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By Root 1153 0

through the gay community, and one of her closest friends succumbed to AIDS before anyone really knew what it was. Before he died, he passed on a gift: He told her that God was in every person she met, even leather boys in gay bars. “Ignore the story and see the soul,” he told her. “And remember to love—you will never regret it.” She has said it was her first lesson in the central tenet of yoga—that we are all one. Eventually, she was able to overcome her addictions through a powerful yoga practice and soon became an inspired teacher, verbally brilliant, boldly devoted to Spirit. After she moved to Los Angeles, Seane became an evangelist for yoga as a healing art and spiritual practice. She started a workshop in Van Nuys, teaching yoga to child prostitutes as a way to help overcome their trauma.

Although we come from very different backgrounds, Seane and I have much in common. She’s very much a leader; she can hold the space in any circumstance. There’s reciprocity in our work. She taught me how to make my physical practice a prayer. I, in turn, have encouraged her social activism. Our relationship deepened after I called her for help when I was so sick in Bangkok, on my first trip for PSI, and she talked me through a night of cramps and mental anguish. I took Seane out to lunch soon after I returned from Asia, to thank her for her kindness. She was full of questions about my activism, and it planted a seed in her soul to use her platform in the yoga community as a launching point for large-scale service work. The conversation eventually led to Seane’s becoming the global yoga ambassador for YouthAIDS, bringing the message of AIDS awareness to the twenty million people doing yoga worldwide, and tapping into a billion-dollar industry for fund-raising. She adopted the slogan “Off the Mat—Into the World,” cofounded an organization that offers leadership training sessions for yoga practioners who then joined or found community service projects all around the country. It also raises money through service projects that bring yoga students to places like Cambodia, Uganda, South Africa, and Haiti.

On top of that, she’s a fun girlfriend who loves to shop. Seane is blessed with the gift of gab, and I couldn’t wait to hear her stories after her appointment to teach yoga to the women of Sanghamitra. I would have loved to go with her—but first I had a slum to visit.

Everything in Mumbai is extreme: the heat, the traffic, the noise, the crush of human bodies everywhere. And nothing I’ve done or seen could have prepared me for what passed for a housing compound in the depths of Dharavi, the sprawling area made internationally famous in the film Slumdog Millionaire. We were surrounded by dozens of squealing children as soon as we parked the car. I emerged at the opening of a tiny dark tunnel running between two shanties, from which a tiny figure in a bright sari materialized. It was Nasreen, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Kausar, a peer educator, who lived at the other end of this ghastly passageway. It was entirely black, no light source at all, about eighteen inches wide and less than six feet high. The uneven cement was wet from an unseen water source. Was it sewage? I hunched down, let my eyes adjust, and held Nasreen’s hand as she escorted me into the reality of this “apartment” complex that accommodates ten thousand people. Our route twisted and turned unexpectedly, I never found my bearings. The sounds of people living their lives was all around us, animated conversations, a TV blaring (there is more jury-rigged electricity around here than I’ve ever seen, it’s amazing none of it catches fire), babies crying. The children who had been at the car when I arrived would crazily appear in cracks in the tunnel along our way, popping out of crevices so small that I hadn’t thought they were passageways, yet from floor to ceiling, the narrow dark space would impossibly fill with faces. It was like being in a nightmare version of a fun house at the fair, the type where you are constantly jolted by unexpected, unwelcome distortions and