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This isn’t a wellness book.

It’s how a pure kid built a shell. How numbness turned into a business. How the hole broke me down, and how books, Bibles, and breath built something back.

It’s facing the judge. Walking out the gate. Becoming the man my son needed. Going from gangster to yogi.

No redemption speech. Just what happened, and what I did with it.

The last part of the book is practical: trauma, breathing, and the nervous system in plain language. Things you can actually reach for.

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Who it’s for

• Anybody inside, or just out
• Men who were taught to hold everything in
• Families of people who are incarcerated
• People working in corrections, reentry, and social services
• Anybody who thinks their record is the last word on them

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If someone watched you closely for a full week, not what you said, just what you did, what would they walk away having learned from you? If the honest answer is something you wouldn’t be proud of, that’s not a life sentence. That’s just information. Change from there.

James Lesly, Not Your Average Yogi

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The book is the story. The work is the mission.

What’s in these pages didn’t stay on the page. I bring it into correctional facilities, reentry programs, workplaces, schools, and rooms full of men. Talks and workshops built straight from the chapters:

• The Hole: isolation, survival, and what happens when you’re forced to sit with yourself
• Books, Bibles & Breath: the tools that started changing an identity built on violence
• Walking Out the Gate: why release and freedom aren’t the same thing
• From Gangster to Yogi: identity, masculinity, accountability

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About the Author

James Lesly is an author, speaker, facilitator, and founder of Not Your Average Yogi.

His path to this work was anything but conventional. After years of living in survival mode, his life led him to incarceration and solitary confinement. In a place defined by restriction, he began the long process of looking inward, through reading, reflection, meditation, movement, and breath.

What started as a way to survive became the foundation for a different way of living.

After returning home, James committed himself to rebuilding his life, being present for his son, and turning what he had learned through adversity into something that could serve others. That path led him to yoga, teaching, community work, and the creation of Not Your Average Yogi.

Today, his work explores resilience, accountability, identity, masculinity, and the possibility of transformation, not from theory but from lived experience.

His memoir, Not Your Average Yogi: From Violence to Service, tells that story with the same philosophy behind his work today: the past should be faced honestly, but it does not have to determine what comes next.