Shaka Senghor

That's such an incredible question.

You know, when I think about my journey to actual physical incarceration, where I spent 19 years, seven years of those was a solitary confinement.

What I discovered through that process of freeing myself was that I had been incarcerated before I had ever been in handcuffs.

because I inherited a narrative that said, you'll be dead or locked up before you're 21.

I was sentenced to prison, I was 19 years old.

So I fulfilled that prophecy that I thought about.

You manifested what you thought.

Absolutely.

And the negative, right?

It was like this whole thing that, oh, my life can only have this outcome.

So let me just live within the framework of that mindset.

Interesting.

And it was when I was in solitary confinement that I went on this journey

journaling, trying to unpack, how did I get here?

I wanted to be an artist and a doctor, but here I was serving out my most promising years in prison, in a prison inside a prison, which is solitary confinement.

And what I did is I started journaling to ask this question, how did I get here?

And what I discovered was mind blowing because I realized that the mindset that I had accepted based on that narrative led me to that path.

And what I began to challenge was if this works absolutely in a negative, then it has to work in a positive.

And that's when I went on this journey to discover my mind, which I eventually fell in love with.

And that's where I found myself getting free.