This morning I was driving to the garden store and heard this story about this documentary by Jenny Phillips Please go to the link and see the trailor etc.
Let's think about meditation! I have listened to holosync tapes during painful passages in my life. Especially when my arm was in a steel cast and I had to sleep sitting up in a recliner for six months. The 12 step Programs also teach the importance of meditation.
Phillips, a cultural anthropologist, psychotherapist and now documentary filmmaker, cemented this bond during the filming of “The Dhamma Brothers,” a documentary she began in 2002 chronicling a 10-day meditation retreat in Donaldson. She interviewed the 36 participating prisoners (called “the dhamma brothers” after the Dhamma, or dharma, the term for the collective teachings of the Buddha) for hours, discussing their childhoods, their crimes, their struggles to get through each day in lockup and the Sisyphean challenge of trying personal transformation inside an often-hopeless prison culture.
One result is an emotional documentary about the benefits of meditation for a most unlikely set of candidates. But until a year ago, the film was shaping up as a different story than the uplifting one it has become.The impetus for the film came in 1999. Ms. Phillips, who had volunteered in Massachusetts prisons and conducted research on prison culture, heard that some inmates were informally practicing meditation inside Donaldson.
After trading letters with the meditation group’s leader and traveling to the prison to meet the men, Ms. Phillips, herself a meditator, wondered if a more formal and intensive program could further help the men’s stress levels. (Similar programs have long been proven successful in some prisons in India.) Ms. Phillips approached two meditation teachers, Bruce Stewart and Jonathan Crowley, to lead a Vipassana meditation course — a 10-day meditation program held in complete silence — at Donaldson.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/13/movies/13dhar.htm
Last edited on Mon Jun 1st, 2009 02:23 am by Garden Queen
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