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

by Seane Corn

Pride is what B.K.S. Iyengar called the “insanity of individualism, when it should be the joy of singularity.” Individualism causes us to despise differences and create separation; singularity allows us to embrace the uniqueness of each soul and find joy in our differences.

Raga becomes an obstacle when we get attached to the pleasures and rewards of our actions, when we serve solely to elevate our image or our own self-worth.

Aversion is an emotional response that causes us to judge something or someone we don’t understand as repulsive, hateful, or just plain wrong. Like raga, dvesha is not, in and of itself, an affliction. It allows us to notice injustice, hateful behaviors, and oppressive actions that cause suffering — and commit to righting those wrongs. But it becomes an obstacle when we equate behaviors and actions with the people doing them — and fail to see the circumstances surrounding all that.

Fear and attachment are what keep us clinging to what we know and who we think we are — our desires and even our aversions. Abhinivesha is a manifestation of our ego, which fights to the death to stay alive. And, of course, it also comes out of ignorance and adversely affects our ability to think, act, and connect with clarity or compassion.

for service to be truly sustainable, you must choose love over fear and most certainly empathy over sympathy or pity every single time.

There’s a Sanskrit mantra many people often recite during yoga class: Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu, which means “May all beings everywhere be happy and free, and may the thoughts, words, and actions of my own life contribute to that happiness and to that freedom for all.”

It’s not enough to pray for happiness or wish for an end to suffering. Those are lovely heart-tugging sentiments, but they won’t get the job done. We must work to find the causes of happiness and alleviate the causes of suffering — for everyone, even those we don’t understand, even those we believe are evil. This takes engaging the mind as well as expanding the

I sometimes think of metta as a gentle sprinkling of goodwill that we offer to everyone because, let’s face it, whether we love them, hate them, or fear them, everyone wants to be happy. And, when our hearts feel particularly open, we can admit that everyone deserves that happiness.

Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for someone’s plight or stepping in to fix or save anyone. If we truly want to alleviate suffering, we must help tear down systems that foster oppression and inequality and build those that support freedom and inclusiveness.

Another translation for mudita is “appreciative joy” — our ability to feel happiness for the good fortune of others.

mudita. Practicing empathetic joy also means remembering the joy that comes from being alive, from doing your dharma, from connecting with another being, soul-to-soul.

The fourth immeasurable, equanimity, is a bit different. Equanimity is often translated as “standing in the middle,” “seeing with patience,” or even “looking over,” all of which suggest that we see what’s in front of us without getting caught by it — without judging it, fearing it, or jumping in to try to fix it.

The truth is you won’t be able to serve everywhere, and you won’t be able to alleviate all of the suffering you encounter. None of us will. But you can practice equanimity by connecting inward first in order to minimize the chance of creating more suffering. That is why you get on the mat and breathe. Then you get off the mat, and from that centered place, do whatever it is that needs to be done in order to create peace.

By being tender, loving, and ruthlessly honest, we can all begin to heal the fractured places within us, love who we are, and embrace the path toward wholeness we’ve chosen. Once that happens, we can cast off the veil of ignorance that clouds our ability to see and embrace the humanity in all souls. We can then feel another’s pain and also connect with their joy and their Spirit. When we love bigger than we ever imagined possible and embrace the interdependence of ALL souls as One, then peace isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable. This is the revolution of the soul; this is the evolution of consciousness; this is the pathway to peace.

The bigger issue is the resistance that those of us with privilege have to looking at how our behavior and belief systems perpetuate oppression — either consciously or subconsciously — and our failure to hold ourselves accountable. So much of our biases, bigotry, and prejudice is historical, ancestral, and cultural; it informs and impacts how we live and how we relate to one another. We are taught to fear differences, instead of celebrating them; to distrust those who think, look, and act differently, rather than learning from them. All of these beliefs live in the body and, no matter how conscious we think we are, can erupt in moments of overwhelm or stress. When that happens, our own biases, ignorance, and fears rub up against someone else’s. If we aren’t aware of what’s happening, all that rubbing creates friction, which leads to more conflict and misunderstandings, which in turn lead to pain, suffering, and even death.

None of us is exempt from the insidious ways our biases keep us separate from one another and make us pawns of the systems of oppression that surround us. Consciously or unconsciously, our prejudices that support and validate this separation make us complicit in these larger systems. The good news, however, is that each and every one of us has the power to heal the suffering we’ve caused and actively resist oppressive systems.

From all of the angels who have crossed my path and enriched my heart, I have learned that yoga is now. It’s in every experience, all beings, the rising of the sun, the shifting tides, the birth, the death, and every funky, wild, and weird moment in between. It is in the beautiful and in the grotesque. It’s in the broken and the healed. It is in all souls emerging and all souls still asleep. Yoga is never an excuse to turn away from pain, discomfort, or suffering — it is an invitation to turn toward it with compassionate action. It is not a reason to bypass the heartbreak — either yours or the world’s.

Yoga is the body, it is the breath, it is the ever-evolving soul. It is the trauma, the self-discovery, the change. It is the loss, the awakening, the forgiveness. It is the love. Yoga is personal, a way to mend the fractures within yourself. But equally important, it is spiritual, a means to heal that which divides us all and to bring us back into union with each other.

when we heal the fractured parts of ourselves and learn to love who we are and the journey we’ve embarked upon for wholeness, we will see that same tender humanity in all souls. Doing the inner work creates compassion; it just does. Although doing the inner work is humbling and exposes the depths of our own humanity, it is only when we can be fully in the human experience and see it for what it is — a process of being that opens us, through experience, to love — that we can love all the evolving, imperfect, and wondrous souls as they come home to themselves.