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Anna’s work is incredibly inspirational to me and I was thrilled to be able to talk with her. In the introduction I mention how this interview was a game-changer for me in terms of deepening my understanding of our innate well-being that the Three Principles are pointing to.
You can listen to the podcast by pressing play above, or listen on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, or watch the video here. Below are the show highlights and full transcript.
Show notes
- How Anna points prisoners to their innate resilience and well-being
- Embarking on a research project to measure the effect on prisoners of an awareness of the Three Principles
- Following up months and years after prisoners are released to measure long term results
- How prisoners cope with re-entry into their communities when they know where their experience is coming from
- Working with young offenders to change the trajectory of their life path
- Looking past the labels we’ve been assigned for our true nature
- How working in prisons points to the universality of the human experience
- On the ex-convicts who are now teaching the Principles to youths in prison
Resources mentioned in this episode
- Anna’s TedX talk (The video is the full morning of TedX talks in Portland in April 2019, but I’ve set that link to begin at the beginning of Anna’s talk.)
- The One Thought Institute
- Beyond Recovery
- Robin Charbit and Ken Manning’s site, Insight Principles

Anna Debenham arrived in Portland, Oregon in the spring of 2016 with no connections to prison or to the criminal justice system or any clue how to start a nonprofit. She did have one thing: an understanding of the mind.
Through this understanding, Anna began to teach in prisons, created a research project that was accepted by the authorities of the prison and built her own organization from scratch. The Insight Alliance was born in the car park of a women’s prison and the rest is history.
They have groups in a men’s prison, a women’s prison and are scheduled to start in the youth prison in a few weeks.
You can find Anna at TheInsightAlliance.org.
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