Visited by spirits – ‘Betwixt and between’ in meditation and solitary confinement in Myanmar

Methods and context

The article draws on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Yangon, Myanmar in 2016–2018. Most of the fieldwork took place outside of the prison with former prisoners; four days of fieldwork were spent inside Insein Central Prison interviewing 10 prisoners who had taken part in Vipassana meditation retreats inside the prison, sitting for meditation with prisoners and conducting a workshop with senior prison staff. Additionally, 10 days were spent sitting for a meditation retreat in a meditation centre outside the prison, where I also joined weekly group sittings and interacted with former prisoners who had continued their meditation practice after release (Gaborit, 2017, 2019). The article draws on two types of data: interviews, with former as well as current prisoners, and field notes. The analysis features quotes with the 10 yogi prisoners and with one former prisoner who spent five years in solitary confinement.

The prison system in Myanmar has capacity for 66,000 prisoners but holds approximately 92,000, with Insein Central Prison having capacity for 5000 but holding approximately 12,000 at the time of fieldwork (World Prison Brief, 2018). Prisons in Myanmar are thus crowded spaces with many prisoners loitering with few activities to keep them busy. The majority of prisoners are convicted of drug-related crimes. Similarly, among the prisoners who participated in this study, several had been involved in drug use or drug distribution. Others had been convicted of murder and one had been imprisoned because of political activity.

The Sayadaw is a former prisoner who spent around five years in prison and who was a monk before his incarceration. His first period of imprisonment took place after his involvement in the Saffron Revolution in 2007. As one of the leaders in the revolution, he faced severe torture in the military interrogation camp where he was questioned and was later placed in solitary confinement once he was moved to the prison. Even after he was placed inside prison, he was subject to regular beatings by prison staff. He spent all day inside the cell and was only allowed to go outside for 15 minutes to shower and empty the toilet bowl from the cell. Inside the cell, he started hearing voices and later also seeing figures. Although he was a monk when arrested, the authorities had taken away his robe. He tried to continue his practice of praying and meditating but found it hard to do so without his ‘Sangha’ ³ brothers. His narrative is selected due to his particularly detailed descriptions of spiritual experiences. ⁴

The 10 yogi prisoners were interviewed in Insein Central Prison. The interviewees had participated in between 1 retreat and 43 retreats and had served between 3 years and 14 years inside the prison. The group consisted of five men and five women, aged between 30 years and 59 years. The meditation retreats are 10-day Vipassana retreats in the U Goenka tradition, which take place in a special meditation ward. ⁵ These are standardised retreats conducted to the exact same schedule across the world. The instruction for meditations is given via an audio recording of Sayadaw U Goenka himself, in English, accompanied by a Burmese translation. U Goenka played an important role in establishing a school for Vipassana meditation for laymen and imported this tradition to Indian prisons (Vipassana Research Institute, 1994). In 2008, the method, which originated in Burma but underwent significant development in India, was implemented in Burmese prisons for the first time. Today, there are meditation centres in the three central prisons in Oh Boh Prison near Mandalay, Thayerwaddy Prison and Insein Central Prison in Yangon. During retreats, prisoners observe noble silence ⁶ and are thus only allowed to speak when consulting with the teacher. They sit in meditation for 11 hours per day.

It should be noted that the prisoners who have contributed to the data of this article are not necessarily representative of the average prisoner in Myanmar. The prisoners who were interviewed inside prison have gone through a double selection process. First, they are the ones who have the mental resources to engage with meditation retreats in a context where daily survival can be a struggle. Although there are cases of prisoners joining the meditation retreat mainly due to the promise of better food, the prisoners interviewed in this study were dedicated yogis, people who found the capacity within themselves to undertake a spiritual journey. Further, the group consisted of the people who volunteered themselves when a high-ranking member of prison staff asked for people willing to speak to a foreigner about meditation. To volunteer in these circumstances will likely have demanded a certain amount of courage from prisoners otherwise used to being at the bottom of the hierarchy, humbly squatting down in silence when I and this same senior staff member passed them in the prison. ⁷ The experiences they and the monk in solitary confinement describe do, however, provide vivid examples of spiritual experiences (James, 2012). Such examples have the potential to enlighten us about the nature of human experiences in situations like these, even if they do not represent experiences that all prisoners go through.

In this article, then, the yogis describe visits by spirits in connection with meditation retreats and the Sayadaw describes the voices he heard while in solitary confinement. Some yogis have, however, spent time in solitary confinement and the Sayadaw stayed in a monastery before his imprisonment. Thus, these data reflect the experiences of people who have been in situations that can contribute to positive as well as negative experiences of liminality. The patterns of their experiences in other contexts support what the analysis shows: that the phenomenon of hearing voices unfolds in different ways in the two different contexts. The fact that the Sayadaw did not describe suffering from voices while in the monastery, and that the yogis who had spent time in solitary confinement reported negatively about spiritual experiences while in solitary confinement, supports the hypothesis that situational rather than individual factors affect the amount of suffering from such experiences.

Imprisonment as liminal experiences

Liminal experiences have been defined as those ‘that happen during occasions of significant transition, passage or disruption’ (Stenner, 2017: 14). In liminal experiences, ‘solid psychosocial structures melt down into liquids, the better to be reformed into a new pattern’ (Stenner, 2017: 16). It is through this framework that this article approaches spiritual experiences of prisoners, as examples of what happens when psychosocial structures liquefy. This explains why such experiences break with hegemonic conceptions of reality and raise ontological questions.

For prisoners, life is disrupted as they are arrested and taken to prison. They are in a liminal position in terms of space (the prison) and time (the sentence). They are betwixt and between; their identity is suspended and so is the social structure they came from. In this liminal phase, prisoners are ‘both/and’ and ‘neither/nor’. They are convicted as criminals, to become reformed citizens, they represent the potential to be both, but they are also no-longer-a-criminal and not-yet-a-reformed-citizen (Stenner, 2017).

Liminality is not an unknown concept in prison studies (Gaborit, 2020). In some cases, the word is used without its theoretical definition by researchers who have identified it as suitable to describe what they see in prisons (see, e.g. Guenther, 2013). In a few cases, the theoretical concept has been imported from anthropology and used for analysis of different aspects of prison life. For example, Moran (2013) analyses prison visitation rooms as liminal spaces, Jewkes (2005) writes about liminality and identity management for long-term prisoners and Green (2016) adds an empirical analysis of imprisonment as ritual in his dissertation. Nonetheless, much is still to be learned from approaching prisons through the conceptual framework of liminality, and this article approaches spiritual experiences in solitary confinement and meditation to fill a gap identified by Peter Scharff Smith by addressing ‘some of the more dramatic effects of solitary confinement’ (2006: 506).

As the variety in the studies of liminality in prison above shows, liminality can be studied on various levels. Thomassen (2015: 15) has suggested that liminality is classified according to space, subject (individual, group or population) and time. According to such classification, liminality can be used as an analytical concept for levels as different as modernity – a global phenomenon, for all human beings, lasting for an epoch – to individual enlightenment – in a specific space, for one person, in a moment. Similarly, experiences of imprisonment, as they take place for the full duration from arrest to release, can be conceptualised as liminal experiences. The following analysis, however, works on a different level, focusing on experiences which are spatially contained within the meditation centre or solitary confinement cell; which happen to a group or yogis or to an individual prisoner; and which are limited to the duration of the spiritual experiences in which a voice is heard or a spirit visits. Thus, the analysis hones in on a specific type of liminal experience within imprisonment.

In addition to the classifications described by Thomassen, Stenner has proposed a set of binaries to describe different types of liminality. According to Stenner (2017), liminal experiences can be spontaneous or devised, structured or unstructured, staged and unstaged. While there appears to be some overlap between the binary categories, they also offer insights into the different characteristics of the liminal experiences of meditation and solitary confinement in Myanmar prisons:

In traditional rites of passage, the ‘passengers’ are guided through by an experienced master of ceremonies or Shaman for whom liminal experience is the norm rather than the exception. In spontaneous liminal events, such guidance is typically lacking, and there are no guarantees about what will be made of the situation. The seed of fabulation that arises through ‘separation’ is delicate and vulnerable. It is easily dismissed as a mere hallucination. (Stenner, 2017: 63)

While these binaries draw attention to important aspects of liminal experiences, it is important to understand that they are scales, which can fluctuate during an experience. These binaries can describe characteristics of experiences at certain moments in time but must be understood as dynamic and changing across time. The case of the prison draws attention to another important binary distinction: whether the experience is forced or voluntary. Imprisonment is characterised as a transitional experience forced upon individuals by the state. It is rarely the case that a prisoner has chosen to go to prison to reform himself/herself. Rather, the state has deemed his or her actions unacceptable and sent him/her to prison as a punishment and to reform. Thus, understanding the general framework of imprisonment as liminal means studying forced liminal experience.

The remainder of this article proposes to add the binary of voluntary or forced liminal experiences to understandings of liminality. To do so, it draws on experiences that take place in two different yet similar situations – similar, that is, in that both entail people spending many hours in silence and introspection. However, there is a significant difference between the described experiences and the meaning attributed to them. Generally, meditation retreats are voluntary while solitary confinement is a forced experience. ⁹ Here again, it is important to think of this binary variable as a dynamic scale that can change over the course of an experience. For example, some yogis report that there are times when they want to leave the meditation retreat but feel they have to stay due to pressure from family or the rules of the prison. Similarly, O’Donnell (2014) has described instances of solitary confinement becoming appreciated by prisoners and leading to spiritual experiences. In spite of the fluctuations, it is a key characteristic that meditation retreats are initiated based on the volition of prisoners, while solitary confinement is forced upon them. This new binary contributes to understandings of liminality in other contexts and offers a possible explanation for why spiritual experiences are permeated by suffering in one context but not in the other.

The following section unfolds descriptions of spiritual experiences had by prisoners in meditation and solitary confinement. These descriptions show significant differences in how prisoners relate to the voices they hear. Voices heard in mediation are spirits in need of compassion, while those in solitary confinement inflict suffering that even amounts to torture.

Visited by spirits while meditating

Spiritual experiences during meditation were often accompanied by passing discomfort and anxiousness, which were relieved after consultation with the meditation teacher. Teachers often give standardised advice to students, along the lines of: ‘It is normal to have such experiences, continue and you shall succeed’ (field notes, March 2017 ¹⁰ ). Given that experiences are perceived as illusions within Theravada Buddhism, the teacher has no reason to delve into the content of the voices or the suffering and ascribe meaning to the experience. Instead, a simple confirmation tells the yogi that he will be okay and allows him/her to let go of the sensation, as she/he is learning to let go of other distractions that disturb meditation. After such guidance, the discomfort associated with visiting spirits subsided. Since the teacher encouraged them to accept these experiences and let them pass, the yogis did not describe them with many details, though several of them recounted such experiences (5 of 10). One yogi even described a shared experience of hearing voices:

Once, there were 30 members of ‘Satipatthana’ ¹¹ [retreat] so I could not participate because it was full. But I heard they heard things and felt them move around. This does not happen to me because I share compassion. People could not even sleep. This does not happen to me because I share. It happens sometimes, the people who experience it asks the teacher, all together they share their compassion and the spirit goes away. The spirits are everywhere. In the life cycle, if they are owners of a house they will ask to stay and rest for a while. After meditation the teacher had a tape, she opened it and the tape said: please forgive us for the things we have done. In the morning they opened the tape with U Goenka, then when they opened the tape only for the Dhamma workers it said this new thing. (Yogi prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

Several yogis described compassion as the key to coexisting peacefully with spirits. This is similar to the approach yogis are taught – to coexist peacefully with other human beings. Thus, they describe how before they were angry and short tempered, but after a meditation retreat, they would feel compassion with the other prisoners and understand their motives for acting as they do. This makes it easier for yogis to cope with prison life and avoid conflicts. Being able to exercise compassion towards spirits and co-prisoners alike is seen as reflecting that the yogi has a ‘right mind’ and is able to practice the lessons from the Dhamma in their everyday life. It also highlights the connectivity between all human beings described in the teachings of the Dhamma. Through compassion, the yogis strengthen their social connection to others – spirits as well as human beings. While what the Sayadaw experienced can be described as ‘becoming unhinged’, we might say that the yogis are strengthening the joints of their interrelational selves through compassion (Guenther, 2013).

The Dhamma is taught to yogis through daily evening lectures during the retreat called ‘Dhamma talks’. Dhamma talks are often given by a monk or teacher, but in the case of Vipassana courses in the U Goenka tradition they are given through video or audio recordings of U Goenka himself. Participants at every 10-day retreat listen to the same Dhamma talks. U Goenka delivers the Dhamma talks in English, followed by a Burmese translation. ¹²

Connectivity as it is described in Dhamma talks – as the reason for compassion with all beings – is similar to what Victor Turner, with reference to Buber, describes as the community going through liminal experiences together:

Community is the being no longer side by side (and, one might add, above and below) but with one another of a multitude of persons. And this multitude, though it moves towards one goal, yet experiences everywhere a turning to, a dynamic facing of, the others, a flowing from/to Thou. (Buber, 1961: 51 in Turner, 1979: 126–127)

There are striking similarities between Turner’s description of communitas and how the Dhamma talks teach yogis that everything is connected and that their previous status is nothing but an illusion. When the yogis sit in meditation together, they are in every sense of the word a ‘communitas’. They are separated in time and in space, and they are experiencing energies flowing together. However, when the yogis leave the meditation hall and the retreat, they bring the teachings and their experiences with them and continue their practice. As they continue their practice in the ordinary wards, they extend their compassion and sense of communitas even to the people who have not participated in the retreats. As such, they act as though they are in a state of prolonged liminality, where they bring parts of what Turner connects to liminal experiences, outside the liminal situation in which they originated. By doing so, they enact a new form of prolonged liminality, in which they act as if they are in communitas with people who have not gone through this liminal experience and who do not share the same conception of communitas.

From solitary confinement to meditation centre

While this article differentiates between experiences in solitary confinement and at meditation retreats, some prisoners live through both. Two of the yogis, who had both participated in meditation retreats and spent time on death row where solitary confinement is used, described having spiritual experiences before they participated in meditation retreats. Thus, the prisoner who was quoted above, speaking about spirits in meditation, also described how she was visited by a spirit in a solitary cell. She stayed on death row during the first part of her sentence but was later moved as her sentence was commuted to lifetime imprisonment through an amnesty. She described a classic nightmare where she was ridden by a spirit:

Once I was sleeping and a bad thing rode me. I could not move. I wanted to pray but I did not know the prayer by heart. I read out a prayer three times then it disappeared. In the execution cell [solitary, death row] I saw a ghost with a very long tail. Now I don’t see them anymore. (Yogi prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

Another yogi explained how, before he meditated, when he sat alone in his cell on death row, he would look out of the window and see the branches of a tree turn into his friend’s face. He described it as if he was losing his sense of reality. These experiences stopped once he started meditating, but he had a different explanation as to why they stopped. For him, it was a question of meditation technique. He was not able to do all kinds of meditations without being thrown back into such experiences. The U Goenka method helped him stay grounded through the technique of body scans. The meditation during the U Goenka retreat consists of 3 days of concentration meditation, where the focus is on sensing breath on the spot below the nostrils, followed by 7 days of body scan. In the body scan, the focus is guided downwards and upwards through the body interchangeably, either part by part or in a free flow. This structure helped him stay focused on his bodily experience and not be distracted by visiting spirits. For him, the visits were a negative experience he hoped to avoid. This might be due to the fact that his first experience of a visit was inside solitary confinement, before meditation retreats took place inside the prison. Generally, spirits are described as something external and their harmfulness depends on the mental state of the yogi. Like the female yogi above, several others said that when you were committed to the right way of living and exercising compassion, spirits are no longer a threat.

Although there are differences in the experiences described by the yogis and the Sayadaw, those who have lived through both describe them similarly. The main differences are that the yogis have a structure within which to understand the experiences, which they are offered by teachers who play the role of master of ceremony. The monk on the other hand is without guidance and finds it hard to describe in words what his experiences are. Still, the phenomenon of hearing voices and the descriptions by the two yogis above suggest that the similarities make them comparable.

Haunted by voices in solitary confinement

For the Sayadaw who was imprisoned in solitary for around 4 years, the spiritual experiences were not just passing, as the ones described by yogis above. While he was imprisoned, he started to hear voices inside his cell. He spoke of the voices as the worst kind of torture he was subjected to. The torture methods in Myanmar at the time of his imprisonment were brutal and include forced standing, rolling of a metal stick on the shins until the skin peels of, electric shocks and water torture (AAPP, 2005, 2019). Yet, it was the voices that caused him the greatest suffering and pushed him to breaking point.

The voices he heard spoke of politics, like the propaganda of the military regime. They reasoned for the actions of the military and sometimes even convinced him that he was colluding with the military himself and that they were simply carrying out his orders. The voices also represented his social life, when they either were the voices of people he knew or spoke about people he knew.

He described the voices as external to himself and perceived them as allied with the military he was imprisoned for opposing, rather than with himself.

They know my mind, yes they know my mind, they know me, how I think, what I think. They know me, the voices know me. Yes. So they annoy me all the time. And I could not know their thinking, yes. (Former prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

Through compassion, yogis were able to see and hear spirits without distress and suffering. Through their connection to the communitas and by including the spirits in it, they found peace. The Sayadaw, on the other hand, became unhinged. While the voices represented the community in which his intersubjective self was formed, they took on a harmful character. Inside the cell, the voices became torture which broke him down and cemented the loss of connection to the loved ones the voices represented.

Symbolic death and suicide

These experiences caused the Sayadaw great suffering and drove him to attempt suicide. In doing so, he broke with the foundational rules of Buddhism, the ‘Sila’. The Sila consists of 10 precepts, 5 of which apply to all Buddhist, 8 of which apply on special occasions such as a meditation retreat and all 10 of which apply to monks and nuns. Suicide breaks the first precept, which prohibits killing. Within Buddhism, all life is seen as suffering, and enlightenment happens in acceptance of this reality. For a human being (a high reincarnation) to commit suicide because of suffering is therefore seen as giving up an important chance to learn and come closer to enlightenment (Maurice Nyunt Wai, 2002). When the Sayadaw attempted suicide, he was not only trying to take his own life, he was committing an offence against the rules of his religion, thereby removing himself further from the chance of enlightenment.

The first time the Sayadaw attempted suicide, he tried to choke himself with the fetters ¹³ between his feet. An officer heard it happening and prevented him. The fetters remained on his feet months after the event. He was then transferred to another prison, where he again got close to killing himself. He had obtained a knife and intended to cut his throat. This time, his suicide attempt was triggered and stopped by the voices:

Sayadaw: Second time in [Lashio ¹⁴ ] Prison. At that time the voices told me, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, many guys, many political persons, many armed strikers and generals. And my parents, my relatives, they talked a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot. So I got dizzy and had a headache. And I didn’t want to hear their voices, so I tried to kill myself by a blade. A knife. By the blade of a knife. Yes.

Author: To your arms or?

Sayadaw: No to my neck. But, at the time, my girlfriend, she, I couldn’t see her, just on the wall. My girlfriend told me, please think deep, think deep, don’t do it. Think a lot, don’t do it, it is, it is a mistake, it is not correct she said. I think, I think yes I must do it for my country, I must work for my country and then I threw the blade. Yeah that is the second time. The last time. (Former prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

The intersubjective nature of his self continued even in the solitude of his prison cell, as he was visited by his parents, relatives and girlfriend. These people had been crucial to who he was outside and continued to be crucial for him inside. His interactions with their voices became a matter of life and death in these liminal experiences.

Experiences of death, though in symbolic form, also feature in the accounts of several yogis and in Turner’s description of the first phase of transitional rituals. Contrary to the Sayadaw’s experience of physical death as a final way out, the yogis describe a changed conception of death as giving immediate relief of their suffering.

When speaking about death, the yogis framed their understandings through ‘anniche’ (impermanence). In Dhamma talks and instructions to meditations, the yogis are repeatedly reminded to be mindful that everything is impermanent, including themselves. In the teachings, U Goenka repeats many times ‘anniche’, meaning everything is impermanent. It is a reminder for yogis to not attach themselves to anything, not to pleasurable sensations or painful sensations and not to an idea of the self. Everything is impermanent and as such, attachment to sensations will inevitably lead to suffering – either when pleasurable sensations stop or when a yogi gets impatient for a painful experience to stop. It also means that no suffering is eternal, whether it be pain from sitting, from a recent operation or the pains of imprisonment. ‘Anniche, anniche’, U Goenka chants in the recordings guiding meditations, it will all pass. This knowledge helps yogis on a practical level, as they remind themselves when sitting becomes uncomfortable, that the pain will pass, or when they miss comforts of life outside the strict discipline of the retreat and the prison. One prisoner recounted how this understanding was useful when, outside the retreats, she became ill and went to hospital for an operation:

The best part is that the Dhamma is a reminder, now even in my situation with the operation I just had, I remind myself this body is just changing. It will die too. I had stomach surgery. They removed a ball of inflammation. The operation was dangerous and life threatening, I was not affected. In May, I had the open stomach surgery. I am still in pain. The body is just a dead body – to know that helps for the pain. (Yogi prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

Other yogis explained how death was connected to non-being, not existing. They spoke of a death beyond the body, a death of the self:

When I breathe in there is [Zaw Win ¹⁵ ], when I breathe out there is no [Zaw Win]. Things disappear, nothing is permanent. When I exhale I don’t exist anywhere. Dhamma is to overcome the fear of death. Buddha says when you breathe in you can feel the body, when you breathe out that does not exist anymore. (Yogi prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

The real Vipassana is to lose myself, there is no me, just waves that comes and goes. (Yogi prisoner, Interview, June 2018)

Both the Sayadaw and the yogis describe experiencing a deconstruction of the self in connection with what has here been conceptualised as liminal experiences. The yogis describe the relief of letting go of the self, while the Sayadaw describes the pain of becoming unhinged from his self. The Sayadaw is familiar with the kind of training and conceptions of self the yogis describe, but it did not help him when he was alone in solitary confinement. When I asked him about the differences between life at the monastery and life in prison, he described them as very different and added that it was a great challenge not to be able to pray with other monks. While he was still allowed to speak his prayers, it was not the same for him without his communitas. As a monk himself, he was no stranger to liminal experiences, but for him, the qualitative difference between imprisonment and monastery life was so great that he saw no similarities. Liminality in the monastery was shared through communitas and was a life he appreciated and chose for himself. This was a kind of liminality he wanted to return to when he was released from prison. Life in prison, however, was full of suffering.

Conclusion

Similar phenomena of hearing voices can be experienced very differently depending on the situation in which they take place. Three key factors appear to explain why hearing voices can be experienced in such different ways. Firstly, the yogis chose to go through meditation retreats of their own volition, while the Sayadaw was forced into solitary confinement. This sense of having a choice leads the yogis to experience a sense of freedom within a regime that regulates every hour of their day and in which there are stricter disciplinary rules than in the rest of the prison. The Sayadaw, on the other hand, does not experience freedom but experiences levels of suffering that place him on the verge of suicide, even if suicide is conceived as immoral within Buddhism. Secondly, through guidance by a teacher and Dhamma talks, the yogis are shown a path, an anti-structure separate from the social structure outside the retreat, while the Sayadaw lives without such guidance. For the yogis, the teacher and philosophy function as a master of ceremony, which lead them through their spiritual experiences by ascribing meaning to them and connecting them to the ability to be compassionate towards spirits and other beings. Without such guidance, the Sayadaw remains uncertain about how to describe the voices he heard, other than as ‘torture’, and as something external to him, which knows him intimately, and which breaks him down. This understanding of the voices ascribes a meaning to them, in a way which make them more harmful to the Sayadaw. Lastly, the yogis go through their experiences with a communitas, while the Sayadaw must do without. The voices he hears are his only communitas, and as such, they become so influential they are able to drive him to attempt suicide.

These conclusions have consequences for the conceptualisation of liminality and for understandings of solitary confinement. Stenner’s division between devised and spontaneous liminal experiences points to some of the differences between the two cases considered. Thus, the guidance yogis receive through Dhamma teachings and the presence of a communitas, with whom they have a shared liminal experience, corresponds with his description of devised liminal experiences. Similarly, the fact that the experiences of the Sayadaw are not shared, and are rejected by others as unreal, corresponds with Stenner’s argument that spontaneous liminal experiences are easily disregarded as hallucinations, since it is hard to change social structures based on individual liminal experiences.

This article, however, questions whether the categorisation of liminal experiences as devised or spontaneous can explain the extreme amounts of suffering connected with liminal experiences in solitary confinement. Is this only a matter of the absence of communitas and a master of ceremony, or are other factors at play? It suggests that understandings of liminality can be enriched by consideration of the degrees to which liminal experiences are sought out voluntarily or forced upon a person. Imprisonment and solitary confinement serve as extreme cases of forced liminality, which highlight a dimension also present in other liminal experiences. For example, people can go through transitional rites based on differing degrees of individual motivation and social pressure, the balance of which can have consequences for the liminal experience. Exploring such differences offers potential for deeper understanding of the experiential aspect of liminality.

Lastly, these findings call for (re)consideration of the high prevalence of mental disorders among prisoners in solitary confinement. Such segregation continues to be used across the world, though it has been shown long ago that it leads to suffering rather than reform through introspection, which was its original purpose (Guenther, 2013; Haney, 2002; Reiter, 2016; Smith, 2006). This article adds to the voices that speak up against the suffering enforced upon prisoners through this practice and points to key characteristics of solitary confinement as contributing to liminal experiences that are characterised by suffering. Solitary confinement is often forced upon the individual, experienced without guidance, and involves total removal from the community. This combination suspends prisoners in prolonged liminality, as they enter a transition with no end goal (Szakolczai, 2015; Thomassen, 2015). In this state, spiritual experiences such as hearing voices and seeing figures are a logical reaction, an attempt to stay connected to the intersubjective self of the prisoner. Conceiving such reactions as pathological is a wrongful understanding of causality. These reactions are direct consequences of the social harms of solitary confinement.