We’re published!!! Check out the full research here in the Nation Association of Social Workers March 2021 issue. A Randomized Controlled Trial of Yoga with Incarcerated Females: Impacts on Emotion Regulation, Body Dissociation, and Warnings of Substance Relapse.

The results are in, and our curriculum has shown positive changes for our students on their ability to regulate emotions, their sense of body connection and warnings of substance relapse.

When Marybeth and I created this program we believed in the healing powers of yoga through our own experiences. It was incredibly important to us to also have the curriculum validated by scientific measures. We wanted very much not to be yoga missionaries. Two white women rolling into the prison trying to “sell our brand of salvation and healing to incarcerated populations.

When Samantha Willy came to us and created the research to test the efficacy of what we had set out to do - lessen the ongoing negative effects of trauma - we were excited. Throughout the process it has been true that we very much wanted the results even if they pointed to our curriculum not delivering our aims. If the outcomes pointed to EMBER not working, then we knew we needed to get back to the drawing board. And we had so much willingness to do that because we wanted to offer a program that works.

While more research needs to be done, these results are very promising.

Here’s a summary: the eMBER group demonstrated positive improvement across all three measures (warnings of relapse, body disassociation and difficulties in emotion regulation), as compared to the other groups, (yay!). Warnings of relapse is a substance use measure that attempts to predict substance use relapse. Body disassociation is a sub scale on the scale of body connection that measures body disassociation (which is often the result of trauma). Emotion regulation is a scale that measures difficulties with emotion regulation, which is a symptom in a variety of mental health/substance use challenges. The EMBER group showed improvement (a decrease) in all three measures, which is fantastic. We had a large enough sample size to have a good statistical analysis, which enables us to be confident in the results.