Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga

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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
“Yoga is a system of integral education, not only of the mind, but also of the inner spirit.” – Swami Sivananda YOGALife |Autumn/Winter 2015 69
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