If any group of humans had an excuse to NOT connect with innate peace and well-being, it’s those in prison. However, that’s not the case. What Anna Debenham points out in this interview is that every single prisoner she’s ever worked with is able to find examples of well-being, resilience, and peace within them.

Anna’s work is incredibly inspirational to me and I was thrilled to be able to talk with her. In the introduction I mention how this interview was a game-changer for me in terms of deepening my understanding of our innate well-being that the Three Principles are pointing to.

You can listen to the podcast by pressing play above, or listen on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, or watch the video here. Below are the show highlights and full transcript.

Show notes

• How Anna points prisoners to their innate resilience and well-being
• Embarking on a research project to measure the effect on prisoners of an awareness of the Three Principles
• Following up months and years after prisoners are released to measure long term results
• How prisoners cope with re-entry into their communities when they know where their experience is coming from
• Working with young offenders to change the trajectory of their life path
• Looking past the labels we’ve been assigned for our true nature
• How working in prisons points to the universality of the human experience
• On the ex-convicts who are now teaching the Principles to youths in prison

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Anna’s TedX talk (The video is the full morning of TedX talks in Portland in April 2019, but I’ve set that link to begin at the beginning of Anna’s talk.)
• The One Thought Institute
• Beyond Recovery
• Robin Charbit and Ken Manning’s site, Insight Principles

You can find Anna at TheInsightAlliance.org.

Transcript of interview with Anna Debenham

Alexandra: Hi everyone I’m Alexandra Amor
from StopSufferingAbout.com and I’m here today with Anna Debenham. Hi Anna.

Anna: Hi. How are you today.

Alexandra: I’m good thanks.

Anna: Thanks for having me.

Alexandra: Oh, I’m thrilled to have you here.
I’m really excited about this conversation. So let me introduce you to our
listeners.

Anna Debenham arrived in Portland, Oregon
in the spring of 2016 with no connections to prison or to the criminal justice
system or any clue how to start a nonprofit. She did have one thing: an
understanding of the mind.

Through this understanding, Anna began to
teach in prisons, created a research project that was accepted by the
authorities of the prison and built her own organization from scratch. The Insight
Alliance was born in the car park of a women’s prison and the rest is history.

They have groups in a men’s prison, a
women’s prison and are scheduled to start in the youth prison in a few weeks.

So Anna, why don’t you give us a little bit
more about your background, your training in the Principles and how you started
working with prisoners and in prisons.

Anna: I joined the One Thought Institute back in 2015 I think, something like that, because I’d heard about the Three P’s in work and stuff and I didn’t know what it was. I was curious and so I went to a talk George Pransky gave. That was my first exposure and it just felt true to me.

Everything that I’d studied before,
everything that I’d searched for, everything I’d learned before kind of felt
like it made sense, so it came together in like a little kind of nugget or
something. And I was like OK that’s true.

So I got really interested and then joined
the One Thought Institute. And when I was there Jacqueline Hollows was just
starting a research project at HM Onley, one of the prisons that she worked in
at the time. I think was the first prison that she was working in.

She needed a volunteer because she was
starting out and she’d done one group before and it was expanding. I got really
curious. So I started volunteering with Beyond Recovery and I was there for
about a year. And I loved it. I really just loved it.

And then moved back to the states because
my husband is American. We’d lived in Portland for about 10 years and then
moved back to England and we were there for seven years and then it just so
happened that life took us back to the States.

I knew I wanted to continue working in
prison. So that’s kind of how it started.

Alexandra: And then as you say you put it all together in the in the parking lot with a woman from the YMCA, is that right?

Anna: Well, I just started having conversations.

I didn’t know how best to get into a prison and one conversation led to another, which led to another, which led to another. And so I was actually running a group of my own through the religious services and then another group I was doing the life skills program.

That was in the men’s prison and I was just
doing it because I enjoyed it. I wasn’t thinking I was going to start an
organization or do anything with it. It was just something that I love doing.

And then I had a conversation with Susan
Stoltenberg who runs the YWCA and she got really interested in what we’re
doing. And they already had a women and children’s program in the women’s
prison. So she got me into the women’s prison and said this is a program I
really think that would benefit from being in here.

When we were in there having our meeting she said to the people that we were having a conversation with, she said if you want this program to kind of go further than just a volunteer program you need to do research because it has to be evidence-based. So I was like OK I can figure that out.

So then we were in a car park and I was
like, well shit, I can’t do a research project just under me. I need to be more
professional than that. So then she offered me fiscal sponsorship if we were going
to be a non-profit and then we came up with the Insight Alliance and she’s
fiscally sponsored as for about the first year or year and a half.

And then we got our nonprofit status and we’re doing our own thing but that was how it very organically came into being from not thinking that I ever wanted to run a non-profit.

It’s one of those things where people can say, oh nonprofit is such hard work, you don’t want to do that. People tried to talk me out of it but you realize that’s just thought. A nonprofit doesn’t mean hard work, a nonprofit just means a nonprofit.

It’s only hard if you think it’s hard. Otherwise, you’re just doing the next thing in front of you and figuring it out as you go, which turns out that’s what we’re doing. It may look like hard work but to me, it’s just get on with it you just sort of show up and figure it out. So that’s what I’m doing.

Alexandra: Oh
that’s lovely. Let me actually pull something from your website. Let me read
that as well for people listening.

The Insight Alliance works in prisons and
in the community with a simple focus: understanding the limitless nature of the
human mind and recognizing our own innate well-being, that everything we need
to thrive already exists within us.

So that’s what you bring to the prisoners
that you’re speaking to. Despite their circumstances they still have that
innate well-being and wisdom within them.

Tell me how you start that conversation with a group of prisoners. Where do you begin?

Anna: I always start with well-being. We don’t go into thought until a bit later. But
it’s interesting, I’ve started of late to do an exercise which I found really
helpful when I got from Robin and Ken Manning in a business group I did with
them. It’s big is basically getting the guys to close their eyes and think