Freedom From the Inside

Learn expressive and embodied practices that will help you re-energize your mind and body, reconnect with your community and yourself, restore your spirit, and renew your sense of play and imagination.

Dance, Yoga, Rhythm and Movement to process Trauma and Grief inside high security prisons for women. This experiential workshop is an invitation to explore how rhythm, dance and creative movement can provide trauma processing, enhanced empathic abilities, emotional regulation, joy, belonging, inspiration and self empowerment in an ongoing stressful environment as a prison.

Course Objective

Upon completion of this activity, you will be able to:

Examine the complexity of working with traumatic stress inside stressful environments of prisons, the connection between adverse childhood experiences, and incarceration - ”Trauma on simmer”
Examine how dance-movement based practices affect mental health and the psychosocial hierarchy inside a prison. Participants will receive short movement practices to share with others
Experience beneficial practices from the book “Freedom from the Inside- A woman’s yoga practice guide” for processing trauma through creative movement, yoga and mindfulness
Learn about the hopeful results from the randomised Swedish research study “Yoga in correctional settings”

Josefin Wikström

Josefin is the Director of Programs for the Prison Yoga Projects European programs and the founder of Trauma-adapted yoga (TAY) in Sweden.

Josefin Wikström has been bringing yoga and dance into the Swedish prisons since 2008. She has been working as a full-time teacher focusing on yoga for trauma-exposed populations since 2003. In 2015, she began working with Prison Yoga Project to coordinate European training and has been teaching Prison Yoga Project training in Mumbai, India, and Mexico.

Josefin and the Prison Yoga Project and is currently training the staff at HMS Probation Services in the UK with trauma informed therapeutic yoga programs for women prisons. A pilot project that will take place in twelve female correctional settings throughout the U.K.