— Therefore being in prison is a great, extremely positive, great advantage and joy. You can see that you have an incredible opportunity: to have happiness now, a happy death, happy future lives, happy liberation from samsara and happy great liberation, full enlightenment. —

Lama Zopa Rinpoche

Our Teachers

A Loving Teacher

 

Judith Hunt began writing to Liberation Prison Project students in 2001, two years after she and her husband Jack Sonnabaum moved back to the US from Japan, where they trained teachers and taught English for 18 years.

Judith, who is English, was one of the project’s first Corresponding Teachers. “She is one of our most loving, reliable and dedicated people,” says Teacher Coordinator Carina Rumrill. “Judith’s motherly wisdom penetrates all her letters.”

In 1981 Judith left her job running the drug rehabilitation program at the Santa Cruz Counseling Center in California to teach at Kopan Monastery in Nepal. “I had heard about Lama Yeshe, who was looking for an English teacher for his monks.”

Nearly half of the eighty monks were under the age of twelve and Lama asked Judith to care for them. “Lama even called me Ama-la, which means Mother. You know how difficult it is getting little boys to wash!”

After fourteen months she moved to Japan, returning to the monastery every year for Christmas. “The monks are now in their thirties and still call me Ama-la!”

Back in California since 1999, Judith and Jack regularly host teachings at their home, a satellite of San Francisco’s Tse Chen Ling, in San Anselmo, a forty-five-minute drive across the Golden Gate Bridge.

Since joining LPP, Judith has communicated with over fifty inmates.

“They are so grateful to be corresponding with someone,” she says.

She worries about her students who have left prison. “They don’t always keep in touch with us, don’t have much support for their practice and often get back into their old problems.”

Judith says she really admires how people in prison struggle with the Dharma when they’re all alone. “I am glad that they have someone out here who even just knows their name and where they come from.”

 

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