Trinidad Correctional Facility students find physical and spiritual healing through yoga
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TRINIDAD, Colo. — For Andrew Marsh, yoga is more than a form of exercise. It’s a way of life, one that has helped him regain his physical fitness and manage his PTSD symptoms.
And it’s one that he’s proud to help introduce to his fellow residents at Trinidad Correctional Facility.
“In this environment a lot of guys think yoga is for girls, but we get a lot of guys who come in here and they realize that yoga is intense,” Marsh said. “There's nothing easy about yoga.”
Over the past year and a half, yoga class has become a popular pastime at the facility, with classes held five days a week, drawing about 30 students each time and prompting prison staff to consider adding more to the schedule.
The classes are led by other men who, like Marsh, are incarcerated at the facility.
“[When] we started out, we'd have one or two guys in the class and now, we can fill up half this gym sometimes,” he said. “They realize that [yoga’s] an awesome thing in their workout program, in their everyday life, trying to change how they live.”
Before there were any organized yoga classes – or a portion of the incarcerated population certified to teach yoga – a group of people in the prison, including Marsh, made their best effort at teaching themselves the practice.
“We were doing just what we thought was yoga,” Marsh said. “It was kind of crazy. We were doing some pretty intense stuff.”
Eventually, in a conversation between the residents and prison staff, someone floated the idea of bringing in a yoga expert from the outside. That’s when Jean Crisler got a call.
Crisler has taught yoga in Trinidad for 16 years. Trinidad Correctional Facility is about 15 miles from downtown Trinidad, where Crisler’s studio is located. To minimize her trips to and from the facility, Crisler decided to not just teach the incarcerated men how to do yoga.
She’d teach them how to become yoga instructors themselves, over the course of a 200-hour certification program, so they could lead yoga classes for the facility’s general population. Thirty hours of attendance at the general classes is required to enroll in the instructor certification program.
More than a year since first visiting the facility — her first time inside any correctional facility — Crisler is now teaching the third cohort of residents to go through the program.
“The yoga program has definitely built a community, and I would even say a family of us,” Crisler said. “Those guys work hard. They show up. It's every teacher's dream, really, to have students that are so committed because they see this possibly as something that could really change their life.”
After completing the program, students receive a yoga instructor certification that meets the requirements set by Yoga Alliance, the nationally-recognized standard for yoga teachers and schools. (They can then choose to register officially with Yoga Alliance, which can help them connect with opportunities in the field, though it’s not required.)
Marsh graduated from the program’s inaugural class. Now, he’s the facility’s yoga coordinator and organizes logistics for the general population classes and assists Crisler in the instructor certification classes.
Marsh, who is up for parole next year, said he has received a couple job offers from yoga studios and programs to teach yoga after his release. A veteran himself, Marsh said he’d like to teach yoga as a form of treatment for veterans or others with PTSD symptoms.
Students in the program study Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga, which emphasizes the connection between movement and breathwork. By hitting and holding the poses, students build strength and flexibility.
And taking the time to breathe, relax and connect with themselves builds students’ mental and emotional strength, which helps them navigate the prison environment.
“For me, when I start getting anxious or something, I can just simply breathe,” Marsh said. “I don't have to squash everything down or get angry. I can breathe through it, and it makes me feel a lot better.”
Danny Stone first got involved with the facility’s yoga program in the general population classes. Amazed at how yoga helped relieve his back pain and improve his concentration, Stone decided to take Crisler’s 200-hour course to become a certified yoga instructor. He graduated from the program’s second class and now teaches general population classes.
“It revolutionized my experience here,” Stone said. “Any kind of weird stress or drama I might run into in this place, I'll be in a better position to deal with it mentally because I'll be able to come back to the present moment, to my breath, to calm down and look at it in an objective, rational way. So it's made all the difference in my time here.”
Each instructor program session meets twice a week for six to seven months.
The program includes two tracks, one that focuses on the physical practice, with students working through the poses on yoga mats. The other discusses anatomy, technique and yoga philosophy in a seminar-style setting.
In the seminars, Crisler discusses the idea of pausing between thoughts or actions, which is demonstrated in yoga practice by taking a breath between each movement. Crisler said this idea of pausing before taking action resonated with many of her students.
“It has been a theme in talking with some of the guys at the prison that that pause hadn't been there,” Crisler said. “And that's part of the reason they find themselves in that situation. Thought or emotion happened, action happened and there was no pause.”
The growth of the facility’s yoga program has created a community among the residents who participate on a regular basis. It’s an example of how prison staff and residents worked together to introduce a program based on the residents’ needs and interests.
The certification the students receive at the end of the instructor program connects those residents with the yoga community beyond the facility walls.
But one of the most important connections the yoga students make through the practice is with themselves.
To Crisler, the purpose of yoga is to discover one’s true nature. For her incarcerated students, whose current way of life has been determined by the way society views them, she said this discovery is especially freeing.
“These guys are at that point where they're questioning what they've done in the past, who they've been in the past, who they want to be in the future, and they don't want to be confined by how they've been before,” Crisler said.
“They are at this tipping point of saying, ‘How do I change? Well, I have to break out of something I thought I was and have the freedom to explore a newness for myself.’”