There is, thankfully, no strip search. We cram our pocketbooks into a single small locker in a vestibule, and a guard buzzes us through the last of six locked gates and doors. We follow a prison escort through a blank cinder-block corridor to a gymnasium, where a handful of teenage boys in navy blue jumpsuits are shooting a few desultory baskets.
It is just past 5 pm, time for the Essex County Juvenile Detention Center’s weekly yoga class. Blue exercise mats are already on the floor. For the next twenty minutes, the boys raucously egg one another on as they attempt a series of awkward poses under the watchful eye and occasional reproving word of three correctional officers.
“You’re doing too much talking,” one guard warns.
At the eye of the storm, seemingly unfazed by the unyoga-like commotion, is teacher Jennifer Kohl. A slim, long-haired blonde in khaki pants and a black shirt, Kohl looks younger than her 40 years and radiates warmth and ease.
“Who can do a headstand?” she asks. One resident responds with a perfect headstand. The rest try to follow his lead using the wall as support. Their bodies assume bizarre angles. But the effort starts to focus the boys and quiet them.
Kohl, the owner of Lotus Yoga in Montclair and a former marketing director for the A&E Network, is a devotee of karma yoga—defined, she says, as “service to others.”
On a volunteer basis, Kohl and some of her acolytes are taking yoga where it has seldom gone: not just to this detention center, but to a Newark youth homeless shelter; the Montclair and Newark public schools; a Boonton drug rehabilitation center; the East Orange Veteran’s Administration hospital; a Montclair senior care center; Kessler Rehabilitation Center in West Orange; and other locations, even an orphanage in Quayaquil, Ecuador. All are places where yoga is an unexpected gift.
“When you look at the state of the world, there needs to be a shift in the way we interact with each other,” says Kohl, who has done volunteer work for two decades, since well before she became a serious yogi, or yoga practitioner. “It’s about taking the time to encourage, to connect.”
For Kohl, who once aspired to be a social worker, “this is really not that much of a stretch.” Not compared to, say, a neophyte performing a sun salutation or a bow pose. “It’s really what I always wanted to do. Yoga became the vehicle.” Her empathy for people in need, she says, comes in part from having had “enough unrest in my life to know what it was like.”
The oldest of three sisters, Kohl spent her childhood in southern California, where she remembers her mother taking her to a yoga class. When she was twelve, disaster struck. Her mother, who was planning to open a wellness center, was riding a bike when a drunk driver hit and killed her. At the time, Kohl’s parents were separated. After the accident, the three sisters moved to Menlo Park in northern California to live with their father. Two years later, the family relocated to the Chicago suburbs where he had a job as a YMCA director.
Kohl still counts her mother as a major influence: “I got so much from her in the twelve years that I was with her,” she says. “It’s largely because of her that I’m doing what I’m doing.” The lessons Kohl says she learned were “to really believe in yourself and to be kind to others…and to not take no for
an answer.”
But the tragedy threw her off course for a while. In her early teens, she went through what she calls a “wild spell.” While on probation for shoplifting, she and a friend used a credit card belonging to her friend’s father to fly from Chicago to Boulder. That’s when the teenage Kohl ended up in a juvenile detention center for a week. “That was my turning point,” she says.
Married at eighteen, Kohl had a son a year later, divorced, and found herself a single mother. She decided to pursue a career in marketing and for awhile worked as an assistant at the record label owned by Michael Nesmith, formerly of the Monkees. UnApix Entertainment hired Kohl as director of direct marketing, and that sparked her move to Montclair from Los Angeles a decade ago. A&E eventually hired her away. But when her department relocated to Stamford, Connecticut, about seven years ago, Kohl found the commute too difficult.
The stresses of work had led her back to yoga. She picked up certifications in vinyasa (flow), prenatal, restorative, and kids’ yoga, and now certifies others to teach. When she opened her own studio in 2004, she was still doing marketing. “I was working from 6 am to midnight. I said, ‘Okay, that’s not going to work.’” It was all yoga from then on.
From the beginning, offering yoga to untraditional constituencies was part of her plan. She invited women recovering from substance abuse at a nearby shelter to take classes for free. In recent months, with the help of fellow yogi Mary Paige Snell, she has worked to expand Lotus Yoga Community Outreach to places like the detention center and the Newark branch of Covenant House, a voluntary refuge for youths in crisis that offers classes and programs to get them back on their feet. The next step, she says, is starting a nonprofit foundation to ramp up the number of community classes offered and fund teachers’ salaries. Right now, Kohl personally donates five to seven yoga classes a week, and other Lotus teachers contribute a total of five or more.
“The whole point of yoga is unity,” says Kohl as she pilots her black Jeep Commander around Newark with a few wrong turns here and there. “Your suffering is my suffering, and your happiness is my happiness. Yoga means union. I don’t think those kids in the jail are different than me.” When she tells them about her own week behind bars, though, they laugh at her, she says. Their misdeeds are more serious.
Lisa Weathers, who oversees recreational activities at the detention center, says that yoga has “worked for our residents very well. It disciplined them—which they needed. It relaxes them. It allows them to interact with each other. They encourage each other in yoga.”
At Covenant House, Kohl says she had no takers when she started in mid-2007. “It wasn’t till recently that I really had a group. I’d show up, there’d be no one there; I’d show up, there’d be one. But I just kept showing up.” The demand is now so great that she has added an extra weekly class.
This afternoon there are nine participants, a mix of young men and women—and not enough yoga mats. Five residents watch from the sidelines, rapt, as Kohl leads the class through a series of asanas (poses) and breathing exercises. Waves of laughter follow each challenging posture, and as the class continues you can sense the individuals—from the tentative first-timers to the young woman close to controlling a split—jelling into a fragile community.
“What do you mean, you don’t know if you’re doing it?” Kohl exclaims. “You’re doing it!”
After class, Makenson St. Juste, a 21-year-old Haitian immigrant who works as an airport baggage handler, says the yoga has loosened his muscles after basketball practice earlier that day: “My body’s not tight right now. I like it.” Wally Henry, 20, a newcomer to Covenant House, is also pleased. “This is my first time,” he says. “I’m glad I chose this.” The alternative was driver’s education.
“It’s been amazing, the impact the physical activity has on the young people’s wellness,” says Meghan Leigh, coordinator of program development at Covenant House. “They look forward to class. Then when they come from class, they feel refreshed and rejuvenated. Their minds seem to be more focused and in better places.”
“Yoga is so much about choices, everything from how you’re going to do the asana to what asana you’re going to do,” says Kohl. “I don’t think what I’m doing is necessarily going to change anyone’s life. But down the road, if we can get yoga as part of the regular program, it may spur juvenile offenders and others to think, A violent path hasn’t worked for me. I have choices. Maybe a peaceful path is something I’ll try.”