In an almost all-white prison in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, R.G. Shore, a person of color, turns up the static and allows the white noise to drown him in sound.
Other than sleep, his handheld radio and cheap headphones provide the only escape from the men around him. The vulgarity, the racist vitriol and the anger of 500 inmates build to a crescendo that fades as Shore sinks deeper beneath the surface. The waterfall of white noise guides him inward, where he is eventually swallowed by a safe ocean of meditation.
MEDITATION
In his memoir, “The Ocean Inside Me,” Shore retraces the nearly three years he spent as a person of color in an almost all-white prison, where he is housed alongside neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Amid harsh conditions and blatant racism, Shore teaches himself to meditate by going into his body, befriending his shadow and sitting with the traumas held by his younger self.
“It’s damn near impossible to try to heal the trauma when you’re living in a place that serves it up twice as fast,” Shore writes in the book. “But it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.”
With nothing but time on his hands, Shore learns to love and accept the cause of his deepest pain: his brown body. The static noise from his prison radio becomes the conduit by which he transcends the confines of his surroundings, connects to nature and finds healing through the element of water.
It’s damn near impossible to try to heal the trauma when you’re living in a place that serves it up twice as fast. But it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.
In “The Ocean Inside Me,” readers are invited into Shore’s spiritual realm, as he seamlessly weaves his meditative practices with his prison experiences and insights on social justice reform. Shore eventually studies law and becomes an advocate for the very men who are oppressing him.
Shore is passionate about sharing his story as a way of working through the trauma in a way that can benefit others.
“As a person of color who is now formerly incarcerated, I’m marginalized in more ways than one,” he says. “At my lowest points in prison, I discovered a way to confront and heal those underlying effects of racial trauma through meditation, and it’s my hope that people of all backgrounds can get something from reading through that experience.”
CALL TO ACTION
As readers witness Shore’s transformation toward profound healing in a place that quickly damages most of its inhabitants, they are left with a call to action, not just within their own spiritual frameworks, but within the larger system as a whole.
“The spiritual journey involves the shadow as much as it involves the light,” Shore observes. “When we are willing to go down deep into the shadows of our wounds, we gain access to the deepest waters of our own heart.”
Shore is founder of Northwest Wisdom, a nonprofit in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, where he focuses on helping people heal racial and spiritual trauma through spiritual embodiment. As a certified Spiritual Counselor, he offers healing through Meditation, Reiki, Yoga and Energy Healing. He also offers a masterclass on Healing Trauma Through Meditation on his website.
For more information, check out www.northwestwisdom.org or follow the organization on Instagram at @northwest_wisdom.
The book itself is available on Amazon.
