I did the brave thing. I chose myself. And then I spent months quietly wondering if someone like me deserved good things on the other side of it.

The first time I ever truly meditated I was sitting in a circle with fourteen women inside a federal prison. 

I was there to teach. They were looking at me like I had all the answers. But the truth was I was thirty days into having googled my way into understanding what meditation actually was.

I often teach about journaling inside of prisons. I usually start with the question: “How many of you have tried journaling?” Every hand in the room usually goes up. Then, I’d follow up with “and how many of you are still journaling today?”. The majority of the time, all the hands would go down.