Restorative justice. Has anyone heard about that? That’s so interesting. There’s this story about this woman in America somewhere—I don’t know if it was Brooklyn or Harlem or maybe Detroit or one of these places, a hard-core gangland—and her young son was killed by another kid who was also very young, gang-related. The kid who killed the other kid did it because he had no choice, right? The gang pressured him to demonstrate his value, to show he’s worth being part of the gang. Anyway, so then he killed the kid and when the court case, when the trial was happening, the mother was there. When she saw the kid after the trial when they condemned him, I don’t know how many years because he was—what do you call it? An underage? What do you call it? Underage? Junior, yeah. He didn’t get the maximum sentence, but he did get a pretty bad sentence. The mother was there, and she looked at him in the eyes and she said, “I will never stop until I kill you.” That’s what the mother told the kid.

The kid went to prison with a heavy heart and slowly it turns out nobody went to see him at all. And guess who was going to see him there; the only person that would go to see him? Guess. The mother of the kid he killed. She was the only person who would go to see him. Not his gang. He didn’t have a family. He was completely forgotten, and the only person was the mother of the kid he killed. She kept going to see him and slowly, through the years, they started to build this bond and she would bring him things, she would talk to him, she would be there for him in a way. Eventually, when he was released, he had no place to go. So, guess who adopted him? The mother. Because she had this place in her house where her kid used to live, so she took in this kid and they started living together.

As the years went by, one day she brought the kid and she said, “Sit down. I want to talk to you.” She looked at the kid and she said, “Remember that day at the trial when I looked at you and I said, ‘I will never stop until I kill you?’”

He said, “Yes, I remember that perfectly.”

“Well”, she said, “I’ve have done it. I’ve killed that kid who went into prison. That kid who killed my kid, I have killed him. Now you are like my son, so I have achieved what I wanted to do, which was transform and bring out the inner values, the real you outside.”

Even my hairs are standing on end just telling the story. It’s a real-life story. It’s amazing and things like that are happening every day.

Addicts, for example, people who are drug addicts, they have issues. addicts and ex-convicts and people who’ve had such a hard time in life, who have been basically thrown into that lifestyle and they haven’t really had a choice. Even if they did have a choice, it’s very hard to sometimes get out of there because of the habit, because of the pattern, because of society, because of the peer pressure—many different conditionings.

The addicts, many times they become addicts in a way because they don’t have a feeling of belonging. They don’t feel useful and then society doesn’t really help them. They make them outcasts, “Oh, you’re an addict. You have to go to a mental hospital, or you have to go to rehab and feel like an outcast, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Normally, the best solution to that would be to give them a feeling of belonging, give them a feeling of being part of something, being useful. That’s how really you can overcome addiction, because addiction is somehow looking for something that you cannot grab, you cannot catch. It’s like the donkey going after the carrot and we go back to satisfaction again. If we’re not living the moment, if we’re not present, we cannot be satisfied.