By Jen Lindgren, Training Manager, Prison Yoga Project
As of last week, Prison Yoga Project’s 10th cohort of Yoga, Social Justice, and Leadership—our 200-hour virtual yoga teacher training—is officially underway. Our first live session took place on Thursday, January 15, marking the beginning of our largest cohort to date.
This cohort brings together participants from a wide range of backgrounds, identities, and lived experiences. Some arrive as educators, clinicians, organizers, or yoga teachers. Others come shaped by personal experiences of incarceration, systemic harm, or community violence. What unites this group is a shared commitment to healing, justice, and showing up for one another—especially in times that demand clarity and courage.
And this is such a time.
Our communities are enduring profound harm. Across the country, we are witnessing ongoing acts of violence carried out through systems of enforcement and control—violence that is structural, normalized, and deeply traumatizing.
In moments like these, neutrality is not safety.
Silence is not peace.
And isolation only serves the systems that depend on our fragmentation.
What becomes vital—what becomes urgent—is that we show up for one another.
We need spaces where people can gather, speak truth, share resources, and tend to the real impacts of trauma and grief. Not so we can bypass what is happening, but so we can metabolize it—so we remain focused, grounded, and resourced enough to respond with intention rather than reaction. Exhaustion, fear, and confusion are tools of control. Community, clarity, and care are forms of resistance.
This is where the practice of yoga matters.
Yoga, at its core, is not an escape from reality. It is a practice of vidyā—clear perception. It invites us to see what is actually happening: in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in our relationships, and in the world around us. It asks us to notice where harm exists, how it is internalized, and how disconnection and misinformation distort our capacity to respond.
Through sustained practice, we strengthen our ability to stay present with what is difficult without collapsing or hardening. We learn to recognize our own stress responses and widen our capacity for choice. We build internal and collective resources so that we can respond rather than react, organize rather than isolate, and act from discernment rather than fear.
Yoga is a practice of connection—within the self and across community.
Yoga is a practice of healing—not to forget harm, but to recover agency in its wake.
Yoga is a practice of action—because clarity demands response.
This training was created with that understanding at its core. It is not about perfect poses or personal transcendence. It is about cultivating the embodied awareness, ethical grounding, and relational skills needed to remain human in systems that depend on dehumanization. It is about building collective strength so that participants are not doing this work alone—inside institutions, within communities, or in their own lives.
In addition to guiding this virtual cohort, I have had the honor of leading three yoga teacher training cohorts inside the New Hampshire Correctional Facility for Women. Those spaces have continually reinforced what I know to be true: healing and resistance are not opposites. They are deeply intertwined. When people have access to practices that support nervous system regulation, self-trust, and connection, they are better able to advocate for themselves, support one another, and imagine different possibilities for their lives and communities.
As we begin this next cohort, I am holding the truth that this work matters precisely because the world is not okay. Yoga does not ask us to look away from harm. It asks us to see clearly—and then to choose how we will respond.
To show up for one another is compassion.
To remain complacent in the face of harm is confusion.
And confusion is exactly what systems of oppression rely on.
The practice of yoga helps cut through that confusion. It sharpens discernment. It steadies the nervous system so we can speak, act, and organize with intention. It reminds us that we belong to one another—and that collective care is not a luxury, but a necessity.
This is what the practice of yoga is for.
To connect.
To heal.
To refuse silence.
And to show up—together.
