Calming influence -- Inmates learn to control their anger

By Joyce Bonesteel
Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008

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By Joyce Bonesteel
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LAPEER — Tough guys at the county jail are learning anger management — and liking it. They’re meditating, too.

“I teach them to be pro-active instead of reactive,” said Roy Sexton, a spiritualist since the early 1970s. More recently he is a sheriff’s department recruit and founder of the Meditation Self-Healing Center across town.

His classes are popular. Even the maximum security inmates are signing up, Lt. Duane Englehardt said.

“They’re not as angry, or tense,” said Englehardt, the jail administrator. “They’re not as apt to lose their tempers. It appears to have a calming effect. And it gets them out of their cells.”

Sexton volunteers two hours on Tuesdays, teaching meditation and breathing techniques. Classes for low, medium and maximum security are separate. Inmates are more receptive in their own pods than they would be among strangers from another jail section, the instructor said.

“They’re looking for something new,” said Sexton. “They don’t want to go back to what they had before. Jail is like being in the hospital. They look at what’s available. It’s important to them. They’re trying it.”

The Lapeer man has followed many paths in his 59 years on earth. Born and raised as a Southern Baptist in Waterford, Sexton said he was drafted and did a tour of duty in Vietnam. He was a cabinetmaker in his youth and later worked for a telephone answering service in Lake Orion. The calls came from an alarm company.

Sexton bought the alarm business in 1981, relocated it to the corner of M-21 and Wilder Road and renamed it Thumb Alarm Systems. Last year he opened the meditation center at his Law Street home, a historic structure built as a Baptist Church in 1873. A century later, the Lapeer Optimists Club converted it to the Henley Recreation Center.

For Sexton, burglar alarms and spirituality are in the same sphere. In both cases he is selling peace of mind.

Sexton’s card for the self-healing center offers meditation classes — basic to advanced, yoga, Reiki and Ti chi, in multiple classrooms that accommodate up to 60 students. His flier advertises a variety of classes by different instructors. In lieu of prices, “monetary love offerings” are asked for.

Linda Jackman, the city’s planning director, said it’s her understanding Sexton only wants to open the doors of his home for meditation groups. If that’s all he’s doing, she said, a variance is not required.

Sexton said he is a certified instructor but does not keep records because he doesn’t think it’s necessary. He said he studied under Reiki master Linda Cox of Tucson, Ariz., formerly of Hadley, and completed a 13-month course in cabala, the art of clearing excess thoughts from the conscious and subconscious mind.

His spiritual journey has led him down the Nile in search of the Egyptian site where Christ was hidden, and five times to Peru on other adventures. He said he fasted four days in a Native American sweat lodge in Canada, undergoing a mystical experience. All it cost him, he said, was a bag of tobacco.

“To me,” said Sexton, “praying is talking to God, and meditation is listening to God.”