We bring yoga to prisons. Once inside, we train adults in custody to become yoga teachers for other adults in custody. Establishing certified yoga teachers within prisons builds multiple layers of capacity and healing on the inside, from community members on the inside in tandem with community members on the "outside".

“The program has given me more perspective of the brain and neuroscience stuff. It’s been cool looking at the brain developmentally, looking at how people are functioning. That’s taught me a little more compassion, a little more patience.”
​– Shawn, OSCI Teacher Training Graduate ​

The student populations at Bridges Middle School and Thomas A. Edison High School consist of a bright, culturally and socially diverse student body with a large variety of learning differences including ADHD, Tourette’s, dyslexia, and autism spectrum. Yoga helps them to cope with the anxiety and frustration that often accompanies these differences, to improve their sensorimotor skills, and promotes focus, concentration, self-awareness and self-acceptance.

ON PAUSE DUE TO COVID

Legacy Emanuel
Many of our students at Legacy Emanuel are living at or below the poverty line. They struggle with multiple chronic health issues that are challenging due to lack of resources including obesity, diabetes, and depression. Many students carry with them trauma histories due to generations of poverty. Yoga helps them to manage their pain, regain strength, and be in community with others who experience similar challenges.

Legacy Good Samaritan
At Legacy Good Samaritan, we offer programs within their Pain Management Clinic. All of our students suffer from chronic pain conditions, including fibromyalgia, lupus, and arthritis. The practice of yoga helps them to interrupt the pain cycle with brain training exercises, mindful movement, breathing practices, and meditation.

The community of students at the Volunteers of America Drug + Alcohol Treatment Center has been exploring yoga within their treatment program two mornings a week to learn:

• how to have a new relationship with their body,
• how to navigate the process of drug and alcohol withdrawal symptoms, and
• how to develop life skills that include their physical body, such as:
  • mindfulness of sensations to increase self-awareness,
  • improved capacity for impulse control and "getting comfortable feeling uncomfortable" (less reactivity),
  • portable mind-body interventions for anxiety, such as coordinating breathing, sensing + moving, and
  • interpersonal respect, mutuality, and encouragement, as they all endeavor to learn new things in a physical practice. 

Yoga is more and more integrated into treatment centers asa proven trauma-informed, somatic practice that helps alleviate the symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.

Pandit Deobrat Mishra carries on the vision of his mother, founder of this school for nurturing and sustaining the arts of Indian tradition: music and dance.

Together, we bring light into darkness.
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At DAYA Foundation, we understand that when human beings are shunned or isolated, we all suffer.  That which we shun, is that which we shun in ourselves, too.

Priyanka is a child that some people have shunned or ignored. Priyanka was born into poverty and illness and has been living at an orphanage in India since she was 2 years old.

Like you, Priyanka was born with a spark.  A creativity and aliveness that wants to shine and be shared.
The Benares Academy of Indian Classical Music, with the guidance of Pandit Deobrat Mishra, welcomed Priyanka. Left with no education or mentorship, children from the orphanage often must turn to begging or survival sex work. However, Priyanka and other children in need were offered the chance to learn music, thanks in part to support by donors like you.
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Priyanka learned from Deobrat and the Academy over many months. At first timid and hungry, she blossomed as she had the chance to make friends and share meals.  

Will you make a gift today and ensure other children need not go hungry, spiritually or physically? DONATE TODAY!

Because of the support of community, Priyanka began to make eye contact, to smile, to sit closer to the other students. She began to sing more loudly. She shared her meals with younger students, making sure everyone was nourished. Priyanka soon began lessons in dance as well. She startled less often. She practiced her hand and foot mudras constantly. Arriving each morning ready for the next thing she would learn, Priyanka began to bring another child from the orphanage.

Music and dance helped to bring back a joyous curiosity and playfulness. Priyanka made friends and started to build community. Poverty and isolation are overwhelming, and smother the spark of creativity and feeling that connects us to one another.

It takes a compassionate, consistent, and nourishing community to reach toward those in need.

Here at DAYA Foundation, we need your help to support those who are shunned, isolated and marginalized. Will you join us in helping children in need in India?

Together with your support, DAYA Foundation serves those most marginalized and in need of nourishment.  This includes the work of DAYA in its partnership with the Benares Academy of Indian Classical Music and Pandit Deobrat Mishra.