Andy Lyman
Phoenix Savage took on the role of prison yoga teacher after she pitched bringing the program back.
Lots of places and situations can make it hard to practice mindfulness and find inner peace, but being locked up behind bars arguably tops the list. A Santa Fe yoga studio aims to make it a little easier and to help inmates after serving their time.
Santa Fe Community Yoga, a nonprofit organization with a Midtown studio, has breathed life back into a dormant program guiding incarcerated people through basic yoga practices and techniques with the help of one of its newest board members. After suggesting the idea of bringing meditative stretching inside prisons, newly transplanted Phoenix Savage was unable to find an available and willing teacher, so she found herself driving the two hours each way to Springer Correctional Center three times a week.
Savage tells SFR on her way to kick off the third week of the eight-week-long program that the classes meet one of the yoga center’s goals to connect with people beyond its four walls. Inmates are among groups of people whom she believes could use that outreach the most. But, she says, the sessions are not what she calls “woo-woo yoga.”
“Each class is designed to assist the women in basically learning how to take self control, and I think that’s something we can all learn as human beings,” Savage says. “Being able to do that as someone who is incarcerated is more significant because in reality, if you’re incarcerated, your body is a product or you’re under the ownership of the government.”
She says she has seen some of her family go in and out of the system, but that her motivation to spend hours teaching nearly two dozen incarcerated women comes from her own life experience as a woman of African descent.
“For me personally, as a human being, it’s about offering someone an avenue to have that autonomy of mind, body and spirit,” she says.
Brittany Goede, the nonprofit’s board president, says the group’s late founder Michael Hopp started a yoga in prisons program more than 20 years ago, but it fell by the wayside when it became increasingly difficult to find teachers for the “really quite challenging work.” Things changed when Savage moved to Santa Fe from Mississippi in August 2022.
“We’re so thankful that she had so much energy and dedication to really make it happen,” Goede says. “It was really a full-throated endorsement from the board and the staff restarting this program.”
A Department of Corrections spokeswoman tells SFR the department entered into a contract with the yoga center for about $10,000 to cover teacher compensation, travel and trauma-informed yoga training. But, Goede says, the nonprofit took a funding hit during the worst of COVID-19 and the organization needs to bolster its revenue in order to support and expand its outreach programs.
“We’re going to be measuring success in tandem with the [Corrections] Department and see whether they want to continue expanding it,” Goede says. “I would hope that we’d be able to work with the department to offer this type of service in every facility in the state.”
Springer has been one of the more unstable prisons in the New Mexico Department of Corrections system. The state closed what was known as the New Mexico Boys’ School, a juvenile lockup, in 2006, then reopened it as a low level prison for adult men in 2007. It transitioned to a women’s prison in October 2016.
It now serves as what Education Program Manager Ashley Bass calls a “release facility” with a population that is “within five years to the door.”
Bass says education programs in general provide “hard skills” such as a trade or vocation, but also “soft skills” to cope with past trauma or the stress of making a life outside the prison’s walls. She tells SFR the latter are “just as important” to avoid recidivism.
“By having the mindfulness to know how to breathe and work your way through a situation that this yoga program is going to bring to our population is super beneficial for them when they release,” Bass says.
Savage says she hopes to do her part to cut down on recidivism by giving the women in her classes not only coping skills but a path to use yoga on the outside. For example, she’s working with yoga studios in Albuquerque to establish a scholarship to pay for teaching certification courses for a woman set for release soon.
“That’s something that she can then do on her own; have a small, independent business.” Savage says. “I mean, you can do yoga in the park, you don’t need a fancy studio to do yoga.”
Bass says the prison is already assessing a new group of women to attend another round of classes starting in July.
