Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Seane Corn. Seane Corn is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher who has been studying yoga for more than 20 years. An active humanitarian, Seane is the national yoga ambassador for YouthAIDS and the cofounder of Off the Mat, Into the World—a leadership training program.
With Sounds True, Seane has created a new DVD series called The Yoga of Awakening. It’s a trilogy that consists of three volumes: Volume 1, Mind-Body Flow, followed by Volume 2, Chakra Flow, and Volume 3, Mystic Flow. Eight DVDs in all, in which Seane explores the deeper dimensions of yoga—really, yoga as awakening—offering in-depth training into our vast potential for greater consciousness, empowerment, and connection.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Seane and I spoke about how trauma is transformed through the practice of yoga, and how as a yoga teacher she works with people in a class to make sure that people are not becoming disconnected during the practice. We also talked about the connection between trauma and the chakras, and how Seane combines the practice of inquiry with the practice of yoga in order to help release limiting beliefs from our energy system. Seane also shared with us her seven non-negotiables for living from the heart, and what it means to live on purpose. Here’s my conversation with someone who always inspires me, Seane Corn:
Seane, at the beginning of The Yoga of Awakening—[these] 24 hours of DVD teaching—you talk about how the whole series is an invitation to wake up. I wanted to begin our conversation asking you what you mean by “waking up.” The reason I want to start here is I did a series called Waking Up: What Does It Really Mean? where I interviewed more than 30 people—30 spiritual teachers—about this question, and believe it or not I got very different answers from different people.
So, I’m curious what this means to Seane Corn—what “waking up” means to you.
Seane Corn: For me personally, it means waking up and recognizing that the God that dwells within is within all and to make a commitment to choose to live a life that is in service to love and our most authentic nature. When we have a relationship with our highest sense of self, we can’t help but to witness it, acknowledge it, and recognize it in another being. When we do wake up to that interconnectedness and that shared divinity, peace is the inevitable outcome.
So, we have to wake up to who we are, who we are to each other, to the relationship that we have with the God of our own understanding, and the relationship we have to this planet. If we don’t, the end result is really what’s happening right now—division; separation; continued racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and genderism and ableism and ageism; oppression; and all that comes along with that, which is violence and death.
So, the change has to happen. But, it can’t happen until we wake up, acknowledge the parts of us that are disenfranchised or where we have created separation, heal it, and then activate from a different point of view.
TS: Now, in The Yoga of Awakening, you really approach the practice of yoga as a spiritual path. You draw some distinctions between just approaching yoga as ordinary exercise. What do you think makes yoga a true waking-up discipline, if you will, and not just calisthenics?
SC: Well, “yoga” means “to yoke” or “to come together to make whole.” It recognizes that everything is connected [and] everything is interdependent. When people think of yoga, they often—because of the contemporary understanding of it—they see the yoga poses as being what yoga is. That’s just an aspect of yoga. That’s just one part of it. It’s one of the tools that we utilize to lead to the Samadhi—to the awakening, to the relationship with God.
So, for me, the practice of yoga is spiritual because it’s an invitation to recognize this interdependency. Everything is connected—meaning heaven and earth, male/female, mind/body—and that any idea of separation is an illusion. But, it’s also a dangerous illusion because it’s separation, which creates the violence that is so prevalent in our world today.
So, in yoga, samadhi—if you will—is the end result of yoga. It’s the liberation. It’s enlightenment. There’s really not a word that I can use to describe the samadhi, because it’s beyond our five-sense reality. It’s ineffable, ultimately. So, the moment I put a word to it, I’m already incorrect. So, I just want to state that now.
But, there is an act of transcendence that happens—that moves us beyond the physical, beyond the literal, beyond our five senses. [It] unites us and expands our perception to be integrated and—dare I say—holy.
I think that once we begin to transcend our ego, transcend our limited beliefs, [and] open ourselves to that interdependency, it’s when we also begin to realize love. Although I can’t define “samadhi” or “enlightenment” truly, the closest I can come to defining that state of liberation in our conscious life is love and truth. I define God as that which exists within that’s of truth and love. So, there’s no separation to me of truth, love, God. And if the practice opens us to love, then therefore it opens us to God.
That’s why—to me—it’s a spiritual practice. It changes everything about who we are, the way in which we perceive, the way we relate. It takes the importance off the individual and moves it onto the collective. That collective is the interdependency that yoga’s all about.
TS: Now, in your own path as a yogi, was there a point in time where you went from practicing yoga more as a physical discipline to starting to understand the energetic level and this collective level that you’re describing? Can you help us understand that progression for you, personally? I know that progression is in the series, The Yoga of Awakening, and I’m presuming it was also in your own life and development as a yoga practitioner.
SC: Yes. I mean, I remember, Tami—when we first started to talk about The Yoga of Awakening, I only saw it as—there was one DVD that I wanted to make, which is Mystic Flow. It’s the third one that’s out.
As I started to write it, I realized that, “I can’t put this out until I set the context for the others.” That’s when I went back to you and I’m like, “I think we got a little issue on our hands. This 90-minute program needs to be a little bit bigger.” And like you said, it’s turned into 24 hours worth of content.
It’s because in my own practice, I saw that—before I got to using the practices as a way to engage, to participate, to be the change if you will—there were steps that had to be taken like a detoxification process physically and emotionally before I could develop the self-confidence that’s required for true engagement. So, when I looked back on my own path, it mirrors the three programs—Body-Mind Flow, Chakra Flow, and Mystic Flow.
Body-Mind Flow—in my evolution, I called it “the physical-mental realm” for probably the first five years of my yoga practice. It was not spiritual. It was not sacred. There was no ritual to it at all. I went to a class. I practiced asana, and after class was over I felt better. I just felt more grounded, I guess more aligned—and even that’s probably too sophisticated of a word. I just felt better in my body and pretty much a nicer person all around. It made me want to quit negative habits—like for me at that time, drugs, alcohol, drinking, and inappropriate behavior where I was acting out or giving myself away, especially sexually. It just changed behavior.
But, it was very physical. I tolerated the OMing, the prayers. I didn’t listen to a majority of that rhetoric. I was just interested in my Sun Salutes, my standing poses, my back-bends, my forward bends, and then get me out of that class. That went on for years.
Then, one day, I was living in—at the time, I was living in New York when the practice was very physical. I moved to LA. One day I was practicing yoga, and we were holding a pose—it’s called Pigeon. We were in it for quite a while. I had done this pose countless times. I’ve held it a very long time before. So, this wasn’t a new experience.
But, the teacher was going on about something. I don’t know. My guess is it was love. Forgiveness, maybe. I wasn’t really paying attention. But, for some reason, all of a sudden I had this emotional response. I felt myself kind of gasp a little bit and shake. At first, I didn’t quite know what it was.
Then, I realized that I was going to start to cry in this class. It freaked me out, because that had never happened to me before. There was nothing wrong in my life that would make that moment so dramatic. But, it really freaked me out.
So, I left the room. I went into the bathroom and I started to sob. My hands were shaking. My heart was pounding. There was all this heat in my face. I couldn’t stop wailing.
As quickly as it came up is as quickly as it went away. I was really confused and a little concerned, because it just seemed out of the ordinary.
So, I went back into the classroom. At this point, the students were on the other side. So, I got into the other side and it was a life-changing moment, because every word that that teacher said I felt like he was speaking only to me—that he was reading my mind, that he was answering all the questions that I had. My eyes were wide open. I could barely breathe because something had dramatically shifted.
After I was done with that class, I started to really investigate the mind-body experience and realize that it had taken me five years of hardcore asana—of doing poses and different shapes—to break down the intensity—or rather the layers of tension that I had built up around my energetic body because of my own trauma and, just really, conditioning. Those five years were cleansing my body, purifying my body, readying me. Finally, my body was available enough to hear what the teacher was saying. It landed in my cells in a very different way, and my life was changed.
My practice became way more sensitive, tender. I didn’t want to push through anything. There was so much that my body was trying to tell me and teach me. I would notice that in my practice, I would get angry, bored, frustrated. I would get sad. I would feel sexual. All these sensations that I’m sure were always there, but because I was so protected by my tension that I had never noticed before.
That took me through about a ten-year process of understanding how trauma lives in the body—the way in which our body will energize around that trauma to create a layer of protective tension so that we can avoid the pain that we experience from the original trauma. That’s very clever. It’s part of our survival. It’s just that as you get older, it doesn’t work. It blocks us from love.
So, it was a process that was very vulnerable. I felt everything. But, I trusted that there were tools in this practice that would allow me to process the feelings—to discharge it. What happened in the bathroom when I cried and my body was shaking—I was discharging all this old, suppressed energy.
So, Chakra Flow is all about understanding that mind-body connection. Well, Body-Mind Flow takes you through the breath, asana, [and] alignment, helping you to really know how to integrate your body properly, safely, intelligently. Then it sets you up for Chakra Flow, which then takes you through the practices but puts your attention on trauma—on where it lives in the body, how to identify it, the different body parts that information gets held [in], how to release it effectively, how to be present to it, and how to shift your limited beliefs to make these narratives something that are actually empowering, useful, meaningful. [It’s] how to assign meaning to perhaps narratives that you saw as flawed or wrong.
So, my first part of my journey was the physical-mental. That’s Body-Mind. The second was energetic-emotional, and that’s Chakra Flow. Both of those parts of my life were about me, though—my health, my body, my awareness, myemotions, my trauma. I think the real shift happened for me when I got to the third realm, which is Mystic Flow—which is the psychic-symbolic realm, when you start to look at the practice not through the individual lens, but through the collective.
So, my shift was: it’s not how the practice of yoga can heal me, but how can I—through these tools and the utilization of these practices—help to transform and heal the world? And that’s still the part of the practice that I’m most inspired by, that I’m the most connected to.
And yet, without the physical-mental and the energetic-emotional, it’s spiritual bypass. We start to tell others how they should live. We start to tell others how they should change the world without actually looking at the ways in which we have been complicit.
So, the first two realms are about taking self-responsibility and the third realm is about activation and participation—but from a conscious place, a mindful place. It doesn’t mean we’ve mastered it. It just means that in the face of conflict, we’re able to maintain our center and make a healthier and more meaningful choice. Then [we] go process the shit out of our anger or fear or rage—our shadow—later on so that we don’t get sick.
So, Mystic Flow is about—on one hand, it’s using your yoga practice ritualistically [and] prayer-based. So, we did the same kinds of asana. We trust that it’ll heal us physically. We trust that it’ll give us insight emotionally. We understand that it will effectively release the tension so that we can connect to our vulnerability and, therefore, surrender to our spirituality. Then the third realm—the Mystic Flow—allows us to pray for people we love, people we need to forgive, people who need healing—to pray for Mother Earth or for our own awakening, or for what I think is most important right now: peace. [It] is for a true willingness to activate change from the inside out so that we as a collective can be part of a conversation that moves the needle away from fear and towards love.
It’s not enough to pray. Activation that’s motivated by love is the essential ammunition that is necessary right now if we’re going to wage a war—if you will—towards love, peace, truth, authenticity, and integrity, and away from violence and oppression and all these other facets that are keeping so many people down, oppressed, scared, lonely, and without access to things that many of us take for granted. [These] are resources, including dignity and respect.
So, that’s really what these practices are about. That’s how my practice has evolved. It’s not to suggest that it’s over. It’s just all I got. These three realms—it’s all I got. Service to me, but from a conscious place, is why I have spent so many years on the mat—all the years of sweating, calluses, bumping up against walls, being bored to death, being overwhelmed emotionally. [This is] all the different shit that comes up in the practice of yoga. Once it flipped and I realized it was about conscious service, suddenly getting on the mat just feels like a self-care thing to do so that I don’t show up in the world and continue to contribute to the dysfunction that is hurting so many people.
TS: Now, Seane, there’s a lot in what you just said and I want to unpack some of what you’ve offered about each part of this trilogy in the series of The Yoga of Awakening. But to begin, do you think that this flowering, if you will, through this practice—beginning with the body-mind, moving to the energetic, and moving to this universal service—do you think that’s inherent in yoga? [Is this] the sort of design of yoga—that it flowers this way?
SC: I’d like to think so. It’s been my experience. It’s what I’ve witnessed in others. But yet at the same time, I’ve met many people who—let’s say activists, for example. I meet incredible activists who are committed to serving the world, but they don’t have the tools of self-care. So, they burn out. Or they don’t know how to understand their own trauma. So, they bypass.
I’ve also met people who are incredibly gifted in terms of the spirit, but ungrounded [and] unsettled in their body—disconnected from that part of their physicality.
So, maybe people go at it from different ways. That was my pathway—starting from the physical first—the individual to the collective. But, I can’t suggest that that pathway is exactly the same for all people. But, I think there’s elements in there that all of us need to look at and engage with at different times.
TS: OK. So, you started your yoga practice very physical. You said [that] for five years you worked hard at the practices, and that the change that you noticed was that you became less addictive—you didn’t engage in addictive behavior in the same way—and that you related to your sexuality differently as well. So, what do you think happened in that first five-year period that these changes came about?
SC: Well, I believe that—without knowing it—I was releasing the tension. The reason I was drinking, doing drugs, and even acting out sexually was because I was self-medicating. I was trying to find ways to anesthetize or numb myself from my own anxiety. The anxiety was the cause of the suppressed emotion.
So, when events would happen [where] I would get triggered, this sensation would arise that would remind me of—now, this is in the unconscious; I’m not aware that I’m time-travelling. But indeed, I was time-travelling.
So, to avoid the fear or the overwhelm of what was in the unconscious, I would act out as many people do. It felt good temporarily—until the next trigger.
What happened with yoga is that, by releasing the tension, the triggers that I would have in life wouldn’t be so magnified. They’d be much less. It would take a lot more for me to want to act out in other ways.
I remember a teacher saying to me, “Breathe and everything changes.” That had a critical impact because I would feel a trigger and I would breathe. It’s not that it magically changed. It actually would get worse a little bit. The anxiety would get worse. But, if I continued breathing and staying in my center, the anxiety would go away. I’d be like, “Oh, OK. So, I don’t need that drink. I don’t need to smoke a joint. I don’t need to act out.”
But, I wasn’t looking at how the tension got there in the first place. I wasn’t looking at the trauma itself. It was still just pretty superficial. But, it got me through a time that allowed my body to cleanse itself.
So, that was really my experience: just understanding that I was a type of personality, because of trauma I experienced, that held onto that trauma as part of the tension—as part of my survival—and that in moments of conflict or crisis, I would act out. Yoga gave me the skills to be able to stay in the discomfort of that sensation without having to act out.
TS: Now, “trauma” is a word we hear a lot today. It seems this is our time in the collective to try to really understand what trauma is and how to heal it. So, how do you understand trauma? When you use that word, what do you mean?
SC: Trauma is anything that overwhelms our capacity to cope and leaves us feeling helpless, hopeless, or out of control. So, what’s traumatic for me might not be traumatic for you. It’s very dependent. I can go into environments where there is serious human injustice and be able to maintain my center. But, if I see an animal getting hurt in any capacity, I am rendered useless. The level of emotion—of overwhelm, of anger I feel—is just a huge, massive trigger for me.
Whereas other people don’t have that. They see a child being abused and that’s their trigger and overwhelm. But an animal? No big deal.
So, it’s very unique to the individual. It’s an energetic response. It’s also a neurological response—especially as children. When we’re children, we don’t have the ability to reconcile or reason what we’re seeing or experiencing. It’s a very primal reaction.
So, we have an experience. There are chemicals that get released through our body, and we’re put in what’s called “fight, flight, or freeze.” So, it’s a biological response to the trauma. Our body is then imprinted with a messaging: “When this happens, my body does this.”
If we’re a child and we have an opportunity to process the trauma—meaning perhaps we’re raised in a family where we’re able to scream, rage, cry, swear, hit something, talk it through—we’re able to discharge the energy and complete the process. Meaning, we’re able to move it from our body-mind.
But, when it gets stuck, every time we experience something that reminds us of “. . .”—you know, that event or circumstance—our body goes directly to that moment and it locks itself down physiologically. So, we’re essentially right back to the moment, but we don’t really know it.
So, everyone experiences trauma in very, very different ways. Some of us are more blessed than others. Our trauma is not as dramatic. There’s shock trauma, there’s situational trauma, there’s generational trauma. But, all of us have it because we’re in human form. It’s just the way in which we identify it and deal with it that’s going to determine the choice we make.
So, I look at trauma very seriously. As a teacher, I’m aware when I go into a room that people have experienced trauma. It’s in their bodies, and now I’m taking them through exercises that [are] going to release that tension. I need to be on high alert and watch for signs that they’re either shutting down or that they’re getting re-traumatized. So, that’s going to influence the words I use or my ability to touch them when, where, and how.
So, I take trauma very seriously in our culture because I see that we are a nation in trauma and that we don’t have great tools to deal with it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because I’m glued to the TV—as many people are right now—watching what’s happening with this election, and the way in which are culture is really polarized right now.
TS: I’m officially being re-traumatized through this election process. I just wanted to say that. I’m sure of that.
SC: Yes. Well, that’s the thing that I’m noticing. Right now, the violence that we’re seeing—especially when we’re looking at the Trump rallies and the violence that’s being enacted—what I’m seeing is there’s violence and then, a day or two later, there’s a letter written from the person saying, “I don’t know why I hit that person and I’m so sorry,” “I don’t know why I pushed that young girl and I’m really embarrassed and I’m really sorry,” “I don’t know why I made that Nazi hand signal. I’m not a Nazi and I’m so sorry.”
I’m seeing a lot of that after the fact—people responding to their behavior. And not everyone, God knows. But there are a few who have written. Whether you have read it as an excuse [or] if they’re being contrite and sincere, it doesn’t matter. But, what I’m recognizing is.
In the moment—in that heightened experience—there are deep layers of trauma. Whether its racial trauma, political trauma—whether it’s this primal—meaning their survival is at stake—the anger is getting ignited. In that moment, when trauma hits trauma, what you’re seeing is an impulse to react violently. It’s discharging the energy. “I don’t know what to do with this energy, so I’m going to hit you, push you, scream at you.” And then later, [they] look at it and [are] like, “Oh my God! What happened?”
That’s what scares me most right now. I’m watching people who are in their trauma getting re-traumatized in that environment, but not having the tools to remain in their center so that they can acknowledge they’re in trauma, acknowledge the impulse that they want to fight or rage, and do something about it that’s mindful and compassionate and loving in the moment—and then process the shit out of it later.
That’s what freaks me out a little bit—we’re seeing how traumatized our nation is and that there’s a lack of tools. There’s rhetoric that’s being ignited that is actually re-traumatizing our population, and it’s moving us towards violence rather than reconciliation.
So, I’m really investigating this right now for myself, noticing my own behavior [and] saying—how many times have I said, “I hate Donald Trump. I hate him.” I don’t use that word freely like that. And yet—hoo, man. That’s deep trauma. He represents something to me that I haven’t yet reconciled. I need to do some really serious work. Otherwise, I’m the problem. Right now as a nation, we’re all the problem because we’re not dealing with our trauma.
TS: Now, I want to just pull out one thing that you said—that as a yoga teacher, you’re sensitive to the trauma that may be present in the room and that you tune in to people who might be either shutting down or feeling re-traumatized. I’m curious, first of all, how you would notice either one of those things happening—and then what you might do. Someone’s shutting down. What might you do?
SC: I think it’s an excellent question. It really is. I’ve also given this a lot of thought too, since I deal with large populations. So, I’m having to read collectives [and] not just individuals. I’m having to read the energy of a room. But, I’m also seeing a lot of young yoga teachers—who I hope are actually listening to this right now—not realizing the power of touch, the power of words, and even music, [as well] as the impact that can have on one’s individual consciousness—especially in the unconscious.
So, every class I have to set up with an intention. Every class begins with personal accountability and responsibility—and asking people to set an intention for themselves in that class. When I do this, I’m using words like “God,” for example. But, I’m also going to use other words: higher power, creative consciousness, Mother Earth. As I’m saying certain words, I’m looking around the room and what I’m looking for is whose eyes are opened. Usually, I have people on their backs. I’m looking at if their eyes are opened, how they’re breathing—like if their chests are moving slow and smooth, or if I can see that they’re holding their breath—[and] if they’re zoning off [and] looking at the persons around them. The way their face registers is often going to start to alert me [to] whether or not that person is present and in their body, or if they’re starting to disassociate.
Those are certain things that I’m looking for: presence and disassociation. As I’m moving through a yoga class itself, I’m constantly walking around the room, and the same thing—I’m assessing quality of facial expression and even tension in the jaw [or] in the hands. If someone’s hands are really tight in a pose and I walk by, I just gently touch their hands and try to move the energy down. If their hands soften and release, then I know they’re just tense. But, if they maintain it and when I glance at their face I can see their mouth looks really tight, I know that they’re—again—not in present time. Something’s coming up.
And so, I’m going to use my language to affirm it, to acknowledge it, but make it very general so it’s not personal to the room—and to normalize the experience. I think that that’s critical. If I’m scared, overwhelmed, or alert, the student is going to read that off of me. But if I’m normalizing the experience—if I’m acknowledging that trauma exists and to pay attention to the sensations in their body, to remind them that anger is not a sensation but heat is. [I remind them] that love is not a sensation, but warmth is—expansion is. [I remind them] that fear is not a sensation, but contraction is. [I] try to help the student recognize, “Oh, I’m contracted. That might also mean I’m afraid. Oh, I’m hot. That might mean I’m scared.”
So, try to make that correlation between the mind and the body. That’s my job as a communicator—is to make this experiential, but nonthreatening. It’s a skill. It’s part of my training and it’s something that I worked with for years.
Have I re-traumatized students over the years? Absolutely. Is it devastating for me as a teacher? Yes. It breaks my heart, but it happens all the time because you can’t really know what’s in someone’s experience.
At the end of the class, I always try to wrap the class up with gratitude—with really looking at [how] our narratives are part of our experience that are leading to transformation. We can’t change what is, but we can shift our perception. We can find value in these narratives that are actually positive and transformative.
So, if I can plant seeds in the student to let them know that where they’re at is exactly where they’re supposed to be, that trauma is real and it lives in the body, and that there are tools like yoga, meditation, prayer, [and] breath-work that can shift the tension into self-realization, it can move them into not thinking it should be different. But, they can make peace with what is and actually learn from it, grow from it, and then transform it.
So, it’s a difficult question to answer because, like I said, it’s years of training and experience and watching students, and also identifying it in my own body. I think that’s also key. I know what shut-down feels like for me. I know what it looks like physically. So, there are certain identifications or markers, if you will, that can help me as a curator [to] be able to see what’s going on in a room.
TS: In your own experience as a yogi, have you been able to actually, fully resolve some traumas—like big traumas from your own life? It’s like through yoga, this was fully resolved?
SC: I’d have to say no. I don’t think it’s fully resolved. I think I’ve made peace. I don’t have the same attachment. It doesn’t define me or rule me. But, there are moments still to this day where something might happen and—for a moment—I’m right back.
But, the difference is it’s a moment. I can identify it in my body, I can take a breath, shake it out, and then move on from it relatively quickly.
But, it’s still alive and well in there. I mean, I have a story. I share this publically all the time. I was molested as a child, so I have a real—like, that lives in my body. That experience. It’s not something I had to uncover or really work through dramatically to remember experiences from my childhood. I knew exactly what happened. I’ve always known exactly what happened. It was something that was very much supported in dialogue within my family.
So, I was really lucky that way. [I] did tons of work in yoga and in therapy to help to really heal it—to move towards forgiveness. Et cetera, et cetera.
When I turned 40, my family was throwing a birthday party for me. My mom called me up and said, “Hey, we have a little situation here. Grandma mentioned to so-and-so—” the person that molested me was a very, very distant young relative, “—that you’re having this party and invited him to come. How do you feel about that?”
Now, I started to shake. I could barely talk. I was so angry that the question was even being put to me. I freaked. My mother felt terrible. She felt awful. She couldn’t believe it. I got myself together very quickly and I said, “Oh my God, Mom. It was as if I was six years old when you asked me that question.” The feeling was, “How come no one didn’t already interfere and protect me from this?” in the same way that I had felt at that time—not protected.
Oh, my mother was devastated. But, her feeling was she wanted to check in with me because she knew how much work I’ve done. She knew I didn’t have a big attachment to the story. She knew how much healing I had maintained from the experience. So, she wanted to really just give me the opportunity to say yes or no. She didn’t want to make that assumption for me.
But, I said to her—it was fascinating to me, because I was so unprepared for even the thought of being in the same room. [It] set me back. That’s how it felt in my body. I was 40. Thirty-four years of working on this. It was if it had happened that morning.
Now, I got over it in all of three minutes. [I] did work on it later on. I processed, cried, wrote a “fuck you” letter—did the things that I do to help make sure that any of that shadow emotion—the residual—that I’m acknowledging it. In that moment, when my mother suggested it, I wasn’t in present time. The moment she said it, I was that little girl again.
So, that little girl is always in me. It’s just that if I didn’t have the tools, that little girl would run the show. I might spend the whole day freaking out. I might go out that night and have a drink. I might go out that night and act out sexually. There’s a thousand things I might do if I didn’t have the tools.
So, does yoga help me to reconcile it—where it’s gone forever? That hasn’t been my experience. But, I don’t have the same attachment. When my humanity comes up, it’s like, “Oh, there that is.” I have a lot of compassion for that little girl that was hurt and for the adult that has worked towards that reconciliation.
So, I think it’s an ongoing, lifelong process. Maybe when enlightenment comes, that attachment is no longer there. That’s the ultimate yoga. It’s all over.
But right now, in this experience, I don’t feel like anything’s been completely reconciled. But, I do think everything—all the trauma that I’ve had—has been absolutely transformed, and where the real transformation is is that I’m utterly grateful for it—not meaning that I wished it happened. I don’t wish any of it happened. But, it did. Can’t change that.
But, I also know that I wouldn’t be doing the work that I’m doing in the world today. I wouldn’t be as compassionate as I am. I wouldn’t be as generous as I am. I wouldn’t be able to identify trauma in others the way that I do had these moments not happened.
So, if they had to happen to anyone, I have an enormous amount of gratitude that that was a part of my journey. I can’t change it if I wanted to. But, I do know that those moments informed the woman that I am, and I really wouldn’t change the woman that I am today except to make me even more compassionate, more generous, more loving.
TS: Seane, tell me how working with your own trauma has made you generous.
SC: Oh, how to explain it? I have such a deep respect for the human experience. It’s really hard. It’s really hard when you don’t have tools. It’s really hard when you don’t have support. It’s really hard when you’ve inherited ancestral trauma and you don’t even know what’s going on in your body. It’s hard when you’re raised in environments where there’s so much bias and prejudice that you don’t have the kind of education that allows you to interpret that or take ownership of that. Being in these bodies is really hard, and I know that because I know how quickly I want to run and check out and bypass.
So, when I see someone else in their struggle—when I see someone else just like fighting the world and they’re so shut down—I want to serve them even more. I want to love them even more. I want to bear witness to them and hope that through my reflection they can see the beauty of who they actually are—not their rage or their fear or their grief, but their light.
So, I know that I’ve become more generous. I’m more interested in being a part of the world in a way that I didn’t when I was younger. I want to participate. I want to engage, because I know how easy it is to want to run and hide. That’s only going to serve our planet into more devastation. That is intolerable to me.
So, any generosity I have is—maybe it is selfish, because it’s really the need to want to engage and to give and to share and to humanize as much as possible of this experience that we’re having on Earth—and not think it should be any other way than the way that it is, and that all of us are growing and learning and transforming.
But, we need the tools—and the tools are shared. So, we need community. That’s the part I want to be a part of. I’m generous because I want to be part of the community that creates change. So, my engagement is what’s generous.
TS: So, the centerpiece—if you will, Seane—of this Yoga of Awakening 24-hour teaching series is about 10 hours that focuses on Chakra Flow—working with the chakras. We’ve been talking about trauma and the resolution of trauma, and how yoga can help us with that. Help me understand the connection between trauma and the chakras in your experience.
SC: Well, when we’re taught that there’s no separation between the mind and body, and we know that our body remembers everything—it remembers all of the good and it remembers all of the challenging—tension, stress, and anxiety.
Let me put it this way: Everything is energy. That’s the thing when we talk about yoga [and] we’re all one. We’re all this energy—this vibration. Actually, Cyndi Dale—who is an author for you—wrote a book I love called—I’m forgetting the name . . .
TS: The Subtle Body?
SC: Yes! The Subtle Body. She describes energy as being vibration with information or vibration with data. I really appreciated when she said this, because—so, although everything is energy, there [is] different information that make up me or you or my cat or my pillow. Everything is energy. Everything is vibration. That’s what makes us integrated and connected—whole, if you will.
So, our bodies—or rather, anger is a vibration. Love is a vibration. Fear is a vibration. If we’re not processing the anger, the fear, the guilt, the shame, the inadequacy—the shadow emotions—[like I said before], that energy has no place to go but back into our body and it becomes the tension that we experience. Tension, stress, and anxiety are the number one causes of illness today, and that includes depression.
So, what happens when you practice yoga is you stretch. And when you stretch, you release the tension. When you release the tension, the vibration that makes up that tension comes up to the surface. It realizes itself as sensation.
So, that’s one piece of it. Chakras are vortices of electromagnetic energy that line the length of the spine. Throughout the body, there are thousands of chakras. But in yoga, there’s seven major chakras that we work with. Each chakra spins at a very particular rate. The job of the chakra is to distribute prana—or life force—throughout the body.
When a chakra gets blocked, it [disables] the prana from moving throughout the body and that energy becomes stagnant. As a result, those areas become vulnerable to that tension or to that illness.
What’s interesting is that each chakra receives information from both the physical and the spiritual worlds. So, it receives the information from—let’s say—trauma. If the chakra receives this information, the chakra either moves [and] spins too slow or too quickly. Either way, it’s affecting our energy body.
Each chakra receives very specific information and also influences very specific parts of the body. So, for example, the first chakra is our foundation. It’s home, safety, family, security. It’s very primal. It’s the relationship that we have with our community, our family, our tribe. When that chakra is balanced, we’re able to feel grounded and safe in the world. We’re able to have trust. We’re able to maintain good and healthy boundaries in relationships. Et cetera, et cetera.
That chakra can get blocked because of poor bonding with our mother, enmeshment, any major illness or surgery, divorce or death of a loved one; families who grew up in impoverished conditions, with gang violence, or where there was genocide like the Holocaust, for example; families with generational trauma, where there was perhaps slavery or over racism. All that lives within that first chakra. It tells us that the world is an unsafe and untrusting place. That chakra becomes blocked. It becomes stagnant. The parts of the body that are affected are the legs, the feet, the ankles, the knees, the lower part of the back, the immune system, the teeth, and the bones. Really, the solid parts of the body.
So, in creating a yoga class, I might do asanas that strengthen, tone, or deliberately release energy in those parts of the body—in the legs—while simultaneously talking about things that are around our safety or our home or our shelter or our work. So, there’s this kind of a double-whammy.
So, when we can change the limited beliefs that we hold within that chakra—if we can heal it—and the way we heal it takes time, but it’s ultimately through forgiveness. But, that’s a long road ahead of us. There’s a lot of other steps that have to happen before we can get to the forgiveness part. But, it allows the energy then to circulate more.
Each chakra is in relationship to something different. The second chakra is one-on-one relationships and sexuality, emotions, and creativity. The third chakra is about our sense of self—our authenticity, our activation, individuation, our ego. The fourth chakra is love, compassion, but also the need to forgive and resentment [live] there as well. The fifth chakra is about communication, self-expression, finding your voice. The sixth chakra is about vision and intuition and imagination. And then the seventh chakra is the connective point between your physical body and the cosmic consciousness—or God, if you will—and it’s where we develop a rapport with the divine that’s beyond ordinary human consciousness.
So, we are healing the trauma and tension that is influencing each of these chakras, releasing the energy associated with those chakras from different body parts. That’s allowing for a cleaner channel so we can ultimately develop our intuition.
Intuition is not a gift—it’s a skill. Everyone is intuitive. But, when we’re attached to a narrative, when we have low self-esteem, when we’re giving away our power, when we’re defining ourselves by our trauma, we block our ability to listen to our inner guidance. When we’re able to cleanse this energy, release the tension, and then do the inner work to ask how that tension got there in the first place, what the trauma we’ve experience [is], how that trauma [has] served us—only then can we begin to cleanse it so that we can start to hear truth.
Truth is not always comfortable. But, it does always guide us into really our authentic nature, which is love.
So, in a nutshell, that’s what the chakras are all about. Then the program takes you through each chakra. It explores what a deficient chakra looks like and feels like, what an excessive chakra looks like and feels like, the traumas or abuses that block a chakra, the illnesses that can occur or inform if there is a block, and the affirmations that can help us to reconcile some of these narratives. But, practice also has a secondary audio track that allows you to go through the same exact sequence, but not hear all that stuff—and instead through meditation, through prayer, and then through just practice, make it more experiential so that you’re having your own experience about body-mind connection and then [be] able to release it through meditation and prayer at the end.
TS: Now, one of the things that’s so interesting to me, Seane, about your approach—The Yoga of Awakening—is, as you’re working with these different energy centers and working with yoga postures, you’re combining being able to investigate and release limiting beliefs. So, how do you do that? It’s one thing to be in a posture, to breathe, and—if we’re working with the first chakra—to feel energy streaming down our legs and our feet are opening and connecting to the ground. But, how do I work through the limiting beliefs I have about being safe, et cetera?
SC: It’s through the experience of yoga, in that in every class I offer prayer [and] meditation, but also inquiry. There’s almost like there’s this arc that happens in every single yoga class that you take: from birth to death. It’s very specific.
As a teacher, I’m going to plant seeds in the beginning and then—for probably 50 percent of the class—I’m only going to teach asana as an asana—feet planted, thighs lift. I’m just going to help you get in your body. But, after the physical part, when you’re in the poses where you’re just breathing or either you’re supine on your back or you’re in a long forward-bend or a hip-opener—where there’s not a lot of muscular activity; it’s just you, the sensation, your imagination, and the ways in which we’ll try to run from our discomfort—it’s in those moments when where I begin to ask questions and invite the student into an inquiry.
I want the student at that point actually thinking, not disassociating. It’s kind of antithetical to the way that a lot of yoga is taught, where students are being invited, “Don’t think. If a thought comes up, let is pass.” There’s absolutely time and space for that, but in the asana practice before we can get to that detachment—which is very sophisticated—we have to understand what it is that we’re detaching from.
So, I actually invite the student to go into a process where I ask questions and then [I ask] them to notice what comes up—what’s true for them, what they feel, [to] notice if they are looking around or if they’re thinking about sex or food or some argument they got into three days ago. These are all signs that there’s an avoidance that’s happening—that sensation is coming up and we’re trying not to stay present. When we don’t have the drink or the food available to us, it’s our mind that will try to take us out of present time.
So, in the experience that I’m offering people in the DVDs, I’m taking them through that inquiry to give them an opportunity to really look at their thoughts and their inability to be present, and then take them through a meditation that I hope—again—normalizes it and then helps to flip it. I want to demystify the yoga/meditation practice. It’s a process. It’s work. It has a level of emotional, psychological, psychosomatic depth that often needs to acknowledged and looked at before we can move away from it—before we can (again I use that word) detach.
But, [to] detach without awareness is disassociation. Because of my own work, disassociation is something that we all do quite readily, and I want to draw people’s attention to it before I invite them away from it.
I don’t know if I answered that question for you completely because it’s pretty complex. But, this work is actually asking people to look and identify their thought process, their trauma, their monkey mind, and then—through meditation—help to witness it without being identified with it in the same way.
TS: Yes. I think part of what’s driving my question is I’m quite curious about how early adopted core beliefs change—what actually makes them change. So, that’s kind of what I’m driving at. You sort of answered it because you’re not getting people to check out when they’re starting to inquire within.
You offered a workshop at Sounds True’s Wake Up Festival a couple years ago that was called “Yoga for the Brokenhearted.” So, let’s say someone’s working with the heart chakra and they identify that part of their heart as shut down. I’m picking this because I think it’s pretty common. Certainly, it’s something that I know in my own experience as well.
There’s some belief that they took on from an early age. Let’s just take a common one—something like, “Some part of me is not loveable. I’m not loveable. I’m not loveable. Some part of me is not loveable.” How in The Yoga of Awakening does that belief actually change?
SC: Yes. Yes. In Chakra Flow, I do a whole practice on the fourth chakra—on love—and also on Mystic Flow, there’s dedicating a practice to someone that you love, including yourself. Going back to that mind-body connection, we all experience trauma, we all believe we’re not loveable—it’s imprinted into our bodies and it becomes tension. It locks around that part of the body and it becomes familiar—because what happens if we release the tension? We can get hurt.
That’s the limited belief. It’s in the unconscious. It’s in sensation.
So, in the practice of yoga, you’re moving, you’re breathing, you’re doing a series of poses that moves the energy—that releases it. Well, there’s a moment where fear is going to come up because it’s going to take you to that place of, “Oh no, I’m not safe!”
My job is to plant seeds to remind you of who you truly are, what love really is, how love is truly our authentic nature, and the ways in which we have bought into those limited beliefs because it’s all that we know. [I teach] how to reclaim that understanding.
Again, I can’t do it justice just explaining it. It’s something that I would have to take people through—getting them to understand that everything has happened exactly the way it needs to in order for an individual soul to transform. Even in their grief, it is a way to crack our hearts open so that we can love bigger than we ever imagined possible. It’s our birthright. It’s who we are. It’s not what we’re becoming. It’s not even what we need to seek, because that would suggest that it’s outside of ourselves. But, it’s what we’re awakening to.
My job as a facilitator is to remind people of what they already know is true. I believe that everybody knows that they are loveable, loved, and loving. But, because of trauma, that knowing has been nullified. It’s been abused. It’s been broken.
But, if you give people an opportunity to move through the tension and have that awakening on an experiential level, it’s something they never forget. That tension gets replaced—even if it’s for a moment—by expansion. Again, it’s an imprint. It’s a remembrance. The more you practice yoga, the more expansive that becomes and the contraction begins to decrease—and the limited belief changes. It doesn’t really serve you or the planet to think of yourself as unlovable or unworthy.
It’s the mantras I have for myself. How dare I use those limited beliefs within myself, because that means that’s what I’m projecting outward. I don’t want to contribute in that way.
So, I really do believe that yoga as a tool—not the tool, a—is critical in shifting limited beliefs and helping us reframe that narrative. I have six non-negotiables. I’m working on a seventh one. I suck at it, but I’m really working on it because I know it’s critical.
If I don’t do my six/seven non-negotiables, because of my trauma and the way in which I respond to my trauma, I revert almost instantaneously back into old limited beliefs because it’s so familiar and it feels safe. I have to practice, yoga, meditation, prayer. I have to have a diet that is nurturing and nourishing. I have to go to therapy. I have to sleep. And my seventh one is play. That’s the one I kind of suck at because I’m more serious-minded. But, I need to incorporate that more.
I know that if I do those non-negotiables, odds are I show up from love. I remember who I am. I’m not influenced by my trauma or any of the voices that I carry—any of that shadow information. For a brief moment in time, I’m able to engage the world from that place.
But, if I don’t do my non-negotiables, then I fall into those old behaviors so quickly. Like what I said with my mom—I was caught off-center for that moment and suddenly all that trauma was back in my body. But, if I didn’t have these skills, I would have stayed deregulated instead of being able to take a breath, cry, and share with my mom just how upset that made me—and have her bear witness for that and hold space for it.
So, I do believe that people have to find their own tools. They’re going to be different for everyone. But, the beautiful news is that there are so many out there that we can access if we choose to [and] can help us shift these patterns and these limited belief, [as well as] become more empowered not in spite of our trauma but because of it.
TS: Seane, there’s so much I can talk with you about right now related to The Yoga of Awakening. But, I’m just going to bring this down with two final questions.
So, here’s my second-to-last one: I think a lot of people see you as a very courageous woman—a very outspoken and courageous person. I’m curious if you experience yourself as courageous and what that might mean to you—if you do or you don’t.
SC: I love your questions, Tami. You’re always—I so appreciate it. You get right in there.
I don’t really think of myself in terms that way. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to this woman who is a medium. Actually, she’s out of Colorado and she was quite remarkable. I don’t usually do that. She’s highly recommended, and I thought, “Eh, I’m in mood for saying yes to anything right now.” So, I was like, “Eh, fuck it. Why not?”
She was remarkable. She was incredible—beyond my expectations. I went in there thinking one thing and I ended up spending an hour talking to my dead dad. I stood between two worlds. But, this is another story.
But, the reason I thought I was talking to her was because I’d been told in the past that I had these spirit guides around me. I’ve been told that I have three. I was like, “You know what? I think that there is someone that I communicate with. I feel like I channel information and I don’t often know where or how that information is coming through me. But, I feel very dedicated to it.”
But, I was curious: Who are these spirit guides? Is it true? Is it real?
This woman actually reflected back to me that I have 12 spirit guides. She said that I am absolutely in dialogue with them. But, the feedback that I got from my spirit guides—and this kind of answers the question. It was really interesting to me, and it rang true. My spirit guides reflected back to me that I have this really strong sense of urgency to interpret the information impeccably. As a result, I work too hard and too intently to manage this information and that I need to relax more into it—that I don’t need to do anything, that it’s already there.
So, when you asked the question about “courageous,” I don’t think of myself as courageous. But, what I do feel is responsible. I cannot tolerate the way it feels in my body if I’m not interpreting and delivering the information the way it’s coming through me. It scares me sometimes to do it. I get afraid that I’m going to be judged. I get afraid that I’m going to be rejected. I’m afraid that I’m not going to have the language to interpret what’s coming through me adequately.
So, where I find I’m courageous is that I fight through that because I’m often very terrified—especially because I don’t have any real academic foundation. All of this is very raw. It’s very primal, very intuitive. Yet, I feel this urgency that says, “Do it! Don’t hesitate. The time is now and you must.”
So, I feel like I’m courageous on one hand—that I confront those limited beliefs. But on the other hand, I don’t feel courageous at all because I feel that it’s divine. I feel that I’m serving something other than myself and that I have to do this. It feels purposeful, if that makes sense.
So, I feel more in purpose than I do courageous. If I was more courageous, there’s so much more that I would deliver that I’m too intimidated and insecure about at this point because I don’t understand the information that’s coming through me. So, I don’t feel adequate to present it to the world. If I was more courageous, I would do it without feeling the fear of the end result.
So, I don’t know if I’m totally courageous, but I am in purpose.
TS: OK, Seane. And now to close our conversation—as I said, there’s so many things I could talk to you about—but I’m a big fan of how you pray and how you invite people to open their hearts and pray with you. I wonder if we can end this part at least of our conversation on The Yoga of Awakening—I hope to have more conversations with you in the future on it—but for now, with a prayer—some type of prayer for each of us from this conversation.
SC: I would love that. That makes me happy—to be able to offer that.
OK. Well, I’m going to assume that the listeners are at home, perhaps in a safe place. If you’re driving and listening to this, don’t do this part of it. But, if you are at home, I want you to sit tall and close your eyes. Take a very deep breath in, and then exhale it out completely. Just notice for a moment your environment—where you are—just what makes up your environment.
Perhaps get a sense of where you are at in your life today—whether you’re going through challenges, whether you’re getting your ass handed to you, or right now if you’re in a zone where things are just unfolding. Just get a sense of your humanity. Life is big and it’s deep and it’s rich and it’s raw and it’s yours. It’s for all of us to uncover and discover and unpack along the way. There’s not one way to do this.
The truth is: we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be, doing exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, learning precisely what we’re supposed to be learning. All of it is meant to awaken us to who we truly are, which is love.
So, again, if it’s appropriate, place your palms in Namaste—into prayer hands. We give thanks. We call in the god of our understanding—be it your higher power or the creative consciousness or Mother Earth or the Holy Mother herself. But, to this grace we give thanks for all of it—for the journey as it is and will continue to be. We give thanks for all the beings who have crossed our path who have ripped open our hearts, who have dropped us to our knees, who have taught us well. We ask: May we love bigger than we ever imagined possible and may we forgive always [audio cuts out briefly] and ourselves for the ways in which we have perceived they have hurt us or let us down. Instead we ask: May we expand our perception. May we see beyond reason. May we open ourselves to transform our narrative so that healing is possible and, where healing is possible, peace is inevitable.
So, we ask: May we heal. May we show up. May we do everything we need to do in our power to participate so as to create change from the inside out—so that we can reach when others would withdraw, embrace when others would reject—so that we can be a part of the culture that creates change by putting love first and making peace inevitable and aligning community in the name of grace.
Take another very deep breath and make a commitment to yourself and the god of your understanding that you will go in and remember who you are. In remembering who you are, you remember who we are to each other—that we are one. Namaste.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Seane Corn. We’ve been talking about a new DVD series that she’s created called The Yoga of Awakening. It is a trilogy—Body-Mind Flow, Chakra Flow, and Mystic Flow. More than 24 hours of teaching across seven discs.
Seane, thank you so much. Thank you so much for this conversation on Insights at the Edge, and just thank you for being Seane Corn!
SC: Thank you, Tami. It is always my pleasure. I love you and I love this program. So, I’m really honored to be a part of it.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
