An overwhelming number of incarcerated girls are victims themselves, caught in cycles of violence and abuse. The Art of Yoga Project is working to break this cycle.
Their approach combines yoga, meditation, creative arts and writing and is the result of over a decade of experience teaching mindfulness-based practices to justice-involved girls. Their model is significantly influenced by shared learnings from our partners in mental health, probation, the judiciary and education. It combines gender-responsive best practices with trauma-sensitive yoga, developmental assets for healthy adolescent maturation and contemporary neuroscience research on developmental trauma and the brain.
Their programming utilizes the Child Trauma Academy’s evidence-based Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics to address the particular needs of girls in the juvenile justice system. This model guides our class sequencing by addressing emotional dysregulation, which is common in traumatized youth. The class structure mirrors “bottom-up” brain development by first regulating the brainstem (the “survival brain”) through sensory integration and self-regulation, then the limbic system (the “feeling brain”) through relational activities, and finally the prefrontal cortex (the “learning brain”) through cognitive activities. Another way to explain this sequencing is with the “three R’s” described in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics —first we Regulate, then Relate then Reason.
The Child Trauma Academy recommends yoga, meditation, and expressive arts as part of essential, therapeutic interventions to regulate traumatized individuals’ nervous systems and bring them back into balance.
Click here to learn more about The Art of Yoga Project.