How I Am Changing The World
By
Bob Livingstone
I wrote a book titled The Body Mind Soul Solution: Healing Emotional Pain through Exercise. It is a self-help program that combines the benefits of physical exercise, the psychotherapeutic technique of self-questioning about your personal traumas, listening to music and journaling as a means to heal emotional pain.
I feel that in order to change the world, it is important to work with folks who are have the least and are suffering the most. This is one of the reasons I chose to teach a class at the San Francisco County Jail based on the program in my book.
The class consists of women who are incarcerated mainly for drug offenses. They are mostly African-American who range in age from early 20’s to early 60’s. The class averages ten women per session which I have been teaching since September 2007.
The class structure consists of in the following order
- Listening and reading the lyrics to a song and then discussing them
- Reading a section of the book
- Writing down an emotional pain question
- Music is played on the boom box and the women are asked to focus on their emotional pain question while they exercise
- Written responses to their emotional pain questions are created
- Their responses are shared with the group
- A song is played to end the class
I have discovered that many of the women are brilliant and my class allows them to share emotions that have been pent up for years. I believe in order to let go of emotional trauma, you must actually experience it inside. We listen to Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, Luther Vandross and others who stir up feelings of heartbreak and redemption.
Some examples of emotional pain questions are: “Why do I keep coming back to prison?” “Why do I find it difficult to trust others?” “Why do I always seem to sabotage myself?”
Some insights expressed are: “If you keep stuff bottled up, you are going to end up being in orange again” (orange is the color of the prison uniform) “I want to leave jail before my mother dies. I want to show her the love and respect she deserves and has not yet received from me.” “I want to understand why I seem to get better only to fall into a world of addiction and prison once again.”
The range of emotion consists of tears to utter joy of moving to Mary J. Blige’s Just Fine.
Each time I leave this class, I know I have participated in something very special. I have not only provided the space for the women to release their pain, I have connected deeply with them and that causes the tears to fall down my face. I honor this work because it is sacred.
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