Giving incarcerated youth and their families new ways to handle difficult situations may help these young people find and reach their potential, rather than return to prison.

At a recent GBGM staff briefing, Nobuko Miyamoto explained that yoga is a system of physical, mental, and spiritual exercises drawing on meditation and mind control, as well as training the body to assume challenging postures.  "These kids don't know how to deal with life," she said.  Her hope was that yoga, with its emphasis on discipline, serenity, self-control, endurance, and integration of the mind, body, and spirit, would help students acquire the skills they would need for concentrating on schoolwork and coping with life's problems after their release.

Nobuko Miyamoto, singer, dancer, and songwriter, founded Great Leap, a Los Angeles nonprofit organization, in 1978.  Great Leap uses music, theater, and dance to dramatize Asian American and multicultural experience throughout the United States.

Approximately six years ago, Upward Bound asked Nobuko Miyamoto and Great Leap to do a summer arts program for youth from disadvantaged areas who were incarcerated in Los Angles County Detention Center camps.  Ms. Miyamoto welcomed the invitation because her "yoga teacher, guru, and best friend," Krishna Kaur, had long dreamed of helping incarcerated youth. Ms. Miyamoto accepted the challenge and decided to center the program on yoga.

Ms. Miyamoto showed a video of youngsters performing kundalini yoga after having studied it for only eight sessions at the 1998 summer arts program.  The narrator remarked that the hardest thing for the young people was the first step:  taking off their shoes and socks.  The video showed them doing breathing exercises and a variety of yoga disciplines with a concentration and coordination that were beautiful to watch.  Ms. Miyamoto said, "The kids relate to yoga easily because they're so physical."  Commenting on the mental and spiritual balance that yoga can bring, she said, "We can teach these kids to look at the outside world differently."

Some of the youngsters were asked in interviews why they liked yoga.  "Yoga helps us to become the diamond we are born to be," said one young man, after several of the youth had described how diamonds, opaque when they come out of the earth, acquire brilliance only after they are cut and polished.  A second young man said that yoga had helped him to control his temper and had improved his sleep.  A young woman said that concentrating on her inner self had helped her to become stress-free.

For a program such as yoga training to be fully effective, it must serve not just the youth who are to be released but also the neighborhoods to which they return.  Fundamental changes must be made in these brutal, violent surroundings, and the dissemination of yoga programs has the potential to make those changes.

A lively dialogue followed the presentation.  When asked if there was a measurable reduction in violence as a result of yoga and meditation programs, Ms. Miyamoto told of a group of Tibetan monks who went into the worst detention camp for a period of three months to teach meditation and organic gardening.  "There was zero violence after that," Ms. Miyamoto said.  She also told of an alcoholic man who at 65 years of age became a yoga addict.  He changed his habits and his diet.  "It transformed his life."

A staff member who has taught yoga at the Interchurch Center, shared some of her experiences.  She once taught women prisoners at Rikers Island and Bedford, as well as parolees of the prison system in the South Bronx near Yankee Stadium.  Many of her clients were drug-addicted mothers.  She said that they responded well to the idea of drawing on universal spiritual energy to integrate their being, since their lives were so fragmented.  Yoga was especially helpful for intense insomniacs.  One woman told her that after starting to practice yoga, with its focus on relaxation and meditation, she slept through the night for the first time in years.  The staff member would have liked to start mother/child yoga classes, but the program could not be maintained because of sporadic funding.

Conversely, in corporate settings where stressed executives crave an opportunity to decompress during the day, yoga classes are starting to receive the funding they need.  "Corporate yoga at lunch hour is very trendy," said one attendee.  The value of yoga classes is also becoming clear in homes for senior citizens.

One of the attendees, a staff member of the Minority Task Force on AIDS, works with inmates at three correctional facilities in the New York area.  He said that the recidivism rate in the New York area is 8 to 10 percent.  Yoga, he believes, could help released inmates stay out of prison, as well as reduce violence and unwanted sexual advances among the prison population.  A yoga afficionado himself, he was curious to know how the subject of religion was discussed with young people in the detention camps.  Ms. Miyamoto said that no specific religion was mentioned, only those values common to most faith systems, such as spiritual growth and service to others.

If the interest generated by Ms. Miyamoto's presentation and the lively discussion that followed are any indication, yoga may well play a role in one of GBGM's emerging prison ministries.

April 25, 2000