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| American Yogini Seane Corn |
Yoga has infiltrated law schools and strip malls, churches and hospitals. This 5,000-year-old spiritual technology is converging with 21st-century medical science and with many religious and philosophical perspectives.
Midwesterner Seane Corn ("Off the Mat Into the World") takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga [mainly those limbs of an ancient eightfold practice focusing on physical postures and breath regulation]. Corn describes how it helps her face the darkness in herself and the world and how she’s come to see yoga as a form of body prayer. More
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- When Yoga Gets Really Real When I moved to Jerusalem two years ago, I thought for sure that I would continue my yoga practice, especially after having yoga present in my life in so many ways for so many years. And I thought that I would even find others in this holy city to practice with. A sangha (spiritual community), a space, a teacher...
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| Exploring Mysteries, Encouraging a Love Affair with Life Parker Palmer pays homage with words of wisdom on "the savage and beautiful country that lies in between." |
Molested at 6-years-old, Corn made a gift of that experience -- not in spite of it -- by transforming the shame and darkness. She works with child prostitutes and sex trafficking here in the U.S. and in Buddhist countries like Cambodia. She went through a period of drug abuse, sex abuse, and other efforts to numb out and check out. But when she faced and actually dealt with and transformed the shadow, she was able to venture on the road to becoming whole.
Trent Gilliss (onbeing.orgj)
For Seane Corn, yoga is much more than a practice in flexibility. It’s a way of applying spiritual lessons to real-world problems and personal issues. One way she channels her energy and love is through a practice she calls “body prayer,” as she shares in this video from Yoga from the Heart.She shared this perspective about “body prayer” in the show, “Yoga, Meditation in Action”:
“I trust that if I do my yoga practice, I’m going to get stronger and more flexible. If I stay in alignment, if I don’t push, if I don’t force, then my body will organically open in time. “I know that if I breathe deeply, I’ll oxygenate my body. It has an influence on my nervous system. These things are fixed and I know to be true.
“But I also recognize that it’s a mystical practice, and you can use your body as an expression of your devotion. So the way that you place your hands, the ways that you step a foot forward or back, everything is done as an offering. I offer the movements to someone I love or to the healing of the planet.
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| Hope I can do yoga like Seane during this war |
“And so if I’m moving from a state of love and my heart is open to that connection between myself and another person or myself and the universe, it becomes an active form of prayer, of meditation, of grace.
“And when you’re offering your practice as a gift, as I was in that particular DVD, as I do often, I was offering to my dad who’s very ill. And so when I have an intention behind what I’m doing, then it becomes so fluid. Because if I fall out of a pose I’m not going to swear, I’m not going to get disappointed or frustrated.
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“I’m going to realize that this is my offering, and I don’t want to offer that energy to my father. I only want to offer him my love. And so I let my body reflect that. And when you link the body with the breath, when my focus is solely on getting the pose to embrace the breath that I’m actualizing, then the practice, it’s almost in slow motion.
“It has a sense of effortlessness. When people can connect to that, it takes the pressure off of trying to do it perfectly. It just becomes a real expression of their own heart.
“Sometimes it’s graceful and elegant, other times it’s kind of funky and abstract, but it’s authentic to who the person is. It’s their own poetry.” More
This week inspired a lesson from Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poetic reflection on being more than doing from Parker Palmer, a precious moment that will make you smile, and a peculiar story about a lockpicker that will make you think.
