Journeying Toward Wholeness

Dear Ms. Julie:

I just wanted to take the opportunity to thank you for introducing the Breema principles to me. Studying them and trying to practice them has been a transforming experience for me. This environment is typically very stressful and not conducive to positive thinking. During my 15 years of incarceration, I have had bouts of depression and anxiety. Fortunately, I have never had to take any medication for those purposes. Recently, as I was walking around the yard, I realized that I was happy. That probably sounds strange to you. But that is not a feeling most convicts experience regularly. Happy — being content, light hearted, not anxious, etc. I also realized that I had been that way for a time now. I smiled, because I knew that it was because of the Breema principles. By not looking down the road at all the negative that will or may come my way — I had simply been focusing on that one moment. Whatever I was doing, enjoying it to the best of my ability. I was conscious of the things around me, what people were really saying, the colors, the smells, etc. I was experiencing life for the first time in a long time. It made me aware of still having a purpose in my life, even though the rest of it will be spent in prison. To say that the Breema principles have changed my life may be an understatement — I would more say that they have given me a life. A life made up of single moments through the day that I enjoy and take in, and appreciate.

Ms. Julie, thanks to you I am breathing, embracing, participating in life. I’m no longer just waiting for it all to end. I don’t know what encourages you to continue to bless us with your presence in our lives. But whatever it is, I’m grateful. Being around your spirit once a week has an effect on us that you may never fully realize. Thank you and thank you — I leave you with this - In my new way of thinking of things, I have embraced the concepts even in nature. This is attested by my recent walk on the prison yard when I saw a beautiful thing in the middle of gray. Here is what I experienced:

I saw a flower in the midst of a desolate area of the field. It was all alone — no other color around it. Bright yellow, peeking through the tan broken grass left over from winter. What was the life in this flower feeling? While under the earth, waiting to explode into the air, the life did not know where it would surface — a beautiful manicured park, the lawn of the White House, or perhaps the flower bed of an expert gardener? But its fate was that of a prison yard. It embraced the earth’s moisture, striving to feel the sun’s rays on its petals. At that single moment during that single activity, when it pierced through the ground and sprung upright, it didn’t care where it was. Its destiny was to live — to adorn its beauty as long as life ran through its stem. And it did — that single moment when my eyes captured its beauty may have been its sole purpose. For not more than an hour later, the landscape crew mowed over the yard, leveling all greenery to one consistent length — chopping the yellow petals of that lone flower across the grass. This single flower had only lived a short time. Its beauty only noticed by one convict passing by. Its life made no judgment on mine. It just lived — it just reached for the sun’s rays with all its might — it just stretched its petals to the sky, embracing all that it could.

Bless you Ms. Julie
TONY
April 1, 2010

Tony Vick

~ The Breema Principles ~