Table in the Clearing: A Memoir of Sacred Jailbreaks

A feminist and a rapist walk into a cement prison chapel.

Sounds like a joke, but it’s one of this book’s unflinching true stories that illuminate the transformative potential of every human heart.

For seventeen years, acclaimed feminist author Gena Corea volunteered at a medium-security prison, sharing personal growth processes with men convicted of violent crimes. The resulting spiritual journey transformed them all.

Table in the Clearing: A Memoir of Sacred Jailbreaks is the story of that transformation — and of the annual Thanksgiving ritual she and the inmates developed: a meditative group process in which participants invite their inner exiles, ancestors, victims, allies, and enemies to sit down together and feast on compassion.

Hear the unvarnished voices of inmates — men who, through painstaking inner work, begin to see themselves and others with new eyes, and who offer hard-won wisdom to a world that rarely listens.

Witness Corea bravely reckon with her own experiences of imprisonment, both literal and metaphoric. The author explores a pattern of involuntary confinement running through three generations in her family, and reflects on a lifetime’s work to break free of suppression by the Catholic church, patriarchal society, her family, and herself.

Join Corea in pondering the many ways we humans reject, suppress, subjugate, ostracize and exile each other — and our own selves.

Drawing on body-based healing practices, Aramaic spirituality, and the transformational power of deep listening, Corea asks: What parts of ourselves and our society have we locked away? What would it mean to welcome these exiles home? What happens when everyone gets a seat at the table?

Table in the Clearing: A Memoir of Sacred Jailbreaks is Corea’s fierce and tender parting plea for social justice. At the end of the book, she offers guidelines for you to partake in your own transformational Thanksgiving ritual.

Foreword by poet, activist, and global feminist leader Robin Morgan.

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