In Insein, Meditating with Prisoners
Liv Gaborit is a social scientist with a background in psychology who worked with DIGNITY (the Danish Institute Against Torture), which is funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In her work, she was interested in studying the impact of Vipassana meditation courses in Insein Prison, the results of which she described on a recent podcast episode.
It is notable that both Gaborit and the political prisoners in Insein Prison were able to connect via a shared experience in having undergone an intensive Vipassana meditation retreat, despite their vastly different backgrounds. As she goes on to talk about in the following excerpt, by participating in a Vipassana retreat herself prior to the study, Gaborit was able to gain a deeper understanding of the experiences of the prisoners and connect with them on a more personal level. This helped her to relate to their experiences more effectively and to communicate her findings more effectively to others.
“It also made the prisoners take me more seriously when they heard that I had sat through a meditation retreat myself.”
“I thought maybe that's a way in; I need to be an ‘old student’ to be allowed. So, I'll go and do a retreat. And then I went to do the retreat.
But I had a dilemma. Because part of the rules [at Goenka Vipassana centers] is that you're not allowed to write during the retreat. And as a researcher, doing field work, I take a lot of notes all the time. That's the way I document what I do. That's the way I generate data.
So, I had to decide whether I was going to respect the rules of this meditation retreat, and really fully do it, or whether I was going to insist on doing research, as I usually did. But I decided not to take notes. I sat through the whole retreat, and I followed the rules. I took notes in my mind along the way; I forgot most of it, probably. But I got the full experience. It enabled me to relate to the experiences of the prisoners in a better way, and to not let my own experiences and my notes about my own experiences take up too much space within the research.
I wrote notes after I finished the retreat, and they're not as precise as if I [had written] them along the way. But it did give me a personal experience of what it means, and it made me able to relate to what the prisoners said. It also made the prisoners take me more seriously when they heard that I had sat through a meditation retreat myself. Most of the prisoners I interviewed, that was actually what they asked when I gave them the opportunity to ask me a question. Their question [was], ‘Have you done this kind of meditation yourself?’ For them, that was key. It was key for them to know that, so [that] they had a sense I would actually understand what they were talking about. This subjective knowledge, it takes up a lot of space in all of this research. It's hard to translate that into something you can write in a research paper and that you can disseminate.”