In October of 2010, while on the front end of a 2 ½-year-long heavy relapse back into alcohol, I was offered a chance to do some free counseling with a woman named Christine Grace, at Unity Church in Santa Barbara. Christine was the Associate Pastor of the church, a “friend of a friend” who had arranged for me to get some personal counseling, as she (my friend) had recognized that my life was in an alcohol-fueled hopeless turmoil of drama and self-created wreckage. I was as lost as lost can be and clinging to a highly toxic and dysfunctional romantic relationship with a codependent woman who had significant untreated problems of her own. That woman was one of my many addictions and she had just taken out a restraining order on me, which devastated me at the time, since, from my perspective, I had done more to protect her than any other man in her entire life. But now, I was the “bad guy” and was facing a court hearing where the judge would make a decision on whether the restraining order had merit or not. That is another story in itself, with a pretty humorous (humorous now) outcome, which I chalked up as a victory for me, at the time. Anyway, I sat in Christine’s office for our counseling session and within minutes I experienced an outpouring release of emotion, crying, sobbing, devastating tears of dread over the break up and pending court embarrassment all the while grieving the loss of the relationship. My then soon-to-be-ex girlfriend was a woman who I truly believed could never be replaced. She was everything I had always wanted but could never quite put together in the hundreds of women I had been with since high school. So, to me, this was a big loss. Devastating.
After getting it all out, after crying and sobbing and expressing what seemed like hours of hysteria, Christine looked at me and smiled lovingly and said two things that I will never forget. She said, “Your problem is very simple, Mike. You need to forgive yourself.” I had no idea what she was talking about at the time, until I bought the book that she referred me to, “The Twelve Steps to Forgiveness”, by Paul Ferrini. This book ended up changing my life, even though it would take me more than 2 more years to get sober. It planted some amazing seeds of self-healing that I was able to do and continue to do in my new sober life. Christine also told me some magic words that I could not even come close to believing, on that same day. As we prepared to finish our session, she looked at me and said, “Mike, you may not know this yet, but I promise you that it is true (I could see in her eyes that SHE did believe what she was going to say): The universe is conspiring on your behalf for the greatest, most beautiful and perfect outcome for your life.” I looked back at her through swollen teary eyes like she was crazy. I had NO IDEA what she was talking about. That made no sense to me, but I clung to the possibility that maybe someday it could be true. But, if that was going to be true, MANY miracles would have to line up and I was not a believer in miracles at that time. So, that was me, in 2010, and as I said before, I was still 27 months away from taking the last drink of alcohol in my life and undergoing a process of personal transformation and healing. There’s a hilarious quote from the big book of Alcoholics Anonymous that reads: “Gradually things got worse.”, and that is the perfect statement to insert here. I ran amuck, as they say, for over two more years, taking advantage of everything and everyone in my path, and blaming my increased problems on everyone and everything else along the way. I wanted to be dead every day for several months, leading up to the end of my drinking. I’d lay in bed crying, not knowing if I could make it through the day but too afraid to kill myself. I woke up each morning for several months in a row, toward the end of 2012, extremely pissed off that I hadn’t died in my sleep. I imagined what it would be like to get stabbed or shot in many of the high risk situations I put myself in while living in Phoenix in 2012. I imagined looking up at my attacker(s) and in my dying breath, saying to them: “THANK YOU!”
I took my first yoga class in Arlington, Texas, on August 25, 2004. I was instantly turned on to yoga with Joseph Stingley, my instructor and eventually my mentor and trainer for my own certification to teach. I practiced yoga 7 days a week. However, I was also into my alcoholism, fully in denial and nowhere close to being “done” with an extended mid-life crisis. So, I started my yoga practice and teaching career as a full blown alcoholic. I could teach a great asana practice and also could party like a madman several nights/week and on the weekends. I carried on all kinds of mischief and mayhem with all kinds of women all over Dallas, TX, Las Vegas, NV, and then again back in Santa Barbara. After burning bridges in all these towns and then again in Santa Barbara, I took my drunken lifestyle and yoga and fitness career to Phoenix, AZ, until I burned every bridge I had there. Yoga and women and alcohol and any other drugs and substances you had that could create the connection that I was missing and help me to hide in my addictive disease, bury my anger and problems from the past and ignore all my responsibilities. I was a fairly high-functioning alcoholic, so could always seem to keep a job – for a while. Phoenix was the end of that.
In January of 2013, I finally returned to Santa Barbara from Phoenix, AZ, a defeated man, having nearly died in the hospital from kidneys shutting down, due to the collective years of abuse on my body from the alcohol. I was 52 years old and my body was finally done. I had never felt so physically ill, having collapsed at a temporary job I had taken, working nights and then teaching by day and trying to nap in between. My workmates watched me to go into convulsions on a warehouse concrete floor for quite a while before they finally called an ambulance. At the hospital a nurse walked into my room and read back my statements to me. I had been diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, a serious syndrome due to a direct or indirect muscle injury. It results from the death of muscle fibers and release of their contents into the bloodstream. This can lead to complications such as renal failure. This occurs when the kidneys cannot remove waste and concentrated urine. In rare cases, rhabdomyolysis can even cause death. The nurse said, “You wrote down that you are a chronic alcoholic.” I said, “Yes”. She then looked at me, paused, and said, “How’s that working for you?” Then she turned around and left the room, the door closing behind her. I burst into tears. I decided I didn’t want to be dead and I finally asked for help in a truly surrendering way. Alcohol had kicked my ass, fair and square. If I could go back and find out who that nurse was, I’d give her a big kiss! This was my first legitimate moment of clarity in regard to the concept of surrender. So I made arrangements and I got back to Santa Barbara within a few days, checked into a program the moment I got into town and got busy with the hard work of early sobriety. I got a solid A.A. sponsor, and a good drug and alcohol counselor. I moved into sober living and went to lots of meetings. One day, in my fifth month of sobriety, I missed a call to my cell phone from Ginny Kuhn, another yoga instructor who I vaguely remembered from the past. How she remembered me at all is beyond me, to this day. Once upon a time, she saw me teaching a yoga class on the pool deck at La Cumbre Country Club for some housewives who had too much time on their hands. Ginny had been at the club getting swim lessons for her son, Jacob. At the time Ginny called, she was already one year into a project at the Santa Barbara County jail. She was teaching yoga to female inmates as a part of her Master’s Degree project. She had gone through many hoops and obstacles and applications and red tape to get herself approved to teach the women at the jail. She had decided that it was time to start a men’s program, and she thought of me. The universe was conspiring!
I listened to Ginny’s voicemail and her proposal for me to teach the men at the jail and I nearly went down onto my knees with gratitude and disbelief. Ginny did not know anything about my struggle with alcohol, or what I had been through to finally get sober. The rewards of sobriety were coming fast to my life. I had always wanted to teach yoga to some underserved population, and a friend of mine, Marc Hyman, who knew I was an instructor had previously turned me onto a book by James Fox, the founder of the Prison Yoga Project. However, at the time Marc gave me that book I was in the turmoil of that co-dependent girlfriend thing – the story above, and I wasn’t even close to becoming sober. I wasn’t anywhere near being able to handle this kind of responsibility. But now, I was in the beginning stages of the self-healing process with a lot of help from my amazing sponsor Jim, my therapist Marty, and many other people who were various caseworkers and social workers who had the patience and compassion to work with me. I was maintaining 100% sobriety on a daily basis and I was slowly working my way back into the fold as a local yoga instructor, and for the first time ever, teaching with integrity. I was finally living a congruent life!
It took me from the month of May until August of 2013 to complete all of the necessary background checks, application forms and insurance forms and interviews and orientations to finally get approved to teach at the Santa Barbara County Jail. Chuck McClain, the head of the Sheriff’s Treatment Program and his key staff, Maria Antonia-Durbiano supervised me and mentored me at the jail. Fantastic people. Taught me how to be “smart” in the jail environment. They started me in at the Medium Security Facility (MSF), aka, the “Honor Farm”. 300+ men are housed there at any given time and the Correctional Officers make an announcement once I arrive: “Anyone who wants to do YOGA, line up and sign up, up here at the office. Limited to 19 guys! Hurry up!” The first day I went to teach at the jail, the first thing I noticed was the SMELL of the place. It’s nasty. It smells like old, dirty, musty filth. Like wet, sweaty laundry that’s been wadded up in a ball and thrown into the corner of some teenager’s room and then left for a few weeks, while the sun heats up the room all day and no one opens any doors or windows. You walk into the room and the smell hits you like someone slapped you in the face with a warm, soaking wet beach towel. It’s just disgusting. The jail is a nasty place and it’s dark and dingy and smelly and no one wants to be there. EVERYONE is “doing time”, staff included! Can you believe that I look forward to going there every week now – that I can’t wait to go and spend the best 2 hours of my week at that nasty place?
I always had this feeling that I wanted to teach at the jail. Never really thought about why, until recently. Marty, my therapist, told me to keep a journal. I worked with Marty for over two years in therapy to start to uncover all of my own pain I’ve been carrying around all my life, literally since childhood. I had some 40+ year-old scars – deep scars in my gut and heart from childhood that never got a chance to heal, so Marty and I slowly started to unlock the doors and walk through those doors together, as I became more aware and more mindful, and somehow this whole jail thing was on the grow. Marty started teaching me about Mindfulness. I went to Marty every week and told him all about the jail. He told me to keep journaling. Everyone wanted to be in my jail class, as the word got out and it became popular amongst the inmates. Some guys who were on the film crew from the original “Restorative Justice” Program heard about what we were doing at the jail and they came and did a documentary on us. As the word got out and it played all over local TV and people started to call me and text me and Facebook me and they were saying, ”Hey man, I saw you on TV! That’s awesome what you’re doing with the jail yoga program!” Ginny applied for a grant and she walked out with a $10,000.00 check. She paid me to teach for about a year in there and that was a big help because I started catching up on child support and other financial amends I needed to make.
We were using the James Fox program and book and we were using the money to buy yoga books and more mats for the men and women at the jail. I was teaching at least 15 – 19 guys each week and the guys were hugging me and thanking me for bringing THEM a little peace and serenity in their shitty life behind bars, each week. God was moving around, the universe was conspiring. I was changing. I would frequently go out to the parking lot and sit in my “sober” car after teaching jail yoga and just sob and cry and I couldn’t believe that these men in the county jail appreciated me and what I was bringing them – just being humble. Do you know what a “sober” car is? It’s a car that a guy gets who has achieved a period of sobriety, and has held a sober job for a while and has a little cash in his pocket. A sober job, for example is a menial, low pressure job, such as cleaning swimming pools, or working at a pet store, or in my case washing dishes at the dining hall of the local community college. It’s humbling. It’s minimum wage. And it helps a man think and meditate and heal while he works with his hands to help others and learns how to be reliable, doing simple tasks, but working hard. Once you prove yourself to be reliable, you save up a few bucks and get a sober car. The sober car is normally a hideous but reliable vehicle. Mine was a ’98 Camry. Severely faded maroon, with 127,000 miles when I got it. Barely broken in! It had a “rice burner” exhaust system, which made a lot of noise, so you knew I was coming from down the street quite a ways. The car door handles broke on a couple of doors, so no one could use those doors, but we figured it out and used the other doors. Minimal insurance and minimal chance of the car being stolen. That car ended up transporting HUNDREDS of my buddies to A.A. meetings and it got me to work and to the jail. That’s a “sober” car. I was being a servant for once. Being a sober servant. Finally GIVING, instead of taking. Teaching the principles of the yoga life – the spiritual life, by example, for the very first time in my life. I wasn’t healing those guys in jail, they were healing ME! I became addicted to HELPING OTHERS – helping inmates who were really hurting. It’s changed my life.
There are so many stories. So many sad, inspiring, moving, crazy fun exciting things that have happened in the four walls of that classroom at the jail where we do yoga and it just keeps getting more powerful every week. Here are some of my favorite stories. On my first day to teach, I was very nervous, not knowing what to expect. I’m in a confined space with 19 gnarly, smelly scary looking men staring me down to see what the hell I was going to present. What the hell is this yoga thing?? The administration had given me this clip-on name tag that kept falling off, because we’re moving around in yoga, doing stuff – physical, athletic stuff, sometimes acrobatic stuff. The nametag said, “VISITOR”. Obviously I was a visitor, since I wasn’t in a “COUNTY JAIL” blue jumpsuit. The visitor tag kept falling off. Once when it fell off, one of the guys in the front row, a white guy named Sean, said, “Now you’re one of us.” He scared the shit out of me, the way he was looking at me, and he eventually smiled, after saying that to me, but it did freak me out a little at the time. This was my first day. He had shoulder length blonde hair and was missing some important teeth that you wouldn’t want to be missing in a normal society. He had some scars on him, had seen some serious shit go down, I’m sure, in his life. About a year after that, I saw Sean at the Alano Club at the Friday noon meeting, during the time when I was the secretary of that meeting, a one-year commitment. I barely recognized him, because he had a full set of beautiful teeth, was wearing very nice clothes and his long blonde hair was clean and combed and he literally looked like he had just jumped off of the cover of “Surfer” magazine. And to boot, he was at the A.A. meeting with a gorgeous girl! I was shocked. He came up to me and gave me a huge hug. He said, “Remember me? I got out. Because of you, and because of the yoga thing, I decided to get sober.” I was floored. I cried again that day. Just sobbing tears of gratitude.
At the jail, the guys kept coming back to class and some guys get out of jail each week and some new guys come, so it’s a bit of a different crowd each week with a few steady regulars. The average “stay” at the county jail here is 1 year. But the word got out that it was a cool class, because we did a kick ass workout, through the vinyasa practice and we got in a great stretch and then we learned how to do basic meditations. I was getting better and better at my own meditation with all the outside help from Marty and his mindful training he was giving me and my own sober living habits. I was really starting to transform into a solid practitioner and instructor. Another time in the jail class some guys almost broke out in a fight. We were doing side planks and the guys were getting real tired, shaking arms and about to give up, when this guy named Charles suddenly yelled out, “MY GUYS DON’T QUIT OR I’LL KICK YOUR ASS!!” He was serious. I stopped the class. I said, “What do you mean ‘MY GUYS’. What’s that? There’s no ‘my guys’, ‘your guys’, ‘her guys’. There’s no yoga teams. There’s no competition in yoga!” They all just kind of stared at me, but I knew they were going to do whatever they wanted to do. I have learned that there are many sub-cultures and plenty of inside prison politics in their world, and I am merely a visitor into that world. I learned that Charles had formed a group of guys. He read in the yoga book and some other books I had recommended to him all about how a “sangha” works. Thich Nhat Hanh says that when we’re in prison or jail, we should form a brotherhood of like-minded individuals to form a “sangha”, to support each other in our daily spiritual practice and in our daily meditation and yoga path. Charles had taken that to mean that he should organize his own yoga “gang” and he would pit them against anyone in the jail not wanting to join “HIS” yoga gang. Amazing, the mind of the antisocial, narcissistic, criminal personality. This guy was in jail and waiting to eventually go on to a 10-year prison sentence for embezzlement. The $4 or $5 million he stole was still unaccounted for and he had no plans to return it, so off to jail he went, and in the meantime, why not form a jail yoga sangha GANG under his own name? Fascinating. Amazing stuff.
One day an older Hispanic gentleman came to class and spoke no words to me or anyone else. It is not uncommon in this town to have at least a 50% Hispanic population in jail, and I would estimate that between 10 and 20% of the Hispanics in jail speak no English. His name is Jaime, and since he did not speak to me or anyone else, I figured he didn’t speak English. I said hello to him and thanked him for coming to my class. When I got up closer to him, I noticed that he was a cutter. He had literally hundreds of scars all up and down his arms. In addition to that, he had pounded a large construction nail into his collarbone and it protruded (permanently) out the front of his chest and was in a bent-down position with the nail head pointing down. Looked pretty gnarly, and hard not to stare at. I just treated him like any other human being who is a child of God and worthy of love and respect. He showed me respect by coming to my yoga class, entrusting me with his health and putting forth his best effort. He let me into his “house”. One day about six weeks after he started my class, as we were lining up to return to the main barracks area following class, Jaime pulled me aside with the first words he ever spoke to me, in broken English. He said, “Look Mike.” He rolled up his sleeves and there were no more scars on his arms. “Look what you did for me. My head (pointing at his head). My voices don’t talk no more. My mind is quiet now because of what you taught me on how to meditate. Thank you, Mike.” I could barely breathe from the lump of inspirational tears that was barely being held in my throat. I made it out to the parking lot a few minutes later, got into my car and cried like a baby for a good ten minutes. Thanking God for that man and what that man did that day for me. Unbelievable. God was back in my life. The universe was showing me the miracles.
I got a chance to teach over at the main jail eventually. The main jail smells like, feels like, looks like what you see in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”. There are approximately 1,000 men at any given time in the main jail and they are felons and most of them are violent offenders and many of them are awaiting sentencing in order to be moved on to another facility somewhere in California, like Soledad, or Chino, or Wasco, or San Quentin – places I don’t know if I even want to think about. The main jail is over 50 years old and has terrible ventilation and is nasty and smelly and large and everything echoes. Doors slam and lock and echo for a while. There is a feeling of dread and permanence. I was assigned to teach in the “P.C.” 200 unit every Saturday morning, from 10 – 11:30 am. P.C. stands for Protective Custody and the men in that unit are segregated from the general population. By the time I started teaching at the main jail, I was comfortable and confident walking around the place, because I had already been over there a couple of times and kind of knew what to expect. The staff are all extremely professional and helpful and solid and they like me, because I respect their world too and I thank them every time I go over there. I stay out of their way and let them do their job and I don’t annoy them with stupid questions or requests. The P.C. 200 unit is a 2-story quad, with six cells of two men on top and six cells on the bottom, and a common area where they are occasionally all let out of their cells. I eventually learned that the men in the odd numbered cells do not like or get along with the men in the even numbered cells. There is a “yard” where we do yoga that can fit all 24 men, if they all choose to attend, and most weeks, I’d get about 18-20 guys. The guards (Correctional Officers) were very reluctant to open even and odd cell doors to let them out at the same time to attend yoga, but I kind of insisted on it, telling them that if they only let odds or evens, and not the others, it may create more tension. The guards warned me that once I was in the “yard”, I was locked in there with them and not to come crying to them if a fight broke out. Incidentally, there is a small button on the wall that I push, when we’re done with yoga and it’s time to unlock me and the inmates and let us back out. Until I push that button, I’m all alone for the class. We are being watched on video camera, but the C.O.s are quite a ways away.
Well, my first day to teach at PC200, I learned that most of the men there had been in jail for over 1 year and one guy had been there for 4 years and most of them were waiting for sentencing for their crimes. I don’t ask them what their crimes are. I don’t care and it’s none of my business. I also don’t ask them why they are in protective custody. If they want to tell me, then they do, and some of them do. I’m there to teach yoga. One of the guys I was most impressed with right off the bat was a young guy – 26 or 27 years-old, named “Jeff”. Jeff had stabbed another guy in the face and in the eye after a 5-day meth bender, when he believed that guy to be stealing his possessions. He was homeless at the time. The guy he stabbed came real close to dying but survived and recovered. That man was African American and Jeff is white and he got an attempted murder charge with a special hate crime tagged onto it, so he eventually got sentenced to 22 years in state prison and he was recently transferred to his new prison home. At the time I met Jeff, he was a solid, well-read, kind-hearted practicing Christian. He had stacks of books in his cell and was extremely physically fit. He embraced the practice of yoga immediately and was loving and kind to me and all the other guys (of all races) in the class. Jeff helped me set up the mats and he cleaned them off for everyone after class and was super encouraging to all the other participants, with no agenda. Just a true servant. He was so joyful, I was just floored. I could not believe that a guy who was locked up in jail and on his way to prison could possibly be this happy in life – consistently happy! I asked him how he did it. How did he maintain this constant joy. He told me it was because of his faith and also because of being clean and sober. He had 4 years of clean time, at that time. He was a renewed man. I had so much respect for a man who approached life the way that Jeff did. He truly inspired me and he “lifted up” all the other guys around him constantly, through his positive talk and encouragement and example of being a servant. Shortly after Jeff was shipped out and we said our last goodbyes, his cell mate (“celly”), Miguel was formally found guilty on murder charges in a gang related shooting. He stood in broad daylight in a well-known gang neighborhood in our little beach town and emptied out 6 rounds of bullets into another man who died on the spot. Miguel has yet to be sentenced. I look at him and look at his eyes and knowing that he is my own son’s young age of 22 and he’ll spend the greater part of his life in prison. But Miguel comes to yoga and has learned to meditate and breathe and to work out with discipline and accuracy and move with intention and he’s transferred that learning into living a life of intention and purpose from some of my yoga teachings and the teachings of the yoga book.
There are several more stories I could tell you about teaching at the jail and I’ve only been there for just under 3 years so far. This year I will be able to get in at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary. The guy in charge of volunteers like me has already asked me how I feel about working with the men in solitary. I said, “HELL YES!!” What is it?? What is this appeal for me? What is this doing for me? It is healing me. The act of going to these men who are in a cage for whatever reason and just maybe me having a TINY little bit of influence in their thinking – their perspective – their hope – their outlook on God and life and internal peacefulness and being worthy of love and unconditional positive regard – being worthy of a happy life and better times ahead and maybe getting the chance to make amends. Yoga behind bars can free a man within. This is what I want them to know. And when they start to “get” that, this whole thing is somehow healing me. Maybe I am now finally forgiving me. Maybe I have found out how to be the man I was supposed to be all that time.