Prison Yoga: An Unexpected Enlightenment

This episode of the critical social worker podcast is hosted by Christian Ace Stettler with Nico as a co-host and with David as a guest. The critical social worker podcast is supported by the social work department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The Critical Social Woker Podcast aims to: “foster critical dialogue, reflection, and critical consciousness. Use storytelling as a form of education. challenge the status quo. Focus on critical thinking, not partisan politics. (re)define and uphold social work values. Encourage empathy and understanding. Build community and connection.”

David is a service-based yoga teacher working out of Anchorage Alaska. He first became interested in yoga when he took college electives on meditation and eastern religions over 30 years ago. He eventually started to learn about different styles of yoga and that lead him to become a yoga instructor. David was deeply influenced by the ideas of service that he found within his studies, so he became the co-founder and lead guide of Turiya of Alaska which offers trauma informed yoga and mindfulness programs within numerous mental health, recovery, and correctional settings. David hosts several of these programs personally in the field.

The prison yoga project is about envisioning a future where we can take a more personal and rehabilitative and healing approach to substance abuse, mental health disorders, and crime.

I feel that this episode of the Critical Social Worker podcast opened my mind to yoga more than anything has been able to before. I have always kind of written off yoga and breathwork as something for only a specific type of people, the super fit, clean eating, most likely vegan, enlightened individual. I always pictured yoga as belonging to a certain group of people. But the more I learn about yoga, the more I feel that it is not about the physical activity itself, but the mindfulness that comes with it and that it is something that is open to everyone. So much of our lives are spent in a rush, without being able to listen to our bodies. I think there is something incredible about being able to slow down and breathe and listen to our bodies and to be able to do something that is actually healing for the mind, body and spirit. Yoga to me, seems to be more about awareness and mindfulness than it is about exercise. Listening to this episode really made me realize how much yoga encompasses, that it is not just something that can be boiled down to a single sentence definition.

As someone who has struggled with mental health issues for most of my life and frequently has anxiety attacks, I often forget to breathe, and I forget how much recognizing my breathing can help me to feel better and more in control of myself and my mind. Most often, my anxiety attacks stem from focusing on too many things at once, whether that is different aspects of school, work, or my personal life. By just focusing on the singular activity of breathing, I can come back to reality and slowly start to refocus on what I need to be focused on while still keeping that mindfulness and control of my breathing to help me keep calm.

I believe that it is important to make yoga feel more accessible to all people in society, yoga can feel like it is only really acceptable to be performed by certain people. All of the times I have seen yoga on television, in magazines and on social media it is always being done by an upper-class white woman. We need to see it become more normalized for all different kinds of people to do yoga. I feel that there is somewhat of a stigma around yoga and that a lot of people do not at all understand it and may take it as simply stretching. Yoga can feel difficult to approach or expensive, one may feel as if they need a special yoga mat or special lululemon clothes to feel prepared to do yoga but really yoga is more of a mindset than anything else.

While I do not have any real experience with incarceration, I can relate to the experience of feeling trapped in my circumstances and needing for a way to escape.  I think that yoga and breathwork can be extremely helpful for those in prison to help them feel less trapped in their situation. Those in prison may feel as if they have been stripped of virtually all of their rights, that they have even been stripped of a lot that makes them human, by practicing yoga and breathwork they are better able to feel in control of themselves and their life circumstances, they may be physically imprisoned, but that does not mean that they have to be mentally imprisoned as well.

Link to the podcast episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4bqcohokteNw8IbgH7XxAL