"Dancing with Fear" by Natalie Smith
Dancing with Fear by Natalie Smith
From Yoga Behind Bars magazine Issue 4 Winter 2009/2010
"Aren't you scared of us?" My eyes passed through the collection of girls in their blue juvenile hall scrubs and found the questioner. A young freckled girl of about fifteen gazed back at me with defiant, playful bravado. There was something so compelling about her question that the background buzz of teen girls paused and they all turned to hear my answer.
I smiled. "Of course not. Why would I be scared of you guys?"
"I don't know...because we're bad," she said, emphasizing the baaaaaad. The class giggled nervously. "Aren't you afraid we'll, like, do something to you?" Their eyes flitted nervously towards the Corrections Officer in the room, wondering if they had crossed a line.
I looked at their oddly familiar faces and decided to give the gift of honesty. "No, I love coming in here to spend time with you ladies. You actually remind me of myself as a teenager."
Teenagers have the uncanny ability to talk about 'things no one talks about.' Obviously no- body would answer, "Yes, I am terrified of you all," but many of us would be lying if we weren't at least a little freaked out. As a culture, we do treat our incarcerated community members like they are, well, baaaaaad. The reason I have such fond memories of this particular moment is that I had finally come to a place personally where I could say - with absolute integrity - that I was not scared to sit with, and to be real with, these girls. I did not feel fear.
When I began teaching inmates, my honest answer to "are you scared?" would have been different. I think I had a very even- minded exterior, but inside, my quickly beating heart betrayed me. I may have been able to recite beautiful verses on the interconnection of all humankind, but this was a completely different universe than practicing it.
Teaching my students required me to change deeply. In order to skillfully work with a population of students with high rates of ad- diction, mental illness and, often, very painful life stories, I needed to examine these elements in my own life and self. We all have times of our lives that we consider dark and painful, and I was certainly no different. Fittingly, I found that there was a lot of highly charged material - experiences of mental suffering, substance abuse, and traumatic events -concentrated in my early teen years. I had long since changed my behaviors, but that is a somewhat artificial measure of actual healing. In truth, the remnants of this time period were still with me - most notably, in the total lack of identification I felt with this young sad girl that I used to be. She was jailed away somewhere in the back of my mind, and I avoided any reminders.
As I continued teaching, I was forced to become much more aware of this inner self I had been ignoring. My students - especially the girls - mirrored this time period back to me with regularity and often hilarity. I finally decided to earnestly invite the old teen- age bad ass Natalie back into my awareness.
What I found while I sat in meditation was not a destructive, scary, "baaaaad" kid that needed to be punished, but a terrified girl with little to no idea how to cope with pain. After the spiritual grunt work of acknowledging, mourning and healing this back-log of traumatic experience, I felt like my heart opened up another chamber. It was as if I had been carrying around a heavy back- pack for a decade and finally put it down.
Accepting and understanding my own dark times led to a huge turning point in my inner and outer life. As I released the idea of an inner villain, and the fear that this engendered, the world ceased to consist of villains. My students were suddenly like parts of myself - not philosophically but experientially. I felt understanding and hope, instead of fear and separation, as I sat with them through their own struggles. I knew they could heal - if they wanted to and when they were ready - because I had.
The relationships that are occurring right now in jails and prisons have the ability to transform both student and teacher. Every week, I have the unique opportunity to revise the human habit of labeling parts of myself, my family or my community as "bad" and approaching them with fear (or, more likely, not approaching them at all). This habit of labeling denies us all - not just those be- hind bars - real opportunities to understand ourselves, to heal and to face the world fearlessly.