By Richard Halstead
Marin Independent Journal
SAN RAFAEL, Calif. — James Fox, 60, of Bolinas quit a lucrative job as director of marketing for a prominent wine company while in his 40s to search for more satisfying work. Today, he teaches yoga and “mindfulness” practices to inmates at San Quentin State Prison and serves as programs director for the San Rafael-based Insight Prison Project.
Q: It sounds like your job as director of marketing may have been quite lucrative.
A: It was and it took a lot to walk away from it. I had this longing to redirect myself and do work that was more fulfilling. I’d already been practicing yoga for about six years. I think my yoga practice had a lot do with this self-investigation.
Q: How did you become interested in yoga?
A: I injured my back and a friend showed me a few stretches. Then another friend invited me to come to a yoga class with her. I went to the class and I felt amazingly better, and it wasn’t just my back that felt better. I felt this sense of well-being as a result of doing the practice.
Q: How do you explain to students what mindfulness is?
A: I say mindfulness is paying close attention to one’s experience in the moment without the mind judging or evaluating that experience. It has a lot to do with redirecting the activity of the mind to feeling bodily sensations and staying connected with breathing rather than focused on thinking.
Q: Why teach yoga and mindfulness to inmates?
A: One of the most practical benefits is impulse control. It teaches inmates how to interrupt the kind of knee-jerk reactions that result in addictive tendencies and violent behavior. Most people in prison are dissociated from the their emotions and the feelings in their body. I apply the practice of yoga to healing the harm one causes oneself by being disconnected.
Q: Are inmates more or less receptive than the general population to this approach?
A: I think they are more receptive because no pun intended they’re a captive audience. Since all these classes are voluntary classes, they’re coming because they’re interested.
Q: Do you enjoy working with inmates?
A: I love it. I really like working with men and that’s somewhat unique in the yoga world because the yoga on the street, probably 80 percent are women. I love the diversity of the population that I get to work with. There is a certain soulfulness to life in working with this population that I wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to experience. It makes me understand that regardless of where we come from, what our ethnicity is, that we all pretty much want the same thing, which is love and acceptance.
Copyright 2011 Marin Independent Journal, a MediaNews Group publication
All Rights Reserved