Frankie Stone (centre) with Eddie Cross, a PE instructor at HMP Eastwood Park, and Geoff O' Meara, from Prison Yoga. Credit: supplied
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When Frankie Stone found yoga, she was recovering from substance addiction.
“I had such low self-worth and self-esteem after my prison sentence that I ended up falling into addiction for about 10 years,” she says. “When I got into recovery in 2009, yoga became a really valuable tool.”
Her incarceration ended decades ago. Since then, she has turned her life around, becoming a yoga instructor, photographer and joining the Big Issue frontline team in Bristol. But the path she took – falling into addiction after leaving prison without support – is still a common one.
Women leaving custody can struggle with insecure housing, separation from their families and mental health challenges. The Prison Reform Trust has described prison as “often an ineffective and damaging response to women’s offending”.
Stone wants to help change that. Through her community interest company, AnyBody Yoga, she delivers six-week trauma-aware yoga courses at HMP Eastwood Park, helping women develop tools to manage their wellbeing.
“The prison system is broken,” says Stone. “It should be a real opportunity for anyone that’s incarcerated to get support to recover.
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“That doesn’t happen so often in prison. It’s just a holding space.”
Women are then released “often without housing or displaced”, she says, “and then they sort of fall back into the same patterns of behaviour.”
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Yoga offers a way to interrupt that cycle, Stone says. Through movement, breathing and focused attention, it can help people regulate their nervous systems and feel more in control of their responses. That can be particularly valuable for women who have experienced trauma, which can manifest physically as hypervigilance, persistent survival responses and dissociation.
“I’m arming people with tools,” says Stone, “to help people find ways of regulating their own nervous system. Because that’s really the only way that people can change – if they can find a sense of safety within their bodies.”
Living in a state of “hyper vigilance”, she adds, can make people more reactive. “It’s like those neural pathways are ingrained, and if you haven’t learned a way of creating new neural pathways to be able to pause, you’ll just continue.”
Yoga can be a vital tool for regulating your emotions. Image:
In 2027, Stone hopes to introduce a 200-hour yoga teacher training programme inside the prison. The aim is to give women the qualification and skills to lead sessions in custody and teach yoga after their release. She also has worked with Clean Break, an organisation running theatre and writing workshops in prison. The case for such programmes is not only moral, but economic.
“There is so much trauma in those environments, and it’s so sad,” Stone says.
“It costs so much money to put a person in prison. If that was invested in their rehabilitation, it would save the government so much.”
Big Issue is also working to make the transition out of prison less precarious. As part of its partnership with HMP Eastwood Park, women leaving custody can be referred to the Bristol service, where they can find a friendly face and a cup of tea, get referrals to specialist substance misuse services and receive help applying for ID.
The team can also provide a phone with credit and, for those who want one, a pitch and magazines to sell.
