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

by Seane Corn

When we let the mind dictate what our practice should look like or say about us, we’ve moved from a body-based practice to an ego-based one.

You cannot find freedom in the body, he said, you cannot feel at ease in your skin, without paying attention to the breath. At the same time, doing asana in a way that opens up the spaces in your body gives the breath more freedom to distribute prana. They are clearly linked.

He would often point out that thoughts and emotions move through the body on the wave of prana, so it’s not unusual to notice that our emotions affect the rhythm and quality of our breath.

The antidote to “monkey mind” — the Buddhist term for a restless mind — is concentration, which isn’t really designed to shut down the mind. Rather, it can bring you clarity and insight, and cultivate (maybe even widen) the gap between your thoughts, which brings more ease.

Asana can help you move any agitation out of your mind and into your body so you can identify it, notice where it lives, and release it.

That allows you to direct your life from your heart instead of your head, which means you can make more ethical, moral, and mindful choices, free from the impulse of any addictions, compulsions, and desires. It provides the pause between your thoughts and your actions that you need in order to show up for yourself and others with more patience and generosity and less judgment. It can help you see where you limit yourself by your actions, fears, or unprocessed traumas.

Wisdom and intuition require trust and self-confidence.

My ego was stronger than my will to change, and I couldn’t see how my judgments were impaired.

How could I trust my intuition when the beliefs I had about myself kept me from the truth of who I was?

Meditation and quiet reflection help engage the wisdom, or discerning, mind.

non-judgment

we can begin to experience the whole of life — even the painful or grief-filled moments — with more compassion and even objectivity.

Anandamaya Kosha (The Bliss Body) The subtlest of the energy bodies, the anandamaya kosha, connects our ordinary awareness with our highest Self or Spirit.

You experience the bliss body when you suddenly and inexplicably feel at ease,

you simply receive the pose. You’re no longer doing the pose; you are the pose.

And for once in my life, I didn’t argue with my experience; I didn’t minimize it by reminding myself that I still had no purpose, that I was still basically an anxious mess. I simply received what was happening, fully present to the moment I was in, and felt at peace.

niyamas, the second of the eight limbs of yoga. These five “observances” encourage us to engage with ourselves as consciously as we can, so we can notice the places in our lives where we’re out of sync with our true nature and commit over and over again to this self-inquiry, with patience and generosity.

who we are and the attachments we have to our own stories.

saucha means to purify or cleanse, to rid the body and the mind of anything that causes suffering.

Saucha also encourages you to get clear on what thoughts and emotions you allow to enter your mind.

As thoughts and feelings come up, which ones do you hold on to, which ones do you feed until they grow much bigger than they were ever intended to be? And

which ones keep you stuck and unable to...

ridding it of any judgments, fears, excuses, and unhealthy habits so you can shine the light on your inner radiance and t...

impurities in our physical environment, including drugs, alcohol, poor diet, and environmental stressors, do affect our mental and emotional states.

Santosha (Contentment)

Think of santosha as present-moment acceptance, welcoming all of your experiences and relationships and seeing them as integral to who you are.

understanding your narrative but not being limited by what you tell yourself.

being completely present, not needing anything to be different. I knew then that I would be just fine;

There’s never enough out there to fill the emptiness inside because what we’re actually lacking is a sense of our own goodness, a sense that yes, we are enough.

It means freeing the mind of all the “if onlys,” “shouldas,” and “wouldas” that cloud your thinking.

Tapas (Discipline)

I definitely practiced tapas because it often took incredible discipline not to fall into old mindless habits when I got discouraged or felt anxious.

It eventually allowed me to cultivate the conscious awareness to stop indulging in unhealthy habits and impulses.

Svadhyaya (Self-Study)

It is self-awareness without judgment.

Svadhyaya, on the other hand, wants you to notice when your actions and thoughts are out of harmony with your purest intentions, to notice when you’re doing things that could set you apart from others. When

Ishvara Pranidhana (Devotion or Surrender)

getting out of the way in order for the soul to evolve. It requires that you surrender to the mystery and trust that the Universe will present what you need, when you need it.

Ishvara pranidhana, on the mat, means to practice without being attached to the outcome, to focus on the process and not be concerned with the results. You may not be able to control what’s going on in your life, but you can control how you think and feel about it all.

you must dedicate the merits of your actions, of your practice, to something bigger than yourself. Everything you do must ...

yoga would place what needed to be acknowledged front and center until the body, mind, and heart could receive it, assimilate it, and then let it go.

“deregulation.” And then he says, “I believe you do these rituals to stave off the discomfort you feel in your body as a result of your trauma. It’s your way of self-regulating.”

I dissociated.

“Trauma is any event you experience that leaves you feeling helpless, out of control, in despair, unable to defend yourself, or powerless to respond.

simply shoved all those emotions down, where they have remained trapped in my body ever since and have formed a deep layer of protective tension. Tension that I have long relied on to actually help me feel safe, or at least alert. Tension that practicing yoga had begun to release.

I feel in control again.

Only thing I can control, ONLY thing, is me

Every time it happened, I would feel afraid, get dizzy, freeze up, and then numb out — classic dissociation. What I couldn’t do was take action, which was beyond frustrating to me.

Because my dissociation had kept me in some sort of emotional disconnect, I would probably freeze or fold and allow whatever my assaulter wanted to happen to happen

theory of “detachment.” He tells me that whenever a big feeling comes up, I should witness it, be present to it, and then let it go. So

Developmental trauma, which most experts agree is the hardest to treat, involves situations that happen in our childhood, events we felt powerless to stop, such as rejection, abandonment, bullying, the