Secrets of the Powerless: Unlocking Authentic Intelligence

Bliss, prison, meditation, and the future

May 25, 2025

Behind prison walls in southeast Wisconsin, something powerful is happening.

A group of incarcerated women have discovered a secret that may just be the key to navigating the increasing uncertainty and instability in our world.

This article includes three chunks and various writing styles because that’s what I felt like doing. Enjoy the ride!

Bliss Behind Bars

I head south on the interstate for a half-hour and get off at an exit with multiple travel centers and truck service stations. I drive down a couple of long country roads, passing endless farms and weaving around a few tractors on the road, until I arrive at my destination where I’m greeted by a congregation of towering oaks. If these trees could talk, I often wonder.

I park my car, usually near the 1990s-era Camaro that’s always angled across two spaces, and around 8:45 a.m., I make my way towards the minimum-security facility. This time, it’s an unfortunately frigid day in mid-May. Come to think of it, it’s always cold here, which makes sense since all of my nearly two dozen visits to this prison have been in the past six months, squarely inside of a long, bone-chilling Wisconsin winter.

I pass alongside a towering chain link fence lined with thick razor wire at the top. Across the walkway is a lawn, then another fierce fence containing, in the distance, a track that some women are already walking around and, in the foreground, a small playground, which always stabs me in the heart. It’s a symbol of isolation. Loss. Families torn apart. I’ve never seen children playing on it. And I’m not sure I could handle the sight if I did.

Officer Johnston buzzes me into the building, unless he has the day off. He’s tall, husky, bald. What you would expect a corrections officer to look like. “Hi, Ben,” he greets me, before checking my ID for the 21st time, reminding me to empty my pockets into a locker, and clearing me through the metal detector. Protocol. He radios for Officer Nimmer, and while I wait, we chat. He’s unusually cussy today.

A few minutes later, Nimmer shows up. She’s sprite-ish, impeccably manicured, and always buzzing as if she’s already consumed a couple Monster energy drinks. They tell me she’s quite competitive too. As program leader, her responsibilities include recreational activities, so she regularly organizes basketball and volleyball tournaments for the incarcerated residents. She usually gets in on the games too.

Johnston buzzes Nimmer and me through a heavy door into a holding area. The door clicks behind us. A moment later, he remotely unlocks a second steel door on the other side of the room. We pass through. I am now officially in the prison.

We walk down a long, narrow hallway past a few residents and officers. Two women in Carolina-blue outfits—a symbol of the positions and privileges they’ve earned—are waiting outside the door to the chapel. We greet them, then Nimmer pulls out a ring of keys and unlocks the door. The two women hustle, moving tables and arranging chairs around the room, which is lined with overstuffed shelves featuring mostly faith-based books. Nimmer sets a sign-in sheet and A-frame name cards on a table, while I write a few things on the white board.

Then the class participants start to arrive. They range from their early 20s to mid-70s, though I can’t say for sure. Most of them have their greens on. A few wear reds, meaning they’ve come from working in the kitchen, a shift that started around 4 a.m. Fifteen women take their seats in the rows of plastic chairs. Some chat. Others keep to themselves. Today a few chairs remain empty. But not all empty chairs are equal―some signal skipping out; others indicate that someone got to go home. That’s always a good thing. Nimmer leaves, and after a little while, we begin.

For the next 75-minutes, under the brightest fluorescent lights you can imagine—old church basement meets DMV, but worse—I teach them how to meditate. We review what we’ve learned, we check in on their practice, we mediate together, and, depending on which week it is of the four-session course, I share a lesson about effortless meditation, stress release, the nature of the mind, or accessing “being” in meditation and daily life.

This is one way of describing what happens on the surface of our sessions... In reality, something deeper is going on. Each week, they experience something that one of the participants called, “indescribable.” But I’ll try to describe it! Through this simple meditation practice, they arrive at a state of deep rest. Stillness. Quiet. Tranquility.

They unlock the bliss within them.
Experience freedom.
Heal.
They remember and reclaim who they really are.

Today is the final session for this group. Graduation day. So I add some closing remarks. Tips on habit-building. Some words of encouragement. My gratitude for their presence and dedication. We wrap up and the women file out. Lighter. Freer. Equipped not only to navigate another day in prison, but a little more prepared for their eventual return to life beyond bars. A few of them linger to talk with me. Nimmer returns with the Carolina blues who reset the room, and then escorts me back down the long hallway, through the steel doors, to the lobby. Johnston reminds me to get my things from the locker. He cracks a joke. And then I exit the prison. Back to my car. Back on the road. Back home.

I feel lighter and freer, too.

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Secrets of the Powerless

In the school of meditation I come from, as well as the broader lineage, there is a general practice of not proselytizing. Yes, you can mention that you meditate or that you teach meditation. But you never pressure people into it. You don’t force it upon others. Instead, you let your life speak. And where there is a genuine interest in learning more about the practice—“worthy inquiry” as my teacher Thom Knoles calls it—you respond. The ancient guidance from 1 Peter 3:15 is apropos here:

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to
give the reason for the hope that you have.
But do this with gentleness and respect.

That being said… I’m going to play on the edge of some some meditation evangelism here!
But it’s not going to be just my perspective.
I want you to hear from the powerless—from these incarcerated women who occupy the far edge of our society.

You see, these powerless people have stumbled upon a powerful “secret.”

Meditation.

It is right in front of all of us.
It is readily available.
It always has been.
But in our high-speed society, so many of us choose to ignore it.

No doubt we are living in chaotic times. Political polarization and instability. Economic uncertainty. The rise of AI. Fundamental changes to the nature of work. Rapid change everywhere.

But what if these women, hidden behind bars in a remote area, have found the key to navigating the future—not just their future, but our collective future?

Unlocking Authentic Intelligence

The age ahead, with all of its volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA), calls for a new way of being. What’s gotten us here cannot carry us forward.

In a world speeding up and spinning out, we need a different way in life and leadership. Grounded. Wise. Deeply alive. Let’s call this Authentic Intelligence.1

The incarcerated women have discovered the “secret” to accessing this Authentic Intelligence: the ancient practice of meditation. It’s a potent―and reliable―path to this desperately needed kind of AI.

Let’s consider five aspects of this Authentic Intelligence that meditation unlocks, as identified by the incarcerated women in my meditation courses.

1. Finding Calm in the Chaos

“Meditation is helping me find calm in chaos. I used to love my inner calmness. I forgot about that the last few years!”

The number one benefit of meditation the women most often identify is calm.

Calm to “cope with the stress of prison and life.”
Calm when “my feathers are getting ruffled.”
Calm “when I’m feeling like I don’t have control over something.”

Prison isn’t the only place where things feel out of control. In an era of rapid change, so much feels out of control. So much is stressful, which is another term for an inability to adapt to a change in expectations.

But meditation releases stress and increases our adaptive energy, making us capable of dealing with uncertainty. It makes us capable of cooperating with change. Which means we can remain grounded—calm amid the chaos.

We can’t sit around and wait for the world to calm down. But we can sit in meditation, get calm, and radiate that calm into the chaos around us.

2. Moving from Reaction to Response

“Because of meditation… I am beginning to react differently in daily ‘situations’... Every thought, belief, and behavior can be controlled by me.”

Reflecting upon a quote about Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s views, author Stephen Covey wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

This quote is often used to describe what mindfulness is all about—growing the gap between something that happens and our reaction to it. It’s about impulse control: turning off the kind of auto-pilot activity that in a state of distress leads to limited and often harmful, degenerative reactions.

Many mindfulness tools can pull this off. They are helpful interventions to draw upon in a moment of reactivity. But a regular meditation practice gets at the root. Rather than thinking I need to pause before responding, the most powerful meditation techniques rewire the nervous system, diminishing irrelevant fight or flight reactions and stabilizing stay and play response. Space between stimulus and response becomes spontaneous, natural.

Does this mean we never react? Like when one of my teens starts acting out and talking back about, say, taking out the trash, which they’ve been kindly asked to do ten times? Or when the market crashes and all of you clients call you because their portfolios are plunging? No. We might still have some remnants of stress reactivity. But rather than staying stuck in reactivity, we naturally begin to reset or recenter more quickly.

3. Downshifting from Productivity to Presence

“Sometimes I feel the need to be productive all the time, so meditation allows me to recharge and clear my head, allowing me to be present.”

The other day I posted this on Notes (and LinkedIn too):

My reason for sharing this here is simple. With the advent of AI, everything is accelerating. We’re getting more done in less time. Productivity is not our growing edge. Presence is.

It is essential to level up our capacity to be present. Presence is the place from which we can slow down time, sift through the abundance of information, and do the next right thing.

Presence means a sharpened intuition that notices subtle signals.
It catches quiet possibilities and sees hidden potential.
It cultivates trust, optimizes team dynamics, and calls forth key contributions.

4. Remembering the True Self

“I learned that the outer layer of myself doesn’t define who I am. My innate being is who I am. Meditation helps connect with my inner self.”

Mother Teresa once said, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.”

You don’t have to look far to see signs of no peace:
Fear and polarization.
Confusion and apathy.
The rising use of antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication.
Half of U.S. adults experiencing loneliness.
Humans owning a billion guns.
Conflicts in the form of drug wars, terrorist insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, and more going on around the world affecting a quarter of the global population.

Wherever there is fear and division, confusion and loneliness, and violence and oppression, these are all signs of our collective amnesia—we have forgotten that we belong to one another.

Meditation remedies this forgetting.

Meditation helps us remember who we really are. Not just our true, unique identity―though it does that―but also our universal identity. Capital “S” Self. The Oneness that is at the foundation of who we are. This reality is the core mystical proclamation of the 2000+ year-old Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita: “Where there is One, that One is me; where there are many, all are me.”

The inverse of Mother Teresa’s insight is also true:

If we want peace, then we need to remember that we are One.

And meditation is the key to unlocking this remembering that is a core aspect of Authentic Intelligence.

5. Unleashing Your Limitless Potential

“Meditation is helping me to become more aware of my potential (self-esteem).”

I often tell the course participants that meditation is a mental hygiene habit. Just like brushing your teeth prevents the collection of food and build-up of plaque on your teeth and gums, meditation (which should also be done twice a day!) removes stress, heals trauma, and cleanses the mind of limiting beliefs about our identity and purpose.

During the four-week meditation course, there are multiple limiting beliefs that I challenge. I remind the women:

You are not your thoughts.
You are not your worst mistake.
You are not the worst thing that happened to you.
You are not your criminal record.
You are not who others say you are.

But the reason I name these limiting mindsets is not because I want them just to start thinking or believing differently. No. I call these things out because I want the women to notice that the more they go inward in meditation, the more they begin to identify with Oneness, with bliss, with their inner “being.”

And as a result, they start to shed these limiting beliefs.
They start living from the inside-out instead of outside-in.
They become internally referenced to the love at their core rather than externally referenced to the perspectives, opinions, and expectations of others.
They begin to imagine a new future for themselves, behind and beyond bars.

This is true freedom.

Whether we’re behind bars or in the “free world,” we all get imprisoned by limiting ideas and beliefs that keep us from living into our fullest potential. But as these incarcerated women are demonstrating, the “secret” of meditation enables us to throw off the things that hinder and entangle us. As a result, we awaken to the most generative, creative, and compassionate contributions that we can make to a world in pain.

***

Down those countries roads, behind the razor-wire, and through the locked steel doors, the supposedly powerless have discovered a “secret.”

Meditation is certainly not just some wellness fad.
It’s not just a stress release tool (though it certainly is a potent one!)
Nor is it a way to escape into bliss (but WOW!).

It’s so much more.

Meditation is the key to unlocking a power we need for these chaotic times:
Authentic Intelligence.

And hopefully more of us heed their wisdom. Because we need more humans embodying this kind of AI:
Real and wide awake.
Grounded and loving.
Soulful and visionary.