Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga

Prison Yoga Outreach Project
Yoga Teachers’ Training
Course Goes to Prison
Sivananda TTC Enlightens Inmates at Otisville Federal Corrections Institute
By John Ittner
“A robber robs for getting freedom from want – though his
movement may be crooked and long-winded. Every movement
of your foot is toward freedom or Sat-chit-ananda.”
– Swami Sivananda, Bliss Divine
Everybody wants to be free. “Freedom is man’s
birthright”, says Swami Sivananda. But what about
the millions of men and women who are in prison,
can they be free while behind bars? Yoga says they
can and The Sivananda Prison Outreach programme is proving
it with the first ever Teachers’ Training Course given in prison.
The drive from the Sivananda Yoga Ranch Ashram to The
Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville, New York, takes about
half an hour and passes through the lush forest-covered hills
of the southern Catskills. Mahadev Chaitanya now makes the
trip once a week, arriving there at 7am. His mission is to bring
yoga to the prisoners and he recently took me with him to visit
the Institute.
Mahadev Chaitanya, who runs the day-to-day operations
at the Yoga Ranch, and Srinivasan, the long-time Yoga Ranch
director, are showing the inmates at Otisville prison how to
follow a straight path to freedom. The course they are following
is the same as the one designed by Swami Vishnudevananda
and taught to all Sivananda teachers. They are learning Hatha
Yoga, philosophy, anatomy, meditation theory and practice,
chanting, mantras, Bhagavad Gita and nutrition. There is one
difference. Instead of the one month of intensive study between
start and graduation, it will take the inmates about eight
months to complete the course. At the time of my visit they
were already six months into the course and it showed. They had
the shiny look about them that comes from practising Yoga.
This programme did not materialise like magic out of thin
air. It all began in 1996 with a letter from an inmate to Prison
Life magazine, who had a copy of Swami Vishnudevananda’s
Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. His letter of appreciation was
so influential that hundreds of other inmates were inspired to
write to the Sivananda organisation asking for books. They were
taking a step in the direction of freedom. Intuition told them
that Yoga offered a path that people behind bars could take,
a way to set the spirit free while incarcerated. It’s like the verse
in Johnny Cash’s “Grey Stone Chapel” from his Folsom Prison
concert album. “Behind the walls of prison my body may be /
but my Lord has set my soul free.” The spiritual path has always
been there for prisoners and Yoga is another expression of it.
The Sivananda Prison Outreach Project has continued and
grown over the years. In the first six months of last year about
$3,000 was raised at the Yoga Ranch and 200 books were sent
out to prisons all around the country. During this time classes
have been taught at two prisons. The next step was for the
inmates to become their own teachers.
In February 2015 a proposal to teach the Teachers’ Training
Course was presented to Otisville Federal Correction Institute and
was accepted, and soon after the classes began. The rationale
68
YOGALife |Autumn/Winter 2015