I’ve been to jail three times in my life.
Once to bail out a friend — it was college — and twice for work.
Last week, I went back to the Dane County Jail after learning Ann Chavez, a graphic artist associated with the Deer Park Buddhist Center in Oregon, has been volunteering on a weekly basis for the past 13 years to teach meditation and yoga-poses to female inmates.
There were two things that crossed my mind when I learned this: it sounded like a good story to share and I didn’t want to just observe the class. I wanted to participate, too.
So like all visitors inside the jail, Cap Times photographer Mike DeVries and I filled out forms orders, passed the background checks and, after Chavez cleared the story idea with the women who participate in the class, we locked our belongings in a locker and were escorted into the jail.
We got on an elevator, went through a few steel doors that were buzzed open when we approached, but it wasn’t until the final door locked shut behind us and we started descending the stairs into the jail gymnasium that the feeling hit me: I was locked in. If I wanted to get out, I couldn’t.
It was the same feeling I experienced when touring the Winchester Mystery House[1] in California. The feeling of being stuck, trapped.
It’s those feelings of entrapment and anxiety, I would soon learn, that bring many of the women inmakes — like 34-year-old Samantha Southward, whose nearly 2-year-old daughter is living with relatives while she serves time for check fraud, or 24-year-old Kira Sergenian, who’s trying to believe she’s strong enough to kick her addiction to heroin — to the jail's weekly stress management and relaxation class.
Eleven women attended the class the day I showed up. We put our yoga mats in a circle as instructed by Chavez and fellow volunteer Frank Barone, a self-described aspiring Buddhist for the past 40 years.
After DeVries and I were introduced to the group, the women had questions for me. They wanted to know what the story was and why I thought what they were doing was something people would want to read.
Used to asking questions, not answering them, I found myself having to share with these women the benefits I had experienced from yoga in my own life. I told them how my daughter had nearly died when she was 9 and how the accident has left her with anxiety. I told them how she started doing yoga and guided meditation and, four years later, she knows how to manage her stress.
I told them I suspected they might be benefiting in a similar way from the classes.
After sharing a bit, the class began. The most moving part for me was the guided meditation. Barone asked each of us to say our names and the miracle we would perform, if we could, in the upcoming year.
No one spoke of her own problems or wished her time in jail would be shortened or erased.
Instead, some were nearly moved to tears talking about relatives suffering from cancer and the toll other hardships had taken on their parents’ lives.
After the class I asked Barone what he gained from volunteering his time working with the women.
“When you put yourself in that situation, you get to look at yourself as well,” he told me for a separate story[2] on the class. “I get to see my own failings, my own weaknesses as well as my own abilities. I then use that as part of my own personal development.”
As I stood in a circle with the women at the end of class, our hands clasped, I felt the same way. Taking myself out of my comfort zone was a challenge. Sharing some of my life experiences with strangers was an unexpected part of the experience.
But in the end, it stretched my own awareness, my own yoga practice. And for that I am thankful to the women for allowing me to share one hour with them.
Namaste.
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