01/18/2026
~ This past week I taught my first yoga class inside a jail.
It is a sentence I have said out loud a few times now and each time it lands a little different. Sometimes it feels very matter of fact, other times it feels heavy with responsibility..mostly it feels humbling.
I walked into a place that is obviously highly structured, deeply constrained, and shaped by systems far larger than any individual inside it - including myself.
I am also walking into a space, into a room full of people who bring their own histories, intelligences, creativity, pain, humor, and curiosity......That reality matters.
Yoga is deeply connected with the freedom of movement..teaching it in a place defined by restriction asks something different - of the practice and of me.
I don't see this this work as "giving" something to people who lack it...Knowledge, insight, and wisdom just doesn't disappear when someone is incarcerated.
I accept and honor that my role is not one of fixing anything that is broken...it is to facilitate, to listen, to offer tools, frameworks and even to learn alongside those who are in the room with me.
I am fully aware of my position as someone who gets to leave at the end of class. That asymmetry doesn't vanish just because my intentions are good. So I am entering with care and humility.
A jail/prison is not a neutral space- and there is no pretending for 60 mins that it is. Bodies are regulated here, surveilled, and constrained in ways every other yoga space I have ever been in could not begin to acknowledge.
Here Trauma is not the exception it is the landscape and suggesting that breath and posture can fix systemic harm is preposterous.
However, I want my time there to be more than just making incarceration palatable and so I trust sharing these practices can offer moments of reconnection- to sensation, to the reality that each person has a body & that it indeed belongs to them.
I suspect this experience will challenge some of my assumptions, complicate other ideas and re-enforce a few things I already hold to be true - especially about how yoga is a relationship between breath, body, and the present moment. That relationship doesn't disappear just because someone is behind bars. If anything that becomes a lifeline.
As, I begin this work, my intention is simple really: to show up grounded, prepared, and open. To offer a practice rooted in dignity rather than discipline and honor the humanity in the room - without asking anyone to transcend their reality in order to be worthy of care.
I am grateful for the opportunity to teach/lead, and I am fully aware of the responsibility that comes with bringing a practice into such a charged space.
I will continue learning as I grow.
~ April
