Freedom to Choose short from University of Santa Monica
For the last ten years, I have found myself inside the razor wire of Chowchilla Women’s Prison, the largest maximum-security prison for women in the world… working with these women by sharing my heart.
Why?
Because it is the most profound healing experience I have ever had!
Along with other volunteers from the University of Santa Monica’s (USM) two-year master’s program in Spiritual Psychology, we work with incarcerated women.
“Freedom to Choose” is based on the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist, who was imprisoned during WWII in a concentration camp. Frankl believed that you can take everything away from an individual, other than one thing – our ability to choose how we respond to our circumstances… that freedom to choose is within each one of us.
“The Freedom to Choose” project has provided me some very profound and moving experiences. And I humbly believe that this project is making a huge difference in transforming the collective pain and suffering of the world.
I know it has supported me in being a better father and a better person.
“To share the healing power that comes through God’s loving is the basic aim or goal of the Freedom to Choose Workshop. We help people do that by teaching them skills that help them connect with the loving part of themselves, with who they are as Spirit inside. We do that mainly through forgiveness of judgments and also by holding a clear focus for Spirit to do its work”
– David Paul, M.D., Ph.D.
“Without forgiveness life is governed…. by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.”
– Roberto Assagioli
