As yoga therapist Denise Druce, C-IAYT, says on the website for her nonprofit, Yoga Forward,

“In a prison setting, yoga can be a refuge inward, away from the external events and environments.

With your awareness directed within, the yoga practice becomes a sanctuary for the mind and spirit from which you can take a deeper look at who you are, what you can become, and how you can serve the world.”

Serving the world might not be the first concept that comes to mind when you think about someone who’s serving time in a prison program. But Denise’s project in the Utah State Prison System equips incarcerated people with a means of doing just that, training them to become yoga instructors so they can help others strengthen their ability to look mindfully within and cope with life’s obstacles.

“I definitely believe if I would have known about yoga when I was a child, I wouldn’t have been so depressed, I wouldn’t have had anxiety as bad as I did, I wouldn’t have isolated myself,”

said Yoga Forward–trained instructor Karen Butterfield in this piece from Salt Lake City news channel KUTV.

Denise told yogatherapy.health that a new 200-hour training program for 20 women has just begun, and 6 graduates of their advanced training—incarcerated women who have longer sentences—are working to become teacher trainers themselves. “Our next project is to serve youth who have incarcerated parents,” says Denise. “The demand is great.” Serving the world!