Yoga as Healing for Prisoners and At-Risk Youth

Published on June 4, 2014

Harvey Mai didn’t take his first yoga class in a pristine studio with bamboo floors and lightly burning sage. Instead, he first practiced yoga while serving a three year sentence at the Cleveland Correctional Center for robbing a bar—his fourth arrest before the age of 21. His introduction to yoga was facilitated by a Houston, Texas-based nonprofit called In-Powered, an organization that brings yoga to schools, juvenile justice centers, prisons and homeless facilities in an effort to disrupt the “school to prison pipeline.” Now out of jail, Mai still practices yoga today in addition to running his own food truck business.

“It seems like [yoga] is for the able bodied, wealthy, white population. That’s what people think it’s for,” said In-Powered Chief Operations Officer, Cristina Houston.” That’s part of our mission. To break what you think you have to wear, what you think it’s supposed to look like and who it’s for.”

In-Powered also works with students at YES Prep, a Houston charter school where there are plenty more yogis who don’t fit the cookie-cutter mold that In-Powered hopes to break. One student in the program had been skipping class and hiding from her family. With the addition of yoga into her routine, she says she feels that she is on the right path.

Of course, In-Powered isn’t the only organization recognizing the power of yoga in prisons and for at-risk populations. Stories of those like Marshawn Feltus at ACT Yoga, and endeavors like the Insight Prison Project, the Siddha Yoga Prison Project, and the Prison Yoga Project (to name a few) have similar aims in rehabilitating prisoners and at-risk populations through the healing practice of yoga.

The Prison Yoga Project is a nonprofit that is invested not only in teaching yoga in prisons across the country but in training more teachers in its methods, so that more yogis will be inspired to bring yoga into the prison setting where it is so desperately needed. “Thanks to yoga, prisoners begin to reconnect more deeply with themselves and others,” says James Fox, founder and director of the Yoga Prison Project. “Where love is so sorely lacking, the transformation is profound. Where suffering is so intense, word spreads.”

Have you or someone close to you discovered yoga during a time of distress or hardship? Please share your comments and experiences below.

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3 responses to “Yoga as Healing for Prisoners and At-Risk Youth”

  1. Ro-riffic Avatar
    Ro-riffic

    This is a wonderful article to see! I teach Yoga at a Juvenile Jail in Colorado. Kids ask everyday how they can get in to the 8 week group. Youth report to the Counselors and Case Workers the positive impact it makes on their emotional well being. At the end of 8 weeks, I take the group to a Yoga studio (if they are safe to leave the facility) and allow them to transition this skill (healthy recreation,emotional regulation, positive peer development and community integration). Underprivileged populations are were we can use Seva and offer the gift of Yoga;. it changes lives.

    1. Timothy Burgin Avatar
      Timothy Burgin

      Thank you for sharing your experience teaching in a prison. Keep up the great work!

  2. Calliope Avatar
    Calliope

    I lost my contract overnight, and was fumbling for what to do next. Because the way I was let go was so deeply unjust, but without recourse, i began deepening my yoga practice as a way to cope with my sensitivity, which was preventing me from doing some things. with a regular practice, i was initially able to cope, and then strengthen myself, my mind, my body, and start making a comeback. when i started out, i was not exercizing at all besides walking, and was merely flexible, but undisciplined. i am now entering ashtanga II practice having mastered more or less all of the ashtanga I poses, and I can do arm balances and my arm and core strength has improved notably. I would encourage anyone to indulge in Yoga, as a lifelong path to balance and deep listening within, especially as a solo practice. I believe classes are useful to learn poses, but deep inner work and listening is ONLY possible when you listen to your own body at YOUR own pace. Ciao! ~K

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Lea McLellan Avatar
About the author
Lea McLellan is a writer and yoga teacher living in Asheville, NC. She experienced the wonder of her first downward dog in college in Burlington, VT where she also studied Buddhism and Asian religious traditions. She completed her 200-hour, vinyasa teacher training in Boston in 2012 and has been practicing and teaching up and down the east coast ever since.
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