Yoga Makes The Indian Prisoners Smarter

A prison is supposed to be the center of rehabilitation and correction for any delinquent individual. Many correctional activities have been undertaken in the prison until recently the yoga programme in the jails of India has been the recent corrective measure of a more holistic and spiritual in nature. This has helped the individuals and the prisoners to a great extent say the reports from various sources. In the recent past Kiran Bedi is one of the police officers who has taken up many correctional programmes in the different jails and prisons of India starting from Tihar jail, Indore jail and many other prisons of India. She also opened her own NGO named India Vision Foundation which works for the rehabilitation of the prison inmates.

Followed by this came the different yoga and spiritual gurus of India who also started to think about the inmates of the prison and their physical and mental wellbeing. One such noted work is done by the Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar who used to regularly visit the prisons and use to teach and preach meditation and yoga for the inmates. Later on this was followed up by the teachers of Art of Living.

Such an attempt is also made by the popular yoga guru known as Shwaasa Guru who is also named as Swami Vachananand who visited many prisons of Karnataka and many parts of India to introduce the yoga classes for the prisoners. 

In this context, it is for us to remember that prisons of India already have a rich history of spirituality and diverting individuals to one’s real life’s goal. One such noted example would be Rishi Aurobindo Ghosh who was essentially an anarchist in the British period and was sentenced to prison in Alipore jail. It was in this period that he realized the real purpose of life and his transformation took place. After his release he took to religious transformation through the practice of yoga and moved to Pondicherry. This is when he gained enlightenment and came to be known as Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, a noted sage and a philosopher. 

India seems to take this history of spirituality and has let her rich heritage of yoga flow into the lives of the poor prisoners. Not only Sri Sri Ravi Shankar or Shwaasa Guru there are other programmes conducted by the trust of Prajapati Brahma Kumari who initiates the prisoners in the Vipassana technique of yoga, a Buddhist technique of meditation. There is Isha foundation also who conducts yoga classes on a regular basis in the various prisons of India. They have held programmes in Coimbatore, Poojapura, Thiruvananthapuram and many other places right from the early nineties. 

It was interesting to note that the country’s largest prison, Tihar Jail organized a yoga programme on the morning of the International Yoga day on the June 21st, 2015. The inmates say that they have been highly benefitted in these programmes and many have been looking forward to such practices. Many reports of increased appetite, regularity of sleep, controlled behavior and a decreased tendency of outburst of anger and negative emotions. 

Yoga & Human Resource Development For The Corporates

For the last 25 years or more yoga is tried to be inculcated in to the corporate spectrum by the corporate leaders and founders alike. Right from the days of the Hawthorne experiment there was a need from the managers to keep their workers mind and the mental conditions in the right frame. Then came different concepts like Work Life Balance, Subjective Wellbeing in the work place and the like. Stress had been a very old detriment in the work place right from the beginning and many steps in this regard is always being ushered in by the corporate and are welcome. Yoga seems to be the panacea of all these corporate ailments. Not only in the US but India, the country where Yoga was founded also seemed to catch up with yoga in the corporate world. Today in the companies and the corporate arena there are foreign teachers who claim expertise and proficiency in the yoga principles and they teach such yoga successfully. The corporates are also benefitted by these courses. Let us find the bottom-line.

The University of Massachusetts established the stress reduction clinic which is the largest and the oldest stress alleviation clinic based on the mind and body centre of its own in the USA. They have treated more than 10,000 patients since their inception in 1979.

This clinic offers Yoga Therapy as a medical supplement for treatment of stress disorders and relieving stress-related disorders in the corporate world. The clinic offers meditation courses and yoga therapy based classes to their reputed clients like judges and the correctional staff and also has a five-day retreat for the top officers and CEOs of different corporates in the Arizona Dessert.

A deserving majority of their patients and the inmates of the yoga classes report a marked decrease of the psychological and physical symptoms of stress. They also report an increment in their ability to relax and a higher energy level with greater enthusiasm in life. Increased self-esteem and an improved ability to handle stress-full situations with better interpersonal relations are few other benefits that they have reported about. Clarity of thinking, creative ability with improved ability of communication, leadership skills with a better teamwork are also some of the benefits they have reported to accrue from these courses. The exponents of management sciences argue that these are most of the objectives of the Human Resource development wing of any company.

How does it happen?

Yoga and meditation strengthen the nervous system and gives more strength and vitality to the patients and the course participants. Most of the time the meditation and the breathing techniques clears the toxins from the cells of the body and gives the body a more cleansing effect along with the brain waves to be slower. This happens because it works on the limbic system of the brain along with the pineal gland of the brain which the gland is supposed to be for the highest wellbeing of the organism. Unfortunately, this kind of effect is not gained in any kind of other corporate programmes. More importantly Yoga is a way of life and these kinds of practices make the body so clean of the toxins that most of the times the participants are in a state to leave or quit bad habits like alcohol or smoking. This strikes a balance in their work life and their family lives also as participants have reported to have improved in the quality of their family lives too. One of the renowned yoga teachers explains that yoga increases the quality of the mind and the body. This in turn improves the quality of the lives of the corporate members. This, of course is translated into more productivity inculcating a more intense bond of a relationship among workers and increases the subjective wellbeing in the climate of any company. Thus, yoga is a great HRD tool for the corporates which has a direct bearing on the performance metrics of the organizations.