Living Yoga: Stretching Lives Beyond Prison

Posted May 1 2011

from an article published in New Connexion, Nov/Dec 2009

Somewhere over the Northern Hemisphere of the planet, my airplane seat neighbor and I simultaneously accepted chai and samosas from the flight attendant, initiating a conversation about our mutual destination. I was traveling to the homeland of yoga, she to a business meeting in Mumbai. In talking about my decades long passion for yoga, I described a recent letter I’d received from a woman at Oregon’s Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, sharing how her zeal for yoga was awakened during her incarceration.

As a yoga teacher, I teach prison inmates through Living Yoga, which is a Portland-based, non-profit yoga outreach program serving area prisons, drug and alcohol rehab facilities, and centers for homeless youth and battered women.

I took it as an invitation when my airplane seatmate asked me, “How is that useful to inmates? I mean, I know what yoga does for me, but how is it helping them? And what difference does it make to me if they do yoga or not?”

Perhaps someday I will once again be surprised by people’s capacity to compartmentalize. But not until there is a wide spread revolution in humanity’s “separateness paradigm.”

When she asked, “What difference does it make whether they do yoga or not,” it implies that they are separate from us, and what happens to them remains separate from us. While it’s true that they live in separate quarters from the rest of us, behind cement walls and barbed-wire fences, what happens to them while in prison impacts us directly, an impact most people are more concerned about upon their release rather than during their sentence.

How does yoga change the lives of people living with the compromised health that results from over-reliance on pharmaceutical medications, crowded living quarters, constant noise and lights, poor quality food, and life histories filled with addiction to drugs and alcohol? What difference does it make when inmates have access to yoga — a practice that addresses the entire ecology of what it is to be human?

What difference does this make to us?

As yoga addresses a person’s circulatory, endocrine, digestive, immune and neurological function, the need for pharmaceutical medications is reduced. Many of Living Yoga’s students have reported a great reduction in their reliance on sleeping medications. Saving on health care is good for everyone. It costs $77.78 a day to house an inmate (or $28,389.70 per year). A portion of that is spent on pharmaceutical medications, and a smaller portion on food.

While one main area of impact may be in tax dollars paid from our personal pocketbooks, any program that attempts to be a part of the solution to our health crisis represents a tremendous and unquantifiable savings. Some of our greatest health care concerns are obesity, diabetes and heart disease. These illnesses are overwhelmingly represented within our prison population. The preventative medicine in yoga reduces current costs and significantly reduces far more expensive future costs. Living Yoga is not a spa-like offering to prisoners. A savings on health costs is something we all benefit from.

But what’s more compelling to me, and what I rarely get to discuss with the stranger in the seat next to me on an airplane, is the question of our separateness paradigm. How does reaching in to the shadows affect systemic change? How does reintegrating, by way of outreach, education and health services, those marginalized persons in our community create healing for all of us?

When asked about what she is learning from yoga, one of our students at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility responded: “I’m learning about nonviolence. To me, it is loving, caring and joy. This is not only for others, it is for ourselves. We are often violent with ourselves, which then gets cast outward. So when we become loving, caring and joyful within ourselves, it will be cast out to others in a positive, nonviolent manner.”

Her response revealed the impact of yoga on her self-awareness as well as what I call her other-awareness — she is growing into an awareness of the reciprocity, the impact, between self and others. The practice of yoga cultivates inner peace, sensitivity, a connection to the interconnected vitality of life, and an ability to examine one’s thoughts, experiences, and reactions in such a manner as to enable us to deliberately contribute to the harmony and purpose of the larger community.

When we as the larger community seek to embrace, include, educate and support those that live in our margins (margins created by our own cultural shadows), we catalyze this healing reciprocity. When we can courageously embrace our personal sense of impoverishment, addiction, fear, rage, racism, compartmentalization, helplessness and anger, we take tremendous personal steps toward our own wholeness. When we do this collectively as a community, the ripples of reciprocity are exponential.

I view a person’s incarceration period as an opportunity for them to courageously examine their history, including the wounds, traumas and life events that have shaped them. They have time to reflect on and to own their personal responsibility for actions taken. This allows them to open themselves to new paths of learning, self-awareness, job and social skills, and life skills for contributing to the larger community upon their release.

Yoga supports people in this process as it addresses our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs. Living Yoga volunteers support students in this process as they consistently teach to the students’ dignity, potential and intelligence.

We received another letter from a student whose experience reflected this back to us:

“The magic happens when the breath takes over and we become movement instead of thought, just a woman in half-moon pose instead of an inmate. For one hour, we have our dignity. For that I am grateful. Yoga has become my new passion. It is hard yet peaceful. It requires complete concentration. Living Yoga has given me a slice of goodness in a hard, inflexible place. I will continue to do yoga long after I leave and, if worthy, perhaps I could be of service. To be part of a healthy, spirited community, I am grateful.”

Recently, I was honored to have two new students (both of whom formerly lived in prison), begin attending classes at my yoga studio, amrita. You cannot tell them apart from any other student here except that they are both extraordinarily well-mannered and attentive in class. They are sincere, respectful, engaging, intelligent and looking for connection in a spiritually focused community. I’m delighted to see the vision I had for Living Yoga come full circle.