We certainly have racial inequality, but can you talk a little bit how that may factor into the prison populations that you deal with?

Yeah, and again, I will give my personal.

This is not necessarily where prison yoga stands, but even in our foundational training, as you know, we talk about the history of mass incarceration, that mass incarceration was adopted and adapted and designed to essentially continue to enslave individuals.

This over over-incarceration really started as, you know, a response to emancipation and coming into spaces where, you know, where, where vacancy was illegal, but, you know, individuals had nowhere to go.

And I think that there's, you know, this can be a whole other podcast of, you know, just the, oh, the, the racial fuckery of our country and these places of, you know, of, of want and need.

And I just, It's a much bigger piece.

We certainly see a disgusting number of inconsistencies with individuals.

So Can you talk a little bit about the coming into a prison? How was that met? And some of the changes that you may have seen with individuals?

did to other people and it was just these little these little clicks of time um and then got very sort of stoic and quiet and I think a little surprised by his own willingness to share um everyone was quiet for a moment and then the person next to him said yeah man like I have that lived experience too and then someone across the room and it turned into this like I'm getting chills talking about it but it turned into this you know this moment of Again, this wasn't a male facility and a group of men who, again, big and tattooed and just needing for their own preservation as well to continue to have this very, you know, strong, intimidating facade.

It's just left away and everyone was healing in that moment and sharing these deep experiences and then to come back and to tie it to the practice of yoga and to work through it and then to kind of recognize, Well, now we have a new energy that we're holding with us.

Can you tell us what you mean by complex trauma and what point did you realize that yoga and movement could become part of your healing path?

I mean, just to put out there for your audience, a little bit of a content note, but for those who are aware of adverse childhood experiences.

You know, I have a perfect ACE score, you know, that from, you know, sexual abuse to neglect, to being unhoused, to being food insecure, all of the things of just going through just life in general, of these spaces that not all of the pieces of my life were, you know, flowers and rainbows that, you know, there was a lot of anger and kind of in these observations of having a parent who was incarcerated, A lot of that time, I was a very angry young woman.

You know, a lot of it was sort of a personal attack at myself and the way that I treated myself, the way that I treated my body, the way that I treated other people, that there was, you know, even though I did have the resources of supportive members of my family, there were also a lot of adults and determined caregivers who were not so, and kind of navigating what that looked like, but then also seeing again, where some adults in my life were, you know, again, this clear vision that, wow, adults do lie and adults do manipulate and adults do come into these spaces where they're not giving the best care to children, you know, and being encouraged to, you know, go sit on someone's lap at a political function and just things that come into these spaces in the different levels of my life and you know, witnessing my mother's own abuse and things that she had endured in different relationships, navigating just, you know, her own life and education and the pieces of herself.

So there was a lot of my own struggles with addiction, my own struggles with harm, but I had to dance.

And, you know, starting at, I think I was six years old, the first time that I was enrolled in a dance class and to, That to me was a return back to my body.

It was control of my own body.

How do you manage that sense of I'm going to go home and these individuals are staying inside? Are you able to just leave it or do you carry that with you?

under the influence of a lot of things, you know, doing a lot of harm to myself and someone, this would have been, again, kind of mid to late 90s.

Someone had said, you know, come and breathe with me.

The first time I did yoga was, you know, after hours in a bar on a pool table, just sitting with someone who recognized in me that, again, I was in crisis and they had some tools that would have been a resource and that stuck with me always.

You know, to the point where I started to learn some tools and have some resources and, you know, who can I pull onto a pool table and say, come and breathe with me and come in and share this space and really haven't looked back.

I've been practicing yoga now for over 30 years and continuing to learn and add more kind of fuel to my passion with understanding the brain more, understanding trauma more.

And we're really piecing together the things that felt so natural to me as a young woman, that there's actual science behind it too.