TRAINING THE MIND, PoF-class one
First, I have to say to everybody, who is reading this blog, that my english writing is not so great, but I try to write shortly something about every class.
On 9.of december I was driving to the Hämeenlinna’s female prison to start a new PoF-group here in Finland. This prison is a kind of open prison and prisoners go to work daily outside the prison. All of them are committing a certain rules (no drugs or alcohol), and if they fail, they have to go back to the “closed prison”.
This beginning of the december was a darkest time of the year here in Finland, and the weather is gray or dark blue almost all of the time. I was thinking that maybe this is a good time of the year for start this program. Prisons don’t have much to do outside because of the weather and also it is raining every day.
We had eleven females in a group. I explaned the class-rules and started to introducing mindfulness.
In the beginning I wrote Meditation on the chaulkboard and asked people what thoughts they have about it. Something weird, religious, they didn’t know much about it and nobody had ever tried to do that.
Then I wrote mindfulness on chaulkboard, and they didn’t know much about that either. So I explaned and it seemed they understood that this PoF training is not some weird religious activity but it has take some techniques from meditation. Then we tried to do that few minutes and for couple of ladies it was really difficult to not talk on sitting still.
So, half of the group has some interest and curiosity, willingness to be there and some of them seemed to think that this is really not for them. One women in the group started to roll up cigarets, and when I remind her about the rules she said that it’s not bothering her at all she can listen and doing this on same time. So, I said, sorry, but that is not okay for me, would you mind to put them off…After a class I heard that she is a kind of ” boss” of the whole group.
Then I was introducing different kind of techniques and we tried some of them and they get a cell-practice for the next time.
Then we finished the group with short meditation.