For most of the people we serve, the room we walk into is the quietest hour of their week.

Yoga Behind Bars is a Seattle-based nonprofit that has been bringing trauma-informed yoga and meditation to people who are incarcerated since 2008. Each week, our trained teachers lead classes inside state prisons, county jails, juvenile detention centers, and reentry programs across Washington — meeting students where they are with practices for breath, movement, and stillness.

The work is simple in form and serious in stakes. Incarceration disconnects people from their bodies, their breath, and their communities. The practices we teach — taught with care, with consent, and without performance — give students a way back to themselves. They report sleeping better, managing chronic pain, regulating overwhelming emotion, and rediscovering a sense of agency in spaces designed to take it away.

We don't believe yoga ends mass incarceration. We believe it interrupts cycles — of trauma, of reactivity, of disconnection — that mass incarceration depends on. And we believe that for one hour a week, in a quiet room behind a locked door, every person deserves to be met with dignity and offered a tool that is theirs to keep.

YOGA BEHIND BARS

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