Behind bars: Sound healing in prisons

Bringing innerdance Into Maximum-Security Prisons

For nearly two years, I have been learning to navigate environments unlike any other, spaces that demand deep respect for their structures and rules, as I introduce a cutting-edge therapeutic practice of inner transformation within these walls. In this time, I have been facilitating a sound and energy process called innerdance within prisons in Scotland and several maximum-security prisons in America.

What innerdance Is: A Multi-Sensory Process of Brainwave Entrainment

innerdance is an integrative and multi-sensory process that harnesses the influence of sound on the body, mind, and soul, working with carefully curated soundscapes designed to entrain participants into a deeply restful yet focused, dreamlike state of awareness. In this process, sound waves vibrate brainwaves into the patterns observed during REM sleep cycles. As the body enters this organic rhythm, it activates the self-repair mechanisms that arise when we dream.

This practice is particularly effective for incarcerated communities, as many prisoners live in states of chronic stress or sleep debt. It helps to restore the nervous system to balance, freeing it from survivalism and supporting the body’s innate intelligence to return to ease. Feedback gathered from participants consistently reports immediate improvements in well-being, a renewed sense of purpose, identity shifts, improved sleep cycles, and disruptions to addiction patterns.

How the Work Feels From the Inside

Participants are supported in their inner journey through trauma-specialised facilitation, skilful touch, and energy work that communicates safety at a somatic and cellular level. The integrative process facilitates a sonic hero’s journey—an inward pilgrimage where individuals experience their inner worlds, insights surface, emotional memories release, and resonance returns. It is like a big dream where something important alchemises, and we feel the difference on awakening.

In environments defined by control, I have witnessed how the body remembers its own capacity for repair and agency. Working across men’s and women’s facilities, I have seen how complex and enduring trauma takes shape differently in each person, and yet how universal the body’s longing for peace is. The armour that once protected the heart begins to soften; breathing slows and deepens as the nervous system remembers the sensation of safety. In these moments, sound becomes a language of equality and co-regulation. It quiets the mind’s narrative and dissolves the illusion of separation, allowing each person to meet themselves beyond the restrictions of identity or trauma stories.

Choosing Vulnerability: The Courage of Lying Down in Prison

When incarcerated men and women lie down and close their eyes, choosing to embody a physical position of vulnerability and go on an inward journey of self-discovery, something remarkable happens. Swift healing, re-patterning, and integration take place. This work is not about fixing or freeing others; it is about remembering. It invites people to dream beyond the conditions of their sentence, their past, or their allocated number. Each session is a return to the inner state where freedom originates—from within.

Mirrors of Sound

Calipatria State Prison: A First Encounter with Deep Inner Freedom

Early in 2025, I travelled to the United States to share the work I am most passionate about. My first visit was to Calipatria State Prison, a maximum-security facility in California. I facilitated a sound session with men serving long-term or life sentences for violent crimes, including multiple homicides, gang-related violence, and addiction-fuelled offences. Most have been incarcerated for decades; for some, it was the first time they had ever closed their eyes in the presence of others or listened to music composed and arranged with empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard.

As the music began, the energy within the room shifted. Muscles softened; attention deepened. The men were no longer paying attention to what was happening around them. I offered energy work around their heads, noticing where tension had built up. I traced the vagus nerve to communicate safety and ease and placed my hands gently over their hearts to activate their capacity for empathy. Fingers twitched, jaws slackened, and bodies began to release from states of survival into states of presence.

The sound journey lasted thirty minutes, followed by time for integration and meaning-making through shared reflections. Some participants described feeling free. One saw himself standing in a vast field with arms open to the sky; another travelled into deep space, feeling expansive. One man spoke of seeing his son and being by his side during a traumatic event. The men expressed surprise at their own capacity to go deeply inward—how they had forgotten they were in prison, and how they experienced something new, unique, and unexpected.

Letters followed in the weeks after. One man wrote that he had discovered love in his own heart and would dedicate the rest of his life to service. Others expressed how vitally important the experience had been and hoped it could be rolled out through other prisons.

Their courage moved me deeply. They reminded me that freedom is not a condition that can ever be taken away from us; it is a vibration innate to all of us, one that can be cultivated.

Rage, Reflection, and the Sacred Masculine at Ironwood State Prison

On a later visit to Ironwood State Prison, I opened a dialogue on rage. Since beginning this work, that energy had been stirring in me, and I asked the group for their insight. One person suggested I might be feeling the collective energy of the prison itself, emphasising the importance of cleansing my energy and self-care; another spoke of using physical movement to transform it. Their wisdom, empathy, and acceptance of me moved me deeply, initiating a process of alchemy and actualisation within.

In these reflections, I recognised my own patterns—the drive to push, strive, and control, mistaking productivity for purpose. My creative force had long been powered by pushing, not trusting. Through the mirror of the prison, I met the energy I had been mimicking for years: the forceful, protective aspect that had become distorted by overdoing.

As I began to understand the sacred masculine within as presence rather than performance, something in me softened. The men taught me that strength lies in tenderness and presence, that I can hold anything without needing to fix or force it. They taught me a truth about unconditional positive regard that I had not yet applied to myself.

Their reflections also helped me witness how my transparency and vulnerability created space for the men to reimagine their relationships with women. For many, their experiences with women or mothers had been traumatic, abusive, or neglectful, and they told me that speaking with a soft-spoken, open-hearted woman who owned her shadows and flaws was refreshing and transformative.

I learned that authentic strength is a steady and gentle current of acceptance, one that is able to respond to anything that arises. Many of those I meet in prisons have grown up without safe models of strength or sensitivity. Their bodies carry the residue of unexpressed love, unacknowledged grief, or misdirected fear, and yet they have been my greatest teachers of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard.

The Desert and the Casino

After California, I travelled to Las Vegas, a city I had never felt drawn to, but one that offered its own initiation. Walking through the casino floors with my phone recording sounds for a new soundscape on addiction, I felt the sensory assault of lights, sound, and synthetic sugary scents piped through the ventilation systems—all calibrated to capture my full attention. In my heightened awareness from the prison work, I could sense the electromagnetic density of the place and its intention to hypnotise me to fall asleep to myself.

Years earlier, my neurodivergent brain would have been overwhelmed by such overstimulation, my nervous system spiralling into fight or flight. Now, I could simply observe with curiosity. My frequency felt stronger, steadier. It was striking to realise that I had witnessed more internal freedom inside prison walls than here, where consumption promises to make our dreams come true.

The paradox was profound. In the desert, behind walls, I had seen people reclaim peace within confinement. Here, in the open, I saw how spaces are designed to imprison us through the seduction of our senses. It reminded me how easily the human system can be hijacked, how the same mechanisms that heal through entrainment can also enslave through manipulation. My therapeutic work, then, is to help people wake up—to their potential, to presence, to the freedom that cannot be bought.

The Garden

Further north, at Oregon State Penitentiary, I visited a memorial garden built through fundraising efforts by staff and inmates, including those once condemned to die. Welcomed by a man whose death sentence had been commuted, I crossed a threshold from a tense and loud prison into a sanctuary of peace. He showed me around the Japanese-designed garden, sharing that no incidence of violence or aggression had been recorded there, confiding in me of their hope to show how such peace could spread throughout the prison.

Over fifty participants gathered, some with thirty- or forty-year sentences, to explore conversations on rage, personal freedom, addiction, and creativity as medicine before they embarked on their sound journey. Facilitating this group in the garden, the soft breeze and the calls of ducks became part of the soundscape, a dance of nature collaborating with technology to create coherence. For many, it was the first time they had ever felt safe enough to close their eyes in each other’s presence. Some saw themselves as children at play; others returned to the childhood spaces before their trauma began.

Their trust transformed me. I learned how to hold larger fields of energy, how to honour both the collective and the individual story, and how to listen to silence as deeply as to sound. Together, we changed the soundscape of the prison, not only the outer acoustics of clanging doors and shouting yards, but the inner resonance of stillness remembered. Within the sound, they found silence. Within silence, they found themselves.

The Frequency of Freedom

Whether in a cell, a casino, or a city, I see the same pattern: systems of control and systems of awakening, and how sound can be both. It can imprison through repetition or liberate through resonance. The difference lies in intention and awareness.

Freedom, I have come to understand, is not an external state or social status. It is a frequency, a way of being that vibrates through every identity, every body, every story. When we learn to listen inwardly, to attune to our own truth, we can begin to unlock the door to our hearts.

I believe that every cell - in our bodies and in our prisons—holds potential, and that raising the vibration within these spaces can set us free. The people I have met, however they self-identify or are projected upon, have each shown me that transformation is co-regulatory. When one person reclaims their frequency of freedom, others begin to remember theirs.

This is a a quiet revolution of sound and silence and one which I am in complete service to: the invitation to return to the music beneath the noise, to the rhythm that connects us all—our heartbeats.