Prison yoga made inmates restive and disturbed
A Norwegian prison has suspended yoga classes for prisoners because the intense emotions evoked by the exercises caused the inmates to become restive and violent. I kinda get this: when I started doing yoga, I would sometimes get into a pose and experience a great upwelling of sadness or anger and have a vivid flash of some past unpleasant experience. The yogic explanation is that the memory is "stored in your muscle," something I treat as allegorical (along with all the business about chakras, prana, etc). I practice yoga every day now, and credit it with keeping me sane and supple.
Link"The reactions we received from the prisoners who participated in the classes were very varied, ranging from completely positive to completely negative," Mr Hagen reportedly wrote in a letter to the group.
On the negative side, the yoga had provoked "strong reactions: agitation, aggression, irritability, trouble sleeping and mental confusion", he said.
(Image: Yoga Baby, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from Autumn's Flickr stream)
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Antinous, have you a comment here?
Man, we should start teaching Yoga to middle-schoolers. Finally a way to get those fat American Goth/Emo kids out of the Heart-Attack-Waiting-To-Happen category.
Maybe it would even stop some of that darn cutting. (you should only mutilate your body as a form of art!)
from the article:
"High-security Ringerike jail near Oslo offered the classes to eight inmates on a trial basis earlier this year."
what dipshits!
if 8 is enough then you're all going to have to recalculate your intake of diet soda and atkin's diet snacks.
in medical statistics, there's a case, a series and a study. there's not even a valid basis for calling this a series.
Actually Cory that explanation might not be so allegorical, Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_markers_hypothesis - considered the leading neurobiological explanation for emotive decision making, posits that a pool affectively weighted associations are stored in the body, and polled or summated to assess the affective impact of decisions - e.g.: which will make me happier jill or jane; increasing the adaptive rationality of the decision making process.
So, I'm guessing that without a spiritual guidance, yoga is contraproducent, no?
the same thing happens when people take up buddhism and start really meditating. deep meditation can stir up all sorts of things from the deep sedimentary layers in your mind. it's not uncommon that people on retreats find themselves suddenly experiencing deep emotions, be it sadness, fear, or happiness.
Television tends to have the opposite effect on inmates; people who get all worked up because prisoners get "free" cable don't understand that TV is a cheap and effective tranquilizer.
Yoga is very productive without spiritual guidance, but it's like in North America and elsewhere, many people in European prisons are afflicted with mental illness and emotional trauma. It's not at all surprising that starting to practice has pulled strong emotions to the surface.
I'm of the same mind as Cory that many of the explanations offered by yoga are metaphorical, as in tai chi and other systems of knowledge, and I've also noticed the interplay between mood, old memories, strong emotions and parts of the body that I otherwise ignore when doing yoga or pilates. My instructor says that she was once told that we keep our secrets in the armpits, but I'm pretty sure that all of mine are in my hips :)
I hope they find a way to keep offering the class to those in the prison who were doing ok with it.
I like to swallow my rage and store it up till I can let it all loose one day in an irrational bout of violence somewhere really inappropriate.
Uhm, the BBC article was last updated in 2005.
Gareth - thanks, that's a really interesting reference. I've tried a variety of massage and similar bodywork techniques over the years, and the "storing" of emotion or memory is one thing that keeps popping up, despite my skepticism. I'm fascinated to hear that there's some scientific basis to it.
You don't happen to know if there's any scientific basis to "meridians" or "energy lines" as used in shiatzu, do you? Whilst presumably not lines of metaphysical energy as such, I do recall a physiotherapist I know mentioning that there was some basis in science for the framework.
Hugh, I'm merely a humble psychology undergraduate, not a biologist or natural scientist, I've certainly never heard any scientific explanation for such phenomena, but that certainly doesn't mean they don't exist - assuming the efficacy of the treatment is beyond what could be expected by placebo.