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UTAH STATE PRISON — If all goes according to plan, many students at a Utah yoga program will one day walk out the door of their current classroom and never return.
Drawing from their own experiences, they'll use the physical discipline to help others heal from traumatic events, recover from addiction or simply find their way against the odds. And they won't cycle back into a criminal justice system that tends to continually pull a person in after an arrest.
The ancient practice credited with improving physical and mental health has become a mainstay at the Utah State Prison and other lockups around the country, with many inmates completing hundreds of hours of training while incarcerated and obtaining certificates to teach yoga.
But the instructors leading those programs are typically "on the outside," passing through metal detectors each week or appearing on a tablet screen.
That's changing in Utah as master teacher Ferosa Bluff prepares to train nine other women in a 10-month program requiring intensive study of the postures and history, along with introspection and practice leading others through the poses. Her students will graduate not just with greater self-awareness, she said, but also job skills and a certification that can help those who will someday leave the prison and more easily adjust to life outside its gates.
"There's a lot to be said for what we do here with yoga," Bluff said. "It isn't mainstream yet, in a prison setting, but we're hoping this will be the start of something big."
She led a group of nine trainees through a vigorous yoga flow at the Timpanogos Women's Correctional Facility this week, cueing physical poses and reminding them to breathe deeply and stay focused. Denise Druce with the Utah-based sister organizations Yoga Assets and Yoga Forward awarded Bluff a certificate marking 500 hours of training, declaring Bluff the first person to do so within a prison setting and praising her for "spending a life serving," rather than serving a life sentence.
In voices thick with emotion, the group describes how the classes bring light into a dark place, relieving not just knee and shoulder injuries, but also helping with anxiety and depression. The sessions have helped some address fears about future efforts to get a job and housing, and more fully come to terms with their own actions.
The women – serving time for a range of felony criminal convictions — say the certification will provide a way to help alleviate suffering after causing it at an earlier time in their lives.
Crystal Gardner, 37, kept getting in disciplinary trouble at the prison as she bottled up feelings of shame and frustration, but she said things have changed since she began taking yoga classes about two years ago.
"I had so much anger I couldn't get out," Gardner recalled. "My first class I took, I just bawled."
Gardner, who is from Fort Duchesne in Uintah County, said she is pursuing the certification so she can share yoga with children and teens growing up within eastern Utah's Uintah and Ouray Reservation. She's also taking college courses in anthropology and plans to get a bachelor's degree. She said she's also focused on her relationship with her son in college and a daughter, who is in high school.
"I've already started the change here. I understand what I did was wrong," said Gardner, one of several defendants in a kidnapping case, who is scheduled to have a parole board hearing in 2025. "I may not be a role model right now because of where I'm at, but when I get out, I do want to be a role model."
Madison Pooley, 21, began to let go of her fears about how society views her drug conviction and focus instead on changes she can make for herself and her 2-year-old daughter, she said.
If parole authorities adhere to state sentencing guidelines, Pooley will leave the prison in October and plans to continue her yoga training after that.
"Yes, there are people who are here for serious crimes, but there are a lot of women who are lost, that didn't have people there for them to teach them and push them in the right direction," Pooley said. "I just want the world to know we're not all terrible people. We really want to do better with our lives and some of us just don't know how. So this opportunity is huge."
The yoga setting is similar in many ways to others outside the prison walls, with mats, straps and blocks for each student and mantras like "love your body" painted on the wall in building five — the gymnasium – at the women's facility. Bluff uses music and lighting to help students settle into the environment, and cues heart-opening poses to address rounded shoulders that often accompany a desire to stay guarded, along with feelings of shame and unworthiness.
"Opening into the heart chakra is the reverse of that," Bluff said.
She and another man were sentenced to up to life in prison for the death of her 3-year-old daughter in 1998. She declined to speak about the case, but has maintained her innocence.
She has long taught fitness classes at the prison and began doing yoga more than a decade ago to get a good stretch and continued because of the emotional and mental benefits. A concept in yoga of finding the soft edge of a hard place resonates with her.
"That's my personal philosophy of how I live my daily life in here," Bluff said. "You have to be in the moment."
