(No, Not a Story About Edward Snowden)

“Consciousness includes everything and judges nothing,” Gary Douglas, founder of Access Consciousness^® and best-selling author often reminds his clients and his classes.

He also reminds these groups that consciousness is “not always comfortable.”

One of the ways a number of people involved in Access Consciousness^® are putting this to the test is by bringing the methods and information of Access Consciousness^® into prisons around the world.

For people who don’t normally frequent prisons, what is discovered can be shocking, horrifying, and quite moving—a great opportunity to exercise the Access Consciousness^® tool of interesting point of view.

The pioneers in this area were Margaret Braunack and Wendy Mulder of Australia. They started “Bars behind bars” in a prison in Brisbane, Australia. They worked in a men’s facility for men who had not yet been sentenced.

Braunack and Mulder’s adventure behind bars started when Mulder approached the prison officials with the book she had written on grief. She lives close to the prison and thought her book might be useful.

The woman she contacted at the prison was immediately interested in Access Consciousness^® and what could be done for prisoners. Before she knew it, Mulder was invited to teach Bars classes behind bars. As she had not yet facilitated an Access Bars^® class, Mulder asked who would be lightest for her to collaborate with and invited Braunack to accompany her.

Braunack and Mulder correctly sensed that many of the guards “required to have their Bars run,” which was their original idea, but they ended up doing a class for the prisoners instead. “It never turns out like you think it’s going to,” she commented wryly.

After the first session with the prisoners, this official’s “jaw dropped to the ground,” as Braunack describes it, because she noticed such change among the inmates. Many chronic insomniacs were finally able to sleep, and less medications of all kinds were required. The “Bars ladies” were invited to return, which they did weekly for several months.

The humanoid facilitators interacting with the prison bureaucracy was an adventure in itself. Braunack, a gourmet cook, liked to bring in treats for the class. These went far beyond the usual m-n-m’s and chips to include cakes baked with generous amounts of alcohol.

Braunack had a bit of a “beyond” moment when going through security one week as they encountered dog searches looking for alcohol. One guard recognized them and said, “The Bars ladies can come through.”

“The universe had our back,” Braunack said.

As usual, the Access facilitators in prison had a different point of view from what’s “normal” in this reality. The prisoners they worked with were mostly “beautiful humanoid men” caught “in the wrong place at the wrong time making an insane choice.”

The prison officers in charge, on the other hand, tended to be human. The intensity of judgment from them was quite extreme, Braunack and Mulder found. “They were judgmental, and fixed in the rightness of their point of view,” Braunack notes. At the time the guards’ judgment was so intense it was more than she was willing to receive, recalls Braunack, and it made her physically sick afterwards.

Bringing consciousness into prisons led to some interesting observations. Braunack and Mulder learned that when prisoners were released from the prison where they worked, they were released on Friday night with no food, no money, and nowhere to go. “Is it any wonder that there is a huge recidivism rate?” they asked.

The starkness of the conditions of the men surprised the “Bars ladies.” When giving Bars, prisoners were not allowed to bring even a pillow or a blanket to make the hard benches on which they were giving and receiving Bars more comfortable.

Braunack and Mulder’s work has inspired others. Simone Milasas, Access World-wide coordinator, asked Dr. Kacie Crisp to connect with Wonita Chung, a Canadian serving 18 months in a US Federal prison.

Wonita Chung, a Canadian and practitioner of several energetic healing methods serving time in the Federal Detention center in Seattle, found out about Access just before she entered prison to serve her sentence. She contacted worldwide coordinator Simone Milasas, who asked Dr. Kacie Crisp to contact her, with a hope of being able to bring Bars to prisoners in the facility.

That has occurred, but, as usual, not in the way one would suspect. “Working with the American prison regulations and bureaucracy could challenge the patience of Job himself,” Crisp noticed. No one can visit without getting approved in advance, which can take weeks. Books sent from the Access store were refused, as prisoners are only allowed to receive books sent directly from the vendor, such as amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.

Getting the Bars manual into the US prison required dividing it into 12 page sections, the largest number of pages prisoners are allowed to receive at once.

Meanwhile, Crisp kept sending books directly from amazon to Chung in prison. Chung started running Bars on one of her prison roommates because she perceived her roommate required it. As prisoners are only allowed to have 5 books at one time, Crisp asked Chung to donate books to the prison library when she was done with them so she could receive others.

Chung discovered one of the secret weapons in Access’s war on unconsciousness in the form of “the animal book,” Talk to the Animals. That book quietly introduces the clearing statement and many hands on processes, ostensibly for use on animals. Chung was quick to find out that they worked on humans as well and she put them to work on people in the prison.

Claudia Cano, a medical doctor who now facilitates and works with Access Consciousness^® fulltime, is taking Access to prisons in Mexico City. A universal observation of those interested in both consciousness and the welfare of those in prisons is just how incredibly inhumane those conditions are.

“No one cares what happens to these guys,” a prison official matter-of-factly told Cano when she first inquired about introducing Bars in prisons.

Alex Corio of New Mexico, a certified facilitator with years of experience with “the tough kids,” has received positive responses from several prisons she has contacted looking for the possibilities of doing Bars. Her love of the tough kids inspired her to work with the tough adults using the amazing tools of Access Bars^® and Access Consciousness^®.

Just as Access has been discovering the inhumanity in prisons (Or is it the humanness? asks Douglas), the same theme is being explored in a new TV series just released by Netflix and reviewed by a recent Time magazine.

Once again, Access Consciousness^® is ahead of the curve. What else might be possible in your life if you, too, could live ahead of the curve of the world’s increasingly surprising events?