This video features short excerpts from conversations with members of our Outside the Walls community. These brief reflections offer glimpses into their experiences and the ways Centering Prayer has helped them find steadiness and peace in the midst of life’s storms.

In this conversation, we sit down with Michael, a member of the Outside the Walls community, for a heartfelt reflection on presence, prayer, and inner transformation.

About halfway through my twenty-year prison sentence, I told my mom, “The day I leave this place will be the happiest and the saddest day of my life.”

The happiest—because I would finally regain my liberty after decades behind bars. The saddest—because by then, prison had also given me brothers. Men I lived with, worked with, prayed with. Men whose presence softened the daily dehumanization of incarceration. Without those relationships, many of us would not have survived.

That paradox has never left me.