DAYA Foundation 3.69

We bring yoga to prisons, hospitals, schools, and rehab centers. We provide 200-hour yoga teacher trainings to incarcerated adults, establishing yoga teachers on the inside who can teach yoga to other inmates with developmental delays, traumatic brain injuries, or mental illnesses.

We also teach medically-sensitive yoga. We recognize that facing a period of medical vulnerability, illness, injury, post-operative rehabilitation, or progressive illness is a time when the practices of yoga become even more critical. Our public health issues, such as anxiety, depression, addiction, obesity, cardiovascular and heart diseases, and other culturally ubiquitous chronic illnesses, can be greatly aided by yoga. Yet many people feel too intimidated to walk into a yoga studio, think yoga is a luxury item, or have the perception that yoga is for “other people.” The DAYA Foundation aims to reach out to these persons and is developing programming to make yoga more accessible to and inclusive of them.

The DAYA Foundation is founded on these essential principles:

- Yoga teaches fundamental life skills.
- These life skills transform our mental and physical health.
- These life skills make us better individuals, family members, and community members.
- All members of our community deserve access to the life-enhancing practices of yoga.
- All members of our community have something to teach us about life, human suffering, and human potential.
- When community is created, healing happens, for it re-knits our experience of belonging.