Episode 23: Yoga Behind Bars: Trauma-Informed Yoga to Help the Incarcerated to Heal

Alyssa is kicking off the new year with Jess Frank, the program director of Yoga Behind Bars. YBB is a nonprofit organization aimed at providing trauma-informed yoga and meditation classes to help transform and heal those who are incarcerated. Find out more about YBB here: https://yogabehindbars.org Check out the Light After Trauma website for transcripts, other episodes, Alyssa's guest appearances, and more at: www.lightaftertrauma.com Want to get more great content and interact with the show? Check us out on Instagram: @lightaftertrauma We need your help! We want to continue to make great content that can help countless trauma warriors on their journey to recovery. So, please help us in supporting the podcast by becoming a recurring patron of the show via Patreon. Every bit helps! Transcript: Alyssa Scolari [00:21]: Hey, y'all. What's up? Happy New Year. It's 2021. This is the first episode of the new year. I am pumped for all of the great stuff that I have coming your way this year. This week's episode is with Jess Frank who is the Program Director of the Yoga Behind Bars program, which is a nonprofit organization, and their mission is to provide trauma-informed yoga and meditation services for people who have been incarcerated in order to promote rehabilitation, personal transformation, and a more just society for all. So, this has been a really interesting episode to record. I learned a lot about Yoga Behind Bars, the transformative powers that trauma-informed yoga can have, and I'm recording this intro actually after the episode was already recorded. So, I recorded it with Jess in December of 2020, and this is the first episode to launch for 2021. So, I hope that you enjoy it. I hope that it provides a lot of education out there. I personally have found yoga to be so healing and so transformative in my personal life, and knowing that there is a program out there like this that is working to help transform the lives of people who are incarcerated is really heartwarming and a great way to kick off 2021, so enjoy. Would you be able to just talk a little bit about the concept and the creation of Yoga Behind Bars? Jess Frank [02:11]: Sure. So, Yoga Behind Bars started a little before 2008. We became a nonprofit in 2008 officially, but a few years before that, it was started by one woman named Shaina Traisman, who kind of fell into it a little bit. She was a yoga teacher, and she met someone who had been incarcerated, and they talked about how much yoga helped them post-incarceration and that they encourage her to teach in a jail setting. So, she ended up contacting the King County Jail here in Seattle, and next thing, there was one yoga class that she was teaching, and then it kind of just slowly grew from there and expanded to other facilities, more people coming on board to teach. Really, since then, it has just continued to grow although has stabilized in terms of the reach of the program in the last few years as we've really tried to deepen the work now that we are really operating across all of Washington state. Alyssa Scolari [03:18]: Now, so you guys are all just in Washington state, but there are also other ... Aren't there other versions of Yoga Behind Bars that span across the United States as well? Jess Frank [03:32]: There are similar organizations, and we're [inaudible 00:03:35]- Alyssa Scolari [03:35]: Okay. Jess Frank [03:36]: ... to quite a few of them actually. We have kind of like an informal email chain, and we've had a few conferences where different folks have come together across the country, so I think I'm aware of most of the established ones and they do ... They are all over the country, and there are a few that span multiple states, but I think most of them tend to recognize that this work is really different state by state because the majority of incarceration happens on the county and state level, and it's just such a disparate system from state to state, so it's kind of hard to really extend our work outside of our geographic area and do it well. Alyssa Scolari [04:18]: That's a good point. That's something I didn't even think about, but that's a very good point. So, wow, you guys are coming up on ... or it's been 12 years since you've been officially a nonprofit. How long have you been with the nonprofit organization? Jess Frank [04:36]: I came on as the Program Director five and a half years ago, and I was a volunteer for a few years before that. I actually did our training. That was kind of my entry point, which is required for anyone who volunteers with the organization inside the facilities. I did that training in 2013. So, I've been pretty at least adjacent or directly involved with the organization for over half of its time and existence, and I've definitely gotten to witness it grow in some pretty exciting ways that the YBB that I knew when I first got started and the YBB that exists today, there's been some really big and, I think, necessary changes ...