Freedom Time Meditation: Cartographies of Release

Settle into a comfortable position. Let your eyes close, or remain open with a softened gaze. Allow your breath to find its own rhythm. Feel each inhale enter through your nostrils, travel down into your lungs, and expand your belly. Feel each exhale as your belly contracts, air rising through your lungs and out through your nose or mouth. The air is already moving, always moving, moving you.

You are at Recess, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on Carnarsie and Munsee Lenape Land. But also somewhere else, Dancing Through Prison Walls’ FREEDOM TIME, a space that refuses a single modality and is many things at once: a dance floor, a studio, an archive, a classroom, an altar, a portal, a commons.

Notice the way your body fills the space, the way the space contours your body, the ground holding all of it. Breathe it in. Take a seat in the audience.

Observe your experience in this moment without judgement.

Imagine yourself in a cage. Not metaphor, but metal. What is it like to move the body in a cage? What does it mean to move the mind when the body is caged?

Imagine a prisoner paired with a dancer from the “free world.” Under the direction of choreographer Suchi Branfman, words transform. To story. Story to gesture. Gesture to movement. Movement to dance. Richard Martinez, once imprisoned, called this freedom time. A time he felt like he could walk beyond prison walls, and go home for dinner.

Breathe into that possibility. Freedom not someday, but now, inside the breath.

It’s freedom time!

Each dance is testimony and practice, a moving archive of Puerto Rico, South Dakota, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Palestine.

Notice the carceral system is global. Feel the solidarity stretch across borders.

Inhale. Exhale. A dancer unfurls a translucent sheet of plastic, nearly three times their size, across the floor. With painter’s tape and the hum of an industrial fan, the sheet becomes scaffolding. First, they tape one edge to the ground; air catches beneath, and the plastic rises, transforming into a wall. The fan switches off. The dancer spreads the sheet flat and stretches their body across it as it becomes the floor. Now, all four sides are taped down, except for a gap where the fan flows air into the plastic. The dancer somersaults onto the swelling surface, and the sheet becomes a bed. “Is this what bondage does to young poets?” a prisoner asks aloud with subtitles projected on the wall. The dancer tears a hole, crawls inside, and the bed becomes a cell. Inside, the dancer thrashes, pushes, tears. The membrane tightens, ruptures, splits. This is “the madness found in the walls,” the prisoner warns. The dancer pulls at the torn plastic, folds it over their body like a blanket, then bursts awake—pushing up, cartwheeling, stretching limbs. They oscillate between constraint and release until the cell falls apart. Even when the body is captive, the mind moves. Let your imagination move.

Slow your breath. Remember spring 2020.

Lockdown. Borders shut. Remote work. Face masks. Distance.

For some, a pause. For others, unbearable isolation. For prisoners, more prison. For millions, death.

Inhale.

Billions of lives saved. Billions touched by grief, rage, insurrection.

Whose names do you remember? George Floyd. Breonna Taylor. Tony McDade.

Exhale.

Notice how the line between the “free” world and prison blurs. Curfews. Kettles. Arrests. Lockdown—a metaphor on the outside, a violent reality on the inside.

Feel the tension in your body. A dancer drags two large speakers diagonally to opposite ends of the dance floor. Pacing back and forth between them, the speakers become walls. The pace quickens—steps sharpen into shuffles, pivots, punches, guards. They jab at one wall, then somersault toward the other. “What belongs to me outside this dark and gloomy place? My freedom, my children, my family—but I can’t reach it,” a translator reads, first in Spanish, then in English, until the words dissolve into static. The dancer seizes a tangle of cables—their personal belongings—and drags them and their body across the floor. Rolling over with exhaustion, they collapse into sleep. They wake, resume pacing, stumbling, ricocheting from wall to wall, pulled back again and again by an unseen gravitational force tethering them to the walls. “I’m not stumbling anymore,” the narrator says, while the dancer, gasping, struggles to rise. “I take what belongs to me: my freedom, my children, my family.” The dancer gathers the cables in their arms and walks away. Shift your attention to the stories that shape how you understand prison. Celebrities and influencers cosplaying in jumpsuits, turning suffering into content. Punching down meretricious jokes: dropped soap, conjugal visits, last meals. Media turning mass incarceration into spectacle. Static. Videos and radio transmissions from prisoners reaching through cracks in virtual walls. What new stories replace the old?

If your mind wanders, simply notice. Let each thought go as if it were a leaf floating downstream. Return to the breath.

A whisper fills the space: “I would like to find myself by the river, listening to the waterfalls falling from the mountain above, with my three children and the fresh smell of nature.”

A dancer struggles through the phrase with repetition, halting, uncertain, searching for the words. Each repetition shifts in cadence and inflection, as though remembering and remaking the sentence anew each time. The words swell, filling the room.

Suddenly, a sharp sound cuts through: The dancer slaps their womb. Sharp, rhythmic slaps. Slap! Slap! Slap! Silence. Slap! Slap! Silence. Silence as counter-rhythm. Rhythm and rupture.

Then, a voice:

“I fall into an abyss, slowly, heavily, watching how the light above fades away through the darkness. Feeling how the warm air caresses my back. Shadows around my body. Fear crawls in my skin, depression puts pressure in my bones, frustration blurs my vision, anger accelerates my heart uncontrollably, sadness picks on my darkest thoughts. Each one wants to control a part of my body.”

The dancer collapses, twists, folds—each motion seized by an unseen force.

Silence again. They rise. The opening phrase returns—this time loud, steady, unshaken: “I would like to find myself by the river…” They walk off the dance floor and into the audience, carrying the words with them. Return to your breath. To this space. To this dance.

Notice pain, discomfort, sadness, frustration or other sensations that draw your attention away from the breath. Acknowledge each feeling that arises without judging it, pushing it away, clinging to it, or wishing it were different.

Feel how Freedom Time invites you to sit with your discomfort and recognize your complicity. Feel the shift— from consuming prisoners’ stories for your own entertainment to sharing the burden within an abolitionist commons.

Prisoners are not objects of pity or spectacle for consumption.

Inhale. “This work is not about one person. This work wants to not replicate the subjugation of the prison. This work asks a reframing of justice. This work demands an end to mass incarceration, an end to the prison industrial complex.” This work insists on abolition. Exhale.

Notice the cop, the judge, and the prison guard that lives inside your head. Notice how your eyes are socialized to surveil. Notice your reflex to punish. Release it.

Return to the breath, to your body, to this moment.

Inhale. Exhale.

Take action. Learn abolition. Join a study group. Write a letter to someone inside. Support a campaign to free a political prisoner. Fund a commissary. Organize.

Take the deepest breath you’ve taken your whole life. Exhale.