Brandon: Welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. I’m Brandon Nappi, and especially welcome to this Within episode of the Leader’s Way podcast where we explore questions of spirituality and healing and justice and the people who are actively at work every day at making the world a better place.
Folks who have followed the podcast for a while or follow me on Instagram where I share almost every day my perspectives on life and God and spirituality and healing and wellness know that I am equally comfortable in traditionally religious spaces, in Christian spaces as well as yoga spaces, meditation spaces, Zen Buddhist spaces and spaces that are spiritual but not religious. I really appreciate the conversations that happen within each of these kinds of communities. And one of the things that I often lament is that there are not more conversations between those groups, among those groups, conversations among spiritual folks who might not be religious and folks who are both spiritual and religious. And of course, my life is actively involved in both of those worlds. And so today’s conversation is about the integration of personal spirituality with work for justice in the world. This is something here at Berkeley Divinity School within the Episcopal tradition that’s really important to us that faith can never be fully private that there are collective and communal and societal ramifications of what we believe about the life and ministry of Jesus. And I’m always really curious about those leaders both within churches and organized religious communities who have really been able to integrate the life of faith with the life of activism.
Over these Lenten days, this period of prayer and preparation before Easter, I’ve been reading Martin Luther King’s letter from Birmingham jail as he reflects on the public witness of his personal faith, the way in which his convictions about God and Jesus and the infinite worth of every human being have collective consequences with how we ought to organize society around equity and justice and equality. And over the last couple of decades, I’ve been really, really struck at the growing privatization of spirituality. That spirituality has grown more and more private and individualistic. And so I’m really intrigued, especially by the spiritual teachers, the folks out in the world who might consider themselves spiritual, but not necessarily religious, the ways in which they are using spiritual practice to address collective injustices and really embodying the belief that our spiritual lives are not only for us, not only for our personal healing, but meant for the healing of the world.
And one of the people who’ve done this outside of traditionally religious communities has been Sean Corn, the yoga teacher whose work to bring yoga to some of the most urgent social justice issues of our day has been underway for decades, a real pioneer of integrating personal spiritual practice in the world of yoga to political activism.
And what an honor it was to have this conversation with her. And so if you’re from the yoga world, you likely know Sean’s work. If you are not a part of this world, perhaps she’s a new voice to you, but I’m particularly interested in the ways in which her personal conversion, her personal transformation quickly became a calling to heal the world. And so I hope that this conversation really inspires a kind of questioning for you about how do you integrate your personal spiritual beliefs with what you believe about how society is organized and about how you feel called to get involved and work toward justice and healing in the world.
So let me tell you about Sean Corn. She’s an internationally acclaimed yoga teacher, author, public speaker, who’s been at the forefront of yoga, activism and community service for more than 30 years. And she’s chosen to use her platform to help bring awareness to global issues, including sex trafficking, HIV, AIDS awareness, animal rights, racism. She was named National Yoga Ambassador for youth AIDS and received both the Global Green in International Environmental Leadership Award and the Humanitarian Award from the Smithsonian Institute. She co-founded the organization Off the Mat Into the World, which trained leaders in community activism. She also co-founded the Global SEVA Challenge, which raised over three and a half million dollars by activating yoga and wellness communities to fund and to raise awareness around various social justice challenges in our communities. Her book Revolution of the Soul was published in 2019 and her online program “Align with Source” has a global reach of thousands and has been a real touchstone of community support for so many people. So I’m so thankful to have this conversation about spirituality and prayer and conversion and yoga and activism and healing and outrage, all the things with Seane Corn. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. (Upbeat Music)
Welcome to “Within,” a contemplative segment within the Leaders Way podcast that explores the convergence of mental health, art, and spirituality through authentic conversations across wisdom traditions about personal and collective transformation.
We welcome artists, musicians, spiritual teachers, and healers to reflect on the sacred wisdom needed to heal the world’s deepest wounds. Within examines the inner path to wholeness, not through quick fixes or spiritual bypassing, but through courageous engagement with life’s profound challenges.
Seane Corn, welcome to the Leader’s Way podcast. We’re so thankful to have you here.
Seane: Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here as well. I appreciate you taking the time to ask me to join you on this.
B: Oh, I’m so excited. I mean, your work in the yoga world and beyond the yoga world has touched so many people. And I think when I first came to yoga, oh goodness, maybe 25 years ago or so, so nervous and scared and curious, was reading articles that you had written that were really kind of my first experience feeling safe enough and courageous enough to practice. So thank you. And I wonder, for those who might not be as familiar with your journey to yoga, I wonder if you could share a little of your story. What were those first steps like in yoga? And then how did becoming a teacher happen for you? It’d just be so honored to hear that part of your journey.
S: Well, thank you for asking. I enjoy telling this story because there are a lot of people who come into a yoga class who really feel uncomfortable and unfamiliar in the environment, especially back in the day, maybe not so much now because it’s more mainstream. But when I started, it was foreign and it felt foreign. It felt very different than the spirituality, if you will, that I was raised in. And I wasn’t raised in any religion. I’m part Jewish, part Catholic. And so I was raised in an environment that celebrated every holiday that gave a gift. But there was really no religious inclination to it. At best, I was raised an agnostic, board aligning on atheism. So walking into a yoga classroom for me would have felt very uncomfortable at that time.
How I got into it: I left home at 17 from New Jersey, a very small town in Northern New Jersey. I moved to New York City. And as Spirit would have it, I worked at a cafe in the East Village on 10th and Avenue B called Life Cafe. Life Cafe was owned by a man by the name of David Life. David Life, years later went on to open Jiva Mukti Yoga, him and his partner, Sharon Gannon. Sharon was a waitress at that time alongside me and partners with David. And so my first introduction to yoga was what I picked up in the cafe over serving coffee and bean burritos.
The delivery boy at the time was a man by the name of Eddie Stern, who went on to open the Ishtanga Yoga Shala in New York City that exists still to this day. And so they would talk about yoga, they would talk about health and wellness, they would bring up things that were so unfamiliar to me and quite frankly, freaky coffee enemas, the idea of veganism as a lifestyle, as an ethical choice. None of this made sense to my little, still teenager head.
At that time in that cafe, there were a lot of people doing drugs and I put myself in that category. It was exploratory, it was fun, it was available. My very first day at the cafe, I had to call 911 on a woman that had overdosed in the bathroom and because she was my customer, I had to be the one to deal with it. Drugs were rampant and I liked drugs a lot. I had been liking drugs since I was a teenager, especially hallucinogenics, anything that would take me out of my body and put me into a kind of an expanded sense of consciousness which I wouldn’t have understood at the time. I just liked tripping.
And so we were doing a lot of drugs at the time and David got very serious about yoga, about consciousness and really invited the staff to make a choice which was quit doing drugs, do yoga and you can keep your job. (Laughing) Otherwise, he didn’t want anyone there who was snorting coke off the toilet, the back of the toilet, which is what we were doing, which is really disgusting.
So I was one of those who decided I wanted to keep my job because it was a good job. So I stopped doing drugs. I didn’t stop drinking and I didn’t stop smoking. I just stopped doing anything that was harder like that. And I started doing yoga, but I didn’t do yoga with David and Sharon because David was my boss. That just felt, it was too much. I went to the integral yoga center in, it was in the Greenwich Village and I walked in, everyone was dressed in white. At the time I rode a motorcycle and I had came off the motorcycle. I had black eyeliner halfway down my face. I was wearing all black and I walked in and I thought, what am I doing here? The incense that was burning in the room, the candles, the people who were quiet, and there was a sense of reverence that I just didn’t feel that I belonged.
And I didn’t know to kick off my shoes and then someone told me and I felt like, I just felt dumb. And which was the theme for me for a while is I felt dumb. I felt out of place, but I kicked off my shoes.
I went up into that room. The teacher came in. And the first thing that I was struck by is I was expecting like an Indian teacher to come in. And it was, he looked like my uncle Seth. He had a long beard and looked like any one of my Jewish ancestors. And instead of wearing all white, if you just put a yarmulke on, you would never know the difference. And he sat down and instructed us to close our eyes. And I closed my eyes and I, not immediately, but when I look back at it, my anxiety, which I struggled with a lot since I was a kid, just came up to the surface. And I had a hard time keeping my eyes closed. And he would keep instructing us to close our eyes and he would look directly at me and he would point to me to close my eyes, but it made me feel really anxious. Then he got us standing up and moving and breathing. And at first it felt odd, but then I liked it. My body started to respond, but then my body started to respond too much and I started feeling nauseous.
I got through the asana part in a very clumsy way. And in meditation at the end, I forget what it is that he said. And I wish for the life of me that I could remember the words, but something about those words hit me in my body. As a truth, there was this deep sense of familiarity to what he was saying. And when class was over, I got up, I went to the bathroom and I threw up. And not out of fear for what I had heard, but because the asana had kicked up so much of the drugs and the alcohol and the cigarettes and the bad eating that I just vomited. And I walked out of there thinking, that’s not for me. I’m never gonna do that again.
And then as I’m walking down the street, and I remember it because there’s a clock in Greenwich Village and I looked up at the clock and the sun was shining on the clock and it must’ve been close to sunset because there was a pinkness to the sky. And I stopped and I took a breath. And I remember thinking, something feels different. Something feels different. Something was out of sort, but not in a bad way. And when I checked in again, I realized I was happy. That I had this sense of joy, that I was so unfamiliar because at that age, at that time in my life, joy wasn’t a word I would have associated myself with.
I remember being confused for the rest of the day, for the next few days that followed. And then I decided to go back and try again. And I heard things differently and my body responded differently. And I didn’t feel as sick, although I still felt sick. And I walked out and again felt that sense of peace. And maybe it lasted an hour, maybe three hours. I don’t remember, but it was there. And I began to make a direct association between going in and doing a yoga practice and moving and breathing and feeling a sense of joy and peace in my body for a limited amount of time when it was over. And that is really what brought me back to the mat each and every day was chasing that sense of joy.
\And before I knew it, I stopped drinking. Then I gave up the cigarettes. I can remember the last time I smoked a cigarette, flipped the butt and it was like it was over. I didn’t assign myself any kind of a title like alcoholic or drug addict in any way. I was leading, I was moving in that direction. But it was more like my body just didn’t want it anymore. And the more yoga I did, the more of these habits would become eradicated from my life. It wasn’t a spiritual practice for me though. It was physical and it was emotional. It’s the spiritual part that was hard earned and that didn’t show up for a really, really long time. I had a lot of reconciliation that I had to do between me and God before I could tolerate the messages that I was receiving in the classroom. But that was really my foray in. I’m so grateful because I was so young and the discipline that was required, that came from my upbringing, that came from my, that was ancestral stuff. I’ve always been a disciplined person when I put my mind to it. But I’m grateful because had I not been turned on to yoga at that age, I really don’t know the direction that my life would have gone.
B: Wow, thank you. I mean, for so many of us, the gateway to a spiritual life is through the body. Some people actually make the reverse journey, but it can often feel too overwhelming. So many people have experienced such spiritual and religious trauma that the body is a more natural starting point. And so I wonder for you, when did the spiritual side of yoga begin to develop? Was that before or after you began to contemplate teaching?
L: It was before I started contemplating teaching. But not that much, me becoming a teacher has its own story, its own trajectory that was unexpected and happened very quickly. And so I never felt at that time prepared for what I was being called into at all. I felt way too inexperienced to be taking that particular seat. The spiritual part, I had as a kid developed obsessive compulsive disorder because of trauma that I experienced at around six years old. And I was obsessed with the numbers fours and eights and had to do things in certain patterns or rhythms. If I didn’t do them, I had this overwhelming superstitious belief that something bad would happen to somebody that I loved, usually my mother and my father. And that by doing these patterns, I could somehow control their fate.
So because I wasn’t raised in a religious background, but I was raised in an environment that was very Christian, Catholic, Jewish, I was picking up a lot of messaging around God, a lot of fear-based messaging that really impacted my very sensitive psyche. So even though my households didn’t enforce this, my environment did. And so I became very superstitious. I had this belief that if God existed, it was a punishing God, it was a mean God. And that as long as I behaved, then I was okay. And I wasn’t behaving. I was a rebellious kid. I was into, I was an open-minded soul that was into all sorts of experimentation, struggling with high levels of anxiety and using obsessive compulsive behaviors to find integration and balance.
So I was really split, if this makes sense. I was very split in my body. In the practice of yoga, you’re forced to have to deal with sensation and patterns in the body that allowed me to have to confront the impulse that I would have for patterning and to stay with the discomfort in my body, to breathe into it, to breathe into it, and to notice what arise past the anxiety, which was really the fear. This was a very long process of understanding the mind-body connection, understanding trauma, the way trauma lives in the body. But I also did recognize that I have a really bad relationship with God. And for me to really heal from my trauma and from the internalized suppression, I needed to understand better this non-relationship. And because obviously I believed in something, in order to have a negative perception, I had some relationship happening.
So I started to study with different teachers around the world to understand more about God. I think the first book I read about, it was The Religions of the World, I think it is, it’s called. And it just broke down all the different religions. And I read them all trying to understand the through line. Was there a through line that connected all of these relationships with God? Then what happened that transformed me–this is in my book. And it’s a story that I share many, many times over the years, because it’s an unlikely relationship with God. And I’m not gonna belabor the story, but I’ll kind of get to the point of it. Is that there was a time in New York city where I worked at a gay sex club called Heaven. It was in a nightclub named Limelight, which is very famous back in the day. And I had been a bartender at Limelight. And one night came upon this private party that was happening up in the rectory. And I wasn’t allowed in. And the reason I wasn’t allowed in was because it was all men and it was all gay men and it was a sex club. And of course that peaked my interest. I was like, what’s going on in there and what’s happening, tell me everything.
And my boss at the time decided for whatever reason to make me a bartender up in Heaven. So I got to work behind the bar and in this environment that was just really wild, but cool, I didn’t see what was happening in the rooms because the sex part was held in back rooms. I was just on the dance floor. But believe me, I saw a lot. During that time, I met amazing men. One in particular was a man named Billy that I look at to this day as my angel. And he was the man who helped me to understand what God was. We became very close. He came in all the time. And for a while I didn’t see him and it made me very concerned. He finally showed up. I noticed he didn’t look well. I asked him what was going on. And he told me that he had AIDS and he had been sick. Now this is back in the very late 80s, early 90s. At that time, of course, AIDS was stigmatized. There was a lot of fear around it. And I asked him a bunch of questions to understand better about what he was going through. And I asked him if he was scared and he told me he wasn’t. And I asked him why and he said because of his relationship with God. And I must have had some kind of like a look on my face because he laughed and he said, And I said, I don’t. And he asked me why. And I remember Billy laughing and saying, Seane, would you like to see God right here, right now? And I’m looking around the club and I’m like, yeah, sure, show me God here. So he points to Danny the Wonder Pony, who was this guy that used to trot around the dance floor, butt naked except for a saddle. And for $1 you can climb on Danny’s back and hit him with a switch and he would trot around with you. And he points to Danny the Wonder Pony and he said, God’s right there.
And then he points to this woman, Violet. Violet at the time would have been referred to as a cross dresser, not as a transgender woman as she would be recognized now. Violet was about six foot something dressed very conservatively, very much like my grandmother would dress, my Polish grandmother, you know, with a little hat and gloves. Violet would, when she would tip me, would slide over a half dollar piece, you know, those, I still have them. I haven’t seen one of those in years. I know, I have all of them, but she would slide them over to me as like, as my tip. And Billy points to her and said, God’s right there. And then Billy points to two men. They looked as straight as either one of my brothers wearing business suits, probably came down from Wall Street, you know, playfully arguing over a pitcher of beer. And Billy points to those two gentlemen and says, God’s right there.
And then Billy takes his hand and he puts it on my chest and he takes my hands and he puts it on his chest. And he says, Seane, God’s right here. He said, “I’m gonna tell you something and I want you to remember this for the whole of your life.” He said, “Ignore the story and see the soul and remember to love, you will never regret it.” And then proceeded to tell me that God is in the light, and I’m paraphrasing of course, but God is in the light. God is in the dark. God is in the rage. God is in the love. God is in every moment still yet unfolding and every moment that has passed and that we are in these bodies ultimately to learn what love is. Everything else is just a story that will bring us to that love. Danny the Wonder Pony, Violet, the men, me, Billy, his aides, my trauma, it’s all a particular narrative that is essential for our individual growth. It doesn’t define us. It’s not our identity, but it’s an essential part of our evolution. And when we understand that, we will understand that God doesn’t exist outside of us, but God exists within us and we make life what it is. And in the telling of this, something shifted in my consciousness where because I was open-minded, because I was curious, because I was a hot mess, I felt like God was something like that yoga space where everyone was wearing white and I felt so out of place. I thought that I didn’t belong. And Billy helped me to understand that we all belong, whether we’re wearing white or motorcycle boots or whether we’re in the back room of a sex club or praying to the deities, that all of us on our journey to learn what love is and that’s what God is.
So that was the seed that was planted that helped to shift just a little bit, not yet. That would take some more years, but helped me to get rid of some of the paranoia that I had around a malevolent patriarchal spirit that was not interested in my wellbeing unless I was a certain kind of person, which I didn’t wanna be. And so that was the first of many glimpses that brought me to God.
B: Oh my gosh, so powerful. Thank you for gracing us with that story. And of course, the Leader’s Way podcast is hosted here at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale and we train Episcopal clergy for work in the church. And so maybe folks might wonder, gosh, Brandon, what is it that led you to invite Seane Corn, a yoga teacher, and have a conversation? And it’s precisely this, right? This is the fundamental truth that we teach is that it’s at the center of our Christian faith. It’s at the center of lots of traditions that the divine is living and moving and breathing in us and we can encounter it anywhere, everywhere, in all people.
And I love that this barroom scene becomes sacred space. It becomes a place of real revelation and learning. And so I love it.
And I had no doubt that we would come to this place of real convergence in our beliefs even. And we don’t have to believe all the same things. It’s another wonderful thing about the diversity of spiritual traditions. We need a plurality of approaches because God is big. And this is, I mean, this is kind of the way we understand things here at Berkeley and we believe it from the core of our Christian perspective. It allows us to see the sacredness in other traditions. So thank you for the story.
I mean, so you’ve had this kind of, the seed has been planted. Maybe you’ve touched into something and then what happens after that? Because in one way, everything has changed but in another way, we all know that the change often takes quite a long time to develop and unfold in our lives. What was it like for you?
S: Well, first though, I wanna mention that that moment that happened was in a church converted into a nightclub in a bar called Heaven. Heaven. So when I look—
B: Is Heaven still there?
S: No, no. And neither is Limelight. The building is still there, but no, it doesn’t exist anymore. But the symbolism of it, it’s like when I think about, God for me now, it was like the whole scene was being set up by spirit, wanting to dismantle the prejudices that I had around church, around this idea of heaven and what angels look like. Billy was an angel in my life. And again, it’s like, that’s how God has shown up for me all along with like a … mischievous and meeting me where I can receive it. I couldn’t receive it in a regular church. It wasn’t a welcoming space for me. That space was, and that’s where I was able to receive God.
Moving along in my journey, I’m on the mat, I’m breathing, I’m moving, I’m tolerating the messaging that I’m receiving around spirituality. I want to believe, but I’m having a difficult time still because God is still being taught in a way that feels external. And I don’t quite know how to relate. So I decide to go to India and I’m going on a pilgrimage. And I’ve been told by everybody, you know, you get to India and it’s the motherland, you’re gonna stand on that soil and feel the presence of God. I fly out there, I stand on the soil and it’s loud. The smells are unfamiliar and it doesn’t feel like my spiritual center. And I start to throw myself into different environments that speak of God.
So I go from one ashram to another and I finally end up at the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry. I had been reading about Sri Aurobindo and the mother for many, many years. And I had connected to their writings. Sri Aurobindo, besides being a spiritual leader, he was a political activist. He was somebody who was very involved in the liberation of the country. He lived in, at that time before he died, in isolation, writing and writing and writing. And the mother who was this French occultist, she was somebody who was deeply committed to magical practices and to the work of Sri Aurobindo, she made things happen. And one of her quotes was, “Without him, I am nothing. But without me, he cannot be made manifest.” There seemed to be some kind of genuine partnership in their relationship, her recognizing that he’s not leaving his house. If he wants to get anything done, it’s gonna have to be me. So they were this masculine, feminine balance, Shiva Shakti, and I was curious. They’re both dead.
So I go out to the ashram and it’s the mother’s birthday. It’s the mother’s birthday. So there’s maybe, I don’t know, 100,000 people all descending in Pondicherry at the same time to pay their respects at the Samadhi, which is their grave site. And so I wait in line with everybody else. And it was a very austere experience, different than anything else I had experienced in India, which was more chaotic. Everybody was quietly meditating. When it was time to move, everyone moved with a lot of consciousness. And I was like, “Oh, I like the vibe here.”
As I’m getting closer to the Samadhi, something is changing in my body. I’m starting to feel in my meditation out of body, almost high. The closer I got, the more lightheaded and peace-filled I was. So by the time I get to the grave, I literally have to crawl on my hands and knees. I don’t feel like I have the strength in my legs to stand. So I crawl over to the grave and I get to Sri Aurobindo’s side first. And it’s covered in flowers, hundreds and thousands of flower heads and petals, about a foot deep. And I’m still on my knees. I drop my head onto the Samadhi, my head in the flowers, and I start to pray to Sri Aurobindo, asking him for guidance, asking him, “Do I leave my home? Do I leave my family? Should I come to the ashram and devote myself to his teachings?” I’m praying that I’ve been in conflict with my relationship with God. I wanna understand God, show me God, help me to feel God’s presence. These are the things that I’m saying.
And then suddenly, I get hit with this blinding, intense sensation right at my third eye. And it shoots very fast down my body, electric, expanding. And I think to myself, like right away, I was like, “Oh my God.” And I know it’s called Shaktipat. I know I’m getting Shaktipat. It’s the transmission from the guru to the disciple. I know this is happening. And Shaktipat is normally this incredibly pleasurable feeling, that like waves that go through your body. It’s joyful, it’s ecstatic. That was not what I was experiencing. And I’m thinking one side of me is like, “Oh my God, I’m getting Shaktipat.” Another part is like, “Ow, this really hurts.”
Finally, I cannot take the sensation any longer. And I lean back and I grab my face and I pull a wasp that’s been stinging me in my forehead, off my head. Well, you can imagine my disappointment. You can imagine how bereft I was thinking I was getting this transmission, thinking I was getting my prayers answered. So I tossed the bee aside and I leave feeling really dejected. And I go later back to what’s called the mantra Mandir, it’s this place to meditate. And I’m sitting and I’m having like a real heart to heart with Sri Aurobindo about how just disappointed I am. And it occurs to me in that meditation that this was my path, that I got my prayers answered. I’m not supposed to surrender to any single human being dead or alive. That I am not ever supposed to give my power over to somebody else’s spiritual experience as if it’s an absolute. That just because the sensation wasn’t what I expected, my prayer was answered. I asked to see God, I asked to feel God. And once again, just like in the sex club, God revealed itself to me that God is in every moment, every experience, even in the bite of the bee, reminding me that it’s everywhere. It’s in my experiences and it’s in my interpretation.
B: Oh my gosh, thank you for that dramatic story. And of course I couldn’t help but think of the symbolism of the bee. The bee is so dear to us and my family. I’m a gardener.
And the bee usually is known as a symbol of industry, or hard work, but the bee is also a symbol of community and the collective. And I think that’s been such a hallmark of your work. I don’t know if it was from day one where you were stung, but over time yoga became, it seems to me, not only a way for you to bring healing to yourself as an individual, but you began thinking about healing outside the self as well. And I can remember my very first yoga class, it was kind of a bit of an exercise class, but I didn’t know one class from another. And I found my way in there packed, there was 50 of us in this tiny little room and it was a really challenging class that pushed me in ways that I’d never been pushed before, but was deeply moving in a spiritual way. And at the end of the class everyone just walked out and left. And I just, I was so moved and I felt like I had touched into something that I’d never tasted before and I wanted to talk about it. And I was really sad to find that in that yoga studio and in many other yoga studios, yoga was this thing that sort of happens on the mat, it’s private, it’s individual, we don’t talk about it with anyone else. But you’ve over the years in your teaching seem to touch into something that certainly includes personal healing, but is so much bigger than that. Can you share that piece of your journey, this awakening to others along the path?
S: My first part of my years of doing yoga, I look at it through three realms. It was physical, mental. The second part of my journey was energetic, emotional. And then the third part of my journey was psychic, symbolic, spiritual. So the first part was more literal and then it grew into the abstract. The first part was about my body, my mental health, my emotional response to the world. The next part moved me from the me to the we, from the individual to the collective. It was just like giving up the drugs and alcohol. I didn’t give it a lot of thought. It was just one of those like, oh, hey, wait a minute, yoga is union. That’s about relationships. Not just the relationship that I have with myself and the God of my understanding, but my relationship to the planet, my relationship to each other. So it just became a natural part of my studentship.
And then of course my teaching. I mean, it depends on the personality of the teacher. You can harness the energy as a way to create an environment where people feel that they are a part of something bigger than themselves. And first it starts with the shared experience of wasn’t that a hard class or oh my God, like a lot of stuff came up for me. Did it come up for you too? Then you find those people are gonna have a cup of tea afterwards or a smoothie or hang out and sit by the garden outside the class.
Building community became an essential part of helping people to feel safe and welcomed in an environment that was unfamiliar to them. I remember how I felt walking into my first yoga class so unwelcomed. I didn’t want anyone to feel that way. I wanted them to feel that regardless of their flexibility, the size or shape of their body, their own ethnicity or religious background, sexuality, that once they walked through the doors of that classroom, they were entering into a sacred environment that welcomed all people.
So it became in its own way for some people, a church, a temple, their own expression of a home that supported the divine. So as a facilitator, it was important to remember people’s names, to remember details about their lives and remember to bring them up here and there, to introduce them to people so that they can make connections, to host events, things of that nature. Not all yoga teachers can do that. Just like you were saying with spirituality, yoga invites a myriad of teachers to serve the myriad of students that exist on this path. And for some people, just walking into a room and stretching their bodies is a mountain that they are climbing in that moment. So forget talking about God. Forget chanting Om Nama Shavaya, like don’t even bother. They’re going to have a transcendent experience, whether you do that or not, in time, if that’s what they’re called for, that’s between them and the God of their own understanding. But for me, community was important. I think because it’s benefited me so much, having a lot of dear friendships, having a family that I’m close to, being open to relationships, especially as I became more of an adult, the next piece of my teaching, because I did see it moving from the me to the we, became about service.
How do I make sense of these practices, not just in the safety of my yoga room, but out in the world where it really matters, out in the world where you’re going to get challenged because of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, bias, prejudice, oppression, you’re going to go up against a world that wants separation because of power dynamics, because of politics. And isn’t that then where we should reach where others might withdraw, create relationships where others might reject. And so service became a big part of my own personal yoga practice off the mat, which brought up so many of my shadows, so many of my own biases and prejudices that I had internalized, that I was raised with, that forced me to have to look at my own complicity to creating separation. It just turned the flame up on a fire that had always been burning, but it just raised the stakes.
And then I knew that it was time, I felt it was time to start to organizing the yoga community, to also teach them the skills of leadership, to invite them also into opportunities to serve within their own local communities, and I created an organization at that time called Off the Mat Into the World. It bridged the gap between yoga, transformational inner work, and social justice. And it helped folks deepen their yoga practice by recognizing their own internalized beliefs, and then organizing in a way that wouldn’t perpetuate harm.
And it was very, very successful. And we modeled it actually based off of a Christian organization, a purpose– the man who wrote A Purpose Driven Life.
B: Rick Warren.
S: Yes, Rick Warren. Rick Warren had the ability to organize his community to doing a lot of service work in communities, and it was really effective. He created small circles, and how they did this, we studied it for about a year. The organization that helped fund us, they studied this, and they passed the information over to us. What they saw is that people wanna be together, and they wanna be in community, and in A Purpose Driven Life, they all shared one thing in common, and that is the word of Christ. And so one day maybe they were focusing on rescuing animals, and maybe another day they were gonna be focusing on feeding the hungry, and they had thousands of circles all over the United States, raising money, really activating their communities.
And we thought like, we’ve got a big community, we don’t have Jesus Christ as the anchor, but what we do have is a spiritual foundation that supports truth and love. We have embodied practices that help us decrease the tension in our bodies so that we can open ourselves to truth and love. So perhaps we can organize in the same way, and so we did. And we started creating small circles throughout the United States and the world, and inviting people to step into leadership and do fundraising efforts and look to create inside out change within their own communities, helping to raise awareness, money, whatever was needed. But we found that the small circles would empower people to step into leadership in their own backyards. And that was really effective. And so that’s how we built community, that’s how we engage the community. And for me, it was the spiritual principle that was missing in my own work was that engagement.
B: I wonder what it was like for you in those early days. I wonder if there was a voice in your head or a voice from some of your colleagues that said like, “Hey, Seane, stick to the yoga studio.” I mean, and when we see this as a very active conversation in wellness spaces today, we have wars raging across the world, we have incredible political divides, we have all the issues that you named, homophobia and misogyny and patriarchy and autocracy raging and in the wellness community and the yoga community and the meditation community, there’s a lot of conversation. Should leaders in these communities weigh in and integrate their personal political beliefs with their spiritual practice? I’m wondering like how you navigated the voices of the naysayers and I presume even some self doubt that you must have had as you wandered into what must have felt like really new territory.
S: Well, absolutely. I always put my studentship before my teaching. That was always primary to me and I led by that. I have seven non-negotiables in my life that I work with and answer to and it includes yoga, meditation, prayer, diet, sleep, therapy and play. The seventh one is a newer one. I’m not good at play, not my nature, but I know how important it is so I’ve brought it in. If I don’t do these seven things in my life, I will get overwhelmed, I’ll be reactive, I will listen to my small self and think my small self is telling the truth, I will fall back into my insecurity and I will not listen to spirit’s guidance. I won’t be able to because to listen to guidance requires self confidence and if I’m falling back into wanting to please people or wanting to shape myself into a perspective that makes others comfortable, then I will fall back into looking for my value from the outside in and it’s impossible then to listen to the guidance of spirit without prejudicing it with the yeah but or trying to negotiate with it because often when you’re dealing with spiritual truths, it’s taking you into some really uncomfortable areas.
I have found myself so many times with Spirit being like, do I have to? Is this really what I’m being called to? I would prefer not if that’s okay and when I get that kind of messaging in my body, it affirms more and more that I’m touching into a truth. So I have to answer to that before I have to answer to the projection that I get from my students or my colleagues. Back in the day, yes, I got a little, a lot of pushback. It was like, shut up and teach, which, you know, just I’m trying to and so I would just look at the yamas and the niyamas, which are basically the golden rules and the practices within the construct of yoga that tells us how to live our life. And the number one rule, if you will, is called a hymseh, which means non-violence, do no harm. And you have to live by that in the yoga, like you’re not a practicing yogi if you are actively causing harm, but I had to look deeper into what that means.
Turning my back on the suffering of others makes me complicit to that suffering. And the only reason I can turn my back on the suffering of others is because of my privilege, is because of the color of my skin, because of my socioeconomic status, because of my education, there are so many things that I get to have that, and I put this in air quotes, that allow me not to have to deal with the hardships like homophobia, like transphobia, like racism, ageism, ableism, all the things that create separation. I would look at politics and recognize that there were policies being put into play that were deliberately designed to give a lot to some and very little to others, and that were actually not just hurting or harming, but potentially killing people that I said I loved, that were friends of mine. And when I would sit with it, it made it impossible for me to stay silent.
Therefore, my commitment must be for the liberation of others, not just for myself.
And so I started to speak in class, at first hesitantly, in the same way, the first time I owned in a class, I was terrified. I thought people were just gonna walk out of the room, look at me like I was ridiculous. It took me eight years of practicing yoga, and probably two years of teaching before I owned.
It was the same way in talking about things like politics or things that mattered, social issues that were oppressive. But every time I did, I noticed my nervous system regulated. My heart didn’t beat quicker. I went into homeostasis, whereas the anxiety I felt was before I spoke, though I knew I was holding back. I knew I had a truth, that I could connect it back to yoga. Satya is truth, I’m telling the truth. If we prioritize truth and love, then we have to look at where’s truth and love not. And here it is, it’s in every social issue around us. And we can’t be selectively conscious. It’s like, either are you not?
And so, the more I, just like prayer, the more I practiced, it was awkward at first, but I found my words, and the more that I trusted what I was speaking to was true and right, the more effortless the words came. And that’s kind of my contract with God. It’s like, I’ll say the things, but you gotta give me the words. I don’t know if I can do both.
And folks recognized that I wasn’t gonna be … I was gonna double down. I was gonna use my platform, any notoriety I had, to here’s what we’re gonna talk about, here’s what I wanna share, otherwise I can’t, I’m not gonna be a part of your magazine. I’m not gonna be a part of that ad. And it worked. And again, my nervous system regulated. It became more challenging when the pandemic hit. And we started to deal with things in the wellness world where there was a trauma bond between the far right and the far left, and somehow they intersected. And people that were at one point in my relationships with them, where we were once on the same page and we were once really in alignment with our beliefs, suddenly when I would be public for things that were related to public safety, or like QAnon, for example, was a big one that I stood against and the messaging that was anti-science and was Islamophobic, I thought my audience was going to be right on board with me. And I was shocked to find how not true that was. And how for the first time, I felt afraid of the words that were gonna come out of my mouth, and the impact it might have on people who had once really trusted me, that I was no longer who they thought I was, because the spectrum of our beliefs were different, because of the politics that existed at that time and still exist to this day, and the fear mongering.
But I still, as a yoga student, keep doing my work, keep breathing into the discomfort. I have more of a responsibility to speaking these truths because of my age and because of my experience and because of my reputation. There are young yoga teachers who do not have the words, who look to me to find a way to express. And I invite them, take my words, power phrase them, paraphrase them, use them exactly as I did, don’t even credit me, or better yet, say, Seane said this, and take the heat off of them. But I feel more than ever leadership with what’s going on in this current administration and in the world in general, the desire, the strategy that is being put out to separate us on a community level, on a family level, that we have to work that much harder to continue to integrate and heal and speak truth to power and name the injustices, even as they get enforced into policy, to continue to name them, to get out on the streets and speak out, especially for those of our friends and family who, because their own lives are being compromised and threatened, might not be able to, they’re not safe.
That’s even more of a reason for those of us with privilege that we should be out there holding up our signs and calling our representatives and being that much more vocal. We have to end this suffering. I always say that the systems are what are, well, they’re actually not broken. They’re doing exactly what they were designed to do. But the systems are just made up of people. Change the people, we change the system. And so the more that we can go to church, go to the synagogue, go into the yoga room, cry, scream, rage, get the energy out of our bodies, confront the limiting beliefs that we’re holding onto that keep us separate from our own family or community, and then orient yourself to the world around you and see what can you do in your own capacity that might create some peace or ease to somebody else in this world. That’s the best that we can do right now that might angle us towards peace.
B: Seane, thank you for speaking to this kind of integration between practice and service, between individual and the collective. In the few moments we have left … I wonder if you could speak to the spiritual leader, whether they be a church leader, a rabbi leading a synagogue, a wellness leader, a yoga teacher, who is feeling that call to use your language and to use really traditional religious language, they’re feeling a call on their heart to move to speak more clearly about what they’re seeing in the world, about the kinds of injustices, about the systemic oppression at all the levels you so beautifully named. But they’re scared and they’re wondering how to find their way.
What kind of encouragement can you give them toward this integration, toward this yoking, right, of the personal and the collective? Of course, you know, religion comes from the Latin word to bind again, to connect again. It is always about integration. You’ve lived this, so speak to the nervous leader who’s almost there but just needs a little nudge. What’s your nudge to them?
S: I appreciate that question because I do know how hard it is. And like I said, I’ve got my seven non-negotiables, yoga, meditation, prayer, diet, sleep, therapy, play. And I emphasize therapy and that doesn’t necessarily mean classical therapy. For some people, it’s their mentors in the church. It’s the elders. It’s the ones who came before, talk it out. I go to my people and I own it. I am terrified. And I connect, what am I terrified of? I’m terrified of losing my job. I’m terrified of being judged or rejected or abandoned or betrayed by my community. There’s a plethora of real deep fears. But when I unpeel that back and I’m looking at, I prayed as I would imagine all spiritual leaders have at one point. I have been on my knees and I have prayed to spirit to open my heart, to open my mind, to allow me to show up in this lifetime and serve their word through my body so that I could create a world that is free and fair and safe and equal and just and abundant for all beings everywhere. I know I made that prayer, maybe different language-ing, but it’s in there. The consequence of a prayer like that is the ego getting terrified of being called out and unloved, unappreciated, judged. That’s a real fear, but it is ego. I know that I have to answer to one thing and that is the God that exists within my own heart. I know exactly what I need to do. I know what we’re being called to do. The injustices that exist in this world, it is wrong. These policies are wrong. It goes against the messaging of God.
I think about a book I read years ago called The Gospel According to Christ or According to Jesus. And it was put together written by a man by the name of Stephen Mitchell, I believe. And in my exploration for a relationship with God, I read this book because what this book did was it split the word of Christ and the Bible. And in red, it took the consistent messaging of Christ. And it was like this big. The rest of the book was in black typeface. Christ’s words were in red and was showing that what was said over here, based on what was happening politically at that time, was incongruent to the messaging that was over here. That there’s no way that this person could have said this and this at the same time.
When I look at the words, the consistent messaging of Christ, which is the consistent messaging in yoga, which is the consistent messaging in all of the religions that exist, that is the roadmap that I use in my own body when I think, what would Christ do?
What would yoga have me do? I have to look to this level of guidance because I know that if Christ, as a brown-skinned immigrant, would be having none of this. None of this, would be looking at everything that is happening and say, “I didn’t say this. This is not what I would intend. How dare you use my name in order to enforce these injustices to my children that I love.”
And so I would hope that any religious leader can drop into their own bodies and recognize they were called to do something that is bigger than their small self. And they need to find a community around them where they can grieve and cry and say all the unspiritual things to and not have to perform a level of spiritual authority and be in the humility of it. If I didn’t have that support, I don’t know if I can have this conversation that I’m having with you now. This, what I’m doing now, is a part of my spiritual maturation and my contract that I have with God. I’m not doing anything that is in opposition to it. I am only in alignment with it.
B: Seane Corn, thank you for the generosity of your time today, the prophetic word that you’ve spoken, the hopefulness, the wisdom, the vulnerability. Gosh, just, it’s been a long time coming, but from my heart to yours, just I hope you know the gratitude that I have for all you’ve done and continue to do. And let’s pray for this integration and the healing of our world that’s suffering in such a deep way. And one of the joys of my life is to bring spiritual leaders both from traditional religious places and yoga places and meditation places and have conversation about really what matters most. And you’ve helped to shine such a bright light in our world. And I’m so thankful. Thank you and God bless.
S: Thank you, everyone.
B: Thank you for listening to “Within,” the contemplative segment of the “Leader’s Way” podcast. We trust this conversation has provided nourishment for your own growing and healing. Until next time, may you find deep peace and courage in all you do.