inhabit either.

What I highlighted for her and me instead was a smaller, stranger word: possibility. Not probability. The probability of her getting out alive was near zero. But possibility is different.

Possibility asks only: can this change? And the answer, always, is yes.

Things change.

Nothing is permanent,
not the body,
not the feeling,
not the sentence.

She kept coming back.

Last Wednesday, I sat in a parole board meeting for three and a half hours. Cloud was case number twenty-five. I heard things in those first hours that I am still carrying, things I won’t describe here. When they finally called her case, eight of us spoke on her behalf.

Cloud will be released March 24th of this year. After thirty-three years.

I’m a professor of English composition at a community college in Miami. I’ve been teaching for thirty-three years, which is, I’ve only just realized, exactly as long as Cloud has been inside. I will turn sixty on March 23. These numbers have been sitting with me like stones in a pocket, present in a way that isn’t quite heavy but isn’t quite not.

This morning, I told her story to my students on a Tuesday Zoom call at seven in the morning. Many of them had their cameras off. The ones whose faces I could see told me in the chat that they were exhausted, burnt out, sad, already lost before the week had properly started. I asked them to say I am feeling tired instead of I am tired, which sounds like a small thing but isn’t — the distance between being a feeling and having one is the distance between a person and their circumstances, which is where all possibility lives.

Then I taught them face yoga.

The vagus nerve runs from the back of the skull down through the neck and into the chest and belly, bidirectionally, carrying signals from the brain to the body and from the body back to the brain. This means the body can talk back. A slight lift at the corners of the mouth sends a message upward through the nervous system that says: not danger. At ease. It sounds absurd until you’re in a room — or a Zoom call, or a prison — with people who are drowning in the weight of their own circumstances, and you realize that the mind cannot always think its way to safety, but the body sometimes can move there.

I’ve tested this in the most challenging of places. I know it works, imperfectly, temporarily, which is all anything works.

After the breathing, after the faces, we read an opinion piece from a newspaper in Oklahoma. A writer gently, carefully, without raising his voice, laid out the evidence that a United States missile had struck a girls’ school in Iran, killing somewhere between 153 and 200 children aged seven to twelve. He connected the death toll to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 — a number his readers would carry in their bodies — and then moved outward, through Gaza, through Ukraine, through Dresden in 1945, until the reader arrived at the only conclusion the evidence allowed: that children have always paid for the decisions of people who will never be held accountable for paying that price.

I told my students: This writer doesn’t sound like me. I am not this subtle. I said it honestly, not as self-deprecation, because there is something they need to understand about rhetoric and reach — that the voice that can enter a room without triggering its defenses can sometimes do more work than the voice that announces itself. I am not that voice. I have made my peace with that. What I can do is teach them to recognize it, to understand why it works, to see the architecture of an argument that moves a reader without appearing to move at all.

We talked about the Trail of Tears. We talked about settler colonialism. We talked about what it means that Oklahoma has the largest Native American population in the country and why. A student said, “It sounds like Gaza.” I said, “Yes.”

Diana di Prima wrote, in her poem Rant: There is no way out of the spiritual battle / there is no way you can avoid taking sides. I believe this. I have believed it for thirty-three years in classrooms that the institution imagines are producing compliant, productive workers for a system that will ultimately consume them. I have stood in those rooms and tried to offer something else: the idea that a person has a home. That you stand somewhere. That the work of a life — maybe the only real work — is to find out where that is and then hold it with care and gentleness.

Most of my students will leave without having fully found their somewhere, their ground. I’ve made my peace with this, too. The semester is less a container for transformation and more like a disturbance. A splinter. Di Prima’s Rant left behind in the tissue, working its slow way in. What matters is not that they leave knowing where they stand, but that they leave knowing a location is something a person can have. That someone stood in front of them, imperfectly and without apology, and occupied one.

Mary Oliver wrote about being a bride to wonder. That’s the phrase I keep returning to this month, this year, in what feels increasingly like the long arc toward something I won’t name yet. Sixty years. Thirty-three years of teaching. A woman named Cloud walking out of a Florida prison on March 24th, blinking into light she hasn’t stood in for a third of a century.

I am not saving any of this for later. I am spending it now, this semester, this morning, on the students in the black boxes whose faces I couldn’t see, on the ones who typed I am feeling burnt out and I am feeling sad into a chat window at seven in the morning because someone asked them to.

This is my gift to myself. The sixty years, and the wonder, and the not looking away.

That’s the whole thing.

This past Saturday, I did not take to the streets.

I sat quietly in my backyard and meditated for an hour.

Stillness is not escape.

It is intimacy with what is.

I took refuge in what is—

Not pushing away any feelings,

Nor the sensations,

Nor the thoughts.

Just being.

What arises will also pass.

Awareness is not touched by any of it.

For that one hour, my mind raced and slowed.

My perspective shifted.

From feeling like the world was ending

To sensing something deeper:

In the midst of doom, of pain, of heartbreak—

There is a center that holds.

The center is not somewhere else.

The center is here, in you.

I write this on a Monday.

Soon I will sit in a room with students who are incarcerated.

Some are serving life without parole.

Some have just come out of 15 years in solitary confinement.

The world builds cages.

The heart knows freedom.

For me, the prison is a microcosm of the constructed world we’re all living in.

Hellish, yes.

But even here, there are Buddhas—

People who sit quietly,

Who take refuge,

Who find stillness in the fire.

There is no place where awakening cannot happen.

Even in hell, there are Buddhas.

My students remind me:

I too can be a Buddha.

The path is not reserved for the pure.

It is walked by the willing.

So if you are reading this

In the midst of whatever you’re going through—

Grief, pain, confusion, overwhelm, or numbness—

Know this:

You are not alone.

The center holds.

You can return to it. Again and again.

Take good care.

-Carlos

It’s been over six months since I last connected with you, and what a heavy start to the year it has been.

In the coming weeks, we’re likely to see the expansion of the carceral state, with policies that round up immigrants and rely on prison system as the infrastructure to house them and mass surveillance and policing to expand fear, distrust, and confusion.

In times like these, I’m reminded of the women I’ve worked with in prison.

Their hope is different from what many of us on the outside know—it’s a hope forged through community, resilience, and finding strength within. They remind me that even in the darkest times, there is always possibility and surprise.

This brings me to my invitation for you:

Not to take to the streets, but to take care of yourself. To find a way to be of service that also nurtures your heart.

The impulse for many right now is to retreat. But the opposite will serve us all so much better. Join me and others as we create a small community of reflection and practice that holds space for despair along with hope along with action.

I invite you to join the next cohort of our meditation and letter-writing program.

This program connects people on the outside with women on the inside through an anonymous letter exchange, fostering connection, understanding, and shared humanity.

Spring Cohort Details:

• Start Date: Monday, Feb. 3

• Orientation:

📅 Monday, Jan. 27

⏰ 7:30–8:30 PM

📍 Zoom (link provided after sign-up for orientation)

Orientation is required to participate. If you can’t attend, you’re welcome to join a future cohort.

Sign up here for the orientation to learn more and reserve your spot and receive the Zoom link for the meeting.

This is an invitation for anyone who is looking for a space to reflect, connect, and act with purpose—even in uncertain times.

With care,

Carlos

🙋🏽‍♀️ Why is empathy important when considering someone else's feelings or situation, especially if you don't know the person well or are unsure how much they care about their own situation?

This thoughtful question was posed by one of my students during a meditation class at the women's prison I teach. It highlights a profound curiosity about the nature and importance of empathy and how our sense of self frames our response.

🔶 Why Should You Care About Empathy?

We often think of empathy and compassion as obligations. This mindset can lead to people doing good deeds with an attitude of superiority or bitterness, turning acts of empathy into burdensome tasks. But what if we approached empathy differently?

🔶 A Fresh Perspective on Empathy

Being empathetic and compassionate means opening up to ourselves and others. It involves creating enough space in our hearts for feelings to flow and having the strength and courage to see the world as it is, rather than shutting ourselves off to protect our sense of being.

🔶 The Power of Meditation

People engage in meditation for many reasons. Many start meditating to feel less anxious, more grounded, and clearer.

At its core, meditation helps us befriend ourselves. It reminds us not to fear any aspect that shows up within us when the light of awareness makes those parts of ourselves visible. This self-befriending takes time.

As it does its work within us, it also spills over into the way we see the world around us. Meditation practice is the ground and path that allows us to show up in the world not merely for ourselves and our limited interests.

Over time, it opens us to the possibility of extending ourselves with compassion and empathy without the resentment that comes from feeling obligated.

🔶 Introducing Bodhichitta

A concept that can help us understand this deeper approach to empathy is bodhichitta, a term from Buddhist teachings.

Bodhichitta means "awakened mind-heart" and refers to a state of mind and heart characterized by a profound sense of compassion and empathy for all beings.

It encourages us to recognize our interconnectedness with others and to cultivate an open heart and a courageous mind, seeing the suffering of others as our own and striving to alleviate it.

🔶 How It Benefits You

Ultimately, we can have empathy for others, even if they don't have empathy for themselves, because we see others as part of ourselves. Through the practice of bodhichitta and meditation, we realize that we carry others within us, not just as separate entities we observe, but as interconnected beings whose well-being is intertwined with our own.

This understanding helps us approach empathy not as a duty, but as a natural and heartfelt response to our shared humanity.

🎁 The practice of empathy leads to freedom from the claustrophobia of our prison cells. If we close ourselves off from our own hearts, we will never be free. This is true for the women on the inside but especially for all of us who are reading these words on the outside.

The best time is when you actually sit and meditate.

• If that happens to be in the morning, then the morning is your best time.

• If that’s in the afternoon, then that’s your best time.

• If that’s at night, you get the idea.

But there are some things you may want to consider:

When are you most at ease, most alert, and least revved up mentally?

For me, this happens to be the morning.

Practicing in the afternoon is difficult because I’m usually in work mode. Night time works, but I usually struggle with staying awake.

But none of the time considerations really matter that much. What is most valuable is that you actually meditate.

Time on your cushion makes a huge difference.

Ready to deepen or start your meditation practice this summer?

This is your chance.

Earlier this week, I attended the graduation ceremony for the semester at the women’s prison. I left feeling heavy even though the event itself was joyful.

While waiting for the graduation to start, I spoke with one of my students who is being released in about 60 days. She’s been in prison for some time.

She told me of her fear of going out into the free world and being alone. She’s not sure how she’s going to manage. Her husband died a couple of years after being incarcerated.

At 55, she said she felt she did not know how to be on her own.

Prison makes no sense. It does not address any of the reasons why people fall apart or do the things that hurt themselves or others.

I came home that afternoon and could not really name the feelings I was experiencing. I’ve heard so many terrible stories from my students. This one was not new.

But in my morning meditation the following day, I sat and, after a couple of minutes, the tears came.

My granddaughter came to mind.

I acknowledged that I don’t want her to suffer, and yet she will.

I thought of the parents of those women and how most never imagined that their daughters would suffer as they have. I cried and felt profound grief. Each one of those women are my daughter and granddaughters.

There’s no way around this grief.

As much as we pursue success and happiness, there’s no way that everyone and everything we love and know will not suffer. We can’t shield ourselves or them.

I realized in my tears that joy and grief are one coin. It’s the currency of being human.

We can’t have one without the other.

In our culture, grief is often put aside and done in private. We don’t really show others our heartaches. We tend to look at grief as something we can avoid if we just don’t pay any attention to it. Or when we face the terror of loss, we don’t really share it or post it anywhere.

Maybe we’re missing out on grief.

Grief can do many things.

It tenderizes the heart.

It humanizes.

It plants seeds of compassion, allowing us to see ourselves and everyone else in a clear, humble light.

It sharpens our awareness of the fragility of life, transforming everyday experiences into one of a kind moments.

It deepens relationships, connections, and community, showing us that our differences are often superficial.

It provides the training ground for each of us to develop our courage, resilience, and purpose.

It expands our emotional capacity, allowing us to experience our one and precious human lives more fully.

We do the best we can when we let the tears flow.

It's not easy to come by good news about prisons. Yet, this spring a group of people in the outside world and those inside a prison demonstrated to each other just how transformative letter writing grounded in meditation and seasoned by compassion can be.

This semester, around 60 incarcerated women engaged in a letter exchange with a similar number of participants from the outside world. The process of sending and receiving these letters every week, though logistically challenging, has proven to be an invaluable tool for emotional, psychological, and spiritual support.

The program incorporates meditation practices such as mindfulness, loving-kindness (Metta), and Tonglen, which equip the women to handle the often harsh realities of prison life with grace and resilience. After a particularly invasive search operation at the prison recently, many of the women shared how these practices helped them maintain their dignity and stay present, despite the humiliation of being stripped and cavity searched.

One of the most poignant moments of this semester came from a woman serving a life sentence for a crime committed under severe postpartum psychosis. Her interaction with a Miami Dade College student through our letter exchange allowed her to articulate her experience and struggle for the first time to someone on the outside. The student's response, full of compassion and understanding, underscored the healing power of simply being seen and heard as more than one's worst act.

The letter exchange program is more than just a means of communication--it is a lifeline. It reminds those incarcerated that they are not forgotten, while also providing participants on the outside with a profound opportunity to grow in compassion, insight, and strength.

We're excited to announce that three new cohorts will begin in June--one inside the prison, one at Miami Dade College, and another for individuals like you, who may not be affiliated with the college but wish to participate in this rewarding program.

If these stories of transformation and healing resonate with you, join us.

It's an opportunity to profoundly impact lives--both others' and your own.

Want to learn more? Simply respond to this message to let me know. I will reach out.

We will meet in that field.

-Carlos

The Weather Was So Nice This Week I Dreamed of the Beach

I read that line in one of the letters this week. It came from one of my students at the prison.

So what happens when we can't imagine the future anymore? When the beach is no longer in our dreams? When dreams no longer show up?

I often wonder about this with the women serving long sentences or life sentences.

Recently as we were doing our weekly check in before starting class, a group of four or five women felt safe enough to share their joy in their expected release and going back to their families within the next couple of weeks.

You can tell sharing this was something special for them and a bit risky.

Prison is not about joy.
Jealousy is baked in to the system.

I knew there are people serving long sentences and life sentences in the group. I felt comfortable asking how they worked with the challenge of what they were listening to, knowing that their time for release was not coming up soon or was not going to come at all unless something in the system changed?

"Pennywise" (not her real name) responded with wisdom that only the heart can teach.

"As you step back into the world," she said, "savor your favorite meal. As you relish the flavors, let out a 'yummy yum yum,' and spare a thought for those of us who remain."

This was more than advice. It was an invitation to practice sympathetic joy—to find happiness in others' happiness, a concept as liberating as it is radical.

Such joy opens our hearts when they're most likely to close, imprisoned by our own thoughts of our misfortunes.

Such joy teaches us how to dream of sunny beaches even from behind barbed wires.

Such joy nurtures a hope that is resilient, grounded, and overflowing with generosity.

I invite you to try this simple yet powerful exercise this week.

Every time you eat, think of those who can’t share your freedom or your meal and say the following mantra before your first bite:

Yummy, yum, yum—savha.

Keeping you all in my heart and wishing you a week of dreaming, hoping, and being that is yummy and liberating.

I'd love to hear from you,

-Carlos

One of my students at the prison mentioned the following:

"About my prison time, I have been sentenced to life without parole. As long as I'm alive, I believe any day God will grant me freedom."

This woman has served close to 30 years. She's not yet 60.

So many thoughts arise from this, particularly about the nature of life sentences without parole—without revisiting the person to assess their mental state and ability to reintegrate into society.

Her message forces me to ponder the nature of hope and how people maintain it in the face of an entire system that treats them more like numbers than individuals.

Hope has been a challenging concept for me in my work at the prison. Initially, I steered away from using the word, unsure of how to integrate it into that particular teaching context. When I get in my car on the way home, I often can't describe how I feel to myself or to others for at least a day. The prison is a vortex that sucks out life and hope.

But I've come to understand that even in the vortex, hope can thrive on the edges, mostly in the commitment to personal transformation, in the belief that change is possible even and often when it seems improbable.

I've learned this as my meditation classes at the prison fill up and have a waiting list. I learn this from many of my students who have been with me for several years now.

I've also learned this through the nonprofit I work with. This organization is committed to a kind of hope that is muscular, worked for, and earned.

Exchange for Change offers classes focused on writing and communication, in the belief that doing so helps lay the groundwork for a robust hope that invites those who practice into a community space dedicated to transformation. The work we do is an antidote to the rampant despair that permeates just about every inch of the prison system.

Our small collective effort nurtures a kind of hope that is more than just a wish for freedom. It's an assertion of humanity, a declaration that even in the face of life's harshest realities, the human spirit can soar and make meaning.

In the summer, I will teach another meditation class. I am always looking for individuals with varied backgrounds who would like to join me and the women. We meet through weekly anonymous letters, and for the space of 12 weeks, we sit and meditate and practice transforming despair.

If you're interested, please reach out to find out how it works.

Introduction: An Insight

Happy Sunday, everybody. It's been a couple of months since I last wrote. I hope you're well.

In my effort to restart this newsletter, I want to share insight that has been a recurring theme in our classes at the prison—and one that might offer you a useful perspective as you navigate the week ahead.

Key Insight: Understanding Suffering

One of the most powerful lessons we've been exploring over and over again is the understanding that suffering is not a form of punishment.

This insight has been transformative for the women and for me, offering us a way to view our challenges and pains through a lens of compassion rather than judgment.

This week, I invite you to reflect on this: How might you walk with a little more joy and lightness if you viewed your suffering as part of the human experience, not a penalty?

Reflective Exercise: Shifting Perspectives

Consider any current challenges in your life. Explore these questions in you mind and on paper:

• What changes when you stop viewing suffering as punishment?

• How does this shift in perspective influence your feelings towards yourself and others?

• How much weight do we carry when we think God is punishing us for our mistakes and mishaps?

As you explore these questions, consider how stepping outside the blame game may free you to live more fully.

Teaching, Learning, and Growing Together

Since my last message to you, I've continued teaching classes at the prison. Our current class has nearly 60 women, alongside a diverse community outside, including Miami Dade College students and participants in a parallel community course.

Classroom Highlights: Meditation and Literature

In our sessions inside and outside the prison walls, we meditate and explore texts like Yann Martel's Life of Pi and Norman Fisher'sTraining in Compassion, which reinforce the power of story and imagination in addressing life's disappointments and losses.

These classes are community building efforts, reminding us that we don't make it through life on our own. No one does. Part of our dis-ease is the effort to go at it on our own, pulling ourselves by our own bootstraps.

Love is always more than one.

Community Invitation

I share this insight with you not just as information but as an invitation. Whether in the free world or behind bars, we all encounter suffering.

Your sufferings are not a verdict on your worth but part of our shared humanity. They nudge us together.

In June we will start a new cohort. I encourage you to join us, engage with these ideas, and perhaps find some joy and lightness in participating.

Closing Thoughts

As we step into the week, I encourage you to mull over this message.

May it be a source of comfort, connection, and growth.

Wishing you well on this Sunday.

Take good care.

-Carlos

I write this message with Christmas music in the background while the smell of turkey and lechón in the oven, and congrí fills the house.

This message goes out full of gratitude for all of you who take the time to read through these little missives. It is also my way of doing something, even if just a small gesture, to soften the harshness of confinement for my students at the prison.

These words will not reach them, but I feel that somehow keeping them in my heart and you doing the same, the burden of isolation is lessened.

The image on this note comes from “Cat’s Meow.”

She colored in the drawing I gave the class the week before Thanksgiving. It represents them, our class, and the freedom from bars and barbed wire that meditation offers.

In many ways, it is a prayer, an aspiration, and a practice.

As the year folds into the silent promise of tomorrow, let us hold in our hearts the understanding that being seen is not merely a gift we give to others but a bridge we build towards a more compassionate world.

Each of you, by taking the time to let these words echo in your consciousness, has contributed to a tapestry of recognition that covers the cold walls of neglect with the warmth of attention.

Together, we step beyond the act of reading and acknowledge the existence and the worth of those who society throws away.

This, in its own right, is a profound act of healing—a chorus of angels singing, "Good tidings."