#179 - The Work of Getting Free: Redemption, Gratitude & Hope - with Shaka Senghor & Jerry Colonna

Welcome to the Reboot podcast. We are so glad you're here. Hey, friends. When I sat down with Shaka Sanghor, we returned again and again to a truth he knows in his bones. The hardest prisons to escape are not the ones built of concrete and steel, but the ones forged in our souls, where the walls are made of shame, grief, anger, and fear. At 19, Shaka took another man's life. For that, he served 19 years in prison, seven of them in solitary confinement. And yet, within those walls, he began the long, hard work of becoming something more than the worst thing he'd ever done. Older men themselves serving life sentences, saw something redeemable in him. They placed books in his hands, challenged his thinking, called him youngblood, and insisted he could still walk free. And in that, seeing he was redeemed years later, when his own younger brother was murdered, Shocker wrote, to the man who pulled the trigger, he extended not vengeance, but compassion. And in doing so, he authored back the very gift he'd once been given. This is the mutuality of redemption. We are redeemed by others, and we in turn redeem others. And in such mutual redemption, we are freed. Freedom such as this is not of a single moment, but a daily practice of hope, a practice of believing that the mind, forged manacles, as poet William Blake once called them, can be broken. This is part of the conversation you're about to hear, for what Shocker shares with us is the essence of his new book, how to be Free. Enjoy it and consider your own acts of redemption in your journey to be free.

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Hey brother, how are you?

I'm amazing man. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm excited to dive into our conversation today.

I'm not so sure you're as excited as I am to have you on. It's really a pleasure. Today I've got the pleasure of sitting down with Shakar Singhur, a man whose life and work bear witness to the possibility of transformation and redemption. Shaka is the New York Times best selling author of Righting My Life, Death and Redemption in an American Prison, as well as Letters to the Sons of Society and most recently how to Be A Proven Guide to Escaping Life's Hidden Prisons. He's a leading voice on criminal justice reform, a sought after speaker, a restorative justice advocate, and relevant to this show, a mentor to founders, creators and change makers navigating invisible shackles of their own. He was incarcerated for murder at 19 and then spent the next 19 years in prison, seven of which were in solitary confinement. Shocker now works with individuals and organizations to foster resilience, emotional clarity and purpose. Feels like a kindred spirit in how to Be Free, Shocker reminds us that the most enduring prisons are the ones we carry inside, made of grief, shame, anger and fear. He invites us to recognize that freedom is not a place we arrive, but a discipline we practice. In this conversation, we'll explore how redemption is lived not as an abstract ideal, but as a daily commitment. We'll look at the legacy of harm both received and caused, and how love, vulnerability and storytelling offer a way through. Welcome to the conversation. Shaka, thanks for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to have a real heart to heart today.

I'm excited to talk about some of the themes in the book, but I did want to create some space for you. There's a wholeness to you and it comes through in your book and it comes through in the healing. And you know, as many on the show know, I'm a Buddhist and I gave up my first religion, Catholicism really, as a teenager because like, who's you stop going to church. And then through my own struggles in my 30s, through depression and suicidal ideation and the remembrance of traumas from my past, I came to a healing place. And even though we came through different doorways, I did find a kinship in the, in the healing work that you've done for yourself. And most importantly and relevant to this conversation, the way you're turning that around and actually be using your own experience to be in service to other people and really seeking to answer the question, the implicit question behind the title, how to be Free.

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's one of those things where I was going through this part of my life in the last few years, and, you know, it's been such a winding road. You know, I tell people, you know, I have the most incredibly interesting life to me. The spaces that I navigate, the people that I've met on this side of the journey. And it always, you know, brings me back to this kind of singular question of like, what is my purpose in the world?

Right.

And when I first began to write, what was my intention when I sat down to put pen to pad? And that's what I just discovered, that I had a purpose that was bigger than I had even imagined. Which can be complicated, right, because it's like, who are you to have a purpose? But what I think is that life begins to deliver things to you consistently, to kind of shake you up and awaken your consciousness to what you're put here to do. And so when I say, you know, recognizing that there was a purpose, it was the ability to look back over the last 10 years or so and see this consistent theme in my life where people would reach out to me with a singular question, how do I get free? And then you can fill in a blank. You know, free from the pain of this divorce that I'm going through, free from navigating my child, you know, being addicted to opioids, free from, you know, suicide ideation, like you name it.

You feel free from memories of childhood.

Absolutely. And what I realized is that people were entrusting me with something so intimate and so personal because they recognized in my own life the actual, you know, freedom that I, you know, had to fight for to get out of a physical prison. And that there were lessons that they were gleaming from my story. And that's how I arrived at this kind of bigger idea about sharing the lessons I've learned about what freedom really looks like.

Well, I will tell you that your descriptions of that which imprison us beyond incarceration, the physical incarceration reminded me of a line from a William Blake poem. Blake, the romantic poet in chimney suite just has this half a sentence, mind forged manacles. And, you know, there's. There's the. Or even the. The Buddhist concept. There's pain and then there's what's called dukkha, which is the suffering that goes on top of the pain. And I think dukkha and mind forged manacles are the prisons that you're talking about it's the stories that we tell ourselves. I interrupted you.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean that. Exactly. I mean, it couldn't have been written more accurately or more beautifully. When I think about my own journey and what I say to people is that I. I was incarcerated before I ever stepped foot into a prison cell. Because I bought into a narrative that had very limited outcomes. And I believed it based on my surroundings, based on my older siblings and the older guys in my neighborhood who had followed these two pathways, dead or in jail. And when I was working my way out of the mental incarceration, I mean, I was struck so, you know, starkly by the realization that I had bought into a narrative that led me right to that prison cell, which, you know, it started with a question, how did I end up here? And that question was prompted by reading philosophy, which oftentimes is not. When you think of philosophy in prison, they don't oftentimes go together or you think of philosophy and a guy from the streets of Detroit. But I got really into philosophy, you know, while I was incarcerated. And I just remember reading from Plato's Republic, the unexamined life isn't worth living. And I just remember, like pondering that over and over, like, what does that mean? And then I was struck by this idea that I had never really looked at my life to figure out how did I end up in a prison cell? You know, I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be an artist, I wanted to help people. I wanted to bring beauty into the world. And here I was in this environment where suffering was the. Was this kind of day to day practice. And that's when I discovered that I had been incarcerated way before I got in that prison cell. And that, you know, if I was going to be free, I had to find that freedom within before they ever let me out. And I was fortunate to be able to do that. And it's one of the things that, you know. So it's such a incredibly amazing experience to be able to share that with other people.

Well, it's. I'll say two things. The first is I want to reassure you that that childhood wish to help other people, you are fulfilling it right now. Not in the way you thought, but maybe in a way that's actually more transformative and more helpful. And the second thing is, you know, your exploration of Plato and the question. Those who listen to this podcast know that I have a phrase I use all the time, which is radical self inquiry. Radical in that we don't often do it. Yeah, radical in the sense that that inquiry process, that inner process, often is done out of a sense of guilt or anger and retribution. And I think what happened. If I could project a little bit into the experience for you, there was something that happened for you where you started to approach it with what would say is curiosity. Like. And to me, it's. It's. It's. You know, my. My famous question is, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want. Right. And I always talk about being an accomplice in our life, but, you know, let's be real here. It's like, how the. Did this happen to me?

Absolutely.

Like, that's not who I am. And all of a sudden, through that curiosity, there's a kind of taking responsibility for your own destiny.

Absolutely.

Carl Jung famously said, I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.

Absolutely.

And I hear freedom in that choosing to become. Does that resonate at all?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I. When I went on that journey, what it looked like for me, I was reading a lot of these books, right? I was reading everything I could get my hand on. And, you know, there were. There were kind of a twofold reason for the. The, you know, thirst for knowledge and the thirst for reading that I had. You know, one was I was really fortunate to be literate in an environment where literacy rates are third grade. Average reading level in prison is third grade. And when I first got introduced to the power of reading, it was by these older gentlemen who were my mentors. Now, these. These weren't, you know, entrepreneurs or spiritual leaders or, you know, artists coming in to kind of save my wretched soul. These were men who were serving life sentences who saw something redeemable in me. And I was rebellious. You know, they would be like, hey, young blood, one day you're going to get out of here. I would say going on overhead. I'm never getting out of here, never getting out of this place. Because at 19, I couldn't even imagine nearly two decades down the line. And so, you know, I was. I was rebellious. I was getting into a ton of trouble. But these men were. They were craftsmen when it came to reaching young men. They were, like, masterful in their ability to be patient, to be strategic, and to be able to offer something that would lead to different outcomes. And for me, they saw that I was a curious guy and I challenged everything, and that's how they led me to books. And, you know, it started with reading this little handwritten book, this Guy, his name was o'. Neill. He had handwritten this book that was probably about 25 pages, the story of his neighborhood. And it was so fascinating, it was so vivid that it drew me in. And he was like, well, if you like this, you should go over to the library and get this book by this guy named Donald Goins. And so I go into the library and I get this book called Dope Fiend by this guy, Donald Goins. And it was just like the most raw and brutal articulation of street life ever. And it drew me in. You know, Donald was from Detroit, like myself. He had served time in prison, and he was writing a language that was familiar to me. And so I read all of Donald books. He wrote about 13. And then I read like, Iceberg Slim and a few others. And then when those books were gone, they were like, hey, you should read this Malcolm X book. And at the time, I didn't know anything about Malcolm X. I knew that people. People seemed to be upset that Spike Lee was making a movie about him, but I didn't know anything about his background and story. I hadn't taught that in school, but I thought the name sounded gangster. I was like, malcolm X, who is this guy? I want to keep reading these gangster books, right? And I read that book and it blew my mind. How, you know, he.

This is the autobiography of Malcolm X.

Autobiography with Alex Haley, the brilliant writer, right. And what was interesting to me is that, you know, people, when they talk about Malcolm, they talk about, you know, his work as a humanitarian and, you know, civil rights and advocate and, you know, black nationalist and Muslim. But what was what struck me more than anything about Malcolm was his intellectual curiosity. I mean, he was reading everything, everything he could get his hands on the dictionary. And so I began to read the dictionary and I began to study etymology of words. But it led me to reading a variety of things. You know, I got into westerns, you know, I got into pop, you know, novels, Jackie Collins and, you know, so I would have a kind of a combination of like these very salacious novels. But I would always grab a couple of books that was like, serious, and they were non fiction. And then eventually, over time, you know, I got into philosophy. Eastern philosophy, Western philosophy. I was just curious about what people really thought. And to summarize it, or to sum it up, is one book in particular, as a Man Think of by James Allen, became this little book that I would just keep going back to. And I had read the Secret, and it talked about this idea of manifesting into Your life. But it was as a man thinketh, that I kept going back to. And it just talked about how the seeds that you plant make will shortly sprout whatever it is that you plant. And if you plant weeds and thistles and thorns, that's what you're going to get. And I just thought about, like, man, what are the seeds I'm planting in my own mind? And then I was struck by this idea that I just didn't know enough about my own life. And to your point, you know, being in solitary confinement, the thing that is the most challenging is sitting with your own thoughts. And so I had had that experience where, you know, I tried to meditate and, you know, my mind is running like that ticker at the bottom of ESPN with every negative thought you can think of. And then I got to a place where I started to learn how to allow those thoughts to dissipate. And I started to think and. But writing it down just became just a profoundly meditative process. And that's when I began to think that, hey, I do have some agency over the rest of my life. I may not be able to control the past. I may not be able to control all the traumatic events that happened to me, but I can take responsibility for my contribution. I can be accountable for how I want to live the rest of my life. And I can create some form of agency, even in an environment where you're stripped of nearly all agency. And that agency was. I can choose how I think about my circumstances and how I think about the future.

You get to write the script that's on the chiron at the bottom of that screen.

Absolutely.

So instead of, you know, shocker is a jerk or, you know, what a loser it becomes, Shocker's trying hard.

Absolutely.

And that myth of irredeemability is just that, a myth.

Yeah.

Because you were born human.

Yeah.

And as a result, were born with basic goodness. And that you can always get back to that basic goodness. I mean, forgive me, I'm slipping in a little Buddhism in here. But, but, but, but I. I sense the. I sense how much work you've done on yourself. And in some ways, I'm not going to romanticize solitary confinement by any stretch of the imagination. But you could have chosen that time to make the situation worse for you.

Yeah. When I think about that, there's a duality to it. Right. And what I've explained to people is that there's a difference between solitude and solitary confinement. And within solitary confinement, I had to find solitude because that environment is extremely Chaotic and barbaric and inhumane. And within that, I also realized that I was, I was really just lucky. Right. Like, there's people who are born, you know, with a form of luck that we envy, as in, in the world, right, that, you know, and you grow up to be foot eight and 220 pounds, and then you're LeBron James. You can't script that. You, you know, there's a, There's a gift portion of that. That's luck. Right. The luck of the biological draw. You know, there's the, the luck of the intellectual draw where, you know, we've been fortunate to, to be able to receive and be recipients of or, or.

Or the luck of which zip code you've been born in.

Absolutely.

And how that, that shapes schools, education, economic opportunity, the skin that you are born in, the gender identity. I mean, all of that.

Yeah, you can name all the things and. Right. For me, that luck really was being literate. I wouldn't be here today without the ability to read and being, and being in solitary. What allowed me to go into solitude was being literate, you know, and being able to read the works of great thinkers who had traveled, you know, traveled the world, who had navigated adversity, who had overcome their own inner prisons and like that. That allowed me to really reimagine my prison cell and to figure out ways to, you know, make it something that I had agency over. And so I would structure my days and as if I was at university, you know, I would get up in the morning, I would eat the slop that they served, and I would decide whether to go out to the cages or not. And then I would set my day, of course, by studying, you know, a different subject every hour. So it would be world history, it would be etymologies, it would be, you know, literature, you know, it'd be black history, it would be poetry. And every day I would make sure that I had some type of structured way that I navigated. Navigated my days. And then I would write deep into the. Whenever they cut the lights off. And then most of the time, I would stand by my door and write until, you know, two or three in the morning, because usually that's when it was the quietest. And so I would have to do this dance around the chaos of the environment and. But that, that ability to create some type of agency over my life, you know, really led to the outcomes of me believing, like, there was something more on the horizon for me. And I wasn't just meant to die in a Prison cell, you know, as just another number in a cog in that. In that machine. But it, but it really started with me just. Just having to take some form of agency over my life.

I appreciate all that you've said and I'll just emphasize one point and I think you relate to it. Reading and writing were my salvation. They got me out of the circumstances of my childhood and into a position where I could be of service to other people, which is the highest form of redemption for me.

Absolutely.

And I see kinship in the work that you're doing. A little bit of projection on my part. But I do see that reading and I'm going to call it out. Your writing, you know, it was like a call and response. You'd hear something and then you'd think about it and then you would respond to it. And you're an incredibly powerful writer. Thank you. So I want to jump a little bit to the book, if you don't mind.

Yeah, no, sir.

I think in the book you say that freedom isn't a one time event. It's something you have to, quote, unwrap every day.

Yeah.

And I think about that also as it relates to redemption. That is not something that's bestowed upon you, it's something you have to grow into.

Absolutely. Yeah. None of these things are one offs. Right. You know, they're part of the overall journey. And I'll talk about freedom first and why I framed it that way, the way I structured the book. I talk about some of the hidden prisons we find ourselves in. And I start with grief, because what I found is that grief is the toughest one to get out of for a variety of reasons. One is hard to let go of love lost. It's hard to let go of people who've gone, you know, gone before us. But it also would be cruel to say to someone, hey, you've grieved long enough. Get over it. Because how we arrive at grief is just as varied as how we arrive at life. And so when I began to write, I realized that that is the toughest one. But it's also one that will, if you live long enough, you'll experience multiple times throughout your life. And so you're constantly in this space of like getting through and figuring it out. And for me, you know, and it's going to be different for everybody else. For me, with grief, what I landed on was gratitude. You know, gratitude is the. Is the key that opens that door to that hidden prison. It allows you to get back to joy and fulfillment in a sense of like, you know, there's something in my life that is worth moving forward, you know, with. And so, you know, that's when I, When I think about the book and I think about, you know, this big idea of freedom and why it's one of those things where it's like every day you have to choose that. And the same with redemption, you know, when I think about redemption, you know, for me, you know, it's so interesting, like, when I think about my life as I was examining it. Right. What really helped me was realizing that the spirit of helpfulness I've always had that, you know, even when I was doing the wrong things, even when I was selling drugs, it was like I made this illegal money. And then I helped people who were going through adversity. You know, I paid rent for people, I helped people get cars. I bought shoes and clothes for kids who, who were going without. And it wasn't even. It wasn't a guilt driven thing. It was just an intuitive response to someone being in need. So that part of my being stretched back even further than that. And once I was able to look back of like, man, everybody used to clam. My neighbor's tree, she had, her name was Ms. Moore, and she had these tall pear trees, and she was an older lady, so she couldn't climb up and shake the pear trees. And I would clam way up in the trees. I'm sure, like, no parent would be able to do that today. Back when I was going, back when I was going, it was like, we can do pretty much anything. But I used to be so high up in these trees that clearly my parents were negligent in letting me do this. But I would go and pick these pears and shake these pears down. And it just brought me joy as a kid to help her to see people in my community in need and to be able to rise to that occasion. And so that that spirit of helpfulness had always been there. And redemption, you know, is something, you know, it's a step beyond that, right? It is. You know, I was recently asked this question. I put in for a pardon, and I was asked this question by Oprah. She said, what would a pardon mean to you? And just that question moved me so emotionally because my answer was, it just means I'm now officially a part of the tribe of humanity that is not impeded by my past and that I can move through the world with a little more freedom than, you know, than the governmental officials would like us to have. And the reason it moved me mostly is Because I have an incredible life. You know, I moved through the world in a way that most people couldn't even begin to comprehend. And yet there are still these moments on my journey where my felony is smack, like right dab in my face. And an example of that is like when I'm traveling with my wife and my son and we going through TSA and my wife has like TSA PreCheck and they're like, hey, you want to go through this line? And she's like, no, I'm going to stay with my husband. It's always like, we do this kind of look, me, my son and my wife, we all kind of look at each other and we're just like that thing again. Right? And like, is that a. Is that the worst thing that I barrier that I will ever face? Absolutely not. But what it is is that it's a reminder over and over and over and over and over again that I have to prove myself or that I'm not quite fully accepted into this bigger idea of what it means to be a part of a society. And there's so many of these things. 40,000 collateral consequences when you have a felony. So there's the kind of structural redemption of just navigating day to day life where these things come up. And then there's the personal, which we're all, you know, as humans and you know, if you live long enough, you're going to offend, hurt, damage, you know, disrespect, dishonor, you know, someone along the journey, and sometimes it's yourself. And so we're constantly, you know, in a state of repairing. And if you're aware of it and you're conscious of it, you're, you're, you're less likely to cause intentional damage or harm to others. But you know, as we know what it means to be human, no one is exempt from causing harm.

I hear you. I want to jump up and pull up a book off my shelf and I want to read you something, if you don't mind.

Absolutely.

So I'm not going to be so bold as to read my own writing. I'm going to read a quote that I quote, but this is from my book Leadership and the Longing to Belong and in Reunion. You know that first question that I spoke about, how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want? That's a really important question. The corollary question is how have I been complicit in and benefited from a world that I say I don't want to see. And when I think about your experience, I have to be honest with you, it never occurred to me that you don't qualify for TSA PreCheck.

Yeah, right.

And it's, it's, it's one of a thousand cuts.

Absolutely.

That you have to deal with. And what it does is it undermines your sense of belonging. And this is the quote I wanted to read. And this, this comes from theologian named Frederick Buechner. And he wrote, there lies the longing to know and be known by another fully and humanly. And that beneath that there lies a longing closer to the heart of the matter still, which is the longing to be at long last where you fully belong. A longing for home. What I heard, you know, and I was really curious about this notion of life after release for you and the movement towards redemption, but a movement really towards belonging, but still being held back from that in some capacity. And as God is my witness, I am doing my best to know you, to see you, and to welcome you into that tribe because you've been there, you've belonged there all along.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, you know, our government doesn't see that and society socially doesn't see it as well. Like we want people to be punished indefinitely. And you know, the reality is 90 over 90% of people will get out of prison at some point. And we have a choice as a society to determine, you know, how do we want people to come home, do we want them to come home healthy and whole, or do we want them to come home so damaged that they are no longer can even contribute in a meaningful way. And the way that we've conducted ourselves when it comes to imprisoning people is the latter. The damage caused is immeasurable. What we're doing to people on our watch is unconscionable.

I think we're denying their humanity. We're kicking them out of the tribe. And what we're saying is basically you're beyond redemption.

Yeah, we're kicking them out of the tribe. And we're also not being honest with ourselves or our fellow people. Because when I was in solitary, the majority of the men I was around had pre existing psychological illnesses. And because the system is over bloated, they're conveniently put those people who can't advocate for themselves in solitary confinement. And because they have pre existing psychological, you know, problems, they consistently break the rules, which are minor rules that leads to them being in there excessively longer. So for example, if you are in solitary confinement because you've had a Manic depressive episode or a schizophrenic episode. And then now you're in there for one infraction, but then you start to beat on your cell door because you're, you're imagining something that's in the cell with you. Then you receive another infraction, and on and on and on it goes. And then you have people there that's there for years for things that aren't even misdemeanors in society. It's not a misdemeanor to, to make noise in society.

Right.

And so that, that type of suffering, like, we're collectively responsible for that. And as a society, we're not going to get out of it free. And what we see is that people who come home extremely damaged end up causing more damage, and we're paying a price for that. And so, you know, with these things, you know, whether it's TSA, whether it's, you know, I bought a home in 2019, right before the pandemic, and I purchased a home before I purchased insurance for the home. And when I was purchasing insurance or trying to purchase insurance, I got rejected because I have a felony. And I'm saying to myself, like, I've just made one of the biggest investments that most people in society would ever make, which is their home. Right? It's just the facts of, like, you know, you think of big ticket items that people invest in is going to be. Be their home, and they refuse to insure me because of my felony. And it was the, it was the most embarrassing experience of, like, trying to protect my property that I'm now, you know, this is very, you know, expensive purchase and having to do this dance where I had to go through multiple people. And it took me to find this one lady at the company who was honest. The other people weren't honest. They would say, hey, just hold, give me a second. And then a phone would hang up. And then I couldn't reach that person I was talking to. And finally I got this one woman who just was like, this really is so sad. You know, I had to have her Google me by my professional name. And she looked me up and she was like, oh, my God, like, I see you with Oprah and you're with Obama and all these different things. But I'm like, what if I wasn't with those people? What if I'm just regular Joe Blow who happened to have a felony, who's just trying to move on with life and contribute like anybody else? What happens then? And, you know, this is a Question that hasn't been answered. You know, I was fortunate she found someone who, you know, agreed to insure my home at a rate that I'm sure nobody else pays. But it's just the way that the system is set up to, like, continue punishment long after you serve your sentence. And again, the things I'm talking about, TSA home insurance, are they, like, the biggest things in the world? No, but they're part of what it means to be contributing member to society, to be able to move about freely for employment. I travel for work, to ensure my home. It's my safe haven for my family. So it's all these things like that that are constant reminders of how far we have to go and as a society. But it's also those things that fuel this passion I have for, you know, us accessing the ultimate agency over our lives. Because even in the face of that, I have a choice. You know, I have a choice when I walk through tsa, whether to let that thing rip me apart, whether to let it make me feel less than. Whether to make it let me feel. Make me feel degraded or dehumanized or. Or I can just look at it and say, you know, I'm actually smarter than our government because I would never do that to another human being. And so I can choose that, right? You know, with insurance, I could have choose to just be like, all right, well, I'm going to sell the house and, you know, go back into a fight and try to get apartments with a felony, or I'm just going to keep fighting this thing until I find the right answer. And so, you know, we're constantly choosing, you know, and it's not just those of us with felonies. It's those of us who are trying to figure out how to have the greatest level of agency over our lives.

I really appreciate all that you've been sharing, and you're really helping me see, even with more clarity, the depth of the problem and quite frankly, the complicity of our society in denying redemption, denying freedom, even after the body is physically no longer incarcerated.

Absolutely.

It's a maintenance of a disconnection, or to use my terms, dismemberment of the person from the society. You know, when you were telling the story about the home insurance, you know, one of the things that I think defines us, and this is a gendered comment. I'm going to make a gendered comment. This is one man to another man. One of the things that we define ourselves is, can we build a hearth? Can we build that Safe haven.

Absolutely.

Right. I see you trying to be, trying to create for your son a life that may be beyond that which was created for you. You know, God. God blessed you. You were literate.

Yeah.

As you made the point and there were. It sounds like your parents were good parents and yet you want to do more. You want to create this safe haven for your son and to have to go up against that.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're on a journey to adulthood, to being the full man that you were born to be. And to have that taken away and just. And again, a thousand little cuts. Yeah, yeah.

You know, and that's exactly what it is. Right. There's the, you know, when I think about the things that people don't see. Right. So like my youngest son, he's 13 now, he's in school. And you know, as a parent with a felony, things that people also don't think about is like, when you have school age children, like, you're not, you're not allowed to be a chaperone for your child. You're not allowed to go up to the school and participate as any other parent, because it's not permissive when you have a felony. And, you know, I can't even tell you how many times that people have reached out to me and be like, hey, can you come and mentor, you know, these boys at the, at the ymca? And then they realize, you know, because I have a felony that they won't allow me to. Or, you know, the times that, you know, one of the parents have been organized. This is in public school at the time, he's no longer in public school, but when he was in public school, they were organized like these father groups. And then the, you know, people at the school would realize that I had a felony and they wouldn't invite me. And like, that was heartbreaking because I'm like, I go into all type of places and mentor young people all the time. And I've been fortunate. I've met a dean, a principal back in my hometown of Detroit. They broke the rules because they saw the value that was added when they allowed me to come in and speak to the kids. And so it's literally all these different things that we're constantly navigating, which is really what, you know, again, it sparks the energy of realizing that this is a perpetual fight. And then the last thing I would say about building, you know, building a hearth and a place of safety for my family and arriving at adulthood is, you know, I went into prison at 19 and, you know, I've been out now for 15 years and there's still parts of my life where I still find myself maturing into full blown adulthood. You know, like, there's so many parts of me that was like arrested development. And you know, the funny story I always tell people, like, I didn't, I didn't think I had arrested development. I think probably partially because I've always been pretty mature, even when I was, you know, I grew up in the streets as a kid, which matured me very quickly. But when I came home, I remember being at a stoplight. I had this old 96 Caprice classic. And you know, I had this big old subwoofer in the trunk and you know, loud rap music blaring. And then there was a kid that pulled up on the side of me, like in the same car and he's blaring music. And I laughed so hard. Cause I was like, I'm almost 40 years old. I feel it's kind of ridiculous. But I was like, she's like, I'm really like the same age as this kid, you know, And I laughed to myself and I embraced it. I didn't, I didn't fight it. I was okay with it. But it was just one of those moments where there was a realization of like, man, you're, you're in your second childhood and you're trying to mature into adulthood and to, you know, be a full on adult. And like, that's another thing that, you know, being imprisoned by anything. Right. You know, if you, if you suffer from grief at an early age that you don't, you know, free yourself from, you'll be stuck at that age. Like there'll be things about you that you're suffering arrested development as if you actually went inside a prison and, and didn't come out until you were, you know, physically or biologically an adult.

Yeah. The, the British psychoanalyst in the 1950s wrote an essay in which he talked about the, the very thing that you just named, which is that our going on being which, I love that phrase, our process of becoming gets frozen.

Yeah.

And you know, there was a process of your going on being that got frozen. And I want to acknowledge all of that and I want to call forth something that I am seeing here, which first of all, you know, I'm about to be a grandfather and I think I'm 16 years old. So there's a part of us that remains, you know, the 19 year old kid with a subwoofer in the trunk, you know, but there's something else Emerging for you. Let me offer this up. There were men in the prison who taught you the importance of reading. They gave you those books. They pointed to Malcolm, and I would use the term elder to describe them.

Absolutely.

And I think, like me, even though you're a little bit younger than me, like me, you're an elder.

Yeah.

And, yeah. An elder who can still act like you're 19 occasionally.

Right.

But there's a fullness about you that is because of your daily practice of becoming free. It's a daily practice, isn't it?

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's. It's. You know, I start my day with, like, one of the. One of the things that I think of as the. As the linchpin to, you know, really opening up our lives to freedom. And this is a spirit of gratitude, you know, And I try to intentionally focus on something that's not as obvious. Right. So it's like, you know, it's kind of easy to. Well, I won't say easy. It would be easy for me to be like, hey, I'm thankful that, you know, I have a wife and I have a great kid in the home. And those things are very obvious. And I am in the spirit of gratitude about those all the time. But when I'm in spirits of gratitude and practice and my conscious awakening of, like, okay, what am I. What are three things that I'm thankful for today? It's always these very small things. Like, I try to think of, like, the smallest detail of my life to be in spirit of gratitude for. It's like, hey, we have. We have a roll of toilet paper, and, you know, I have socks. I can go into my refrigerator and drink orange juice or cold water. You know, so there's these things like that. That really is part of that. That liberating practice daily because it gets you out of. It gets you out of all your. Your stuff. Right. And I'm like anybody else. Like, I. We have our stuff. You can't be ambitious and not have your stuff. You can't be go oriented and creative. And, you know, you know, I write. I write for books and, you know, this Jerry. Oh, man, people love to be like, oh, my God, you wrote a book. And they don't know the arduous nature of what it takes to get a book from an idea to an actual form physical thing that you can hold in your hand. And so it's tough, you know, and you can get in your own way and you can get in your own head, and, you know, you're in and out of these prisons and those moments, you're insecure, you're not insecure, you're confident, you're overconfident. You know, you're, you know, you're ambitious, you're, you know, procrastinating. There's all these things, right? And so the gratitude helps me really, in those moments is like I get the privilege to sit down at my computer and express myself. And maybe it'll turn into a book, maybe not. But I get the privilege to explore my own mind. I get the privilege to explore an idea, to tinker with it, to figure it out, to write it in my voice memos, to write it by hand. Whatever I choose to do. All of it is a gift. All of it is a moment of becoming in a moment of awakening because it challenged me. And I will say this, I'll embrace the term as an elder. In the black community, we have a few different versions of gray going on. In a black community, we have a few different versions of that, right? There's like, you're now called Unk, right? Everybody's like, oh, this is unknown. And if not unc, it's og. And if it's not og, it's O head. So there's a variety of it, but in that wisdom. And I think this is super important for the audience writing. And I don't know this to be sure, because I'm not a doctor per se, but it's one of the things that I believe activates our brain in a way that will have lasting impact as we age. For me, I know, just like the mental exercise of examining a thought that I have about something, is this thing true? Does it have any merit? Does it have any value? Like that keeps my mind fired up, you know, when I have an idea, I'm up with that idea at 2, 3 in the morning when I'm showering, when I'm doing things, that idea comes back. So I'm engaged in my mind in this beautiful way. And so I always encourage people to write, even if they never have plans to publish, because I do think it is a great practice for keeping your mind sharp and providing mental clarity.

I reached over this little paperweight that my sister gave me years ago, and it says, write every day.

Yeah, yeah.

And look, a couple of things I would say in response. First, thank you for pointing out the privilege of being able to write. Yeah, it is a privilege. And I, like you, find great solace in writing. And like you, it's a fucking torture, man. I mean, you know, the self doubt the criticism, you know, in my first book reboot, I called it the crow who sits on your shoulder telling you what a terrible writer you are, even as you're writing the words, you know, especially if you're writing with the intention of it being read by somebody somewhere. But it also feels like a responsibility I have, and I'm going to call forth that, because whether you're OG or an elder, you know what we are. We're someday somebody's ancestors.

Absolutely.

And what I. You know, when I was exploring reunion, part of what I was really working with was my relationship to my ancestors. But even more importantly, I wanted to grapple with the question of I wanted to be, or the assertion I want to be the ancestor that my descendants deserve. And one of the pathways for me to do that is this daily practice of freedom, this daily practice of resilience, building this daily practice. And. And you've taught me something really important. This daily practice of gratitude.

Yeah.

I'll confess, I was never a big fan of the gratitudes. The daily thing, the affirmations. It reminded me of Stuart Smalley from Saturday night. You know, I'm smart enough, I'm good enough, and gosh darn it, people like me. But I think what you're doing, you know, just. Just that phrase, you know, I'm grateful for having toilet paper. You know what popped into my head? I'm grateful that I had granola this morning.

Yeah. Yeah, right.

Instead of slop.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'm grateful that, you know, the sun is shining and the world is really fucked up right now.

Yeah.

But there's a mountain outside my window that reminds me there's still beauty in the world.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. It's so. It's so interesting, like, you know, thinking about that mountain outside your window. You know, I went. I went 19 years without touching, like, a plant. And, you know, there's so many things that. When we talk about gratitude and being thankful and, you know, it's life, it's easy to forget about all the things around us that make life possible. You know, the trees, the grass, the wind, the water, the ocean, you know, and so, like, that's one of the things that I found myself. Like, I have become like, this plant daddy. Like, I take care of most of the plants at our home. And I remember I started with one plant, and then I ended up with about 20 or 30 before I had to edit down. At least inside the house, outside the house, there's an abundance of plants, but it's those things like. Like that right where you, you really think about life sometimes it requires you to get out of your home, get out of your head. It's just another practice to like, go and feel the earth, you know, go and spend time with the majestic nature of it, be in awe of it, you know, like, I'm, I'm, I'm so in awe of natural life, you know, you know, animals. I've always been like a, kind of like a science nerd. I should watch nature shows when I was a kid. But, like, now I'm just like, I can walk out of my backyard and I marvel at the same plant that I've had for five years. You know, what is this plant doing now? You know, look how big it's grown in the last X amount of days. And, and so it's all these things that, that really tie us back to the bigger idea or lead us back to the bigger idea of like, what is it? What does it really mean to be free? And a lot of ways we get trapped in all these kind of social expectations. What kind of car you have, what kind of home, what kind of job. When there's all around us, there's so much abundance, you know, to be had and, you know, interesting enough, it's like when you get all the trappings. At least I've seen this with people. When they get all the trappings of life, the thing they end up seeking out the most is nature. You know, how can I get to the beach? How can I get to the, you know, a hiking trail? Because there is something incomparable, you know, that there's no value you can assign to a redwood tree that's grown for thousands of years, you know, you can't do nothing but look and be in awe of it, you know, and so for me, all these things like ladder up to, you know, how to be free. It's really being presence in your life is being in the spirit of gratitude, is taking these practices that are outlined in the book and applying them with an intentionality that I don't think other books really offer because a lot of books just don't. Aren't based on real lived experience. And that's, you know, what I'm telling is that, look, I'm not, I'm not selling you snake oil, you know, I'm not selling you on, you know, how to feel good. I'm telling you how to be free, which is two very different things. And I think you should practice how to feel good. But if you want to be free, you know, you have to go on this journey and do the work. And that's what I really want people to. And it's a beautiful journey once you agree to it. But if you, if you do it, I'm living proof that, listen, you can be as free as you want to be.

You know, I'll close by being grateful to you not only for this conversation, which has really uplifted my spirit and really moved me deeply, but for your work, for your presence, for your being. So I just want to say thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for taking the time out of your day. May everyone who listens to our conversation and all of your other conversations buy how to Be Free.

Yes. And let's call this part one of a conversation because I think there's more conversations for us to have.

I would. I would welcome that. I would really welcome that. It feels like I found a friend.

Likewise. But in this mutual, you know.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me.

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