How not to be hostage to hatred

Amanda Lindhout suffered routine torture, and physical and sexual abuse as a captive of Somalian militants, but learnt to forgive her captors and embrace empathy. She is now a best-selling writer and humanitarian speaker.

Amanda Lindhout speaks during an engagement at Shangri-la Hotel in Dubai. Jeffrey E Biteng / The National

“Close your eyes and get into your postures,” calls out the voice, resonating with calmness. “Straight back and feet on the floor. Begin to connect with your breath.

“As you breathe in, call upon the perfection of mercy and as you breathe out, call upon the perfection of compassion.”

The room falls silent. Cars whisper past nine storeys below, muffled by thick glass windows. The central air conditioning grows into a drone set against the uncluttered mind’s silence.

“Once you’re settled, bring to mind an image of your most dear loved one, the person with whom you carry the deepest affection and in your mind, repeat with me: ‘May you be well, may you be happy, may you be safe, may you live with ease’.”

Thus begins the boundless friendliness practice, a meditation method used to stave off ill will towards others.

It is a technique that Amanda Lindhout, a former hostage, is keen to share with others, to demonstrate the power of forgiveness.

“Feel the sense of love and affection filling your body, as you connect with these feelings. Shift your focus to yourself and, again, in your mind, repeat: ‘May I be well, may I be happy, may I be safe, may I live with ease’.

“Now, lastly, imagine a person towards whom you harbour some resentment. Begin to direct a feeling of compassion and well wishes for them, as you repeat after me in your mind: ‘May we be well, may we be happy, may we be safe, may we live with ease’.”

The glamorous Lindhout holds her head high as she speaks. Her audience weeps and thanks her for sharing her experiences. “I will keep this with me forever,” says one person.

Lindhout, 33, has achieved much since a US$1million (Dh3.6m) ransom was paid to secure her release in 2009.

She founded the Global Enrichment Foundation to cultivate peace and leadership in Somalia, and is a member of the Women’s Executive Network, which voted her one of the most powerful women in the world. She has also contributed to many other humanitarian causes.

Lindhout's memoir, A House in the Sky, documents her painful transformation from soul searcher to world changer, and made The New York Times Best Seller List. It has won awards and options have been bought for a feature film. But the Canadian is just getting started.

“I have lived through something really extraordinary and I have learnt a lot, so I feel a certain sense of responsibility to share what I learnt,” she says. “Of course, I have the choice to either do nothing with this story, and just sort of sit on it and live with it personally, or to share what I learnt with other people.”

Although today she is synonymous with strength in the face of adversity, Lindhout spent much of her life searching for a higher purpose. In her youth, she worked as a cocktail waitress, saving tips to travel across Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Sudan, Syria and Pakistan.

She sensed her future lay in journalism, although she had no formal training. It was a decision that saw her travel to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, where she began reporting for Press TV, the Iranian state-backed news channel.

But this career change also led her on a fateful expedition to Somalia where she hoped to freelance with her former partner, photojournalist Nigel Brennan. After just four days, the pair were kidnapped by members of the Somalian Hizbul Islam insurgent group, who held them captive for more than 15 months.

“For many, many, many months in captivity, I was angry. Those first seven months, I was just furious and full of, not even just anger, but self-pity and regret, and all these negative emotions, which do not feel good inside of you,” says Lindhout.

She was routinely tortured, beaten and sexually assaulted, particularly after an escape attempt in early 2009. Her internal suffering eventually snowballed and began to cripple her, to the point where she became ill and was constantly in pain.

But after seven months of “cultivating” such negative feelings she says she had a breakthrough, almost halfway through her 460-day captivity, when she began to see those holding her hostage as damaged human beings.

“I had a moment with one of my captors, where I just understood that he was a human being with a painful story of his own; that a person who hurts another is always hurting from a place of their own suffering.

“A person who is happy and healthy has no desire, nor capacity, to hurt another human being.”

The realisation was surprising and confusing to her, but immediately provided relief from her own internal negativity, and she began actively pursuing this empathy. Such compassion for her captors did not come easy but it was something she “just had to learn” for her own survival. Although she was spiritual in her 20s, she says captivity provided the opportunity to practise the true power of positive thinking, affirmations and visualisations.

“I have learnt the very hard way the value of forgiveness, but was I before this experience someone who applied and practised what I knew about spirituality?” says Lindhout. “Was I an especially forgiving person? No, I was just like everybody else.

“But because of what I went through, I had to learn how to cultivate that inside of myself, so as not to be limited and bound by what happened to me.”

She was able to see through her captors and realise that the degree to which they enacted suffering was a reflection of their own suffering. In their case, she states, “it was so clear they were products of a war-torn environment who were very damaged individuals”.

Lindhout now spends much of her time jet-setting around the world to tell her story, although she makes the most of her stints back home in Canada.

Some of her forgiveness exercises are based in Buddhist methodology, drawing on meditation, breathing exercises, visualisation, mantras and other techniques.

She coaxes her audiences into dipping their toes into the world of mindfulness, to great effect. Many seem to emerge from their brief meditations pleasantly surprised at the resulting calm.

Lindhout has various methods for maintaining peace and harmony.

“I don’t use the same one every day, and actually the thing that I do for myself every morning isn’t something that I lead everybody through, but it’s a visualisation technique. That’s what I did in captivity.”

She says she tries to picture not just her kidnappers, but anyone she is feeling anger towards and who she would like to forgive.

“I’m not saying that every day I’ve forgiven, but I’ve come a long way. It’s much easier than it was for me three years ago. It’s been five-and-a-half years and it gets easier and easier.”

Other recent developments in the same period have proven difficult to deal with. Lindhout says she is always deeply troubled to learn of the fates of other captives, such as the western journalists murdered in the desert by ISIL.

She also once had a knife pressed to her throat in the middle of the desert and now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

“They put me on the phone with my mother,” says Lindhout. “I thought I was going to die like that, and as these terrible stories have come out of the Middle East, of course I feel incredibly lucky to be alive, and incredibly sad for those families, but it brings back the trauma of my own kidnapping. It’s very hard.”

But she remains determined to spread positive change through her work, which she calls “compassion in action”, and says it is only made possible through the choice she makes every day to forgive and seek compassion. This, she says, helps her to cleanse herself and delivers freedom from negativity.

“You move through life holding on to your resentments and bitterness, and you think that’s normal. It’s only because I went through something so heavy and so severe that I realised I needed to do that. But then you realise that it applies to everything in life, all of the daily little things.”

Anger, Lindhout believes, is a big problem in the world.

“When we can learn to cultivate peace inside of ourselves and learn to let go of all the little things, like the driver who cut you off, or big things like what I went through, and when you can have peace within yourself, you then contribute to living within a peaceful community, a peaceful country, a peaceful planet.

“That’s what we have the power to do, as individuals.”