Feature
The Karma Yoga Queens
Seane Corn and Julia Butterfly Hill are teaming up for a new type of
leadership in the yoga world—one that can help you put your passion
into action.
By Kristin Barendsen
At the gala opening of Jivamukti Yoga School’s new Manhattan studio in May 2006, yoga glitterati watched as Julia Butterfly Hill took the stage. “What is it in your life that calls you to be bigger than what you think is possible, for yourself and for your world?” asked Hill, who is known for living in a giant redwood tree for two years in a heroic campaign to save our ancient forests.
Seane Corn was in the audience. “Here she is, this famous activist who did something very courageous and radical,” Corn recalled in a recent interview with Yoga+. “I was expecting her to go onstage and pump her fist in the air. But all I heard was ‘love, God, purpose, and truth.’ I thought, ‘Now, that’s a yogi.’”
Corn, whose popular, inspiring approach to vinyasa yoga has made her a celebrity in her own right, joked with Julia for all of two minutes, but she came away with the strong feeling that she and Julia would work together one day. Seane felt connected to Julia because she is also an activist, working to help stop the spread of AIDS among young people in developing countries. She leads “spiritual activism” workshops across the country, facilitating asana and meditation classes, along with journaling exercises and dharma talks, to help participants explore yoga not only as a path of self-transformation but also as a path of service.
Corn observes, “There’s an interesting wave in the yoga community today. A lot of people have been practicing yoga for years, even decades. Their bodies are healthier, their relationships are better. They’re saying, ‘Now what? How can I take my practice off the mat and into the world?’”
A month after their first meeting, Seane got a call from Julia’s colleague, Alissa Hauser, who asked Seane to get involved in the launch of a leadership training program that teaches people how to create karma yoga projects within their own communities, just as Julia and Seane have. “I was so excited,” Seane says. “They came to me with the ‘Now what.’”
Loosely translated as “selfless service” or “the yoga of action,” karma yoga is described in the Bhagavad Gita as one of the four main branches of yoga. This ancient concept is also a growing contemporary trend. For example, people in over 30 countries participated in Shiva Rea’s colossal Global Mala Project last September to raise consciousness about global causes through hatha practice, prayer, chanting, and fund-raising; organizations like the Green Yoga Association are promoting ecological practices in the yoga community; celebrity yoga teachers such as Sharon Gannon and David Life are raising awareness about issues like animal rights; while studio owners from Los Angeles to Bristol are hosting “yogathon” fund-raisers to help victims of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the genocide in Darfur. As the global yoga community begins to direct its energy toward service, buzzwords like “sacred activism,” “engaged spirituality,” “seva,” and “peace in action” are becoming part of the vernacular.
Both Seane Corn and Julia Butterfly Hill are role models for this yoga-in-action trend. Through a multifaceted collaboration, these women are aiming to help activists and yoga practitioners from all walks of life discover their deeper purpose—their life’s calling—and put that purpose into action. “We have the opportunity to become the leaders that we seek,” Seane says.
Two Years In A Tree
Ten years ago, at age 23, Hill traveled on a spiritual quest to California, where she discovered the old-growth redwood forests, but soon learned that Pacific Lumber, under the direction of corporate raider Charles Hurwitz, was ravaging them to turn a quick profit. Hill joined an Earth First! tree-sit action in which participants took turns living on a 4 x 6 foot platform 180 feet up a 1,000-year-old redwood known as “Luna.”
“I climbed a tree because I fell in love with the redwoods, and I found out that over 97 percent of them had been destroyed,” she said in a recent interview. “The devastation broke my heart. My love became a purpose that called me into action that called me into that tree.” With winter approaching, volunteers were scarce, and Julia knew what would happen to Luna if she descended.
Loggers tried to scare her out with helicopters and starve her out by cutting off supplies. They shouted obscenities at her day and night. But her most difficult challenge, Hill says now, was watching the forest being destroyed around her—for 738 days. “My rage and my anger were consuming me,” she says. “And when I was praying one day, the answer that came to me was, ‘Julia, you must simply love.’”
Over time, Hill came to a new definition of the word. “Love is not a fluffy thing. It’s got edges and teeth,” she says. “Love refuses to play small or to sell out.” Julia learned to work from her fierce love of the forest rather than from her anger at Pacific Lumber. “I would have come down out of that tree if I had stayed angry,” she says. “Love is more powerful than rage.”
A key to that love, she says, was learning forgiveness. When a record-breaking El Niño storm pummeled her with sleet and hail for over two weeks, Julia thought that she and Luna were going down.
“I was praying constantly, ‘Please don’t let us die.’ Then I prayed for everyone I loved. I ran out of people after a few days. Then I had to pray for people I don’t love.” Hill says she kept praying until she reached the most difficult person in her past: a man who had stalked her and threatened her life. “I prayed for his peace, healing, and well-being until I really felt it inside of me.” This profound moment of forgiveness helped her dissolve her illusion of separateness and see the union (or “yoga”) of all life on earth. Forgiveness and love are central to what she teaches today.
Hill’s tree-sit became a historic civil action that, along with her best seller, The Legacy of Luna, brought a huge amount of attention to her cause and gave her an international platform for speaking about environmental issues. In the end, she negotiated with Pacific Lumber to protect the tree and a three-acre zone around it, though logging in the area continues. Her feet touched earth again in December 1999.
While in Luna, Hill founded the small nonprofit organization Circle of Life, which identifies trends in the environmental movement, such as green publishing and eco-friendly music festivals, and creates projects that give them momentum. To date, Hill has given over 1,000 speeches across the United States and abroad; her television appearances include The Today Show and Oprah. She has helped raise about $3 million for dozens of environmental organizations. This year, however, weary of the demands of touring, she has stepped out of the limelight to work on new projects. “I’m done being the ‘Julia Butterfly Hill Show,’” she jokes.
Hill has counted on morning meditation sessions to keep her centered throughout these busy years, she reports, and she strives to act with mindfulness throughout each day. “My life is my meditation practice,” Julia says. She began practicing yoga five years ago, attending class when her schedule permitted. Now that her life is more grounded, she says she’s committed to focusing more on yoga.
Julia’s tree-sit has all the makings of a Hollywood film, and in fact the movie Luna is currently in development with producer Baldwin Entertainment Group (Ray), co-producer Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth), and director Deepa Mehta (Earth, Fire, and Water trilogy). Circle of Life executive director Alissa Hauser says, “The movie has the potential to inspire a large audience of people into action. We want to channel that energy into long-term activism and give people a ‘Now what.’” Enter Seane Corn.
Off the Mat, Into the World
Former “Nike Goddess” model Seane Corn, like Hill, shatters preconceptions. How could someone with such great hair be so...real? She’s a Jersey girl, raised in a hardworking, Jewish-Catholic family, with an approach to yoga that is earthy, not ethereal. Her irreverent humor and authenticity are key to her popularity.
Corn, now 41, left home at 17 for Manhattan, where she got into drugs as a way to escape from overwhelming emotions and expand her consciousness. She waited tables at a café run by future Jivamukti founders Gannon and Life, who introduced her to yoga. Through the practice she realized, “The high I was looking for could not be found in a drug, but in my relationship to God.” She quit drugs and took to yoga with the determination of an athlete. “I practiced yoga like crazy—but for myself,” Seane says. “It was always ‘me, me, me.’” In 1992, Corn moved to Los Angeles, where she trained with renowned teachers Bryan Kest, Richard Freeman, and Rodney Yee at YogaWorks.
Seane’s understanding of yoga deepened when she began teaching asana classes to girls at Children of the Night, a shelter in Van Nuys that houses and educates adolescents rescued from prostitution. The girls were not exactly welcoming. “They were street whores. They ripped me to shreds with their negative attitude and clear disinterest,” Seane recalls. “I sat in the car and cried until I realized I couldn’t stand them because they were me.” The girls had triggered a flood of unresolved feelings about her own history, which includes difficult experiences that she acknowledges in workshops but prefers not to discuss for publication.
Corn says that when she saw the connections between herself and these girls, her sense of separateness dissolved. She told her story to them, and their relationship transformed into one of trust and openness. “I realized that yoga isn’t about me. It’s about us,” she says. Through this experience, Seane discovered her passion for empowering high-risk youth. The yoga program she started at the shelter in 2000 continues to this day.
“I found my purpose by going straight into what scared me,” Seane says. “Whatever brings you to the mat—alcoholism, abuse, divorce—will be the place from where you’ll serve.”
In 2000, Nike asked Corn to model for magazine ads and appear in a series of TV commercials highlighting hatha yoga as an athletic discipline. Aware of Nike’s overseas sweatshops, she nearly turned down the offer. But she saw the invitation as an opportunity to educate a large mainstream audience about yoga through interviews she would give to CNN and other outlets. Seane’s decision to appear in the ads generated controversy within the yoga community but gave her a platform as a teacher, and her face became familiar to millions of Americans. Using her influence, she was able to persuade Nike into making one of the market’s first PVC-free yoga mats.
In 2003, a conversation with her movie-star student Ashley Judd led to the next evolution of Corn’s yoga practice. Judd spoke about her work with YouthAIDS, an initiative of Population Services International that addresses the impact of HIV on young people in more than 60 countries. She told Seane about the commercial sex workers in Nairobi, many of whom are young girls sold into prostitution by their poor families. “They often charge $1 for sex with a condom and $2 for sex without,” Seane laments. Predictably, many contract AIDS.
Corn wondered if she could rally the yoga community around this crisis. “Think about it,” she says. “There are 20 million yoga practitioners in the U.S., and yoga is a billion-dollar industry. If we could harness that energy, we could make a huge difference in the world.”
In 2005, Seane Corn became YouthAIDS’s first National Yoga Ambassador. Partnering with businesses such as Gaiam and Luna Bar to sell yoga and health products, she launched the campaign Off the Mat, Into the World, with all proceeds going to YouthAIDS. To date, Seane’s efforts have raised about $400,000 for YouthAIDS, which, along with its parent organization, PSI, helped prevent an estimated 250,000 new infections in 2006 through education, testing, condom distribution, and other programs, according to spokesperson Alison Brett Smith.
In March 2007, Corn traveled to India with Judd on her first tour of YouthAIDS programs. She taught yoga to sex workers in Mumbai, visited clinics, and met with educators. She held children in her arms that were dying of AIDS. “I had to cry and rage in the privacy of my hotel room and then go out into the field and offer love and compassion wherever I could,” she says, adding that her yoga practice helped her process these feelings and stay grounded. Seane says that before her experience with the girls in Van Nuys, she could not have held a dying child with such compassion. “Ten years ago, it would have been all about me.”
The Passion-Driven Life
When, in 2005, Julia Butterfly Hill and Alissa Hauser realized that the film Luna could inspire a large audience of people nationwide, they started looking at ways to mobilize them. They researched the history of political movements, analyzing which ones have succeeded and why. Their search took them to such diverse sources as Martin Luther King, Jr., MoveOn.org, and megachurch leader Rick Warren, whose book, The Purpose Driven Life, has rallied hundreds of thousands of Christians into service work. In Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose program, church members meet in small groups over a 40-day period to explore their purpose and start community service projects. “If they can do it, why can’t we?” Alissa asked.
Melding influences of this and other models with Julia’s story and teachings, Alissa and Julia created a detailed curriculum for small groups to follow in weekly meetings over seven weeks. Aimed at environmentalists, this program is called What’s Your Tree?—which translates as, “What are you passionate about?” Members explore their purpose, develop new leadership skills, and organize an outreach project that, ideally, continues beyond the seven weeks and makes a positive impact in their community. Participants with leadership potential will be trained (by Hauser and colleagues) to lead their own groups, and the project can grow like the branches of a tree, with the potential to mobilize thousands.
But Hauser didn’t want to limit the project to environmentalists—she saw the yoga community as a like-minded group of people who are also trying to make a difference in the world. She had heard about Corn’s spiritual activism workshops and saw her as a natural ally—someone who could help yoga practitioners channel their good intentions into concrete action.
Seeds of Change
Their collaboration debuted in a workshop held last September at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. The workshop, called “Divine Action: Living Like You Mean It,” attracted a diverse crowd of yoga students and activists (including myself), who were eager to deepen their sense of purpose and direct it into service work.
If finding one’s calling seems like a daunting goal for a five-day workshop, Julia clarifies that “your core purpose is not what you’re called to do, but who you’re called to be.” Finding your purpose is a process of listening deep within to discover your core values, such as love, then aligning your actions with those values.
Seane adds that actions inspired by love—whether raising kids in a conscious way, teaching yoga from the heart, or volunteering at a soup kitchen—are, by definition, service. “Service is whatever you do in the name of love and grace,” she says. “It’s not about attaching yourself to some cause, but about finding your own path, and being really true to that.” Both leaders stressed the importance of approaching social activism from love rather than anger, with a healthy dose of humor thrown in.
During the retreat, Corn led morning yoga classes centered around themes of the course, such as detoxifying our bodies and making healthier choices for ourselves and the world, and clearing emotional blocks, like resentment, with the spiritual practice of forgiveness. Hill directed afternoon sessions outdoors, facilitating dialogue about how to deepen our sense of purpose in the work we are already doing in the world. Each day, she offered us a challenge, such as examining our food choices and our use of disposables. “Every time you take a napkin, know that there’s a chain saw attached to it,” Julia said. Although this may sound radical, her message is that small, everyday choices can add up to making a big impact on the environment. “It’s about seeing self as earth and earth as self,” she says. In her backpack, she carries a cloth napkin, a stainless steel food container, a coffee mug, and a glass bottle of water, to eliminate her need for disposables. Initiatives like this are highlighted in her second book, One Makes the Difference. However, Julia also stresses that “activism is not a to-do list. It truly is a way to celebrate life.”
At the end of the week, she and Seane gave participants a fund-raising challenge as a way to apply the lessons of the retreat in our own communities.
Now What?
This workshop was the beginning of a larger collaboration between Corn, Hill, and their colleagues. Following the model of What’s Your Tree? Seane has expanded Off the Mat, Into the World into a seven-week leadership and karma yoga training program for yoga teachers and students, weaving asana and meditation practice together with presentations and dialogue about spiritual activism. Toward the end of the seven weeks, participants will start a community service project together. Corn plans to attract yoga practitioners into the program with “bridge events,” such as the Omega workshop, as well as five-day intensives that she plans to lead with yoga teacher Hala Khouri and ecstatic vocalist Suzanne Sterling.
The first Off the Mat, Into the World seven-week course debuted in Santa Monica in October. What’s Your Tree? is already under way in Texas, California, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania, with several more locations planned for 2008.
Their vision is inspiring. What would happen if karma yoga training were included in every yoga center, in every teacher training program? What if the mainstream yoga community began to understand that yoga is more than asana—that selfless service and spiritual activism are a core part of yoga practice? How much of an impact could we make in the world?
As Seane explained at Omega’s “Path of Yoga” conference in 2006: “It’s through yoga, through meditation, through prayer…that we begin to understand our own journey and develop the compassion necessary so that we can serve—so that we can hold the light for others. Because if we’re doing our own work, we’ll have empathy for others. Empathy creates unity. And unity is what we need to heal the world.”+
Contributing editor Kristin Barendsen writes about yoga, travel, and the arts from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
RESOURCES
Off the Mat, Into the World Intensives with Seane Corn, Hala Khouri & Suzanne Sterling
• January 5–11: Exhale Spa, Venice, CA
• February 4–8: YogaWorks, New York, NY
• July 6–11: Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, NY
To learn more about the work Corn and Hill are doing, visit: circleoflife.org and youthaids.org.
For more information on Julia Butterfly Hill’s What’s Your Tree? program, send an e-mail to whatsyourtree@circleoflife.org.
+To watch inspiring footage of Circle of Life’s work, go to YogaPlus.org and click on Video: Circle of Life. To watch a clip of Seane giving a speech about the yoga of service, click on Video: Seane Corn.
Yoga+ magazine