If you think of feng shui, the Chinese practice that focuses on harmonizing your environment with the flow of universal energy, this place was that: Jared McCann’s Lighthouse Yoga School in Brooklyn (sadly no longer in operation).
It felt surreal to be there, in New York City, doing something I had dreamt about while I was incarcerated in Florida. Reading the articles my mom sent me about yoga, and then eventually teaching it. Inside, I started the first inmate-led yoga classes ever offered in a Florida prison. I’d be lying on my rack wishing with all my might to be free, to be home, to travel and see the world. And now here I was, fulfilling my dream of learning to be a yoga teacher from a real yoga instructor, taking my 200-hour certification with McCann.
People might wonder why a guy like me would give a damn about yoga. Here’s why. Research published in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that yoga practiced in correctional settings significantly reduced depression, anxiety, stress, and anger in incarcerated people while improving behavioral control. A systematic review and meta-analysis by a University of Cambridge team, published in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, pulled together two meta-analyses and found that prison yoga and meditation programs produced small but real improvements in psychological well-being and behavioral functioning. A separate systematic review of the literature on yoga in correctional settings found that it is a cost-effective practice that produces measurable mental health benefits, supports spiritual growth and self-actualization, and has demonstrated positive effects for people after leaving prison, including lower recidivism rates.
Back in 2017, that Cambridge team asked the same question I was living out inside those fences: Does prison yoga and meditation actually help, or is it bullshit? Turns out it does fucking help. People who complete yoga or meditation programs in prison show a small but real bump in how they feel and behave. In plain English, guys and women who showed up to those classes felt a little better and acted a little better. That might sound small until you remember where they are living.
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Since then, newer work has only backed that up. A 2018 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that yoga practice reduced psychological distress levels in prison, including depression and anxiety, and argued that better mental health is key for real rehabilitation. A trauma-focused yoga program for women in South Carolina prisons showed significant drops in depression and stress and improved self-awareness compared with women who were waiting for the program. More recent trauma-sensitive yoga projects and psychosocial rehab studies in different countries keep finding the same thing, that daily yoga is one of the few cheap tools that actually helps people behind the fence calm their bodies, regulate their emotions, and start healing in places built to keep you broken and silenced.
This isn’t bullshit or soft stuff. This is science backing up what I already knew from watching men in a Florida prison learn yoga and breathe for the first time. That’s my lived experience confirmed by science.
Jared had us do an exercise. Sitting across from another yogi, holding my palm over one eye while she did the same, staring into each other’s exposed eyeball. What a real transformation this is. This is what I read about and tried to recreate during the classes I taught inside prison. Community. Understanding. Real freedom.
But then I grew sad looking into this other individual’s eye, another seeker. I didn’t know why she was there. I think a lot of yogis weren’t prepared for what this exercise would uncover inside our hearts. I saw sadness within that eye, or at least some sort of yearning—for what, I do not know. Within my own eye I hoped she didn’t see me thinking about the murder I witnessed inside Florida’s brutal Taylor CI Main Unit prison when I was on the cusp of getting to come home.
I felt busted. I felt trapped again.
My yogi partner and I were in the back corner of the room. I think we both wanted to be as far away from the others as possible. Maybe that’s why we were paired up by the benevolent Jared. Maybe he sensed we both had dark histories.
And then Jared spoke, snapping me out of my reverie.
“OK,” he said. “We are all going to sit in a giant circle and share our journeys.”
Shit.
How was I going to tell this class of all-star yogis about the visions I’d beheld?
I dragged my yoga mat to the circle’s perimeter, where all us yogis gathered to sit in silence. Part of me felt like a fucking phony sitting with all these established yogis practicing vinyasa, sun salutations, and meditation, staring into one another’s fucking eyeballs—and me alone thinking about murder.
Each person, one by one, began sharing their experience with us. Each yogi who spoke brought my turn closer. Time was running out. Inside, a million conversations were happening at once. Should I share what happened? Should I keep it short and simple and say, “Really great exercise, Jared! Thanks, lots of fun”?
Then again Jared spoke, snapping me out of my reverie.
“Emmett, how was your experience?”
I began talking slowly at first, still debating if I wanted to be completely, brutally honest.
There’s always trouble on the compound.
“Tatter, you know so and so just got stabbed the fuck up, right?” Or it would be, “Tatter, you know who just got killed on the pound, bro?”
With my family outside, I tell them everything’s always good. Don’t want to tell them how things really are.
And then the floodgates opened and I regurgitated all of it.
Don’t want to tell them how many close calls I’ve had over using that damn phone. Nope. I don’t tell them how sometimes I have to sleep with shoes on, hoping I don’t get knifed by a hating motherfucker. Haters are out there. Everywhere you go, you have to be on alert.
Before I leave Taylor, I watch a man die. He’s struck with locks repeatedly by four guys while two more stab him. The doors in the dorm are swinging because people are returning from the rec yard. He makes it outside while being sliced with razors, stabbed, and beaten with locks, but falls not even twenty-five yards beyond the dorm. I can’t even believe he made it that far.
I told them everything: The murder. The brutality. The blood. How I was so close to coming home and how all I wanted to do was make my family proud and teach yoga. It was like I was a child blurting out everything, and then the tears came.
Fucking hell.
Inside prison, our classes weren’t like this. We talked shit with each other and were all about accomplishing goals, only feeling and searching our hearts late at night, on our racks, during the cover of darkness. Not here. Everyone in this damn circle can see my tears cascading down my cheeks.
But a remarkable thing happened. I felt calm about it, which should have been impossible with all these eyes on me.
And Jared, bless his heart. Bless all their hearts in that circle. I was embarrassed. I felt alone. I felt like I wasn’t one of them, sitting here in this circle inside a yoga classroom in New York City, being taught by an amazing yoga teacher, with real yogis listening to me bitch about my life.
But they didn’t see it like that.
I can’t remember exactly what Jared said, but it was beautiful, and it ended, “Emmett, you are a real yogi. You are a teacher.”
And then others started talking to me and telling me how happy they were that I was there. I felt like crying all over again and I didn’t even give a damn.
Recovery from trauma is not a straightforward process, though, and not long after the training, my life fell apart. Not even three years out from being released from prison, I had a mental health crisis during which I fought police officers and caught Battery on Law Enforcement charges, amongst others. It was another realization that my healing journey was only just beginning.
I knew that, like many formerly incarcerated people, I needed help. One peer-reviewed study reports lifetime PTSD prevalence of 17.8 percent among incarcerated men and 40.1 percent among incarcerated women, but even the researchers acknowledged that those numbers reflect massive underdiagnosis because of a lack of knowledge and a system that never properly screens for it. A 2024 fact sheet from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies likely gets closer to capturing the prevalence of PTSD among incarcerated people (how much trauma incarcerated people carry) when it writes that almost everybody behind bars has lived through at least one potentially traumatic event, and most have been hit with multiple different types of trauma. Untreated PTSD is directly tied to getting rearrested after release, even when you control for drug use.
No wonder recidivism rates are high. We come home carrying everything I described above, with no real tools, no real support, and a society that would rather lock us back up than ask why we’re struggling in the first place. The state response to this struggle is often more punishment and, in some cases, violence. During my fight with the officers inside the county jail, I sustained orbital fractures and a concussion and needed stiches. I needed help; instead I was put in a suicide turtle suit and thrown into a suicide watch cell. New charges racked up and a fight for my life and freedom was only just beginning. But I was glad it was beginning. No one has ever been happier about getting their ass whooped than I was.
When I got out of jail on bond a week later, my first stop was counseling. I knew I needed answers to why I was the way I was. I signed power of attorney to my parents and asked if I could move back in with them while I healed. I worked detailing cars while I also went back to working on writing I had started back in 2019 about my prison experiences.
After a brutal year of fighting for my freedom against the charges stemming from my fight with the officers, I was given six months of house arrest and five years of probation, no early termination allowed. “Your sentence was mitigated enough,” the prosecutor said.
Counseling lasted two and a half years. Completing my book and editing it lasted years. After house arrest, I began my advocacy for prisoners again. I’m sober now for five years and my book is complete. I’m now the first runner-up for the 2026 Killer Nashville Claymore Award for best nonfiction. I’m a journalist now, lecturing at colleges and really living.
Amidst all of those changes, I also started to practice yoga again. Here’s what I know: yoga works. I didn’t need the academic papers I cited near the start to tell me that. I built that from nothing inside a Florida state prison with no funding, no mats, no studio with good chi. Just men on a rec yard floor trying to breathe together. If that can work inside, imagine what it can do when people come home and someone actually gives a damn.
I’ll never forget looking into that eyeball so long ago and breaking down. That was the real beginning of my healing journey and I’m still on that road. I’m grateful and take responsibility for my mistakes, and I hope one day my words can help others and we can all heal together. Community is a motherfucker. Now I’m just more careful about which community I surround myself with, and even more careful about the inner Emmett. He wants to be happy and earn his way in life.
I’ll walk with him down that road.
Image: Barry Silver / flickr (CC BY 2.0)
