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Seane Corn: Your Pain Is Your Purpose

Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Seane Corn. Seane Corn is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher known for her impassioned activism, truth-telling, and her groundbreaking work in the field of yoga and trauma healing. Since 2007, she has been training leaders of activism through her cofounded organization Off the Mat, Into the World and utilizes her national platform to bring awareness to global humanitarian issues.

With Sounds True, Seane Corn has written a new book called Revolution of the Soul: Awaken to Love Through Raw Truth, Radical Healing, and Conscious Action. With her new book, Seane makes it an imperative that we connect the inner work of yoga to the social needs of our time. According to Seane, at a certain point in our personal evolution, if it has real depth and integrity, there is a flowering and a maturation. It’s the work of recreating the outer structures—the structures in our world that need to change—in the name of equity and in the name of love. Seane calls this “a revolution of the soul.” Here’s my conversation with the very lit-up Seane Corn:

Welcome, everyone. I’m here in the Sounds True studio with Seane Corn and this is a pretty big moment. We’re here to talk about her new book—check it out. Yes, that’s it. Revolution of the Soul: Awaken to Love Through Raw Truth, Radical Healing, and Conscious Action.

Seane, to begin, I’m going to share with you the secret code word for this book that occurred to me while I was reading it, which is—it’s two words—”love bigly.” And I don’t even think “bigly” is a word, but that’s what the book sings on every page, which is how to love bigly. And I actually want to start right there. What keeps our hearts more closed than we want them to be, and what can we do about it?

Seane Corn: What keeps our hearts—?

TS: Yes.

SC: I’d have to say trauma. Trauma, socialization, religion, education. Anything that thwarts curiosity. There are so many ways in which we are denied connection with the highest part of ourself. So when we get attached to the ego and to the smaller self, there’s never enough of anything to feel good. We’re always wanting more sex, more food, more relationship, more money to be able to feel defined or valued.

And when we can start reframing our narratives, heal our trauma, call our power back, it helps us to build our self-confidence. When we build our self-confidence we trust our intuition. When we trust our intuition, we can’t help but appreciate and have gratitude and love ourselves and then each other.

I don’t want to suggest that it’s like this: we’ve been socialized not to love, to be in our ego. It’s going to take a long time for us to get back to … which is our inherent state, which is grace.

TS: The core of the book is about radical healing and then moving into conscious action. I want to talk about people who engage deeply in radical healing—you talk about that as the movement of evolution—but then don’t make that move to conscious action, to the revolution part. What keeps us stuck there?

SC: Well, I’m going to get to that in a second. Before that, I want to say this to the people who are out here that I’ve been writing this thing for three and a half years.

TS: You have indeed, three and a half years of lots of work.

SC: And none of this would’ve happened if it wasn’t for you. And I just want to like let that be known: Tami, you have been up my butt for years to write this book and I did not want to. I did not have the confidence to do it. I did not have the skill to do it. I knew it was going to take way more time than I had, and also I had a sense it was going to invite me into places that I was not interested in dabbling into again.

And you just were relentless, like a dog with a bone. And I cursed you for years—

TS: Oh, right!

SC: And I’m so grateful because even though this was without a doubt, the hardest experience I’ve ever had because everything that I was afraid it was going to be, it held up the mirror to every single one of my limiting beliefs. Even though it was so hard, it also brought me more creative joy than I’ve ever had. The accomplishment that I feel having written … the rabbit holes of just despair that I went into—creative despair—just trying to figure out the process and then pull myself out of. There were so many times I’m like, “That’s it, I’m at capacity,” and then I would solve the problem.

And so as much as I cursed you, I equally—if not more—blessed you because honestly if it wasn’t for you—just you were the only one who was like, “You need to do this. You really need to do this.” And you were right. I needed to do this and it was a scary process.

And so the book is about inviting people to reframe their narratives. It’s also asking them to take accountability. What was so intense about the process is that it forced me to have to take accountability in a way I didn’t expect, I didn’t want to … and yet, my hypocrisy became so evident. It was like, “How dare I ask other people to step into their power and to start a revolution and resist it myself?”

What I also learned is that as transparent as I think I am—and I will be in this conversation most certainly—it’s like I found that there’s an edge to that, that I’m transparent to a certain degree, but you get here, the walls shut very quickly and I control my narrative. The book wouldn’t let me do that. It forced me into that level of vulnerability.

So it was intense. Like, I don’t know why people write. I honestly don’t know why people elect to do this.

TS: So, let me ask you a question because I think there’s a portion of our audience who would love to write the stories of their life and when they sit down to write, they’re not quite getting to the same level of raw truth, vulnerability that you get to in Revolution of the Soul. And you say the book wouldn’t let you. What about the book wouldn’t let you and what would be instructive for our listeners who want to make that journey themselves?

SC: Yes. Because my commitment was to my students—like I thought about them a lot—over the years I’ve been in a really privileged position in that I get to bear witness to people’s vulnerability, I get to help facilitate and take them into places within their consciousness where they resist. It’s because of their trust in me that they let themselves open just enough to allow some of those more shadowed places to come up. I don’t take that relationship for granted at all.

I wrote the book, I had that in the back of my mind—that every time I would resist going deeper, I would think, “How dare I? Because they trusted me, I’ve got to give that back, I’ve got to model what it looks like.”

And so I would write. And I wouldn’t suggest that what I wrote was—when I would first write the first chapter, for example, it was like superficial. I would step back and I could feel it in my body like, “There’s more here, there’s so much more here.” And another part of my head would be like, “Nope, it’s more than enough.” But there was something so incongruent in me; so then I would just go a little bit deeper and I’d say, “That’s enough.”

And then finally I came up with a mantra for myself that I had to write everything but I didn’t have to print everything, and that freed me up personally because I think in the back of my mind I would self-censor, thinking about like my mother or my teachers or my brothers.

TS: Sure.

SC: And I would write with that in my mind. And instead I said, “You know what? No one’s going to read this. This is for you. You just write it all.” But none of it ever has actually has to make it to the book.

What happened though is I got so accustomed to the stories, I processed so much of that information—I grieved, I worked it out in therapy—that by the time it was when I had to hand in the manuscript, there was very little that I didn’t include. There was a couple little things, but it might end up in my next book. But mostly everything ended up in that book and I think that that’s what I had to commit to—knowing it was going to be deeply personal, and that I was going to be confronting some raw truths. I had to give my—the little girl in me just some permission that, “Right now we’re just processing. You’re just going to write and explore that. Later we’ll decide who gets to actually see it.”

TS: Yes. You poured yourself out.

SC: Yes.

TS: You really did.

SC: I did.

TS: OK. Now I’m going to restate the question I asked you because …

SC: Also, thank you.

TS: Yes.

SC: Yes, that’s more what I want to say: thank you.

TS: You’re welcome. The question I wanted to ask you is: here at Sounds True, we’ve done so much to help people with their personal evolution, and I think one of the things we’ve heard back from our audience is sometimes it’s transforming into the world as effective action and for some people and in some situations they seem to get kind of stuck in the personal evolution part of the journey and they don’t quite know how to make that next step. And your book is really framed as these two sections. First, we grow and heal, but then we love bigly out in the world. So, help people make that bridge.

SC: But I think it’s like anything. It’s like someone might come to me and want to get their leg behind their head.

TS: Yes.

SC: I’m going to say to them, “Well before that can happen, let’s get some bolsters and some blocks and let’s just do Vatayanasana. Let’s just do something very modified based on where you’re at, what your body can handle, and just sit in the discomfort of that.” I think the same can be said for the way in which we evolve and work towards social change. If we go out there without understanding the ways in which we can actually create harm, that’s approaching it in a way that’s not sustainable and ultimately harmful.

Maybe those people need the evolutionary part—the part where they’re doing the inner work; where they’re holding up the mirror to their own limited beliefs; where they’re just getting into their body, their breath, and their projections. The next step then is going beyond the stretch and into the reach. That’s how I always look at it. But some people do get stuck there. They get comfortable in that complacency. But that’s never for me what yoga is been about. And if you understand the practice of yoga the way I do, there was a point in my own evolution where it was like, “Now what? Now that I’m happier, now that I’m healthier, now that I have pretty good skills to deal with chaos, what do I do with this?”

And when I would reread the texts, it was so clear that our liberation is bound—that I can’t be free unless we’re all free; that I need to actually take these skills off of the mat, out of the yoga school, and apply them out in the world. Now for some it might just be in their families—depending on where they’re at in their lives—raising healthy, conscious children, being in mindful relationship that doesn’t create personal or collective harm.

But for others it’s taking it one step further. And hopefully for everybody at some point we realize—especially for privileged—that we have a responsibility to be of service, to help to shift the consciousness of this planet, now more than ever because so many lives are at stake.

And so to me conscious action is an inevitable step in the path of yoga and it is its own spiritual practice. Most people that I see in the mainstream yoga community, we want to help but we don’t understand the shadow of that. And our helping can often look like dominance, supremacy, saviorism. That continues to perpetuate that power dynamic that creates separation.

And so I caution people when they want to go out there and help to really unpack what that means and who is it actually for. That’s its own yoga—to have to look at the ego, my need to feel good about myself, fixing something that I may not even understand. That’s about me, that’s not about the situation. So the practice of yoga really exposes all this as another part of your emotional practice that also leads to evolution.

So I encourage everybody to try to take that step away from indulging in the inner work and trying to understand how that inner work informs the work we need to do in the world.

TS: Now, one of my favorite parts of the book—and there are lots of favorite parts—is your introduction of a woman named Mona Miller and your experiences with Mona. And as I started off and I said, “What keeps us from loving bigly?” you said, “A lot of it is our trauma.” You worked through levels of trauma with Mona that were remarkable. So share a little bit—introduce Mona to the Sounds True audience.

SC: Mona was—and I say was because Mona died. You would have loved Mona.

TS: I already do.

SC: She actually has a book online that she had wrote called Invisible Warfare before she had died, that was remarkable. She was a character larger than life—like a cartoon character when I first met her I just thought, “Who is this woman?”

She could just break you down but make you crack up hysterically all at the same time. And Mona was not a therapist. She was called “communication arts.” And because—as I say in the book—she would have been arrested for what she did because it was very radical and it was really intense and she was quite psychic, if you would. She would squint like this. And throughout the whole week she would make you do these things called “air-outs” where I would have to call her machine and just bitch—just bitch and moan—because she didn’t want to waste time in sessions dealing with the story.

So she would kind of do the dishes, listen to whatever the nonsense was, and then get to work. And Mona’s work was about rinsing the big feelings (the trauma), giving it a voice, and being in relationship with the shadow, not denying it. And she had an issue with a lot of the mainstream spirituality communities because very often spirituality doesn’t look like rage, it doesn’t look like the “fuck yous,” it doesn’t look like jealousy, it doesn’t look like bitterness. And Mona’s work was to help you to give voice to that because it was energy and it lived in the body and it was going to come out in another way. And so there was a lot of yelling and hitting things and I hated it, it was so vulnerable. A lot of writing and always getting to the grief.

But her way of doing things was just hysterically funny and so open. I mean, let’s say I went and I’m like, “Mona, I just murdered someone 10 minutes ago,” and she’d be like, “OK baby, let’s get down to this.” There’d be zero judgment and everything was just about the work.

I remember my dad died. I called her. I was on my way to the airport and I called her to tell her that my dad died and I was missing a session.

She goes, “OK, when you get on the plane, I want you to write ’Dear dad …’” I’m like, “No, no Mona. I’m not doing that.” She goes, “Too soon, I guess.”

But that was Mona. She was like get right at it but with so much joy and everything was, “When I look at you I see and feel … I’m angry because … I’m scared because …” But then she would do this weird thing.

I never figured out how she would do this. We would do all this journal writing and then she’d come in and just circle words. And then she would write the words up on one side and leave the room to go—like, whatever she would do. And you had to—let’s say she circled “red,” you wrote the first thing that came to your head. “Blue,” “in,” “out”; whatever it was, you’d do your own column. She’d come back in and then she’d connect the dots and reframe whatever it was. And it was your soul talking.

And every single time I’d be like, “That freaks me out.” And she goes, “There’s your answer.” And it really helped inform that our ego was having—the story was what I was writing. But within the story, there was always the truth. And her work was to help us identify the truth within the story, not separate from. It was genius.

And so I worked with Mona for 11 years—did intense work; deep, deep healing work around everything I write about in the book: sexual molestation, obsessive compulsive disorder, all sorts of limiting beliefs, all sorts of attachments. She went after all of it.

And then I guess it’d be nine years ago, she was in a horrible car accident. Her and her wife—they flipped in the car and she was thrown from it and died. It was horrible. All of us were broken. But at the same time, I wasn’t surprised. I always had a sense she wasn’t really long for this world. She was in a whole other stratosphere. She used to say to me that he wanted to stay on the planet until her son became an adult. That was so important to her.” She died about two weeks after he turned 21.

So, that was Mona Miller. Get her book, Invisible Warfare—deep, deep work and funny and rich. And I think it helped me—like I don’t have a lot of judgment in me when people also tell me their stuff, whatever it is, because I recognized through Mona that it’s just part of the story. It’s like, “Let’s get what’s underneath it.” It’s just an aspect of their experience, but it’s not who they are. And I write about this in the book. But she gave me a lot of wisdom and a lot of confidence and much of my voice. I think she’d be very proud of me.

I have no doubt in my mind this is what she would’ve wanted from me—not to hold back, to tell the truth, to be funny about it, and at the same time real and vulnerable and angry and not let those emotions somehow become second to my love. And she would want both of them to have presence in the book. So, I hope she’s proud.

< p>TS: I’m sure she is, actually. I think what impressed me—and the reason I wanted to talk about Mona—is that for some people who are on a yogic path, they’re doing their exercises, they may be chanting, they’re on the cushion meditating and they’re trying to work through their trauma that way.

And part of what you point out in this section on radical healing is that there was something in that that wasn’t thorough, didn’t take you all the way—that there was still a type of control in that and there was something in your work with Mona where you went out of control. And I wanted to underscore that. And here, what do you think is the core of doing that type of shadow work?

SC: For me? I mean, like you said—but all my practices … they built me to Mona. Meaning that my nervous system had to be ready for her. Had I gone to Mona too soon?

TS: Yes.

SC: I don’t know if I could have handled that. It’s like the asana grounded me, the breath work regulated my nervous system. I learned tools of—Mona would say it was I learned “tools of detachment,” but not in the healthy way. Detachment is dissociation. I used the physical movements to steady and ground, the breath to self-regulate. I could admit the way I felt, but I couldn’t own it—and those are two very different things. Like, if you asked me how I felt, I could say like, “Oh, I’m angry.” Mona was like, “No, no, no, you are angry. Let’s see it. Let’s witness it.” And I could feel my whole nervous system be like, “No, no, no, no, no. We can’t go there.”

And so she was saying like, “Your yoga is all great. This is great.” But in some ways I was using asana and breath work the same way I had once used cocaine and sex as a way to numb out. So I just found another tool for self-control.

Mona forced me to have to get wild and to have to let the uncontrolled animal out because her feeling was that the rage was an animal energy and that if not acknowledged, it would find its outlet. And so the wildness of my time with Mona freed me up in such a huge, huge way in conjunction with my yoga practice. That didn’t go away. I did my asana, I did my breath work, I did my prayers and my chanting, and I screamed and I cried and I processed. And I got to the “fuck you” underneath the “Everything happens the way it’s supposed to in order for the soul to transform.”

I had to get underneath that first before I can actually own the truth of that statement. Otherwise it was just bypass. So she taught me how not to bypass.

TS: How does someone know when they’re doing their yoga practice, their breath practice, whatever, that they’re using it as a type of bypass? How do we self-identify that?

SC: I think that’s a very individual question. I would hope that people work with a teacher [and] that they are both challenged and supported in their process. I know for myself, I can tell when someone is a dissociating and checking out. But the only reason I can do that is because I’m a dissociator and I check out. So I know the signs to see.

If someone’s checking out or dissociating, there’s a reason for it. So you don’t want to re-traumatize someone by saying like, “What are you feeling?” But there are ways to gently help to support a student, to get safe enough in their bodies to be willing to confront some of that suppression. But the only way to really do that is through a good teacher, is through some serious radical self-reflection—asking yourself those questions like, “Am I really going deep enough? What is my intention in this practice? Am I present?”

For me, when I’m teaching, part of the discipline—what I invite my students to do is focus on the breath (of course), on sensation, and how long they can stay with the sensation until they begin to check out. And I’m asking them to notice their thoughts, I’m asking them to notice, “Is that your ex-boyfriend? Is it your kids? Do you get one breath or three breaths before you’re in fantasy?”

The reason is because when you’re practicing asana, the body starts to release energy—the tension starts to release. There’s emotion that’s buried within the body that’s also coming up to the surface. If we don’t have any indication that what is on the other side of that tension is safe, it would make sense why you would want to stay in that contraction. The sensation of the contraction means control, it means safety.

Yoga actually breaks that down and it makes you start to feel, but once you start to feel the go-to is fantasy. And the same way out in life if we have a big feeling, we drink alcohol, we smoke pot, we do things maybe to anesthetize ourselves. On the mat, we don’t have that. All we have is our monkey mind. And so I want to invite students to identify—literally name—the sensation—stabby, tingly, electric, whatever it might be—and keep breathing into that sensation and then notice agitation, frustration, projection. Those are all indicators that there’s something going on beneath the surface that their nervous system is trying to run from, and that if they can learn to breathe and stay present to it, there’s an incredible wisdom that the body wants to share. It’s the story.

So, I would guide the students into just staying present. I think for the students who are checking out, there’s probably something going on that needs to be identified, that needs excavation, that they’re in avoidance to, and to be patient with the process. Because that’s all this is: a process.

I did five years of asana before I had an emotional response. It’s in the book. But those five years—they were so important. I needed those five years just to feel OK in my body. I didn’t have a relationship to my body in the same way; I needed those five years to stop doing drugs and drinking and just eating better and changing my environment.

There was this other purification process that was happening that was just as important as the work I do out in the world. The work that I do out in the world came from those initial steps.

So I don’t want someone who’s in their practice thinking that somehow what they’re doing is inadequate. I hope that they recognize though that there are tools to get into the body deeper if they’re open to it. And I hope they can get open to it because that’s the work that doesn’t change the body; it changes their life.

TS: You write quite a bit about your own experiences with dissociation and how you came to a place where you can recognize when it’s happening in you. You define it as anytime we feel so overwhelmed by experience and feeling that we just escape.

How do you know? What does it feel like in you when you dissociate? And maybe you could share an example—something, you know … it happens I’m sure still in your life.

SC: Yes, of course.

TS: And how do you come back?

SC: My dissociation—it’s interesting because people might not identify my dissociation because I look very calm. I will seem incredibly grounded, I’ll be articulate, mature almost … like just if you asked me a question, I’ll respond to it in a way that just seems like that I understand, that I got it. But there’s a lack of presence and zero emotion. There’s a numbness that I experience, slightly disembodied—that I’m slightly behind myself in a way. But I’ve gotten in the past just really, really good at being able to be just like this, and at the same time completely checked out from my own emotions.

My dissociation started (as I talk about in the book) at six because I experienced sexual molestation. The first time that it happened, there was a literal feeling of floating above myself. You hear that a lot with people who’ve experienced that kind of overwhelm. It was as if it was happening to someone else. I was very calm, there was no emotion attached to it. It was a very disembodied experience and it has a sensation. There’s a thickness to it.

And yet within the thickness … It’s like the parameters are thick, but inside of it there’s this odd airiness. You could pretty much say anything to me and I’d have no emotional response to it. And that followed me. Any time I experienced something traumatic, my body would revert back to that mechanism. It was incredible. It was a gift at that time. It was what my nervous system knew to do in order to protect me. It’s just that as I got older, it just didn’t work anymore.

And so I don’t dissociate like I used to, not even close, but that’s only because I have the skills of yoga to pull me in my body. The times where I’ve experienced my dissociation now is usually if I’m doing any major service work and I’m in environments where there’s unimaginable trauma, especially related to children and especially if it’s related to sex trafficking or sexual abuse. For me to do my job almost—talking to pimps, anything of that nature—I have to dissociate, otherwise I will lose my mind. Otherwise I’ll re-traumatize myself.

The thing is I can use the dissociation to do what I have to do, but later when I go back to my hotel or I go home, I get my tennis racket and I get my cushion and I process it.

TS: Wow.

SC: So, I don’t live in that kind of disconnected space. I make sure that I rinse whatever it is—”Fuck you!” Just pour it out of me until I start crying. My dissociation is to avoid tears and to avoid anger. So avoid any emotion. So until I can get to the anger and the tears, I’m suppressed. So that’s a little how … like I know if it’s happening, if I feel that thickness and that odd airiness that floats between it.

TS: So you bring a tennis racket with you as part of your toolkit. OK, now another thing from Mona that really was so meaningful to me was this sentence: “Your pain is your purpose.” I thought that was tremendously deep and rich. What does that mean? “Your pain is your purpose.”

SC: The very thing that brings you to your knees; the very place where your own journey leads you for self-love, self-compassion, and empathy is the very place from which you will be most skilled to be of service. I’m my best with children who have been sexually exploited in any capacity. That’s the space I can hold and it’s because—now, of course abuse lives on this massive spectrum and you can’t say that just because I’ve experienced a form of sexual abuse that it’s just that I understand exactly what someone else has gone through. That wouldn’t be true at all.

But I do understand dissociation, I do understand betrayal, I understand the shutdown that can come with that kind of betrayal. And so it allows me not to feel pity or sympathy, which is hierarchal—that puts me above them—but it lets me empathize and talk to them heart to heart, and learn something from them in the same way. Hopefully they can connect to something within me. It’s not one-sided.

And so Mona was very clear from the very beginning: “We’re going to go after that and you’re going to find gratitude because of this and you’re going to thank God that this experience happened to you, so that you can show up in the world and actually step into your purpose fully.”

And that’s exactly what she did. It got me to a place where I was able to say, “I didn’t welcome sexual molestation, but I can’t change what is.” That’s life. That’s just how it went down.

What Mona taught me to do was shift my perception so that I can become empowered, not in spite of that experience but because of it and be free of the resentment, the anger that I feel towards those characters in my life. Otherwise, I’m still holding that energy. But that took me years to get to. Years.

When I first started working with Mona, it’s in alignment with this. I was talking with my boyfriend at the time—this is 18 years ago now; he’s my fiancé—but we were talking about manifestation and he’s more cynical than I am. And I said to him at that time, I said, “OK, I have the feeling of Oprah around me.” And remember: I was a newer yoga teacher though, so it wasn’t like in the realm of possibility. I said, “I feel the energy of Oprah around me.” I said, “I don’t know when, and I don’t know what capacity. I can be her cleaning lady. But I will work for her. At some point, her and I are going to work together.”

And my partner was like, “OK. OK.” And I said, “In 5 years from now, 10 years from now, I’ll find you and I’m going to tell you that this happened. I know what’s going to happen. I feel it in my body.” The next morning I come home, there’s a message on my machine, and it’s from Oprah’s company. What was it at the time? Harpo?

TS: Yes.

SC: And they’re doing a particular episode and they wanted to talk to me about it. Now, I thought it was Al playing a joke on me. So, I call him up. I’m like, “Haha.” And he’s like, “Oh my God, no. I had nothing to do with this. I swear to God, that’s really them.” And I’m like, “Oh my God. I manifested this in like, you know, 24 hours for God’s sake. I’m amazing!”

So they send me a questionnaire and they start asking all sorts of questions. I’m just filling this all out—like little essays. I send it to them, they send it back to me, and now they’re getting specific. And I realize that they want my story. At that point, I knew I had a story and I knew I had a great story for Oprah. I knew that I can get on there and be wonderful. But I froze inside because I had this sense that if I was sitting across from Oprah in that moment and she started asking me questions, I hadn’t processed it enough to be empowered by it—that I would be re-traumatized, I’d start to cry, I wouldn’t model what the work looks like because it was just too raw.

So I stopped the process. I was like, “I’m just not doing this.” And I went to Mona and I remember her saying to me saying like, “OK, obviously you see you got to be careful what you ask for. And let’s set you up now. Let’s do everything we can in your power so that when that time comes, you can sit as an empowered woman, own that story, and everything that goes with that story, feel it, be vulnerable, just not broken in the vulnerability. And be an example of someone who actually lives this work.” She goes, “Let’s prepare for it.”

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That’s how I wrote this book. The 11 years that I worked with Mona was all catalyzed in that moment; that experience was inviting me into my pain. Mona was saying, “Let’s turn this into your purpose,” and that’s exactly what this is. All that work evolved into that.

TS: Now let’s say someone’s listening and they’re looking at their own pain and maybe their pain has to do with early childhood something or other, and maybe their pain’s about something in the world—who knows what their pain is, maybe. But they’re not making a connection yet to how that’s their purpose, they’ve in fact been looking for how to be purposeful. And they’re like, “In the areas of my pain, that’s actually where I’m weak. I don’t know a lot about that. That’s why it’s so painful.”

SC: Well, I would have to say keep doing their work, they have to keep doing their work. You can’t skip steps. I couldn’t have started working with sexually abused kids at 18 or at 25. I had to do my own… I had to go be in relationship with my pain, I had to move towards forgiveness, which is an ongoing process, but I had to feel it first before I could actually be in service to others.

Sometimes it happens simultaneously where I was kind of at the edge of my discomfort, but I had enough tools for self-regulation. For someone else, it might not yet be time. Find a place where your nervous system can be regulated. For example, I cannot do anything related to animal rescue, animal rights, where it puts me on the front line where I actually see an animal in pain or someone else abusing an animal. My nervous system just implodes, I shake, I can’t communicate, it becomes all about me. That’s not the best place for me to be in service.

I have other ways in which—my veganism, I donate money, but I stay away from environments like that where have to … I’m not a front-line animal right activist because my nervous system can’t contain it. But sexually abused children? My nervous system can hold that because I’ve done so much inner work to lead me there.

Alcoholics, when they get to a place—it’s in the 12 steps. Services, one of the main tenets of the 12 steps is, “But who better than an alcoholic? Who better than a drug addict?” Who better than someone who has been exploited in some capacity, when they’ve done the work and have tools for self-regulation to be able to model space for someone else to breathe, to ground, and to have the confidence within themselves to express.

So I caution people who want to move too quickly. This is all a pathway. Find little ways to get involved instead of front-line. Don’t go after it all at once, all at once. And there are definitely trainings throughout the whole of this country that really can support people in looking at their pain and their purpose, learning how to reconcile it and also finding tools of sustainability so they don’t burn out or create harm for themselves or for others.

TS: And starting to live more and more your own mission of service to help in lots of different ways—to empower yoga leaders and to work with … At this point as you were working with Mona, you started working with young girls who had been sexually abused or been put up as prostitutes, and you developed something that you called body prayer. And I thought this was so interesting, how you developed it and what it is? And I wonder if you can share that with us.

SC: Yes. Well, God, it’s so interesting because there’s so much context, and context often matters. But I didn’t have a really strong sense of spirituality because of my own connection to spirituality would have been based on the Judeo-Christian models of religion that I just could not get behind intuitively.

And so I rejected the word “God” and I certainly rejected the word “prayer.” It didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t know who is this that I’m praying to and what is this unseen and very patriarchal energy going to do for me? Why me? There’s a lot of shit going on in the world, you know? So like why am I suddenly a focus? And if I don’t pray, then I get punished. Like that seems incongruent, so I had a lot of resistance to anything like prayer. And there was a time in my relationship with Mona, with working with these kids—again, your pain is your purpose—and Mona was like, “You got to get out into the world and be of service. I’ve got all this stuff coming at me and it’s so positive that you got to turn it around, and its abundance, its energy.” And if you don’t, the energy becomes constricted, it becomes even caustic. And so my service was very cavalier at first. It wasn’t about really going out there because I had so much empathy. I didn’t want to stop the flow of abundance in my life.

And so Mona was just like, “You’ve got to serve, you’ve got to serve.” My activism and my youth—because I hadn’t processed, it was very rage filled—and it was great, it felt good because I would scream and get in people’s faces and discharge energy. The rage was there; I was just moving it through.

But because it wasn’t processed, it was only temporary, and I was an ineffective leader as a result of that, passionate but not skillful. By the time I got to Mona—I now have all these tools—she’s like, “Alright, get back out there and serve.” And it was very difficult because the kids really held a mirror up to my shadow. And I did not like these kids at first because I still wasn’t comfortable with my own shadow, and I wasn’t seeing how I was judging in them, what I was still judging within myself. And I knew that there was a deep spiritual lesson in this on so many levels. Me being in the presence of these kinds of kids that reflected back so much of my own trauma.

And you know, Mona one day was just like, “You’ve got to pray for these kids.” And it was like, “Huh, what? Pray?” And so I remember just sitting in my meditation and my mind was all over the place trying to figure out how I never had to go teach these kids again, but you had to make a commitment at that time. Abandonment is a big deal with children who’ve been abused like that. So you have to commit to a six-month period. So I’ve got like six months that I have to tolerate, and I’ve only done one day, and I’m trying to figure out how I can get out of it.

So my mind is spinning and I start to practice yoga. And as I was practicing, there was just something about the movements that felt in that moment, sometimes I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, but it was just like, “Oh, that feels very ritualistic.” You know what I mean? Surya Namaskara is in the name of the sun. These are movements that are in recognition to a higher energy. It only took me two decades to figure that out.

I was like, “Wait a second, this feels like my body, the way I placed my hands, the way I placed my feet, how I move in and out of a pose. ” There was something about it that triggered something in me that energy is never static, that it’s constant. And from my training, I understood that language has an energy.

So if I’m teaching a yoga class, and people are opening, I’m only going to use words that are mindful and supportive and loving and, not to suggest they won’t be challenging, but I’m not going to use words that are at a low vibration. And because energy matters, touch matters. If I touch you one way or another way, you’re going to receive the energy behind it. It doesn’t stop at my fingertips nor does it stop at your physical body.

And the same with thoughts. I had a real sense that, if this is a mind-body connection, my body remembers everything, if I embody everything in that moment, if I deflect the intention onto someone else and then just practice yoga like I normally would, but let my body reflect that prayer. I was curious on how the vibration of the thoughts and then the energy of my body could move that energy.

And so put my palms together and said, “Calling in the God of your own unique understanding, be it your higher power, the creative consciousness, Mother Earth, or the Holy Mother herself.” The reason I did that is because I wasn’t quite sure who to pray to, so I was just kind of like—it didn’t quite come out like that. It would’ve been more like, “The God of your understanding? The Mother Earth? The Holy Mother?” I was just grasping and yes, I was like, “Well, that kind of covers it.” And then I thought, OK, well what am I asking for? First it was maybe these children be blessed, may they be happy, may they move through this day with more ease and peace. But then I thought, well, what about me? What’s my part in this? May I have the strength and the commitment to do the inner work necessary so that I can show up for these children and see them for who they truly are? And can I allow them to expose that which is within me?

And it seemed inclusive, it wasn’t asking for money, it wasn’t asking to change circumstance, it was asking for clarity, for confidence, for strength, for myself and for someone else. And then I just let my body express it and instead of getting caught up—when my mind would get caught up in a thought, I’d realize I don’t want to introduce that to the prayer. So I bring all my awareness to what was happening and what it did was make me present, because if I was focusing on my feet and hands, I didn’t have time to think about my ex-boyfriend. Everything became single pointed and committed.

And when I was done with the practice, I remember thinking, oh, my heart felt open, I felt like I had done something in my practice beyond my own health and wellness. And it also helped me to feel more connected to the children, not on a physical level, but on a more unified soul level. And so that’s what I kept doing from that … That’s how I still practice. My practice is still a dedicated prayer. There’s not a single practice I do where I don’t get on that mat, put my palms together and pray.

For some circumstance in the world, usually, or for someone who’s ailing, someone who needs a little light, or if I’m going through something I’m not saying like, “Dear God, take this away.” It was more just like, “Dear God, give me the wisdom to get out of my own way so that I can understand the circumstance with more clarity.”

TS: OK. Now, I’m going to just keep us moving along because there are a couple of things I really want to make sure we cover. This podcast, this Sounds True podcast is called Insights at the Edge, and there are a couple sections of Revolution of the Soul that are particularly edgy, and I want to make sure we talk about them.

So one of the super-edgy sections is you have a chapter in the book where you describe your journey to India. And at that point in time you were thinking that maybe you needed a spiritual teacher, you needed a guru. Friends of yours said to you, “It would help you so much if you had a teacher. Great.”

And in your travels to India, you go to study for a period of time with Pattabhi Jois, who’s the founder of Ashtanga yoga, or the popularizer of that method in the twentieth century. And what you discovered when you went there was that he was sexually inappropriate when he was making adjustments to poses, working with people in the room and also working with you.

OK, on the one hand, is that really that edgy? I mean, it wasn’t that edgy to me when I read it, didn’t surprise me that much that an old Indian patriarchal spiritual teacher would do that. I wasn’t surprised.

And yet in writing Revolution of the Soul, you’ve heard from people, people who refuse to endorse the book because you wrote that. You’ve gotten letters from people. What’s going on? Why is this so edgy?

SC: Sometimes I think that the yoga community is like the mafia: you keep it in the family. And this is a … Pattabhi’s behavior was a well-understood and accepted, I don’t even want to say “secret.” There was a lot of denial around it. There were a lot of people who were very direct about it. I’ve been talking about this since 1996. It wasn’t like I ever hid it, it was like, “Oh yes, this happened.” And I think what happened for me is about five years ago, there were some women who came forward who shared details of their experience with Pattabhi publicly and they got vilified, ostracized from the community, shunned.

And I would read their accounts and think to myself, they’re not lying. This is exactly what happened. And I felt so bad for these women, A) because they were so victimized, they went to Pattabhi thinking he was the guru. They went … They’re so vulnerable, and were really exploited. I was 30 years old when I went, I had been in therapy for years, I have a very close relationship with my family. It wasn’t traumatic in that I was able to say like, “Oh, this happened.” This kicked up some stuff from my childhood, because I deal with dissociation and trauma, I better process that. But I didn’t carry it with me and I didn’t really hold a whole story around Pattabhi at all, but I watched these women get vilified.

And when I started to write the chapter, I didn’t intend to write about Pattabhi. I was writing about the guru-student relationship. I was really looking at the power dynamics that exist. And as I was pulling back these power dynamics, of course, what was also coming up to the surface was how we elevate these teachers and how they exploit students, here in the US and all over, sexually. It was just naturally arising. But I was avoiding mentioning Pattabhi the whole way, but the chapter, it wouldn’t rest because I knew it was like this big chunk. The book was saying like, “Honey, honey, this chapter is going to make so much sense when you just fill in the blank.”

The blank was my own personal experience. So it was becoming preachy and lecture-y, but you didn’t know where it was coming from. And there was this moment where I thought to myself, I am in an elevated position within this community. I’ve been around for a really long time. I know that I’m respected, I know that I’m loved. I have an obligation because of that authority to take the hit in the way that those women did. Those women put themselves out there, but they didn’t have the protection that I have. Their careers suffered.

My career is not going to suffer. They were ostracized, I’m not going to be ostracized. And I thought, how dare I not use my position and my authority to share this story and to validate this experience? To say, “This is true.” These women were never lying. None of these women were lying. And we are in such a culture of secrecy that we continue to protect these people and we perpetuate this culture of secrecy.

So I realized in the writing of it that I was part of this culture of secrecy because I was avoiding it. That’s what it put me into my edge. I had to confront the parts of myself that were complicit in the secret, that were practicing it very overtly by avoiding publicly just naming it for what it is without apology and taking the heat a little bit off of some of the people who don’t have again the same kind of protection that I have. That’s why I wrote it. That’s why it put me to my edge. I knew it was going to affect some of my relationships because people deify Pattabhi.

My feeling is this: Pattabhi must’ve had his own trauma. There’s no way for him to do what he did had there not been some trauma related to this. The people who love Pattabhi should not have been deifying him, they should have been helping him. And by using sacred texts—by saying “the guru doesn’t have the same relationship with the body,” “you’re projecting onto the guru that which is within you”—that is, I think, a real abuse of these texts. And it doesn’t help or serve people like Pattabhi and many, many other teachers who are so elevated, they don’t any longer have to do their own work. And so for me, if I’m really a leader in the community and I really want to break the shame around this and stop this division of power that happens, that elevates teachers to be able to do this kind of exploitation, then I’ve got to be willing just to name it and own it and take the hits if the hits come my way, because again, I can handle it.

Otherwise, I’m the problem. Otherwise, I’m a hypocrite and I couldn’t do that knowing, holding onto that secret inside me, even though it wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t pulled apart the way I pull it apart in the book. But it also cuts back to, Pattabhi wasn’t my guru, but he was a teacher and I don’t condone his behavior, I will never condone that, that kind of behavior. But I also recognize that that was an instrumental moment for me going out to Pattabhi. I dissociated every single time he touched me, until once. He touched me and, it would happen instantaneously, there was like an eruption of my body and I turned around and I smacked him, told him to stop. And it was the first time that I’d ever, in all the years where men that exposed themselves or touched me or things that happened—I usually went in dissociation—it was the first time I actually had action. And after that I broke this strange cycle that I had been in and never have I—no, that’s not true, not never. So much less frequently in the face of where I would feel that kind of abuse of power would I dissociate, like it broke something in me.

And so later on in life I was able to say that was a significant moment. I wish it could have happened in a different way, but I was actually able to find my voice in that moment and stop this, what I felt was, abusive behavior. It was inappropriate behavior and [I was] able to stop it. So there was a great teaching in it, but Pattabhi was no way my guru and that’s why I wanted to share this story. There’s a lot of layers to it.

And I hope that by sharing it that other women who were working with Pattabhi who got touched by him, who have been told that it was no big deal, I hope they exhale a little and don’t feel so isolated or alone. And not just with Pattabhi, with any teacher that takes advantage of the vulnerability in that space. I hope they find the voice or at least the community so that they can express themselves and heal.

TS: I want to talk about that “finding the voice” because I’m imagining people who are listening to us right now who are questioning their own call to truth telling and ways that they’ve held back. And maybe they held back, maybe I’ve held back, we’ve held back because I don’t want to make waves. And maybe it may not be a crossing of a sexual line, it could be something else where somebody acted in a way that they really should’ve been called on it, but I’ll just keep it to myself. How do you know it’s time for me to speak up? I mean, it sounds like this book almost had its own soul. The soul of the book. And it required you as the scribe to do a certain amount of rigorous truth telling.

SC: Nightmare. It was a nightmare.

TS: OK, and I know I’m responsible in some part, but in it for your nightmare, but yes. But in any case, someone who’s asking themselves, “Am I called to tell the truth in this situation,” what would be your counsel to them?

SC: Are they safe? Do they have resources? Do they have support? I think that’s very important. I had all of that by the time I was able to express myself and I still have all of that. Again, it’s very individual. I would never say to someone, “Tell the truth,” but there is a saying that you’re only as sick as your secrets.

And so if there’s one person that you can own it to, find that person, sit with them and let it be. Let yourself be free of it so it’s not living inside your body. I was 30 years old when I told Pattabhi to stop and that was … I’ve been in therapy since I was 18 years old and I had been doing yoga since around the same time. So I had 12 years of deep, deep, doing deep, deep work before I was able to find that movement in my throat and feel safe enough within myself to say stop and to deal with the consequences of what that might mean. And the consequences were Pattabhi never touched me again after that. Meaning he ignored me, like, I got punished.

The other students, they ostracized me because I spoke up and pretty much what I was afraid would happen, happened, but I wasn’t bothered by it in the same way because I had some strength within me at that point to be able to manage it. It didn’t break me in any way. Someone who might be newer to this—baby steps. Maybe just write the truth down, whatever it might be, just write it down. So it’s like, so it lives somewhere, put it in an envelope, seal it, make a commitment that in five years from that point you’ll open that letter and reread it and see how you’ve evolved. Were you able to actually go towards even a piece of that truth?

But it’s so important to liberate yourself from the energy. It’s energy—that suppression is energy. And like I had said earlier, it blocks our self-confidence and that blocks our intuition. And once you start to open your self-confidence, you know what to say and what to do and how to take care of yourself, and don’t have the same attachment to it. But it’s a hard process.

I mean, in some ways I waited for my dad to die before I wrote this book. My dad would have … It would have been very hard for my father to read the details of my experience around sexual molestation and obsessive compulsive disorder and the Pattabhi, all of it. It would have broken his heart, in a way, and forced him to have to relive things and I didn’t want to do that. So here I am, 52 years old and I still was like, “I’m going to kind of try to wait for a little bit until I lay this all out,” and I’m glad I did, for me, for that was my truth.

I felt once he passed, I just felt liberated enough to be able to lay this out the way I needed to without feeling like I was self-censoring to protect someone else around me.

TS: OK. So I said I wanted to talk about a couple edgy things and here’s the second one. And I think this was because it was actually edgy for me personally, and you brought it up a lot through the final 30 percent of the book, which is the importance of facing our own privilege than not just facing it, but holding ourselves accountable for it. I want to understand more what it means to hold ourselves accountable for our privilege.

SC: Yes. I mean, the book is broken up into two sections, there’s the evolution of the soul, which is the personal work, and then the revolution of the soul, which is actually how do you take that work out into the world. And the book moves in an arc that is reflective of my own journey. And from the demark, the middle section between evolution and revolution is “your pain is your purpose.” And that leads me to the girls, to going into the shelter where I learned about the concept of helping, like, I want to serve, I want to help.

So I helped, until I realized— again, the veils just get pulled back—that my helping, I was replicating a power dynamic, that I was playing out these behaviors that kept me in “saviorism” and therefore someone else in “victim.” That meant that’s the opposite of yoga. Yoga is interdependency. It’s coming together and making whole. But when there’s power over helping, there’s power under that’s dominant and there’s dominance and then there’s oppression. And that became a real moment for me, I’m like, “Wait a second.” So I’m actually participating in the very separation that I say I want to change, but this doesn’t make any sense.

I want to help, but I hadn’t yet unpacked what lives within us, within our bodies. If there’s no separation between anything and our bodies remember everything and our bodies hold onto trauma, that means that my perception is going to be influenced not just by what happens in my conscious life, but I’m a product of my education, my religion, my parents, my grandparents, my whiteness, as a culture—all of that influences who I am and what lives in my body. And I started to realize that so much of my service, I was going out there helping as, you know, as a do-gooder white woman. But I’m bringing in hundreds of years of colonization everywhere I go; I’m bringing in hundreds and hundreds of years of white supremacy.

The onus is on me to recognize the trauma that someone else, on an energetic level, might receive off of me, meaning that I might go into environments and I want to help, and they’re shying away. Now they might not be aware that the reason they’re shying away is because in the unconscious I represent something that’s not safe. That became something I needed to unpack as a spiritual practice, and it was hard.

This whole back of the book, it was hard to write, it’s hard to print. I’m sure that a lot of people are going to be confronted by it. The hardest story that I wrote is Chapter 12, dealing with my own internalized racism and all the other isms. But what I want people to understand, there’s no way I can’t be racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ageist, ableist. There’s no way I can’t be biased or have prejudice or stereotype people, it lives within my body.

So in this moment, those elements aren’t present. But put me in a situation where the rational part of my brain shuts down and the reactive part of my brain illuminates and I get scared. In that moment, I’m not in present time, I, my grandmother and all of those ancestral biases shoot up to the surface. That became … This is the work I’ve been doing over the last 12 years, is really understanding this and going towards this: that I cannot be of service. I cannot help people and move us into oneness until I understand our differences.

And until I understand the ways in which I’m complicit in the oppression of others because of the culture I’m a part of. That’s my privilege, that’s my power, those are the power dynamics. This is a deeply spiritual practice, and that’s where accountability needs to come forward. Being privileged is not a problem. But not understanding the way I benefit from that privilege and how the way in which I benefit actually means someone else gets less—that’s the problem.

So the hypocrisy is I was walking around like we’re saying we’re all one, that everything’s connected, but it wasn’t really true. It’s not true when I can walk hand-in-hand down the street with my partner, kiss him and hug him and never worry about getting beat up. It’s not true when I can get a visa to anywhere in the world that I want to go. It’s not true when I have access to healthcare and education. We’re not all one. And so it’s normalized, my privilege is very normalized so I don’t have to look at the discomfort that’s behind me. But my yoga says, “Actually, if your liberation is bound, you better look and you better recognize the ways that you actually create that.” And that’s what a lot of the book, the back end of the book really starts to unpack and invites people not to be afraid of this conversation. You can’t change it until you see it, and it’s a deep spiritual practice.

And if I really want to change this world, there’s only one revolution, it starts from within. I’ve got to dismantle the systems within myself first that create oppression, then I can actually participate in creating systems that are actually in service to all.

And so that’s really what this goes after. I have a feeling it’s going to be challenging for people and I hope it is, but it’s necessary, it’s not scary at all. Like I needed to share my stories to model what accountability looks like and to not be afraid of it as a spiritual practice.

TS: What I’d love to understand more is how it didn’t just change this question into privilege and accountability, how you view yourself, but how it’s changed your actions, how you live, what you do every day, what you do with your lifestyle, your money, your good fortune, your fabulous relationship? How has it changed that?

SC: In so many ways. I have to always look at how I use my privilege to help to support and benefit others and how I de-center myself, which is very important when you have privilege, how do I get out of the way? And that’s something … I weigh both. I will have opportunities based on the culture that I’m a part of that other people won’t get.

So how do I use the platform? How do I use that privilege to raise awareness, to raise money, things of that nature, but also how do I just get myself out of the way? Where am I taking up too much space because I can? My privilege lets me take up space. How do I get myself out and realize that I need to de-center myself and so that someone else who probably has more wisdom, more experience can have that space? And to be able to express that wisdom?

My privilege shows up in every capacity in my life, but my hope is always, how do I use this effectively? How do I use this to help elevate others? How do I use it to raise awareness and not be afraid of the fallout? Again, my privilege prevents me from getting hurt in some ways. In the book, there’s going to be some feedback, some pushback, but my privilege allows me to be able to hold that and be OK with it. That’s the way I should be using my privilege.

TS: OK, just two final things, Seane.

SC: Yes.

TS: This quote from Mona—”Your pain is your purpose”—has a second part. The second part is, “… and the true revolution to freedom begins the moment we answer the soul’s call for peace.” Tell me about what that means to you—”answering the soul’s call for peace.”

SC: Soul’s call for peace. I mean, that is our inherent nature. It’s love; and with love there’s peace. The two are side by side: there can’t be a fractured society, there can’t be lack of resource when there’s love, there can’t be violence, there can’t be oppression, there can’t be any of the isms that I mentioned. There can be only peace when you answer the soul’s call, when you surrender to who you truly are, which is love.

That moment is the initiation, and so your pain is your purpose, but that purpose, your dharma is what happens the moment you say yes to the soul’s call for reintegration, for connection here, planetary and internally. So that’s what that means.

TS: And can we end with a body prayer?

SC: The body prayer?

TS: Yes, let’s end together.

SC: Yes. You mean to actually go—

TS: Let’s do it. Let’s do it together. You, me, and our audience.

SC: Alright. So if you’re driving and listening to this, do not participate but do it in your soul. But if you’re at home, just sit up tall and close your eyes and just take a deep breath in and exhale it out. Do that again. Take a really deep breath in and exhale it out.

And just be aware of your body wherever you are at right now, any sensations you might feel, any sounds that are in your environment, and know for a moment, just a moment, that you have been called, that you have work to do, and the time is now and you are more than ready. And our job is to cultivate the necessary tools so that we can awaken to the grace that is within and within all. Remember who you are, remember who we are to each other, and the world will know peace. Place your palms into namaste. So, calling in the God of your own unique understanding, be at your higher power, the creative consciousness, Mother Earth or the Holy Mother herself, but to this grace we ask, may this moment be an opportunity for connection and remembrance and awakening to occur, body, mind, and spirit.

May we have the grace, the willingness to step into that sacred world directly behind our eyes, letting go of human interpretation. May we embrace divine perception, which is infinite and limitless. We ask, may we transform our resistance and to surrender our judgment into compassion and understanding and most certainly, dear God, our fear into faith. And may faith be the quality of beingness that moves us forward on our path, breath by breath, moment to moment, movement by movement.

We dedicate this practice, this moment to all of our brothers and sisters out in the world who, because of systemic or religious or political oppression, know unimaginable separation, fear, and violence. To our brothers and sisters in Iran and Iraq, Syria and Libya, Afghanistan, to our brothers and sisters in Israel and Palestine, to our brothers and sisters throughout the continent of Africa and Europe, Russia, the Ukraine, and to all of our family here in our nation and the Americas who suffer every day from racism and sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, bias, and discrimination. To the souls, we commit that we will do our inner work, the inner work necessary, so that we can take accountability for the ways in which we are complicit to this oppression, so that we can transform the way in which we experience ourselves and each other and work towards creating a more unified world where all souls are equal, where all lives are free, where all experience is fair, safe, happy, abundant, peace-filled, and loving.

Let’s send the energy from our palms out into the universe, may it touch the hearts and souls of all of these souls who need this light. Inhale, bring your arms up and just extend the arms over the head and let the energy just move through the fingertips. Bring your palms to the third eye, ask to know the truth. Bring your fingertips to your lips, ask to speak the truth. Bring your fingertips to your heart center, ask to know it, embody it, feel it, behold it forevermore.

Release your palms. Keep your eyes closed, but take two more very deep breaths and exhale it out. Again, take another deep breath in, exhale it out, and then open your eyes. And now go out into the world, do good, love big, forgive always. I’m not going to say the last part because you’ve got to read the book and you’ll know what that last part is. But when you do read it and you do hear those last words, live your life in that truth. God bless.

TS: Seane Corn. Revolution of the Soul. Thank you so much, Seane!

SC: Thank you. Yay!

TS: SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.