James Fox ~ Prison Yoga Project: Finding Freedom Behind Bars Through Yoga

James Fox is the founder of the Prison Yoga Project, an initiative dedicated to bringing yoga and mindfulness practices to incarcerated populations. Over the past two decades, Fox has developed a trauma-informed approach to teaching yoga, focusing on emotional healing and rehabilitation within the prison system. Under his leadership, the Prison Yoga Project has expanded globally across multiple continents. Fox has authored the book "Yoga A Path for Healing and Recovery," which has been distributed widely to incarcerated individuals worldwide. He is also a trained facilitator in violence prevention and emotional intelligence, contributing significantly to prison reform and rehabilitation through yoga.

Visit Prison Yoga Project and make a donation today: https://www.prisonyoga.org/

Key Takeaways:

• Trauma-Informed Approach: James Fox emphasizes the importance of using yoga as a tool for managing unresolved trauma, which is common among the incarcerated.
• Prison System Insights: Fox provides a critical look at how the current prison system lacks effective rehabilitation programs and suggests a shift towards healing over mere punishment.
• Global Impact: The Prison Yoga Project has grown significantly, with affiliates worldwide, demonstrating the universal applicability of yoga as a rehabilitation tool.

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Chapters

• 0:03 James Fox's Journey to Teaching Yoga in Prisons
• 12:30 he Global Impact of the Prison Yoga Project
• 19:58 Understanding Trauma's Impact on Incarcerated Individuals Through Emotional Literacy
• 27:45 Rehabilitation and Reform in the Prison Industrial Complex
• 31:45 Trauma-Informed Yoga: Balancing Mindfulness and Relaxation
• 34:47 The Impact of Foundational Training on Personal Growth
• 37:45 Teaching Yoga in Prisons: Challenges and Confrontations
• 44:33 Yoga and Mindfulness Transformations in Incarcerated Individuals
• 51:02 Reforming Incarceration: From Punishment to Rehabilitation
• 58:28 he Transformative Power of Yoga in Challenging Environments

Transcript

0:33

Welcome to Native Yoga Toddcast, so happy you are here. My goal with this channel is to bring inspirational speakers to the mic in the field of yoga, massage, bodywork and beyond. Follow us at @nativeyoga and check us out at nativeyogacenter.com. All right, let's begin. Hello. Welcome to Native Yoga Toddcast. Welcome to the show. I record this intro. I record all my introductions to these episodes after the interview has completed and today, upon finishing my conversation with my guest this week, James Fox, who is the founder of the Prison Yoga Project, and of which you can find him on prisonyoga.org I just needed to take a moment because I'm floored. I feel like the information that James is sharing is really deep and really profound, and I'm so grateful. So thank you so much for being here. And you know, I guess what I what I'm getting from it is, you know, go to his website and make a donation. I think that's, that's, really, that's, that's the gist of it. Donate to this cause. I feel, really, I feel empowered by the attempt to try to help this cause. I think this is important. Please go back and listen to the interview that I did with Robert Sturman on Episode 181 and he's the photographer that has been going to photograph some of the classes that are happening in the prisons in California. And then definitely go listen to episode 201 where I interviewed Darnell Moe Washington, who who took his first yoga class in prison with James. James Fox, who I'm bringing on the show right now, and you'll hear Mo's side of the story from his first practice with James and to now have the chance to speak with the founder of the organization, I just feel this sense of like, wow, this is really powerful. This is really good. This is what we need to do. This is something that we need to focus on. This is something I need to focus on. So therefore, I'm taking you along on the journey, and maybe you agree, maybe you disagree, and I'm open to your thoughts and feelings, and please share with me what you think. Thank you so much, James for taking the time to join me, and without any further ado, let's go ahead and get started. I'm really honored to have this opportunity to both meet and speak with James Fox, James, thank you so much for joining me today. How, how has your day been? So far,my day been, what my day has been, well, and I'm happy to join you. Todd, well, thank you. I found you through the organization that you founded, which is prison yoga.org and or the prison yoga project, via a little bit of a breadcrumb trail situation of interviewing Robert Sturman, him introducing me to Darnell Moe Washington, which got me incredibly inspired after I heard his story about the work and Mo said so many amazing things about you and his first experiencing practicing yoga in prison with the class that you taught him, that I felt compelled to reach out to you of what you were gracious enough to accept and Thank so I just want to just thank you for for being here. And I'm really curious to hear your story and and how did you get involved in teaching yoga in prisons? Yeah, well, thanks again for this opportunity. Todd. How did I get in. Involved in teaching yoga in prisons. When I decided to become certified as a yoga teacher, which was back in 2000 I was really clear that I didn't want to teach in a yoga studio. I wanted to bring yoga to people who weren't being exposed to yoga. I felt, from my own experience of having received the benefits of yoga that, particularly as it related to young men at the time, that if young men were exposed to yoga, it could really help them. And so what I first started doing, this was back in 2000 was working with youth at risk, young men at risk, although I did end up going into juvenile halls where there were young men and young women. And couple years after that, I knew a guy who was starting a rehabilitation program at San Quentin Prison. This was in 2003 and he wanted to add a mind body component to the rehabilitation program that he was bringing to San Quentin. So he asked me if I would come on board and bring in a yoga program. And then what happened was, because that organization was called the Insight Prison Project, his name was Jacques Verdun, and there were four components to that rehabilitation program, violence prevention, victim offender education, emotional intelligence and Mind Body integration. So what happened was, although I came in as bringing in the yoga program, because there was such a need. I also became certified. I also became trained as a violence prevention facilitator, and also worked on developing the curriculum of emotional intelligence. So what that meant? You know, in terms of violence prevention, that meant that in addition to teaching a weekly or actually, there were two weekly classes of yoga. I also had a group of men that I was working with over a year long period of time following a violence prevention curriculum. So the important aspect of that is that it really was informing me about how to structure a yoga program to deal with what I always considered to be the two common denominators of incarceration, violence and addiction. And most of the time, those aren't separate. They come together, violence and addiction, I think the, I think the the rates are roughly 80% of the crimes that are committed are committed by somebody who's under the influence of some kind of substance. So there's your combination of violence and addiction. Wow, yes. And, and you were able to through how much trial and error was it for you to come to a place of feeling like I have a strategy for coming into this environment with did it? Do you feel like it? It clicked very easily for you to to teach in this environment? Or was it something that obviously you've been at this for more than 23 years now, have you, you know, obviously you're you've gotten really good at it, you've put some time in. But do you feel like that that came really easy for you? Or what was the process like as this unfolded? I don't know came easily for me. It might have come naturally for me. I pretty much drew on my own experience of I grew up in Chicago, and one of the core concepts of the violence prevention training that I went through was called Understanding the male role belief system, and what that relates to is how most men grow up being somewhat indoctrinated or influenced as to this is what it means to be a man. This is how you think as a man. This is how you act as a man. And as a result of that, it brings about a lot of pain and suffering, quite frankly, a lot of pain and suffering for other people, and a lot of pain and suffering for one. 12 so drawing on my experience of growing up in an inner city in Chicago back in the 60s and the 70s, and being witness to a fair amount of violence and understanding that, particularly when you were involved in sports and athletics, it was like, well, that's part of the program. I mean, if you have to be violent, you know, if you have to be aggressive, and again, when you think about aggressiveness as something that's completely accepted in this culture, particularly expected of men. Hey, if you want to get yours, you've got to be aggressive. And then really examining how aggressiveness results in pain and suffering, so intuitively, I felt that yoga offered a different way of operating in terms of strength and resilience and well being as far as men were concerned. But even that, when I first started out teaching at San Quentin, I was teaching primarily men who were life sentenced with the possibility of parole, so they were doing long sentences, and we were having a weekly class. And so in the beginning, I felt, well, what these guys really want is a good workout. They want me to come in and challenge them and give them a good workout. And about six months into the program, this was one of the classes, was a Tuesday night class. One of the participants in the class, who was quite skilled and in really good shape, came in and he saw me, and he said, Hey, James, you're going to kick our ass tonight. And I realized, wait a minute, what am I doing? Wow. Um, I may be challenged them, and I may be I may be falling in, and this was before I did the whole violence prevention training and my whole real understanding of the male role belief system and but intuitively I thought, What am I doing? I'm kind of buying into this male culture, which these guys came from, and they live in. You can just imagine what it's like if you're a man living in a prison environment, and how much of that male Bs is happening and challenging and things of that nature. And so I started to make a change, and I started really focusing more on, well, what were the greatest benefits I got from yoga? And one of the things that motivated me to become a yoga teacher and to do the work was the emotional benefits that I gained from practicing yoga, the emotional impact that it had on me, um, the the the assistance that it gave me in in moderating my emotions and being able to draw on my yoga practice that when I was triggered in certain this is outside of a yoga class, but when I was triggered in my life, I was able to lean on my yoga practice to develop a different response to situations than the way I had been responding to situations in an impulsive kind of way, rather than in a considered kind of way. And when I say that, you know, when you look at yoga and you look at the complete picture of yoga, I'm not just talking about asana practice, which, of course, is really important in terms of being able to discharge the stress, the anxiety, the other emotional issues that we carry On a regular basis, but the meditative aspects of yoga and developing the ability to calm the mind and to create those moments of inner peace that we all need to stay in a balanced state. So I really started to emphasize that, yes, we were continuing to do asana practice, and the asana practice needs to be somewhat challenging, not over the top, but it needs to be somewhat challenging to accomplish the discharge and some of the other things that we want to accomplish in doing physical practices. But I began to lean more heavily on the emotional and the neuro. The neuro the mental benefits of the practice. Amazing. Yeah. And then what happened? Was one of the things you had asked me is, you know, how did I come about creating the prison yoga project? Well, after being with the inside prison project and building that program over several years, I decided that I wanted to write a book that was like an introduction, a complete introduction to yoga for incarcerated people. And so I wrote that book in 2009 in 2008 I established the domain name prison yoga. And if so, if people went online and looked at prison yoga, I was the one that came up. But I did that because I was preparing to write my book, which is called Yoga, a path for healing and recovery. And when I wrote the book and we started sending it out free of charge to any incarcerated person who wrote us asking for a copy, I established the prison yoga project as its own nonprofit. Wow, and today, over 40,000 copies more. We've sent more than 40,000 copies to incarcerated people who have written us free of charge. And if you do the math, that's over$200,000 that it's cost us to do that. That really was the first step in launching the prison yoga project. And then it was after that I actually was invited to a conference in India called the first international conference on yoga for health and social transformation, and I was one of the few non Indian yoga teachers who gave a presentation at that conference, and it was at Patanjali University in hardware. I remember taking the train from Delhi to hardware, and I got up on this stage to make this presentation. And I'm looking out on this audience of hundreds of mostly Indian people, and here I am at Dart war at Patanjali university, at Patanjali university, that what you might consider to be the center of yoga in the world, and giving this presentation on my work. Wow. And I remember taking the train back to Delhi to come back to to the US, thinking to myself, I think I better take the next step, which is, I think I better start training teachers to do this work. Yeah. So that was the beginning in 2011 when I started actually training teachers, and mostly by invitation, I was contacted by various yoga teachers around the country. Eddie stern in New York, a very well known Ashtanga Yoga teacher, had contacted me and said, hey, we'll make our Shala available for you to come and teach trainings here. And I did several trainings over maybe a period of three years at Eddie Shala, and then it was one after the other, and I started training teachers, and that's what started the prison yoga project chapters developing around the country and outside of the country, wow, that's amazing. What I love hearing the organic nature of this growth process. I mean, it required, like you said, to come up with the funding to be able to send these books for free to anyone that requested it. What an incredible Well, obviously, that's a very generous offering on your behalf. Was it difficult for you to come up with that funding? Did you find that when you were passionate about, when you started speaking with people, and obviously you're very passionate about this, did was that an easy thing for you to fundraise for? Did you have to work hard to get that to come about? You know, it was not easy. The initial funding came from give back yoga foundation and connecting with Rob schwere, who's one of the founders of give back yoga Foundation. He and Beryl Bender Burch established give back yoga foundation, but that was for the printing of the book. Then it was like, okay, and I had no idea when I first published the book. How many people other than the guys I was teaching in San Quentin are interested in yoga? Yeah. So the initial printing, excuse me, was 1000 copies. Those were gone in like two or three months. Oh, wow, because I put a small app in, there's a kind of a partnership organization called the human kindness Foundation. Which is in North Carolina, that has a newsletter. They send out a newsletter to, I think, around 40,000 incarcerated people every month. And I did a small placement of an ad in that news, in that newsletter, and I was overwhelmed with requests. And so then it was like, Okay, I paid for the first printing, and I have to set these. So that was also part of the motivation for for raising revenues by doing the trainings, by reaching out and doing the trainings. Because, of course, the trainings brought in revenues, but then I also started reaching out for donors. And so we pretty much, there was myself, and then I had somebody who was working with me part time, helping me at the time, and, you know, we just kind of patched it together. Wow, until such time that things started to grow. Oh, it's amazing how many different countries, is some form of your work being offered? Well, we have affiliates. And by affiliates, I mean they operate as prison yoga project, they operate under our name in five European countries. In three South American countries, in Mexico, in Australia and Canada, and in 19 US states. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. And then, if you had to guess, or maybe you actually know a number, how many people have taken your training and facilitated a class of some sort around the world? So I think, I think we're probably anywhere between 30 504,000 people have taken our specific Brahma informed training. How many people have facilitated for us around the world? Wow, that's good question. I'd say at least 500 people. Nice, you know. And yeah there. That doesn't mean they're all still active, but at least at some point in time we had a program. There's some places where we had programs before, where we no longer have programs, and things like that. But yeah, it's, it's, we've had a significant impact. That's incredible. James, I mean, it sounds like, from the way you told the story, you really had no idea it was gonna grow to this. Oh, I had no idea. It sounds like you just went in. You started, you, you, you got, you developed your own kind of method. I love hearing about how you switched from how you kind of got glimpse of the that male culture identity issue, and then, you know, and we hear that a lot in our public yoga classes of like, you know, you know, really kick our butts today, work us over really strong. But it's, it's fascinating how you kind of clued in on that and then put the emotional intelligence part in. And can you tell me what happens when you what sort of transformations have you witnessed in this process of encouraging inmates or prisoners to get in touch with their feelings? What what comes out of this? I mean, this has to be powerful. I can't imagine, because I think probably a lot of a lot of folks that end up in this sort of situation, maybe are unaware of the trauma that they have gone through, perhaps never really identified with the fact that they have been traumatized. And then maybe have a grand realization of, oh, wow, this is why I'm here. What what are you witnessing, and what have you felt over the years in your in your work? Yeah, so you've hit on a really important aspect there. And the way that I look at this is what happened over time was, you know, it's really only been since, kind of since Bessel van der Kolk wrote his book The Body Keeps the Score. I love that book, and I believe it was published in 2012 I think you're right. And I think there was a combination of that, and it was a combination of understanding the trauma that military veterans had experienced as a result of their active duty that the whole focus on the issues of unresolved trauma came in to clarity in particularly in the United States and and Dr van der Kolk has had a huge. Influence in in that so then it became, then it became kind of clear that, intuitively, we were taking this approach, but now all of a sudden, we were beginning to understand, well, what are these unresolved symptoms of trauma that remain with somebody when they're not addressed. And so we started to really dive in on trauma training. And so we, we're, we're a therapeutic alliance partner of the trauma of Vander Cox trauma Research Foundation. Oh, wow. And most of our senior facilitators teachers have done trauma training, either through Dr Vander Koch or through Peter Levine or through other other people. So, and that's that's evolving, you know, in terms of trauma therapy and understanding trauma is is evolving. So we started clearly recognizing, what are those unresolved symptoms of you know of and you take people who come from traumatic backgrounds, as you mentioned, who've witnessed what they call adverse child experiences, particularly when you when it comes to developmental trauma, which is childhood trauma, and you look at incarcerated people, and you look at the vast majority of people who are incarcerated come from backgrounds of developmental trauma. What that means is that they witness violence, they witnessed addiction. They in some cases, they witnessed murder. They witnessed abandoned. They experienced a bad abandonment. They grew up in communities that were not safe. And as you also pointed out, when you first begin to speak with those people about the trauma that they experience, the response that you might get is, what are you talking about? Trauma? That's my life. That was my life. I never looked at it as trauma. But then when you start to break it down, well, this is the impact that trauma has on your nervous system. Now I'm talking science, and I'm talking research, the real neuroscience impact of trauma and how it shows up in your body, how it shows up in your mental capacities, how it shows up in your ability, or your lack of ability, to respond with care and with consciousness to any given situation that arises. You may wonder why you have such little impulse control, why you've got a knee jerk reaction to everything, why you can't sleep at night, why you rely on drugs and alcohol as a way to to self medicate and deal with yourself, and it isn't until you actually understand, oh my gosh, I come from this traumatic background. When we were doing our emotional literacy classes that I was involved in and help write the curriculum for we used to do an exercise with the men called original pain, secondary pain. And what we asked so you're with a group of guys every week for maybe a whole year, maybe longer. And it's not like everybody opens up as soon as you start the you know that takes weeks to establish a certain level of trust, and then you start to introduce different topics, like this original pain, secondary pain, can you identify in your life? Can you identify the first major pain that you experienced in your life. And so we would ask the guys to do that, and then, then and and then, and they would come up with things like, I saw my uncle get shot and killed on the corner. My father, my father beat my mother or my mother's boyfriend in front of me. My mother, my father was gone. I witnessed my mother being beat up on a regular basis by her boyfriend. And how old were you? I was four years old. In my memory, I was four years old. Okay, that was your original pain. Now, can you identify secondary pains? Oh, yeah, I can identify secondary pains from that. I remember one time I was riding my bicycle down the street and I got hit by a car. I remember another time that myself and my friends were hanging out in an abandoned building, and one of my friends fell off the second floor, and he's a cripple today. I remember having my first drink of alcohol when. I was nine years old because I went by these guys who were hanging out on the street corner, and they said, Hey, kid here have some of this. So then what would happen would be, well, can you understand that, how your original pain sent you on a projectory of secondary pain? Wow. And now here you are, 36 years old. How long have you been incarcerated? Oh, I've been down for 12 years. And what about before that? Oh, yeah, I spent time in juvenile hall. Can you trace it back to the roots? So this is the reality. Something's broken here. Well, the brokenness is we're not rehabilitating people. We're housing people and we're punishing people. We're not We're not rehabilitating people. We're not providing healing possibilities for people so that they don't come back to prison and they don't go out into society and re offend, and that's the big quandary of the prison industrial complex. And you know, you could go down that rabbit hole and you could say, why does it exist? And so on. Well, it's a multi, multi, multi, multi billion dollar industry that employs a lot of people, the country is still stuck on this tough on crime. That hasn't worked. It hasn't worked. Given the recidivism rate, how could anybody say that it's worked? See, you can get me on my soapbox. Well, I thank you. I need to hear all this. I don't. I don't know all these facts. I don't know that our our listeners right now know all all of this from this angle. I think probably people hear information from sources that don't have people with their feet on the ground like you do. You're going in, you see it and you're feeling it. So I want you to please go on the soapbox and share what you know that's I'm so grateful to hear this. Thank you. There's a lot more information available today than there was 23 years ago when I started doing this work. I mean, you can go to you and I were talking about this, you could go to the Sentencing Project out of Washington, DC, and they've done tremendous amount of research on prison reform and sentencing reform, and you can really get the facts and the realities around people who are incarcerated. So the American public is kind of presented with this veil that the media presents around incarceration and prisoners, and you know, particularly the the dramatic media that we you know that all prisoners are dangerous and and you know, they're animals. And what I have found through the work that I've done is that everybody wants the same thing. They want to be acknowledged. They want to be accepted. I mean, if you want to really drop down to the very bottom line, they want to be loved. They want to be looked at as worthwhile human beings. And Shame does not create worthwhile human beings. So you put people into into an environment, into a system where they're shamed. You're, you're you're a prisoner, you're a con. The amount if you're going to be in prison, that's how you're going to be treated. You're going to be treated as a con. Well, what's the opportunity for healing? So we come in, and it's not just Yoga people, but other people who are doing great work. A program that I you know, the guy who I work with, shot for Dunn, established a program called grip, guiding rage into power. Phenomenal program that's in a number of California prisons, helping people deal with the origins of their violence and shifting that and a lot of the men that have gone through that program get out and are now facilitating the program back in the prisons. So their programs like that. They're they're music programs, they're writing programs. There are radio program. There's a program in San Francisco by k, a, l, W, radio called uncuffed. It's a podcast that comes out of San Quentin. There's another one called ear hustle. And these present the real, the realities so that if people who have these, you know, these biases about who prisoners are, would just listen for a moment to some of these resources that are available, they find that they're real people who are incarcerated, who made big mistakes. Aches and caused major harm. And it's not like, it's not like we don't want to hold them accountable and responsible for the harm that they've caused. That's part of the rehabilitation process, but that's just part of who they are. It's not all of who they are. Yes. Wow. So what we're able to do, and which you can relate to, and people who are dedicated yoga practitioners can relate to, is that over time, as you dedicate yourself to a yoga practice, things start to break down within you, right? I mean, one of the things that I realized was I became more self sensitive, because from my yoga practice, I was I was much more in touch with myself. And what I mean by that is, mentally, emotionally, physically, I was more in touch with myself as I dedicated myself to a yoga practice, and that brought about different behavioral changes within me. Didn't make them disappear, but enabled me to work with them in a more skillful way, and that's exactly what happens with our approach to to to trauma. Informed yoga is first of all helping our participants understand you. You come from backgrounds of trauma, and you're living in a trauma inducing environment. So how do we address those issues? Well, traditional yoga addresses those issues through mindfulness, conscious breathing, movement and deep relaxation. I'm kind of quoting sat bir Khalsa, who's major researcher at Harvard on the benefits of yoga, those are the foundational principles that Patanjali laid out through the eight limbs. And so if you structure a yoga class and a yoga program to address those issues and to balance those mindfulness, conscious breathing movement, deep relaxation, and not necessarily save the Oh yeah, deep relaxation in Shavasana. No, can you sprinkle it in throughout the practice? That's that's where you learn impulse control, by the way. So you're activating, you're you're activating your system, you're activating your system, and then you stop for a moment of stillness and relaxation. So you learn that modulation of modulating sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. That's how you're working on the brain when you're practicing yoga. Now I'm giving away some of our trainings. Well, I, you know, I got so inspired from mo that I sound I signed up for your foundational training, and I just started it this week, and already, right off the bat, with the very first video that I came in on I am already feeling this excitement of just like what just for my own personal benefit, like regardless if I ever have an opportunity to teach in the environment that you're talking of, either in a prison or in a situation where I could volunteer and offer I already feel like my own practice is going to benefit, or just practice is the right word, but my own relationship to myself is going to benefit greatly from from the training that you've put together. So, I mean, I've only just scratched the surface, so I'd only want to, I mean, I probably need to. I need to finish before I come back and speak with you. But I just, I can already tell the professionalism from the the way that you've court put the course together is just so good already. I'm so excited to have this chance to hear your enthusiasm and passion for what you're doing. I feel really grateful. I'm curious, um, what is did you Was there ever a situation that you felt that was you were in over your head. First of all, let me say I really appreciate what you said, that that touches me. You've already gotten that much from the foundational training. And also, I want to make sure everybody knows it's not just me. I've got a team that I work with. Fin, we're the ones who put the training together. So what I used to do by myself is now a group collaboration. So anyway, thank you very much. I appreciate that. Whether I was in 23 years, there has to be a time. Well, I'll go back 25 years. And I remember one juvenile hall I was teaching on a Friday evening in the Bay Area, where I used to go into the juvenile hall, and the yoga class was offered to people. Well, you can either go to the yoga class, I think it was at six o'clock at night. It was after their their dinner. Well, you you can go to the yoga class, or you can stay locked up. And I would have this group of youth, boys and girls in the class, and I used to leave that hour long class and go out into my car, and I take some deep breaths and go, What am I doing here? I mean, you know, this is like, This is torture. This is torture. And at the time, I had juvenile daughters too, so it was like, now I gotta go. No, anyway, but, yeah, you know, I guess once again, kind of going back to having grown up in Chicago and having found my way as a young man that to kind of handle as best I could situations. Let's say I was 65% prepared for what I would come in contact with when I went into San Quentin. Remember a program Sergeant one time saying to me and some other people at an orientation, if you just basically look at this, that you're dealing with a class of high school students, you'll be you'll be well off. And I thought, Gee, what a thing to say. And then in a very short period of time, I realized, oh, yeah, most of these people are experiencing Arrested Development that the and, and and. So to be specific with you, about one time I felt, whoa, okay, this is so, as it's typical, if you're going into a prison situation, that you carry a whistle with you. It's required in California, and you're supposed to blow the whistle if anything comes up that is threatening, and usually in any place where you're teaching there also, there's also an alarm box. So I had a class in this one unit at San Quentin. And what would happen is, typically, what happens is you show up about a half an hour early for the class to make sure everything gets set up. The mats get rolled out, the foam blocks are available, things like that. And you'll find that some guys will come to the class, they'll roll their mat out, and they'll just lie down. It's like, oh, Safe Harbor. I'm finally out of the nonsense of the prison, and I'm in a space that I know I can rely on. It's going to be protected, it's going to be safe, so on. So this particular day, some guys had come and they laid their mats on and they were lying down, and all of a sudden, these two guys come busting into the class, and they've got a box of crackers, and they're kind of pulling the crackers out and pushing each other around and making a lot of noise. And I turned them and I said, Hey, take that out of here. And I, of course, I didn't even think about it, my own lack of impulse control, but at the same moment, yes, at the same moment, it called for, I mean, you know, in a prison environment, you need to be able to establish some very clear boundaries. So the one guy looked at me, a rather big guy, looked at me like, we're here for the yoga class. And I said, Well, you, you haven't signed up for the yoga class. These are and he said, Well, we'll be back. So, so what I, what I had to do is I had to collect the ID cards that that was, you know, the protocol, you collect the ID cards of those guys who were in the class, because it was during an outcome period where everybody had to be accounted for, and then you turn the IDs in to the program office. And so I'm getting ready to turn the i. IDs back, and these two guys come back in, and they give me their IDs. And I go, okay, okay, I guess you're going to be in the yoga class. And so I walk back to the program office, and I come back, and I'm going over to my mat, and the big guy gets up and he goes, Hey, man, I didn't like the way I didn't like the way you talk to me. And I went, oh, oh, man, oh yes. I said that to myself, right? Yeah. And he got up, and he started kind of moving forward toward me, and I leaned down, acting like I was adjusting my yoga mat, and I was buying time to figure out what the hell am I going to do. So I came back up and he was standing there, and I said, Look, I could have handled the situation a little bit better. But let me tell you, the guys who come to this class, count on it being a place where they can come. It's a safe space, it's a refuge in the prison, and I'm the guy who's in charge of that. So I could have handled it. You're right. I said I could have handled it differently, but I did the best job I could, because you and your buddy were coming in here, there were guys lying down. So he bought it. Wow. And then another time, great story, another time in that same that same class, not that exact same class, but maybe a year or two later, right after shavasana, two guys over in the corner started fighting, wow, and I had to intervene. Now, what happens in a situation like that is, oh yeah, I could have gone over and hit the alarm, or I could have blown the whistle and had this correctional officers come in. But I knew intuitively, if I did that, the rest of the guys in the class would go see, he can't, he can't handle conflict. He can't handle he can't hit. He's teaching us how to deal with conflict. Yeah, they want to. They want to feel you have, yeah, they want exactly so yeah. And then a couple of other minor situations, but I was yeah, some other things that I you know, I like yeah, here, yeah. I like that in the first situation, it sounds like, just by acknowledging personally, that you could have done differently sets the example that I'm willing to acknowledge I made a mistake, and there is a choice here and I and next time I'm going to try to make a different choice, and it's almost like you encapsulated the whole maybe concept that you're talking originally about the emotional intelligence and the ability to like, you know, make tense up your hand, relax your hand, and feel what's different here, and get in touch with what I'm actually feeling that that's that's so interesting. I love hearing this. Did I picked up on that it's difficult, potentially, for people to even feel their bodies, if they're dissociative or dissociating. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about maybe a situation where you've witnessed somebody go from not being able to feel to feel, or what kind of feedback you've Gosh, many, many, many, many. So we have a we have a workbook that's kind of like, it's kind of like our course curriculum called Yoga and mindfulness immersion. And here it is. Yeah, anyway, our course workbook and so we operate in in year long segments of time. So we'll have a group of participants for a year. I don't start using the workbook for until three or four months into the into the program, because I want people to have their own experience of yoga before they start doing exercises where they write about the different aspects of what it is that we're trying to share with them. So since we've been using that workbook, which has been the last three years, really a lot of feedback, a lot of feedback how the practice is impacting people in their ability to feel, in their ability to make the connections with their bodies. Um. Um, in their ability to actually recognize what's going on in their nervous system and recognize how the yoga practice is helping them balance their nervous system. Before that, it was, it was basically reports that people would say, one of the most common reports that I would get back from from guys would be, you know, before I started doing yoga, when I used to get into a beef with somebody, which happens all the time, by the way, there was like, oh, game on. We're on. And the number of times that guy said to me, but since I've been practicing yoga, I backed off, wow. I backed off and I took a breath like one of our expressions of five mindful breaths can make the difference between a blind reaction and a considered response. Five mindful breaths. And I mean, Mo might have said something about that when, when you interviewed him, but he did. He does. One of the things that I get from the guys who've been in the program, who are released and are out in public, is very few of them are going to be going to yoga studios and practicing yoga and so but what they've retained from their practice has so much more to do with the mindfulness and particularly the breathing aspects of the practice. That's the most common reports that I get from people that's amazing. So, and as you know, it takes time. You know, you can't expect, I mean, some people, like, maybe the most immediate response after one or two classes is, I had the best night's sleep I've had since I've been incarcerated or because, you know, their sleeping conditions are terrible. They sleep on really thin mats, either on cookie sheets or, you know, wiring underneath them, the mats. And they're small mats because they're in bunks. But that's a real common that and relief of chronic pain, those are the two most common immediate responses to the practice. And then as time goes on, the emotional, psychological benefits start to happen. Wow. So cool that you're introducing the workbook component where people can write, and are they handing these workbooks into and that's where you're able to receive this feedback, and yeah, which was is obviously able to inform your program and how you plan to move forward and and over the last 20 plus years, obviously you've evolved. It's it's evolving. Do you do you see in I know, there's no point to try to look into the future. Let's stay focused here and now and do the work. But I'm curious to do Do you have a feeling of this evolving into something where there is a shift in the way we focus on rehabilitating people and incarceration? Well, there are more voices. Certainly, there are more voices advocating for prison reform and sentencing reform. My experience over the years has been that there's three steps forward and two steps back, three steps forward and two steps back. So incrementally, things have improved, but very slowly, very slowly, I we have no idea what's going to happen. You know, in terms of the federal government, about a half a million people are incarcerated in federal prisons. The rest are primarily in in state prisons and county jails. In fact, it might be less than a half a million, maybe 300,300 50,000 in federal prisons. But I think I mean the train has left the station. There are too many people that are that are aware of and educated around mass incarceration, prison reform, the cost, just the cost, even if you look at the economic factors and not the humane factors. But when you combine the two, then it's the argument becomes even stronger. We've we've kind of taken a bold approach in our the last couple of years of really putting out as a vision, healing over punishment, healing over punishment, because punishment is our judicial system and. Is a retributive justice system. Retributive meaning punishment. You you commit a crime, you're punished for it. Well, I get it. I understand that. But how about kind of bringing it up from 90% punishment and 10% rehabilitation to 5050, because the 90, 10% isn't working. If there's 70% recidivism, yes, and, and the man and people would say, Oh, well, you know 70% recidivism, how's that impact me? Because if people are going back out into society and they haven't been rehabilitated. You're going to run into them at a ball game, at the grocery store, on the highway. So what kind of a person do you want to encounter in that regard? Great point, yeah. So I think yes, yes. And, you know, our biggest challenge is continuing to raise the funds to do the work. You know, we're in, like I had mentioned, you were in 19 states. That means we've got weekly classes in hundreds of facilities around the country, and starting to make headway. And in order to continue to offer those programs, we need to be able to pay for at least, you know, where we've got volunteers who are going in and teaching the classes. We still need to pay for at least travel, and we need to pay for yoga mats, and we need to pay for yoga blocks, and we need for all those other things that come up. So that's the our greatest challenge is to continue funding the nonprofit. The other thing is, and I wanted to mention this to you, you know, in terms of the book program, we still get 150 200 letters a month asking for a book, we get letters Todd. We get letters from people. For instance, I could show you letters from somebody who writes saying, I'm in lockdown. They've given me nine months of solitary. Your book has saved my life. Wow, literally, I can show you these letters your book, having your book that I can use to practice while I'm in the hole, while I'm in lockdown, has saved my mental and emotional well being. I believe it. James, yeah, I believe it. You know, I recently finished reading a book called The sun does shine by Anthony Ray Hinton. Where he is is in lockdown for 30 years on death row, and if I to be very honest, I don't know that I ever formed an opinion about whether I believed in the death penalty or not after reading his account, I don't believe in the death penalty. How do you feel about that? What is your thoughts on that? Well, life in prison without the possibility of parole is is punishment enough, and even though we still have a death penalty in California, the governors have refused to enforce it. So Jerry Brown and Newsom. Gavin Newsom have said, and death row at San Quentin has been phased out. Those guys who are on death row, 729 of them, were largest death row in the probably in the world, were sent to other prisons, and they now have life without the possibility of parole. Well, that means you're going to die in prison, so putting people to death. No, understood, yeah, I see, I see it's a, it's a, it's a, huh? No, it's a big one. Some incarcerated people will tell you that there are people in prison who should not be let back out into society. Some of that has to do with the lack of our ability to rehabilitate them. Some of it has to do with the fact that they shouldn't be in prison. They should be in mental institutions. And so then that, and that's what we could do. A whole other podcast on mental health and the fact that prisons and jails in this country are the largest mental health institutions because our our health care system is so broken. Yes, we have programs in Sweden. In Sweden, they have separate prisons for mental health, where they provide in depth services to people with some of those people are never going to get out of prison, but they're given full. Of course, Sweden is a socialist country, but they're given, you know, full on services to deal with their mental health issues. Yes, so far away from that, I hear ya. Thank you for weighing in on that. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I thank you, Todd. I mean, I really appreciate people like you are willing to dedicate the time to give us a voice like you said, those of us who are who are privileged enough to be able to go into facilities and be able to come back out and say, Hey, this is the reality. Yeah, yes, to lift the veil. Well, thank you for being bold enough and brave enough and interested enough. I love the fact that right the beginning of the conversation, you did your yoga teacher training and just had this feeling that I don't want to just teach in a classic yoga studio environment. I want to go to this situation where there's affected youth and and or challenged youth that's in a really interesting impulse to come from, to be honest. I mean, I feel like when I felt the power of yoga and how it benefited my life, I thought along the lines of, I want to help people with with this and but you took it to another level right away, which is very interesting and fascinating to me, that that's the role you took. But I mean, luckily and thankfully, you did. I think it's incredibly important that people are doing what you're doing, to get the true information out there, my eyes are being opened up for some all of a sudden, in the last two months, all my whole world has been shifted into like, whoa. Pay attention to this. Look what's happening. And I fascinated. And I'm really grateful to have this chance to speak with you, James, because you know you're, you're a powerful force in the world. So thank you for giving me this chance and opportunity. And I am extreme. I'm now, I'm really amped up to finish that, to go through the training that you've put together. And I would like to, if it's I would like to invite you back please. When you said we could do a whole nother podcast, I know we scheduled an hour, and we're coming right in on that hour, so yes, if you're up to it, and I would love to do that. And thank you just for you know, from the bottom my heart, thank you so much. I really appreciate this. Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. And thank you, Todd. Really appreciate it myself. Thank you. I look forward to the future another conversation. Thank you, James, great. Take care. Thank you. Native yoga. Todd, cast is produced by myself. The theme music is dreamed up by Bryce Allen. If you like this show, let me know if there's room for improvement. I want to hear that too. We are curious to know what you think and what you want more of what I can improve. And if you have ideas for future guests or topics, please send us your thoughts to info at Native yoga center. 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