Ep. 50- REMASTERED Conversation with Lara Naughton on compassion and sexual assault

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Gissele overdub: Hello and welcome to this podcast entitled, can we truly have unconditional compassion for those who hurt us? Lessons from a sexual assault. My guest today is a new Orleans based writer, teacher and compassion trainer with more than 20 years experience teaching and facilitating workshops and retreats with individuals who have faced challenging circumstances, including homelessness, domestic violence, HIV AIDS, wrongful conviction, incarceration, and torture.

She is a certified compassion cultivation trainer through the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education. She’s also the founder of the Compassion Program at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, as well as the founder of the Victim Outreach Program through the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Parole.

She is creative writing faculty at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and her writing includes the documentary play, Never Fight a Shark in Water, The Wrongful [00:01:00] Conviction of Gregory Bright. Which has been performed by Bright himself on stages across the country. And of course her memoir, The Jaguar Man.

Welcome, Laura.

Lara: Thank you for having me.

Gissele overdub: I’d love to talk, to start talking about your book. You touch on so many issues that are facing women and men today and how we have systems that aren’t moving forward in a compassionate way when it comes to sexual assault. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what inspired you to write the book.

The

Lara: backstory is I went and took a, was meant to be a two week vacation in Belize and on the fourth day of that trip, I was picked up by a man. Pretending to be a cab driver, and I was kidnapped into the jungle at knife point where I was robbed and raped twice. That’s one level of the story, and of course after that kind of a traumatic incident, you know, I was left with the question, what just happened?

But there was another what just happened that was [00:02:00] even bigger, that while I was in the jungle with this man, who I refer to as the Jaguar Man throughout the book, it mixed in with the violence was also this very profound experience of compassion, because It was compassion, I believe, that saved my life.

It was very obvious that this man was acting out of his own madness, or pain, or trouble. It was not personal to me, that I knew immediately. I never met this man before, so it couldn’t have been about me. So, really my only defense, not being able to to run or to hide or to overpower him, my only defense was to turn toward him and his pain and try to soothe him so that he would stop harming me.

And all of that made a lot of sense in the jungle. But the moment I was safe and away from him, it didn’t make sense anymore. And part of that confusion came because I was living in Los Angeles at the [00:03:00] time and I told people what happened. I wasn’t hiding it or ashamed in any way. But the reactions I got were so varied and so angry, and I really started to question my own approach to self defense.

And so the book was born out of wanting to have some control over the narrative, to shape it, to make sense of it, and how to think about and talk about compassion. I wanted to have a conversation about compassion in the face of violence. and, and that’s what birthed the Jaguar Man.

Gissele overdub: That’s beautiful. And of course, writing has been a tool and probably was a tool for you beforehand. Absolutely. Yeah. That’s kind

Lara: of how I orient in the world.

Gissele overdub: Yeah. And I loved how you kind of wrote this story because you kind of use facts and myths of storytelling. And I don’t know if