I say the first five guys who showed up for my first yoga class at San Quentin were the five bravest guys in the prison because they had to walk across the yard, and you know they everybody on the yard saw the yoga man walk in with it, which is what they used to call me when I said, hey, yoga man, what's that under your arm?

And maybe a few cat calls and whistles too.

Welcome to an army of normal folks.

I'm Bill Courtney.

I'm a normal guy.

I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm a football coach in inner City Memphis.

And that last part, somehow, well, it led to an oscar for a film about one of my teams.

It's called Undefeated.

Guys, I believe our country's problems are never going to be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits talking big words that nobody understands on CNN and Fox, but rather by an army of normal folks.

Guys, that's us, just you and me deciding hey, maybe I can help.

That's what James Fox, the voice you just heard, has done.

James is the founder of Prison Yoga Project, which brings trauma informed yoga to prisoners to help them heal and most importantly, actually rehabilitate.

And last year fifty seven thousand prisoners attended their programming, which is led by their own army of normal folks who are facilitators.

I cannot wait for you to meet James right after these brief messages from our generous fonsors.

James Fox, Welcome to Memphis.

Oh, thanks very much, Bill.

I mean all the way from Billinas, California.

Where in the world is Billinas?

Billina says, about an hour north of San Francisco.

You go over the Golden Gate Bridge and you follow Highway one along the coast, and first you get to Stinson Beach, which is a beautiful beach, probably the closest beach to San Francisco outside of San Francisco, that is.

And then just a little farther north is the ton of Bellina is sixteen hundred people.

So everybody, James Fox, get ready for this is the founder of the Prison Yoga Project.

And I gotta admit, when I first just saw your name and your title, I thought about Colin Alex and saying, all right, prison Yoga.

I mean, let's what in the world are we getting ourselves into.

And then as I found out more about you, gained a lot of excitement to meet you and I cannot wait to dive into prison yoga.

But first, I think it is youer maane to your story to briefly just tell us about even though you're Bay Area guy now and doing prison yoga in California, you're a Midwest guy of by roots I am.

And I think how you grew up in Chicago, especially Inner City of Chicago is Germane or sheds a little light on maybe who you are and why you do the work you do now.

So why don't you just give us a little background to you growing up in Chicago so that we have that as a set point for the rest of your story.

Yeah, so I grew up privileged, and I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, but right on the edge of the Chicago city limits.

I played a lot of sports growing up, mostly baseball and basketball, and so played a lot of teams in the inner city.

And also one of the things that I came to know as soon as I started doing this work with incarcerated people was that common denominators are violence and addiction.

When I thought about that, I thought, hmm, okay, well I've brushed up against both of those.

And when you grow up in an urban environment and you're exposed to an urban environment, you come in contact with that sort of thing all the time.

And I became trained as a violence prevention facilitator also, and I ran groups at San Quentin basically violence prevention groups.

And part of the training of that, becoming a facilitator for that was understanding what's called the male role belief system and how you grow up and how you're influenced by the male role belief system, meaning how you think like a man, or at least the influences in your life, how you think like a man, and how you act like a man.

And I think, particularly now in these days, people talk a lot about toxic masculinity, and I think toxic masculinity comes from that malero belief system, such as, if you need to get your needs met, if you have to revert to violence, you revert to violence.

There's assertiveness, which is saying what it is that you need, and then going past assertiveness is aggressiveness.

And I think that a lot of people in the culture can basically relate to that is that particularly men grow up with Hey, if you have to be aggressive, you've got to be aggressive if you certainly, if you're ever called out, be it playing sports or any other way, you're not going to back down.

So I would say having grown up being influenced by some of those things paid a price with me.

And I found that I.

Had poor impulse control, like many people have poor est impulse control.

I was a hothead.

I was easily triggered, and that brought a certain amount of suffering to myself and to other people.

And so having been an athlete and when somebody first started to talk to me, I was a runner, a middle distance runner.

When I was living in San Francisco, I used to run through Golden Gate Park down to the beach and back.

It was about eight or nine miles, and I developed a problem.

I developed some kind of a pinch nerve in my back.

And like most runners, you know, you take a week off and you go yeah, but I got to get back to running and I'd run and I would come back.

So I had friends saying, you ought to try yoga yoga.

You gotta be kidding, yoga yoga, you know, I.

Word itself is goofy.

When you've heard yoga, I'm sure everybody does.

You know representations, but I think a yogi bear.

I'm like yogi yoga.

I'm out it.

Yeah, you're this dude for the Midwest.

If I out there says you need to try yoga, you gotta be like yoga's weird.

Well, I felt, you know, why would I want to do yoga.

I'm an athlete, so on and so forth.

So I like to say I had to suffer enough to finally go all right, all right, I'll go to a yoga class.

And I went to a yoga class, and I went, ohh this is very different than.

What I thought.

And I had already been exposed to meditation before I started practicing yoga, and I pretty quickly got oh, this is meditation in motion.

So this is combining the athletic part of myself with the introspective part of myself.

And the other thing that happened to me is I can continued to go to classes.

My injury got better and I was actually able to overcomment.

But I found that.

It was really giving me deeper insight into myself.

And then I really dedicated myself and I started taking retreats.

I started going on retreats.

Where you practiced yoga, you know, first thing in the morning, six o'clock in the morning, before you had breakfast, and basically the weekend was held in silence until the final night on Sunday night.

And it really gave me an opportunity to drop deeply into myself and have a better understanding of myself in some of these issues that I was dealing with, interpersonal issues.

And so after practicing for about thirteen years, I felt, so I can do the physical part of the practice, the greatest benefit I'm getting from this practice is the emotional benefit.

And I had this feeling I think I could work with young men, young men who are athletic, but also young men who are coming from urban environments and dealing with different kinds of issues and introducing them to certain practices, to certain skills that could really help them.

So that's a great setup.

But I think we need to unpack a few things for our listeners before we go any further.

One is when those who don't know much about yoga, you're truly included.

Here's yoga.

I think the vast majority of us think about a far Eastern practice.

If we've read anything, many assume that it's part of a far Eastern religion, a Hindu or something like that.

The second thing is when people think about yoga if you haven't seen it in a park or at a studio or on some TV show or movie with a bunch of ladies and workout gear in a park and a bunch of mats stretching.

If you don't know much about it, you think of yoga as a thirty to one hour kind of stretching exercise.

It's almost what's vogue now?

What was once the eighties?

What were those people that were those scrunchy things and they job what was that stuff called jazzer side or what was that stuff called?

Yeah, jazzer jazzer size.

And then there was another one that my mom, did I remember, abics aerobics.

Aerobics.

Yeah, it's kind of like yoga is now the new aerobics for these ladies and parks.

And what I've learned is both of those two things are really and accurate misconceptions.

So before we go any further, I would like you to take the time to explain to our listeners that while it is far Eastern I think in its basis, it really doesn't have any attachment to one particular region or another.

And it is not jazz or size because it actually has three components and only one is the physical one.

And I think before we go any further, it would be good for our listeners to understand what in the world yoga really is, as we understand how it had a connection with you and then how you saw to employ it in a very different way.

And apparently men from Chicago can do it too.

What's up?

Speaking of stereotypes.

Apparently a man from Chicago can do it too.

Yeah, and I'm a rest dude from Chicago.

You know, you're supposed to be drinking beer and eating brats, not doing yoga.

But I think it's important to set the stage.

Yeah, yeah, Well I'll begin with it did originate?

Yoga originated in India.

But what they have discovered is that, for instance, in Egypt, you know, many many, many centuries ago, they were doing a very similar kind of a practice.

They didn't call it yoga, they called it what they called it.

They did something similar in China.

Also, there are a lot of similarities between like yoga and tai chi and chigung and things like that.

However, yoga is a Sanskrit word, and yoga means union.

It means union, it means.

That's really interesting.

I didn't know that either.

And when you really dive into the origins of yoga and the purpose of yoga, what they're talking about in terms of union is it's the union of the mental, emotional, and physical aspects of ourselves, of ourselves.

Of ourselves.

So it's a practice to bring into balance those three aspects of ourselves.

Whichever human being has a mental, emotional and a physical aspect of themselves, most people are out of balance mentally, basically living their life from their neck to the top of their head, and basically whatever their mind shatter is telling them is what they're following, particularly as it relates to men, not a real clear emotional connection and a physical connection with themselves.

So the whole intention of yoga was to bring about that balance or that union.

That's very secular.

There's no faith based component specific to.

That, right, And really what's happened, particularly in the twentieth century, is that yoga has developed many different paths from the origins to now a secular path of yoga therapy.

There are distinct practices of yoga that are being used with military veterans.

There's something called yoga nidra.

Nidra is another Sanskrit word that means sleep, where they've had a lot of success in working with combat veterans to deal with PTSD by working with them with yoga nidra.

And there's other therapeutic approaches to yoga, and particularly I would say this is probably more in the last fifteen or twenty years of the understanding of the value of yoga to address symptoms of unresolved trauma.

And probably the greatest contributor to that is doctor Besil Vanderkock, a psychiatrist who wrote The Body Keeps the Score.

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I think what happens when you start to practice yoga is it's almost like wait a minute, time out here, time out.

That first of all, you're slowing everything down, and it's not just working out.

You know, it's like working out is great.

You know you're working out, You're you know, you're basically working your muscles and bones.

And from a physical standpoint, one of the great values of yoga is you're not just working muscles and bones, but you're working joints and connective tissues and internal way organs.

From a physical standpoint.

From an emotional standpoint, you're learning or you're being able to develop impulse control.

You're strengthening impulse control, you're being able to take those moments where you pause before you react, which is one of the big things.

Does that have to do with the breathing has.

A lot to do with the breathing.

There's a lot to do with the breathing, but the breathing connected with the prefrontal cortex.

Because I guarantee my North Mississippi born Southern grandmother never knew a Dagham thing about yoga and probably never knew the word, but I can always remember her.

She always said, if you get really angry before you act, take a deep breath.

Yeah, I said, naturally yogi.

Yeah, yeah, but that's I mean, that's interesting.

Yeah, that that's the idea behind the breathing part of yoga, is it not?

And yes, and interestingly enough, this is something that it's not only take a deep breath, but if you really want to value, take a long exhale, because your ex sale is your body's built in release valve, not the inhale.

Right.

When you inhale, you're drawing energy in.

When you exale, you're letting go and you're actually letting go of toxins in your body too when you exhale.

All right, and then the third part of yoga.

Is these the meditative part of yoga.

The meditative You'll see a lot of people will hear that and think, oh, that's where it gets weird.

Explain the meditative.

Yeah, I'm glad you asked me that, because I don't use that word when I teach incarcerated people.

I don't use that term in prison.

I call it centering practice.

Why don't you use meditative.

Because some people are for what you said.

It was like some people say, oh, now you're going to take me into some kind of original religion or yeah, or oh yeah, I tried that once and I can't.

Do that, So you call it centering centering.

And the way that I approach that is how do you deal with all the emotional storms that come into your life?

Emotional storm that we can't avoid, right, Emotions come, Emotions come.

And the world is a tough place and you're going to be hit with things.

So how do you stay centered?

How do you stay grounded when you're hit with these emotional storms?

What is it that you do?

Working out is great because you're discharging a lot of that stuff, but being able to quiet your mind, being able to learn skills to quiet your mind, so then your mind here we go back to mental, emotional, and physical.

Your mind and your body are connected in a place where you can actually stop and be still for a moment, and what comes as a result of that is some emotional benefit and the more.

And it doesn't take a lot.

It's not like you don't you don't have to sit down for forty minutes or a half an hour and meditate.

You can learn these different skills where you can do something in three minutes that's going to serve you.

In terms of this what's now called self regulation.

How do you self regulate?

Right?

Self control?

Self regulate, and every human being has an issue with self regulation and self control.

Again, that kind of went back to my time, you know, growing up in Chicago, where I realized, hey, I got a self control problem.

I got a self control issue.

If I'm in my early twenties and I'm still getting into fights, because that's what you did with growing up in Chicago, I got a self control issue.

So I found that that was something that I could carry over in working with young men initially and then it transitioned into adult men.

With all this understanding and with this practice that you've been doing now thirteen years, starting for yourself, and as you're evolving, you think kids that are and stressful tough situations would benefit from this.

And then you're like, well, if the data says that eighty percent or so of the incarcerated people did it because of some substance abuse or trauma issue or combination, what could we actually do for people in the prison population.

So I just kind of teed that up for you take it from that point forward.

Now that we have a real basis behind why you think the way you think, and then what has evolved in what you do now.

Well, in the beginning, I was working on intuition, you know, my intuition was telling me, I think, I think this might be able to providing some tools from yoga that people could incorporate into their lives.

And I found out pretty quickly in working with the boys.

So I first start out in a residential treatment facility for boys who being court ordered to this program ages thirteen to eighteen.

And yes they were receiving therapy and many of them were medicated, but there wasn't anything that involving their bodies.

And I pretty quickly realized, oh, my intuition is I'm not going to sit down and talk to them about their issues.

I'm going to move with them.

I'm going to work.

And this was all intuitive.

This was before I really understood trauma.

And then when I started out working with men at San Quentin, I'm working with men who are a life sentenced with the possibility of parole.

Probably manslaughter, yeah, murders people for people don't know, tell them a little bit about San Quentin.

San Quentin had California's condemned row until last year when it was disbanded, and it houses right now it houses about thirty eight hundred men.

When I first started going in there, it was fifty five hundred they were to harm and thirty percent capacity and the general population at San Quentin were mostly life sentenced with the possibility of pearl, so violent offenders, many of whom came from backgrounds where whatever they knew about yoga was something they saw in a magazine or television ad or something like that.

I probably thought it was stupid.

Yes, so I'm often asked, well, who showed up for your first yoga class?

I was actually going to ask what dude?

Yeah, what bad dude showed up for his first yoga class?

But first I want to just set the stage.

San Quentin is the toughest of the tough, right, I mean.

Not so much anymore, but it does have a reputation like that because they're like different security levels within the prison.

But it's not so much anymore.

It's actually a very progressive rehabilitated rehabilitation.

The people that are going there are still life erst When I say the people in it are, yeah, folks who've committed some serious class Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And the guys that I've worked with over the twenty three years, almost most of the men that I've really worked seriously with because they've got very committed to the practice lifers.

Okay, so you show them san Quentin.

So I go there and I go, I figure, okay, these guys, I'm working with these guys.

Well, first of all, I say, the first five guys who showed up for my first yoga class at San Quentin were the five bravest guys in the prison because they had to walk across the yard, and you know, they everybody on the yard saw the yoga man walk in with it, which is what they used to call me when I said, hey, yoga man, what's that under your arm?

And maybe a few cat calls and whistles too, But everything in prison spreads by word of mouth.

And when these five guys left and went back to their homes and their cell blocks and everything like that, started saying, hey, man, I had the best night's sleep I've had in memory from that yoga class, or this chronic pain that I've had in my you know, my right hip that I haven't been able to get rid of.

It's actually less after that class.

So the words started to spread, not right away, but after a few weeks, five turned into seven, and then after a few more weeks, seven turned into ten.

That was when I taught one class today.

We teach five separate classes a week at San Quentin, and we have waiting lists of up to one hundred guys trying to get into the class.

So what started out and I basically was feeling, Okay, Well, these guys they want to they want to work out, so I'm going to give them a workout and they're gonna discover how really strong they are.

And I imagine it's like anything when I show up to coach football to a new team that I've never coached.

I'm not yucking it up and slapping backs because I don't have the relationship.

It develops over time, and it develops with a consistent approach where the people start to size you up and then remove their barriers and then you can really start having some meaningful relationships.

And so I got to imagine at first they're sizing you up and just speaking of you as the yoga workout guy, which is not really what you're there for.

But you had to spend the consistent time engaged to start to reach the two most beneficial parts of yoga, in my opinion, which are the two that fall behind the physcal One yes, I mean is that right.

It's true.

I always saved at least a few minutes at the end of the class to start to introduce to drop into.

That we will be right back.

One of the most impactful moments was after I'd been running this lifer's class for a couple of months, several weeks one of the guys who was the super athlete came in and before class, he came out to me and said, Hey, James, you're gonna kick our tonight.

You're gonna work us today, And I went, wait a minute, But he meant that in a positive way.

He meant it in a positive way.

But it also made me reflect on am I buying into the typical male thing of I'm gonna challenge you and see who can really hang in here.

And show these lifers how tough I am?

And yeah, and it was part of it, like, you know, you guys are you know, you guys are muscular and everything like that, but are you really strong?

I want to take you through a yoga practice where you're really gonna find out how strong you really are.

And then I realized, you know what, I don't want to do that.

I want to start balancing this out.

With honestly, that fringes on the very toxic masculinity that you're trying to break down.

Absolutely, absolutely interesting.

I didn't understand that one I read your prov but hearing you say, I now understand what you're saying.

Yeah, there's something in almost all yoga practices hata yoga hatta meaning physical yoga practices where you do sun salutations, which is kind of the calisthenics part of a yoga practice.

Right in the middle.

There's one part where you're what they call mountain posts where you start and then after you do one sun salutation, you end up in mountain posts, and then you go again.

I would stop and say, wait a minute, Wait a minute, let's not rush through this.

Let's take a moment.

I invite you, guys, and things are invitational.

You learn invitational rather than barking out orders, right, coach.

Yeah, especially to those guys.

Yes, yeah, maybe you want to put a hand on your belly, and maybe you want maybe you want to put one hand over your sternum and just for a moment, take a few breaths and feel what's going on in your body.

Now I'm starting to okay, there's this physical aspect there's this, you know, but then there's this other aspect of learning how to back off.

And again, intuitively, what I was touching on was impulse control learning how to back off?

All right?

I know you guys can do the sun salutations, and you know we've been doing them.

But can you back off?

Well, and here's the bigger question.

Everybody in this prison knows you can fight, here's the real question.

Can you walk away?

Absolutely?

Yep.

So that was a turning point.

And then and and some of that came out in.

My book that I wrote, But it was when I was interduce to understanding trauma that I realized, once again I was on the right track.

Intuitively, I was on the right track as it applies to trauma healing and how how do you overcome the unresolved symptoms of trauma that you're left with as a result of childhood trauma which is called developmental trauma, and then all the trauma on top of that, which is called complex trauma.

And now you're in an environment which is trauma on simmer when there's a lack of safety, predictability and control.

When there's a lack of safety predictability and control, for anybody who has unresolved symptoms of trauma, the situation is ripe to restimulate those symptoms.

We interviewed somebody from Chicago who started a inner city routine, and he had kids from his high school that had never seen Lake Michigan and grew up on the South Side because they were afraid to cross the blocks.

Sure, one of the things he said that I will never forget.

This may be one of the more impactful metaphors that I don't think I'll ever forget, is that in their project apartment they had a fan because their conditioner didn't work real well, just a you know room fanshplug in the wall and one of the blades was out of balance, and so as it spun around, that fourth blade hit the shroud and it clicked and click click click click click cook.

As the fan was moving, he said, if you'd never been in our apartment, you walked in that click and might drive you absolutely insane.

But he said, you know, we had that fan for years and after a while we didn't even notice it anymore.

You would have noticed it, we wouldn't.

And he said, that's exactly what it was like walking to school every day murders, rapes, prostitution, drugs, stepping over people who'd overdose in the hallway to go down the steps to get to school.

And he said it became so commonplace that it was like the click of that fan, we didn't even notice the trauma and dysfunction surrounding us anymore.

Yeah, And he said, I just gotta ask you, do you think as a fourth grader I gave twos what fifty divided by two was when I was just trying to get back and forth to school and home again without being one of those victims.

Yeah, And he said, and the click of that fan is what layers and layers and layers and layers of trauma and dysfunction feels like onto a five year old that ends up a fourteen year old that doesn't even notice the dysfunction anymore because it's so commonplace, like the click on a fan.

And is that not amazingly?

Absolutely?

Okay, Well, those are the people that end up in San Quentin.

That's right, there's a life for that.

I worked with for many years who was in Cabrini Greens Project in Chicago and used to tell me stories about growing up at Cabrini Green told a story about you know, when he was really young, people were going to kidnap him.

Is like a four year old kid had to run away from people who were trying to kidnap him.

I look at it from the standpoint bill of you know, you could look at society, and I look at it in terms of look at society as a funnel.

And at the top of the funnel where everything comes in, you've got all these inequalities, all these inequities in the American society that are bouncing back and forth, bouncing back and forth, bouncing back and forth.

And then there's the funnel part of it.

And at the very bottom of the funnel, it's the prison population in this country, people who basically couldn't manage, they couldn't assimilate into a law abiding American society, and they had to revert from survival to revert the criminality.

Now, even the guys who truly understand this, who get to the point of truly understanding this, will not make excuses for the crimes that they cost, which is, by the way, a really important part of restorative justice.

Taking personal responsibility for the harm that you cost.

That's the beginning of a healing for somebody.

That's a major part of actual rehabilitation, because most people who committed violent crimes going to prison in denial of the harm that they've cost.

And that's a whole other road we could go down.

Well.

But the interesting part is if yoga the two steps below yoga from the physical teaches you to calm yourself and then think about who you are as a person and really not meditate, but gets centered, that feels like that's a step toward.

Restoration personal accountability, personal responsibility.

So this was your inclination, but you hadn't proved it yet and you're working on it right at this point.

Yes, yeah, so take us more.

So I just continued on and then really going to school on understanding trauma and being trained by doctor vander Koch and his people.

Bessel Vanderkoke is the is the psychiatrist who wrote The Body Keeps the Score Right, and he has the Trauma Research Center in Boston and he's trained.

That's the part I don't know that people know that that author actually has a trauma research.

Trama Research, Trauma Research foundation.

He and his wife Lisha, and we're a therapeutic alliance partner.

If there's no Prison Yoga Project is and we're asked to present at their annual conference, which is every May in Boston.

But that was just that was when we really went to school on trauma and really got trained on trauma, and it really supported my intuitive approach, but took it much deeper so that we were able to apply different kinds of movement practices, different kinds of breathing practices, being more informed about how we language the class.

How important it is to use invitational language when you're Everybody who's incarcerated is told what to do twenty four to seven from the time they get up till the time they go to sleep.

It's like do this, do that, do this, do that, do this?

Do that.

Nobody ever said if, if you're ready, or if it feels right to you.

So one of the things that we're doing, and this is also trauma related, is we're establishing agency for them.

You have a choice here.

I'm leading you through a practice.

It's not military commanding you got to do this, you got to do that.

I'm providing you with an opportunity to do this.

In that you develop.

Trust, right because I'm not kicking anybody's no I'm basically taking them along.

I'm bringing them along in a way where they feel safe in an environment where it's very rare to feel safe, and I'm establishing a relationship of trust.

And that concludes Part one of our conversation with James Fox.

Guys, you don't want to miss Part two.

It's now available to listen to together.

Guys, we can change this country, but it starts with you.

I'll see in part two.