Revolution of the Soul: Awaken to Love Through Raw Truth, Radical Healing, and Conscious Action

by Seane Corn

Shadow: Fear Location: Legs, feet, rectum, spinal column, lower intestinal tract, bones, teeth, and immune system

Inherited Traumas: Family members who were survivors of genocide

Someone with a manipura chakra imbalance can become deceptive, volatile, stubborn, addicted to power, arrogant, demeaning, and cruel. Shadow: Shame Location: The muscular system, stomach, pancreas, liver, gallbladder, spleen, and intestinal tract

Shadow: Grief Location: Heart, lungs, thymus gland, breasts, shoulder blades, and arms Personal Traumas: Experiences of rejection, humiliation, abandonment; suppressed grief; break-up, loss, or death of a loved one; withheld affection; betrayal; and sexual, emotional, or physical abuse

Shadow: Lies Location: Throat, mouth, lips, teeth, tongue, and neck

Located between the eyebrows, the sixth chakra, or third eye center, is where you develop your thoughts and ideas and where you begin to access your intuition, visions, and dreams. When balanced, this vortex allows you to see beyond reason, to become more intuitive, to think more symbolically, and to create meaning in your life by seeing a larger spiritual framework at play. You can trust your inner knowing and follow its mystical guidance with full faith. When trauma blocks the third eye, it may manifest as insensitivity, a distrust of intuition, lack of imagination, inability to recall your dreams, dogmatic or rigid thinking, or a weak memory. The opposite end of the spectrum includes excessive daydreaming, fantastical or obsessive thinking, nightmares, hallucinations, illusions, and inability to concentrate. Shadow: Illusion Location: Face, eyes, ears, and central nervous system

ethereal,

It felt like a country of extremes, a place that seemed to hold so many dualities. India is beautiful, exotic, rich, lush, vibrant, magical, and spiritual. It is also grotesque, brutal, impoverished, unfair, depraved, dirty, and cruel. It is my favorite country in the world. I can’t stand it. I can’t wait to go back. When can I leave? Yeah, it’s kinda like that. India has a way of exposing those very dualities within you. The shadow and the light. India is yoga,

Shit. I don’t need a guru. I don’t need to search far and wide for something that’s already within me. That’s what Billy was trying to tell me all along, right? The teacher is in me and in you, in the easy times and the hard ones? In the heartbreak and in the beauty? I can almost see Billy nodding his head. Every experience is meant to awaken us to love and every person is the guru. Fuck, life is the guru! Each moment contains a message and offers significant guidance. I need to assign meaning, even to the incomprehensible. That is how I heal. That is how I love. That is how to know God. No, that is how to be God, by being love.

the universe sends us the same lesson, in different guises, again and again, until we learn from it, heal, and grow.

other person on that stage looked like me. I got a taste of how this privilege, and the power dynamics that came with it, gave me advantages that kept me separate from the others. David had tried to teach me this at Life Café years before — but I didn’t get it then. Now I saw it, and it could not have been clearer. This separation is endemic in our society; it perpetuates the oppression that harms and impedes certain groups while protecting and advancing others — based on race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and education — and it runs deep in the collective psyche, influencing how we experience ourselves and each other. This separation, the opposite of yoga, was alive and well — even in a yoga ashram, even in the lap of the guru. Throughout the world and in every culture, separation begets pain and suffering, which are the roots of all oppression.

I discovered what happens when I choose to move out of my small self and see the Divine in all beings. I found God not in the shala of Pattabhi Jois, in the hugs of Ammachi, or in the rainbows and flowers of Pondicherry, but within myself. Yogis call this ishvara pranidhana — radical openness, surrender, devotion, communion with the Divine — the fifth of the five niyamas. When that happened, I witnessed the sacredness of the whole world. Swami Satchidananda nailed it when he said we must surrender to what is, which “requires trust in our deepest Self, our intuition and the courage to express ourselves for who we are, as we are, with all of our perfect imperfections, all of which ultimately leads to freedom.”

I left India without a guru but came home with something infinitely more powerful: confidence, clarity, and compassion. Whether they knew it or not, the teachers I met gave me what I had prayed for most of my adult life — the confidence to heed my body’s wisdom, the clarity to trust my intuition, and the compassion to love without exception. I felt love for the whole world, for the bitter, beautiful, glorious, tragic, and wondrous mystery of it all, and, for the first time, I knew without a doubt that the “heaven” I had been seeking was right here all along — everywhere I look and wherever I am.

I particularly loved practicing vinyasa flow. Vinyasa, which means “to place in a special way,” links movement with breath. It’s rhythmic, informed by proper alignment, and, because it’s not attached to any particular school of yoga, spiritually open to personal interpretation.

“Oh. Really? You’re sad? You don’t seem terribly sad. How do you feel right now?” “I don’t know. Right now?” I think about it for a second. “Fine, I guess.” Mona laughs. “You know what F-I-N-E means? Fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional!”

“You yogis are the worst to work with! Detachment, right? That’s what you strive for, isn’t it? Well, let me tell you something, Yogi. Detachment without true awareness is just dissociation, and it’s something I have no doubt you are brilliant at. You’ve gotten really good at understanding your pain; you can even articulate it beautifully, but you suck balls at actually feeling it. That’s true, isn’t it?”

“And God speaks to you from here.” She gently thumps my third eye. “It’s in your intuition. You know what intuition means? It’s in-tuition. Inner teaching. It lives within you. The shadow just blocks the light. Just keep doing your work. Do your yoga, keep grounding and moving that energy. Just don’t bypass any emotion. Feel it all! Be in relationship with it and let it liberate your true nature.

“What do you mean, my purpose?” “Oh sweetie,” she says. “Sometimes our pain is our purpose. And the very thing you have been running from, once empowered, becomes the very place from which you will serve. It’s the gift of karma. It’s called empathy,” she leans forward and whispers in my ear, “and it’s what will heal this world.”

Some say that the seat of the soul resides in the heart (in the anahata chakra) and is what awakens within us an inherent capacity for compassion, connection, and love. Spirit, they say, resides at the crown (in the sahasrara chakra) and awakens us to Source, to our divinity. In truth, there is no separation between soul and Spirit — the former is simply the individual expression of the latter.

We suffer when we believe that our fear, doubt, anxiety, or heartbreak is real and forever, that we’ll never be happy, healthy, financially successful, or in love again. We also suffer when we become attached to pleasure, when we believe that our happiness, love, health, and financial success is permanent — because it isn’t! Either way, defining ourselves by external validation or material worth is a tried-and-true recipe for misery.

When we enter into a relationship with Spirit, we develop real Self-confidence — with a capital S — and we begin to see who we are beyond our ego and understand why we’re here and what we need to accomplish. As a result of that, we can embrace the totality of our authentic nature and trust our intuition, or what I call the inner teachings of God.

ephemeral,

Flipping the story means reinterpreting an event from a larger spiritual perspective and understanding its divine purpose beyond how the small self perceives it. Through a process of self-reflection, rinsing, and radical accountability — without bypassing the teachings of the shadow self — we can begin to heal our own pain body, as well as develop empathy for the fragile humanity of all the people involved in our story, without judgment, especially those who have caused us pain. This process requires us to understand the ways we “co-create” with Spirit to manifest what is essential for our soul’s growth, to see the brutal and crucial role of forgiveness for personal healing, to willingly “own” how each experience is in service to our awakening, and to recognize its role in our soul’s evolution toward Oneness. Oh, and, while we’re at it, to cultivate gratitude for each experience as it is without wishing that it could be or should be different.

Introducing you to yourself means remembering and embodying everything that makes you you, including the cringeworthy or traumatic experiences you’ve hidden away or “forgotten.” It means learning to trust your intuition. To do that requires a strong and steady foundation. You must feel rooted and connected both to the earth and to a force beyond that. Your inner wisdom will open you up to the flow of life, unencumbered by the illusions that keep you tethered to your smaller mind. A regular asana practice grounds the body, and chakra work exposes the emotional fissures that influence your ability to stay steady and present. Only when we are stable, are we free to fly.

We must be willing to “go get it,” she said, own it, and be in full relationship with it. Go beyond the admitting, beyond the noticing — which was all ego-driven — and name our feelings, feel them, get down into the muck, and engage with them. She insisted that I confront my feelings, rail against them, and mourn all that I felt I had lost. In Mona’s words, I needed to rinse this shit out of me. Rinsing makes space for total self-acceptance and joyous self-reunion. It insists, in the words of Nikki Myers, my friend and yoga teacher extraordinaire, that we acknowledge the “Fuck you” before we can get to the “Bless you.”

We can’t expand our own consciousness and forgive ourselves for our human frailties and then turn around and judge someone else as being broken or flawed when they’re just working out their shit too.

To forgive is probably the toughest spiritual practice we will face in life. But forgive we must in order to release the caustic energy festering within us, making us sick, and separating us from our highest Self — and from each other. Forgive because we recognize that we are all flawed, all broken to some degree, all traumatized, all human. Ignore the story and see the soul. The people who have hurt us may be assholes, but they are also children of God, like we all are. So give them back to God. Pray they learn, heal, and open to love. It is this forgiveness that unites, and it is this forgiveness that heals. And just when you think you’ve fully forgiven, forgive again. This process takes time, but it’s worth it; in the end, you get your Self back. Fully and whole.

The truth is that we are here to awaken to the light, to the God within us and within all. How do we do that? By experiencing all of life, without creating separation. By healing the fractured parts of ourselves and accepting the gifts every one of our relationships has to give. By seeing the soul of every being as a pure expression of that person’s own divinity. Finally, by letting ourselves love the whole messy, chaotic, and beautiful process of “being” that can bring us home to the God within.

The way I teach, the prayers I speak, and the words I write — especially in this book — are all expressions of that work and reflections of the time I spent flipping the narrative from one of blame, victimization, and resentment to one of compassion, empowerment, and gratitude. The reason I can be honest, authentic, raw, and open about my experiences today is because they do not define me. They are simply aspects of my journey, vital for the evolution of my soul and for “remembering” who I truly am beyond my body and my limited thoughts.

Blame and resentments are energies that deplete our physical and emotional bodies — natural impulses derived from our ego self — but they are not who we are. Love is who we are; love is our true nature. The energy of forgiveness refills our reserves and allows us to be fully expressed in the Self. Forgiveness unites, resentment separates. As long as we remain in separation on a personal level, we are perpetuating the very disconnect we wish to transform on a global one. The work begins within us: we must uncover the love we are. And then, as yoga teaches, we must give it away. We are obligated to share it with the world, and when we do, we will come to know, over and over again, the power of that love to awaken the soul to its deepest purpose. And that purpose? To lead a revolution from within for the benefit of all — in the name of equality, justice, freedom, and, of course, love.

Our inner work must inform our outer work, our dharma. Only then can we meet those we wish to serve with our full attention, employing all of our senses so we may hear, see, and feel into their experience and meet them where they are.

You may never transcend your ego or scrub your shadow self clean. Serve anyway. Your work is to show up as you are — without denying, burying, or justifying your shadow emotions — and then commit to serving consciously and in love, as best you can.

I think author and activist Parker Palmer said it best when he addressed the 2015 graduating class at Naropa University: “Take everything that is bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself. Let your altruism meet your egoism, let your generosity meet your greed, let your joy meet your grief . . . but when you are able to say ‘I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,’ the shadow’s power is put in service to the good.” And you have found your dharma.

I didn’t care if the only reason someone wanted to do yoga was to tone their abs or tighten their butt. My experience taught me that in time and with commitment, yoga would guide each soul into a personal awakening beyond the body. I was happy to see so many people, who might normally shy away from a practice steeped in spirit, step onto their mats.

Rushing in to fix things without connecting first, it turns out, is the number one shadow of the privileged. It creates a hierarchy, a power dynamic designed to perpetuate oppression, born from a model of charity, rather than true service.

Help is born from inequality; it is a one-sided offering that puts the helper in a position of authority and those who’ve been helped forever in the helper’s debt. Had I truly come to serve, I would have come in love, with mutual respect, understanding, and a willingness to learn and be useful. The fact that I wanted to give money was not the issue. The fact that I saw my money as the solution to their problems was.

Yoga gives us the capacity to approach the natural world and one another with reverence and a willingness to listen, to show up more from our wisdom mind and less from our logical, “let me tell you what you need” brain. In both permaculture and yoga, living in harmony with all includes ourselves and other people, of course, as well as our animal friends, trees, plants, soil, water, and air. This relationship is divinely bound and sacred.

This kind of love was deeper than the feel-goods I got being around the children, hearing their laughter, seeing how they cared for one another and for themselves. This kind of love comes from the depth of our soul — not from our ego — and it knows no bounds. It’s the kind of love that Ancient Greeks, along with Christian theologians including Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called agape, meaning the highest form of love: selfless, unconditional, “the love of God operating in the human heart.”

We contain within us the same fundamental forces that are found in nature — stability (tamas), energy (rajas), and harmony or basic goodness (sattva) — the gunas as they are called in Sanskrit. These three intertwine, in various ways, to create everything (visible and invisible) in the universe and within ourselves as well. All of this weaving together happens without us being conscious of it, but we can learn to pay attention to their individual characteristics so we can figure out how they work and how we can work with them.

Nothing can live without energy (rajas).

Rajas provides the passion and desire to get things done and the effort and enthusiasm required to make it all happen. Unfortunately, it can also make you flighty, impatient, and annoying and can create harmful division when left unchecked.

Rajas fuels the desire to serve but only to the extent that such service makes you look and feel good; rajas is all about ego gratification. Rajastic types need validation and look for happiness outside themselves.

Tamas brings a sense of inner stability and groundedness, which can stop you from jumping into action prematurely or overextending yourself. When it dominates, however, that stability can turn to apathy, obstruction, and self-beat — Who am I, thinking I can make a difference? What do I have to offer? — and keep you from getting off the couch and doing something.

Tamas tempers rajas by offering stability and encouraging rest. Rajas lights a fire under your tamasic ass to awaken your passion and get you off that couch.

The yin and the yang.

As Rolf Sovik of the Himalayan Institute wrote in an article for Yoga International, “Cultivating sattva — by making choices in life that elevate awareness and foster unselfish joy — is a principal goal of yoga.” When you’re able to cultivate a sattvic state of mind, you transcend the demands of the ego, enter into a state of pure awareness, and unite in love with the world around you. You may feel a profound sense of connection — a sense that all’s right with the world

According to the yoga tradition, certain mental and emotional roadblocks interfere with our ability to connect, to see the truth, and to serve. These kleshas, or personal obstacles, include ignorance (avidya), pride or ego (asmita), desire (raga), aversion (dvesha), and fear or attachment (abhinivesa). Yoga doesn’t really see any of these as character flaws (thank God); they’re more like interruptions or disturbances that throw us off track. And it’s part of our asana and meditation practice to identify and work with them. You’ll notice that these kleshas start with our mental obstacles and then move into our emotional ones. Every one of these obstacles demonstrates how privilege can get in the way of authentic service, especially when a person isn’t aware of their privilege.

Avidya doesn’t refer to being stupid or clueless; it simply means “not knowing.” It implies that we don’t know what we don’t know, that we act from our limiting beliefs as though they’re universal truths. Avidya is pretty much the root of all the other kleshas; it’s the biggest barrier to connecting with others because in our ignorance, we fail to distinguish our soul’s truth from our ego’s interference.

Ignorance is an insidious byproduct of privilege, a subconscious refusal to acknowledge or become aware of things that make us feel uncomfortable or guilty. Privilege gives us the ability to live our lives unaware of things that other people have to struggle with every day.

Ignorance often comes from fear, and fear keeps us from moving out of ignorance.

the ego rejects the unknown, clinging desperately to the known. The soul craves experience and opens to whatever presents itself.