Mindfulness through yoga helps
Inmates who do yoga may be more accepting, calmer and deal better with stress
Raeez Safar sits i n a grassy courtyard, his eyes closed as he lifts his hands to his face. As the sleeves of his white top fall past his wrists, they reveal a small, neat gang tattoo featuring the number 26 on his right wrist. He plugs his ears with his fingers, muffling the din of the prison.
An inmate at Pollsmoor Prison, Safar is one of more than 250 prisoners who regularly practice yoga. He says it helps him cope with incarceration at one of South Africa’s most notorious prisons.
“Yoga makes me feel positive about life. It has helped me deal with the stress of prison life and feel positive again,” he says.
A Cape Town volunteer organisation, SevaUnite, introduced yoga at Pollsmoor six years ago. Today, more than 250 prisoners in about nine correctional facilities nationwide are part of the programme.
“We now also teach classes, but the main thrust is teaching yoga through a correspondence course,” says SevaUnite founder and director Brian Bergman.
“Inmates complete six modules a year. Every time they write a module, our teachers provide written feedback and, at the end, they have to teach three inmates the course they’ve just done.”
Bergman says inmate feedback has been positive.
“T h e y s a y h o w mu c h mo r e relaxed and focused they feel and how they can apply themselves [better] if they are studying and doing other courses.
“We had one guy write to us and say that he feels freer now than he’s ever felt in his life and this is coming from a guy who had it all — the house, the car, the expensive watch. He’s serving a life sentence.”
Bergman says a similar programme in India inspired him to start the prison yoga project at home. India is just one of many countries, including New Zealand, Australia and the United Kingdom, to use yoga to introduce prisoners to a type of psychological therapy that has seen a recent resurgence in popularity following its birth in the 1960s and 1970s: mindfulness.
“Mindfulness is knowing what’s happening while it’s happening no matter what it is without judgment,” says clinical psychologist Tracy McIntyre, quoting a definition first coined by South African mindfulness practitioner Rob Nairn.
Based in Port Elizabeth, McIntyre is one of a growing number of South African clinical psychologists to have adopted the therapeutic technique.
People may not be able to control life’s ups and downs, but psychologists say mindfulness may be able to help us reshape how we frame these events.
“What happens when an event happens, that’s what we call ‘primary suffering’. Then there is secondary suffering, and that is what we do with that event: our feelings, thoughts and emotions around what’s happened. That’s where psychology comes in; to say, how do we effectively manage that,” says McIntyre.