THE OCEAN INSIDE ME

A formerly incarcerated person offers his story of spiritual and racial healing in this debut memoir.

When Shore arrived at the prison where he would serve for three years, he was a self-described “small little Brown thing, surrounded by large, angry, muscular White men.” Born in Calcutta, India, and adopted by white Christians, Shore had always called Oregon home, a mostly white state with its own sordid racial history that’s often masked behind a progressive facade. Long before prison, where he directly confronted overt racism, Shore struggled with his racial identity. “I wasn’t White,” he writes, “but I wasn’t really Indian either.” Raised by his well-meaning, but racially naïve, parents, he joked that he was “Brown on the outside but very White on the inside.” While he attended Catholic church in his youth, it wasn’t until prison that the author found spiritual enlightenment. He writes that his daily meditations, which he began as a way to escape the cacophony of racism and violence that surrounded him, “were also leading me to a kind of healing that I couldn’t find anywhere else.” Indeed, as a “spiritual memoir,” this book eschews the chronological, biographical focus of the genre; readers don’t learn the details of his Indian heritage, adoption, and upbringing until they’re 200 pages into the book, for example. The story opens with an out-of-body experience in prison as the white noise of radio static transforms into the sound of an ocean, and the author meets younger versions of himself. Now free from prison, Shore is a reiki practitioner and energy healer whose work focuses on helping incarcerated people heal from racial and spiritual trauma. This expertise in mystical spirituality is reflected throughout the book’s narrative, which effectively blends descriptions of spiritual experiences and practices with personal anecdotes. The author is also sensitive to the difficulties that formerly incarcerated people face upon their release. Despite having advanced college degrees, he struggled to find employment or even a place to live, since being “a felon is an automatic ‘no’ in the renting world.” The book provides ways to address and cope with these and other stressors of the outside.

An insightful, mystic exploration of spiritual and racial healing.