Gritty Inspiration: Chicago Welcomes the Prison Yoga Project (Yoga Chicago)

By Carol Horton, Ph.D. 
Photos by Elizabeth Sattelberger 

Moksha Yoga's main studio was buzzing with a quiet but powerful current of passion, interest, and purpose as James Fox launched his Prison Yoga Project (PYP) training on a Friday evening last April. A number of those attending this two-hour introductory session, which was open to the public, complained (in a good-natured way) that they'd wanted to take the full weekend workshop (April 5–7), but couldn't get in. Fox had tried to accommodate the unanticipated demand for this training by pushing his limit up to 47 students--twice the number anticipated, yet nowhere near enough slots for the additional 40 or so people interested. 

Yoga in San Quentin 
James Fox has been practicing yoga since the late 1980s and took his first teacher training with Erich Schiffmann in 2000. Knowing that he wasn't interested in working in a traditional yoga studio, he secured a position teaching yoga at a residential center for boys who'd suffered abuse and neglect. In 2002, he began teaching yoga to San Quentin inmates with the Insight Prison Project (IPP), a nonprofit dedicated to fostering personal insight and lasting behavioral change by providing rehabilitative tools to prisoners in California. 

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