July 16, 2018 | 64 minutes, 59 seconds
Download
In This Article
About Seane Corn
Seane Corn is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher known for her impassioned activism, unique self-expression, and inspirational style of teaching. Featured in commercials, magazines, NPR, and Oprah.com, Seane now utilizes her national platform to bring awareness to global humanitarian issues. In 2005, she was named “National Yoga Ambassador” for YouthAIDS, and in 2013 was given the “Global Green International Environmental Leadership Award.” Since 2007, she has been training leaders of activism through her co-founded organization Off the Mat, Into the World®. Seane has spent time in the US, India, Cambodia, Haiti and Africa working with communities in need- teaching yoga, providing support for child labor and educating people about HIV/AIDS prevention. Seane is also co-founder of the Seva Challenge Humanitarian Tours, which have raised roughly $4.5 million since 2007, getting the yoga community involved in fund and awareness raising efforts across the globe. Her self-authored dvds are available through Gaiam and Yoga Journal, as well as her most recent ground-breaking 3-dvd set “The Yoga of Awakening” through Sounds True. She is currently working on her first book.
Podcast Show Notes
I asked internationally known, transformational yoga teacher and activist, Seane Corn to join me on tonight’s podcast to discuss how we can all start changing the world using the philosophies of Yoga and Ayurveda.
The underlying philosophy of all Vedic Sciences can be boiled down to four words which Seane Corn embodies so well: “Establish Being, Perform Action.”
These words, in Sanskrit, “Yogastha Kuru Karmani” come from Chapter 2.48 of the Bhagavad Gita.
In essence, this means that all of our actions must come from a deep-seated place of truth and love, deep silence, and knowing.
All too often, our daily decisions and actions come from an outwardly-directed busy mind, from a mind in tied into the world of right and wrong, emotions, or judgements, or from the need for approval from others.
Science now tells us that 95 percent of the things we think, say and do as adults come from impressions that were made in the formative first six years of life. We carry the same need for approval into our adult lives, taking all the unconscious emotional patterns of behavior with us, inclining most of to live unconsciously.
If this science is even close to accurate, it makes sense that strategies were developed to make us fully conscious of our thoughts, actions, and desires. Vedic science is one of these strategies.
Traditional rites of passage were also strategies for becoming conscious—not needing the approval of or help from mom and dad any longer. With today’s cultural addiction to approval and a reward-seeking brain chemistry, such traditions have fallen out of favor.
Seane Corn’s Transformational Yoga mirrors the philosophy of all Vedic sciences which, like yoga and Ayurveda, are centered on positive transformational change. Ayurveda is not only about healing the body, and yoga is not only about fitness and flexibility—although these are important means to a transformational end.
Yoga and Ayurveda were created to help us transform or free ourselves from emotional patterns of behavior that no longer serve us. They teach us how to become conscious and perform actions from a place of inner truth and loving awareness.
See also Free Yourself from Unconscious Desires with Yoga + Ayurveda
Seane Corn’s yoga philosophy is about using yoga to become more self-aware. With this awareness, you can then start acting from a place of truth and love. First in your own life, then off the mat and into the world!
My favorite definition of Ayurveda is “ayur” means life and “veda” means truth, suggesting that the whole purpose of Ayurveda is to let the “truth of you” out.
First, the body must be balanced and the mind more aware. Ayurveda, yoga, breathing, meditation, prayer and, most importantly, action are the tools to transform and become conscious.
Ayurveda is aimed at balancing the body, so that we can still the mind and become more aware. Yoga is about moving the subtle energy of the body called prana (life-force) through the body.
Once the physiological blocks are removed, breathing exercises are employed to drive the prana deeper into the body and then the mind. Once the prana is moving, the body’s more subtle energy system called the nadis will activate.
At a subtle level, the nadi pathways will open the awareness of the deeper aspects of the mind, making us conscious of our unconscious behaviors.
Meditation is the final step in pulling back the bow of self-awareness which gives us the insight of what, where, when, and how to take transformational action steps.
See also The Psycho-Physiology of Stress
