Interview by Kasey Luber

It’s difficult to believe Seane Corn went through most of her teacher training terrified to lead her class, considering now, nearly two decades later, she’s one of the most passionate and well-spoken leaders in the yoga world. With several DVDs under her belt, worldwide teaching appearances and a near cult-like following, Corn is a reluctant yoga celebrity. Rather than simply basking in this attention, she’s using her popularity to challenge the world’s 20 million yogis to become agents of change in their communities.

Tell us how your nonprofit, Off the Mat, Into the World, got its start.

I starting by teaching adolescent prostitutes — that was really my first act of seva (service), teaching them yoga, getting them into their bodies. Then I got involved with YouthAIDS [an organization that provides products, services, and education to children worldwide in regards to the HIV/AIDS crisis].

Globally, children are being exploited because there’s no water, no food, because these families don’t have anything, so they put their children into the sex trade. Learning more, I couldn’t tolerate it in my spirit. I stepped back, and I thought, “Well, who do I know?” And I thought, “Hell, I think I know 20 million people, and I think I have a platform.” If I can help use this forum as a way to raise awareness and to inspire people to recognize it only takes one person to create great change, perhaps we can harness this energy of 20 million people doing yoga — a billion-dollar industry.

So in a very short amount of time, I raised a lot of money by working with grassroots organizations, creating product and just talking about it — talking about AIDS, saying, “Hey, I’ve got this t-shirt. It’s 20 bucks. Buy it and it saves the lives of two children.” And then I went to India to work with YouthAIDS as the National Yoga Ambassador; it was my job to raise awareness and funds. They wanted me to come into the field and experience the brothels and impoverished slums — I mean slums like you can’t even imagine — to talk about AIDS, and to witness impoverished children with HIV and get a sense of that culture. So I went, and it was probably one of the most challenging months of my entire life.

While I was in India, I blogged about my experience on yogajournal.com. Readers wanted to get involved, and strangely, wanted to take this trip — they wanted to go and serve in the exact same way I was serving and be a part of the gritty, hands-on work. And it started to occur to me that there are a lot of leaders in the yoga community, and it’s an untapped resource in a lot of ways.

I came back from India more inspired than ever. Battling AIDS and sex trafficking is my passion. But with 20 million people, there are probably 20 million different purposes and passions. And I know that I’m in my destiny, I know this is my dharma. That’s what Off the Mat, Into the World (OTM) is about. It’s a leadership training program to help people find their purpose, and then give them the organizational skills to activate that purpose in their local community through outreach and service.

What’s the OTM experience like?

The challenge is, anyone who can raise $20,000 through outreach, through any service-oriented project, events, products, whatever, you come with me for two weeks to Cambodia. Your trip is paid for — airfare, food, yoga, processing work, everything. You will work in the garbage dump literally collecting children. You will work in five of the Cambodian Children’s Fund orphanages, both educational and vocational. You will build a well in a village that doesn’t have access to clean water. You will be dirtier, grittier and more exposed to a culture at that level than you can ever imagine.

After the expense, which is minimal — the trip is like $3,500 per person — 90 percent of the rest of the money goes to the Cambodian Children’s Fund, so that they can continue what they’re doing so incredibly well. Ten percent comes back to OTM. With that 10 percent, we’re creating a national scholarship program. We’re committed to paying teachers who are willing to teach yoga once a week for one year in either the inner city school system, in juvenile detention halls, in the prison system or shelters. If you’re willing to commit to us, we will supplement it through a scholarship so that it’s sustainable.

What’s next for OTM?

I recently got back from Africa after spending a month there cultivating partnerships. Our next challenge will start January 1st — you raise $20,000, and you come to either South Africa or Uganda. We’re going to be building schools, working on sustainable organic farms and understanding more about the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa. Each year, I want to focus on a different culture in crisis.

As people raise the money and it gets closer to the date, we’re asking they go to their local high school and do a presentation. We’re training people in these leadership programs to form their own circles. We have a seven-week program to empower the leaders — we’ll hand them this curriculum and say, “Now you go home and meet with your eight friends at your house, have brownies, whatever, and go through this program.” At the end of the seven weeks, they create a project together in their local community. This is how we expect to create change on a national level, by not waiting for our leaders to make a difference, but by becoming the leaders ourselves.

We take our yoga practices off the mat and bring it out to the world where it really does matter. Because maybe this yoga community is way more powerful than we ever imagined it. I believe this community is going to be responsible for changing the world. As we change ourselves, we create a dialogue within our household that is more inclusive, more accepting, more empowered and more loving. We plant seeds in our children’s minds so they can evolve and grow and don’t have to do as much work on themselves as we’ve had to do to basically get to the same place.

You attended the Democratic National Convention. What’s a yogi doing at the DNC?

I can’t imagine a better place for a yogi to be. I partnered with Arianna Huffington who runs huffingtonpost.com and we created the Huffington Post oasis, an alternative space where politicians, delegates and new and old media could come together in the midst of all that insanity. The space itself was 100 percent green, all the food was vegan, organic and fair trade. We provided massage, yoga, tai chi, mini-facials, hand and foot rubs by Pangea, and Ayurvedic counseling. We tried to de-stress the people who were making decisions on our behalf. What we yogis know is that when you’re overwhelmed or stressed, you start to shut down. When you start to shut down you either disassociate or become reactive, so we wanted to provide tools to keep people present and calm in the face of whatever turmoil, chaos and crises they were up against.

It was an incredible success. It was totally non-partisan. I had wanted to go to the RNC, but unfortunately we couldn’t get funded. The most beautiful part about the oasis was everyone, including myself, who participated, did so on a voluntary level. So people gave up their time, and even their own products to come there and serve that space. I think they all felt the same way I felt. It’s one thing to preach to the choir, but it’s another thing to bring those kinds of healing modalities to an audience that might be resistant. To be able to impact and influence them, and especially their decisions, during that time was probably one of the best things we could possibly do in regard to supporting, hopefully, a shift of change in this election.

Did you have experiences there that made you hopeful?

Well, I was lucky enough to go to Barack’s speech. It was without a doubt one of the single most important moments of my entire life — being one of those 85,000 people. I was transfixed. I hung on every single word. My heart opened to the possibility of change, and it wasn’t so much because of what Barack said, it was because of the reaction of the people in the audience to what he was saying. You could see people were looking not just for a leader, but for guidance on how they themselves can participate in this climate of change and to be part of this shift of consciousness. I cried nonstop and so did everyone around me.

Sometimes the yoga community can seem so separate, and to be able to go and engage and talk to people and to see most were operating from love and their hearts were in the right place was empowering, even with fear and anger and rage and all that stuff in the mix.

Tell us about the voter drive you’re spearheading.

We’re doing a mass voter registration drive in the yoga community. It’s non-partisan and non-biased. We’re sending a letter out to the yoga community via some of the big yoga publications and teachers. It’s like a voter tool kit, with a website for registration, for absentee balloting and also unbiased talk about issues and what the individual candidates are saying. We’re hoping to access a million practitioners and encourage them to send it out to their lists.

It’s not about the yoga you do, or the weight you’ve lost, or the food you’re eating, or even the direction you’re casting your ballot. What’s important is that we mobilize, we support each other, we educate each other and help guide each other to take responsibility for the country we live in and the globe we live upon.

What would you like to see the future president do? What is the most important thing that needs to change?

The leader that comes in and recognizes the interconnectedness of all beings and species will certainly have my heart. That’s the thing that I always feel is missing from our culture. There is this sense of otherness that kills the spirit. It’s the opposite of yoga. It’s the opposite of everything I’ve been taught, certainly. The one that gets into office, if I had my druthers, would be the one that dealt with the shadow part of human experience, who really did inner work on himself, who wasn’t afraid of talking from their heart, wasn’t afraid of being vulnerable. I don’t even know if that’s possible in the culture of politics. The candidate that not only talks about his own feelings but actually cares about someone else’s truly, that’s who my vote would go to.

Photo: Sabina McGrew