Yoga is many things to many people — a religion, a primary form of exercise, a regularly utilized tool for pain, anger, and anxiety management. The power of the practice comes from its ancient South Asian and East Asian roots and all the ways teachers and students have iterated on those practices over hundreds of generations. It is an ever-evolving canon, and an ongoing conversation I am endlessly grateful to be one small part of.

Across all of the populations I work with, I keep observing the same thing: the experience of being trapped in, by, or through a body. Sometimes, trapped in a body that feels uncooperative with the demands of daily life. Sometimes trapped by a person, a system, or a circumstance that forecloses choices that should be available.

I've been volunteering as a yoga teacher in both the men's and women's divisions of the Cook County Jail for the better part of a year. It has clarified my thinking about bodies and institutions more than almost anything else I've done. Chronic pain and hypermobility are nearly universal in that population and largely unaddressed.

Lots of buildings and environments that humans have no choice but to spend significant time in look like this in one way or another — the harsh light that never dims, the noise, the absence of privacy, the purposeful removal of autonomy and choice. Each of these has been shown empirically to make the experience of pain measurably worse.

Jail itself as an illustration of how feeling trapped is bad for a body may be a bit on the nose. But it keeps bringing me back to my chronic pain clients, my chronically ill clients, my clients whose aging bodies feel increasingly outside their control. The feeling of being trapped stems from the experience of being trapped, regardless of what is doing the trapping or how literal the inability to leave really is.

Yoga cannot make jail a good place to live, and it’s not a cheat code out of the gnarlier parts of the human experience. But it is a powerful tool for moving one's experience of the body as cage toward the body as a source of felt safety. That is what I am trying to do in every room I teach in.

I teach in traditional studios, gyms, jails, outdoor settings, and nonprofit-affiliated wellness programs, and I am committed to creating inclusive, adaptive environments that honor each student's unique abilities.

If you are a nonprofit or small business interested in hosting a class in your facilities, or otherwise brainstorming about how yoga programming could enhance your mission, reach out to me!