Mpls/St. Paul Magazine Feature
How the Locally Underserved Are Finding Inner Peace
Karuna Community MN, a small but mighty advocacy nonprofit, is giving criminal legal system-involved individuals the opportunity to roll out the mat and mentally move forward—even if for the moment.
by Jamie Korf
June 21, 2023
There’s a growing movement at Hennepin County Jail, Ramsey County Jail, and a handful of other local correctional facilities where underserved, system-impacted individuals are turning toward an ancient practice for mindfulness, connection and healing: yoga. Time on the mat, coupled with meditation and guided breathwork, helps self-regulate a nervous system often stuck in a state of high reactivity, says Lauren Kvasnicka, executive director of Karuna Community MN, a nonprofit whose mission is to offer compassion-based mindfulness tools for people impacted by the criminal legal system.
“Providing these tools for healing is done in the hopes of creating healthier communities,” she says. “Our communities are only as healthy as every single individual among them.” It’s been shown that instilling the principles of mindfulness can, in the short term, lower rates of recidivism. The goal over the long run is to help break the generational cycles of poverty, addiction, and trauma. “[The mechanisms provided by Karuna] help with feeling a sense of autonomy and grounding—empowerment is an overused word, but our participants share they feel a sense of empowerment to make decisions and feel connected with themselves, “says Kvasnicka.
Karuna is among a small cohort of organizations in the nation that facilitate trauma-informed yoga, giving inmates another option amid a lean slate of weekly programs, like AA meetings or bible study sessions. “That’s all very important programming, but there needs to be more resources available because different things are going to resonate with different people,” she says. “If we can be in support of each other and offer more programming for those system-involved, I think it will ultimately help with building community, restoring justice, and reducing recidivism.”
Starts, Stops, and Storytelling
Kvasnicka, who has roots in public health, yoga, and social justice, connected with founder Mike Millios in 2019 when the organization was just getting off the ground, only facilitating in Hennepin County Jail once a month. Over the next year, Karuna became a 501c3, a board of directors was established, and interest swelled within the local yoga community.
Yoga Behind Bars, a nonprofit based out of Washington with a very similar mission, hosted trauma-informed yoga training specific to incarcerated settings for individuals interested in volunteering their time at Karuna (or simply learning more about the criminal legal system). That was in February of 2020 and just as word was spreading rapidly, the shutdown happened, pausing the work for a period of time.
“It took a while, but we [resumed] programming on a weekly basis via virtual yoga classes at Hennepin County Jail, our longest running partner,” she says. “We kept the program steady.” From there, things started to slowly fall back into place—those classes ramped up to a weekly schedule, Kvasnicka was officially appointed the first employee of Karuna to run operations and programming, and the organization now counts six programs and seven instructors among its roster: Hennepin County Jail (women’s and men’s facilities), Salvation Army’s Adult Rehabilitation Center, two VOA Residential Reentry Centers, Ramsey County Juvenile Detention Center, and Anoka County Jail (adult women’s facility).
“When I talk to folks and say we offer yoga, mindfulness, and meditation in the criminal legal system, the first thing people think is, ‘That’s great. Of course that would feel good!’” she says. “But we’re bigger than that—we want to have conversations with folks about mass incarceration and cycles of trauma and healing, and restoring transformative justice.”
It’s tricky to measure how yoga is benefiting the populations that Karuna serves, so the team relies on the age-old mode of storytelling as their driving metric for success. “We’ll connect at the beginning of a session and afterwards, and I so often hear gratitude for our program,” says Kvasnicka. “People will say that this is the first time they’ve felt connected to themselves in a long time … A testament of our programming is that folks will come up to us at the end and say, ‘Are you in this recovery center?’ ‘Are you in that workhouse?’ or ‘Are you in this prison? I want to continue this yoga practice, or find a yoga community upon my release,’ which is so nice to hear.”
“After our time today, I felt a sense of release. A release of all the negative feelings about being in here [jail], and I feel more able to connect with myself and others.” —Program Participant
As a byproduct of its mission, the facilitators at Karuna strive to eliminate a sense of otherness in the moves that they execute and in the language they use (“we say that we’re ‘facilitators,’ not ‘teachers’”). Yoga has become the zeitgeist of modern Western society, but it’s so much deeper than that. Kvasnicka says it’s a philosophy, a practice, a journey.
“There’s such a societal separation and stigma surrounding system-impacted, reentry, and recovery populations,” she says. “We’re just people, we’re just human, and I encourage myself and others who facilitate with us to do an icebreaker. Check in! [Ask]: how are you feeling today? What color do you feel like and why? We’ll get chatting on something and I think that’s the importance of eliminating otherness and creating connection—that is yoga.”
That sense of shared humanity is why classes can vary from engaging in a moment of stillness to dancing to Beyonce. “Last fall, for whatever reason, we all had sugar for breakfast and played ‘Beyonce Says’ instead of ‘Simon Says,’” she laughs. “That’s yoga—having fun, smiling, honoring the way you show up.”
Laying Down the Law
Weekly yoga isn’t a regular feature of facilities nationwide, but the underlying goal for groups like Karuna is to maintain a steady presence in facilities with the hopes that it will shift wellness programming from a “nice to have” to “must have.” Just this year, The Minnesota Department of Corrections passed the Minnesota Rehabilitation and Reinvestment Act (MRRA), a new approach to sentencing in Minnesota that allows people to earn early release and earned supervision abatement by successfully completing goals identified in their individualized rehabilitation plan.
“This is why I don’t think we’re going away anytime soon because we’re the program that should be a part of that [plan],” says Kvasnicka. “Facilities are understaffed and have their own issues … We want to make this as simple and as easy as possible for everyone. The resource is the practice.”
While change doesn’t happen overnight in the justice system, Kvasnicka is keeping the faith for program participants to become yoga facilitators as part of the Karuna team. That, she says, would be the ultimate dream. “I would love to step away as a facilitator—a better connection comes from those folks in that community who have had similar experiences.
“If this was a value to you, jump on board and let’s spread the mission together.”
For those interested in getting involved, becoming a future trauma-informed yoga facilitator at Karuna, or learning more about the criminal legal system, more information can be found here.
Jamie Korf
Jamie Korf is a deputy editor for Studio MSP at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.
