Four years ago I attended a Prison Yoga Project (PYP) training. James Fox is a valuable outlier in the yoga world. In 2002 he decided to devote his life to bringing yoga to at-risk communities, leading programs in juvenile detention facilities and inner-city community programs in Chicago.
After moving to the Bay Area he started donating his time teaching prisoners yoga in San Quentin, which eventually led to PYP.There are many approaches to a physical yoga practice. I teach a rigorous form of Vinyasa, in which you lead the class through a flowing series of postures and exercises to eventually cool students off with stretches, meditation, and relaxation. You fire up their nervous systems in order to slow them down. This is the exact opposite approach that Fox teaches.
Stop Negative Emotions from Defining You: Welcome to The Actors’ Gang Sabra Williams
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Stop Negative Emotions from Defining You: Welcome to The Actors’ Gang
Sabra Williams
Founder & Director, The Actors’ Gang Prison Project
07:09
Prisoners, Fox told us, are always on edge. Their nervous systems never turn off. There is so much stimulation inside of the facilities that any opportunity for quiet is welcome. In prison yoga, you’re taught a stretch-based format with lots of breathing and even more compassion.
Parasympathetic mode is the only goal; turning off the monkey brain, as they say in Buddhism.Compassion requires understanding that not all prisoners are going to be able to even shut their eyes. This is not dissimilar from victims of sexual assault, who during the final relaxation posture sometimes suffer the same fate. There is a certain sense of trust required to close your eyes in public, one which not everyone is capable of. You cannot force someone to relax; you can only create the conditions in which relaxation is possible.
A new paper published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin investigates the potential “dark side” to one such technique, mindfulness meditation. This is not a new concept. For thousands of years there have been cases of meditation gone awry in the psychologically…
The post There’s a Dark Side to Mindfulness Meditation appeared first on FeedBox.