Trauma-Informed Yoga for Prisons, Reentry & Youth Programs

Not Your Average Yogi started in a cell.

I was sentenced to eight and a half years. In there, breathing and reading were the only things nobody could take from me. That’s where this work comes from. For me, it isn’t theory.

Today we bring trauma-informed yoga, breathwork, and honest conversation into corrections, reentry programs, youth services, and community organizations. To people who’ve been through things, and who are usually the last ones offered tools for dealing with them.

Who we work with

• Correctional facilities
• Halfway houses and reentry programs
• Youth services and programs for at-risk youth
• Community organizations

What a session looks like

Breath first. Then simple movement that works in a gym, a classroom, a common room, or a small space. Everything is offered as a choice. Participants decide what their body does.

Then we talk about what’s actually going on: stress, anger, staying steady when someone’s trying to set you off. Plain language. No lectures.

The goal isn’t to make people calm for an hour. It’s to give them something they can reach for at 2 a.m. when nobody’s around.

Training and background

• Prison Yoga Project Ambassador
• 200-hour Yoga, Social Justice & Leadership (Prison Yoga Project)
• 200-hour Hatha/Vinyasa Yoga (Yoga Alliance)
• Helped recruit French-speaking teachers to bring meditation into a Québec prison with Freeing the Human Spirit
• Adaptive movement with older adults, Parkinson’s and post-stroke participants, and people with visual impairments
• Lived experience of incarceration and reentry

Formats

• 60–90 minute workshop
• Half-day experience
• Multi-week series
• Talk, panel, or fireside conversation

Sessions are delivered in English. French by arrangement.

Want to understand the approach first? Read what trauma-informed yoga is.