Yoga Behind Bars: An Interview with Living Yoga

Volunteers make some amazing things happen behind prison walls. Volunteers bring in religious services, art programs, treatment programs, and more, and many of the programs wouldn’t happen without volunteers. Since it’s the season between Thanksgiving and the New Year, we thought it was a good time to thank the different individual volunteers and organizations that bring programs and services to people in prison. As part of showing gratitude to prison volunteers, we’re featuring a volunteer-driven program that is unique to Oregon: Living Yoga.

JM: First, before we get too far, what is yoga?

Nancy Williams: That’s a big question. When I teach, I tell my students that “yoga” means “union” in Sanskrit. It means to yoke or to bring together. Yoga brings us together as students, it brings the class together as a community, and it brings the individual student in union with breath, body and a connection to the inner life. The feedback I’ve gotten from my students, both brand new students and students who are very experienced, is that people feel like yoga brings them home to themselves. It gives them a sense of quiet in a stressful environment and tools to deal with the stress of daily living in prison.

JM: Tell us about Living Yoga and how it got started.

Leslie Bevan: Living Yoga started because one person believed she could make a difference. Sarahjoy Marsh teaches yoga and began thinking about teaching in prison when she was living at Bretenbush Hotsprings near Salem. Every time she drove into Salem, she passed Oregon State Correctional Institution. She had also read Bo Lozoff’s book We’re All Doing Time. In 1998, Sarahjoy began teaching yoga twice a week at Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI). She trained new teachers and when the women’s prison, Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, opened, Living Yoga started teaching two classes a week there.

After gaining some experience teaching in the prisons, Sarahjoy realized that a lot of the people there had things in common, like 85% of the women in prison had pre-existing substance abuse issues. Sarahjoy started looking upstream to determine how to reach people before they ended up in prison, so Living Yoga started classes at DePaul Treatment Center.

Today, Living Yoga teaches about thirteen classes a week with 40 active volunteers and over 200 volunteers trained to teach classes. Living Yoga brings classes into three Oregon prisons, the DePaul Treatment Centers for adults and teens, Central City Concern and a Volunteers of America men’s residential treatment center. We’re also looking for ways to deepen relationships with service providers and provide classes to people after they leave prison or treatment programs, and we’ve tried conducting a couple of pilot projects with transition programs.

JM: Tell us about your volunteers and their experiences teaching yoga in prison.

LB: It takes a lot of commitment just to want to teach in prison. First, volunteers go through a training with Living Yoga. Right now, we have about 20 – 30 people each time we do a training. After our training, volunteers who want to teach in prison must also go through the volunteer training with the Oregon Department of Corrections. We also ask new volunteers to shadow or apprentice with experienced volunteers at least eight to ten times regardless of their prior experience. People self-select. They have to know they want to do it.

Our volunteers tell us there’s no more grateful audience to teach than people in prison. Some people come to volunteer with a history of substance abuse or something in their lives that was unmanageable and yoga has given them more tools for dealing with these problems. Many volunteers tell us, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Teaching is a great way to give back what you’ve learned from your yoga practice. Many people have personal stories of self-transformation, and they want to share their experiences that got them to that point.

To find out more about what volunteers think, maybe you should talk to Jim who teaches classes as OSP and OSCI.

Jim Wanless: There’s a lot to learn by going into prison. I was first struck by how prisoners were just people. Society gives us this idea that they’re all defective or sociopaths, and there are a few of those people there, but the majority of people are not sociopaths.

I’ve been teaching at Oregon State Penitentiary for over a year, and the change in the men is remarkable. When I first started teaching, men took a cavalier approach to the class. They thought it was a stretching class that could help them with running or weight lifting. The energy in the class was noisy. Now, it’s much quieter. Students come in, get their props, sit down and settle down. The energy comes down. They now have their own practice outside of class and are trying to get yoga mats on the canteen so they can practice on the yard. There’s been a culture change in the prison, too. More people realize how yoga can help people.

JM: How do people in prison benefit from yoga, and what do incarcerated people have to say about the program?

LB: So many people in our culture are disconnected with their essential nature. When someone has been the victim of violence or self-abuse, people become even more disconnected as a way of not feeling, not feeling emotion. People who are incarcerated or recovering from addiction are often in a state of perpetual stress. Yoga helps an individual get back into her body. One of our students in prison said that participating in the yoga class was the only time when (metaphorically) the lights really go out. Yoga can help people deal with acute stress. It can also help people feel physically good just from the stretching. We have kids who come in for classes from the DePaul Treatment Center. They tell us when they go back to the center that they sleep much better – just that amount of stress relief and relaxation in the class has had a huge benefit. And relief from stress has to happen in order for change and healing to occur.

Yoga also helps develop mindfulness – helps create a gap between what’s coming at you and how you react. In that gap, people find that they have choices that they didn’t know they had. They can learn to react in that gap and learn that they don’t always have to get angry or feed a craving, or maybe they learn to feed the craving with something that’s healthier. Yoga helps us understand that we are not our thoughts. We begin to realize we have a choice.

NW: Yoga can be the practice that opens the door to the idea that you want something different.
LB: We’re not a political organization. We’re not advocates for prison reform. We are advocates for seeing change in people and we want to take in something healing whether a person comes to yoga for spiritual reasons or for exercise. Either way, that’s great.

We know how yoga has impacted our own lives. We can see how yoga changes people in the class. Yoga isn’t a magic bullet, but it does help create an environment to support the potential in people. Healing doesn’t just happen between the ears. We have a lot of memory and pain stored in our bodies that yoga can help us with.

JM: What would you suggest to someone in prison who wants to connect to a program like Living Yoga?
LB: In order to make a program like Living Yoga work, you need a community of practitioners. Portland is a great place because we have lots of volunteers who give us the capacity to do the work here. We would love to do workshops outside of the I-5 area. We could build capacity to do the workshops with people from Portland, but we have to compensate our volunteers for their driving and the time they would spend going to places like Pendleton or Ontario. The time commitment for that kind of class or workshop is huge. We’re still trying to build the infrastructure and organization to do something like that.

To be successful, you also need someone from the prison who wants the program there, whether that’s staff or prisoners. It’s more successful if we’re pulled into teaching classes somewhere rather than trying to set up a program where people haven’t expressed an interest. The chaplain at OSP is also a yoga practitioner, so he is a huge advocate for the program and understands its power to change a life.
JW: Every prison has its own culture and unique circumstances. The OSP program was started by one of the inmate clubs, Asian Pacific Family, which wrote and asked for a program. These guys are the reason the program exists.

LB: The door is always open for people in other communities to start their own program. The people who started Yoga Behind Bars in Seattle started with Living Yoga and send their volunteers to Living Yoga for training. We’d be happy to provide support to other groups.

Caylor Roling, Prison Program Director, conducted this interview for Justice Matters.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 Edition of Justice Matters.