Corissa Bragg is a musician and an EFWA certified yoga
instructor specializing in yoga therapy, tantra yoga and hatha yoga. I’ve known
Corissa from the music community for years and was happy to see her two years
ago at a Shakti awakening ritual conducted by tantrika Psalm Isadora (http://psalmisadorayoga.com). It
turns out Corissa is Psalm’s student and one of the few teachers of tantra yoga
in the area.
Corissa and I have both recently had babies. Before our interview
officially started, I expressed my difficulty practicing yoga and meditation
with my baby near me. I experience yoga
with my baby, but when it comes to sadhana, I find my ego thickens, acting as a
shield over my baby, and it’s hard for me to let go and dissolve. Here are her
thoughts in response, followed by our conversation:
CBCB: I know exactly what you mean when you say you are clinging
to ego. I look at it more, like, I'm
clinging to my experience in this world. Which is why I have always been drawn
to tantra. My interpretation of it, is letting our spiritual experience, our
mediation, be the experience we are having in this life, in our bodies, and on
the earth. That's why I think tantra and
paganism are so intertwined. In tantra
we worship our bodies and in paganism we worship the earth. It is so similar. I would say I do both. I think having a baby requires this intense
grounding experience, it's hard to just let go, it's hard to give in to an
ecstatic experience. You still have to
be present. I've found it really helpful
to do all my practices without the baby for now. I let my partner take care of him, so I can
let go a little during meditation.
ARH: Wow yes - I agree with you about tantra and
paganism and being able to let go in the practices without the baby present.
I
love the similarities between tantra and paganism - they seem to both stem from
the same natural urge that people return to despite millennia of authoritarian
state religion. I picked up most of the books that Psalm recommends on her
page, and I think the Andre Lysebeth tantra book and Starhawk's book are
terrific companion pieces. I recently read ORIGINS OF MODERN WITCHCRAFT:
EVOLUTION OF A WORLD RELIGION by Ann Moura that connects ancient Dravidian
pre-Aryan Shiva/Shakti religion to European paganism. Some of it is a stretch,
but generally the book is fascinating.
For a long time I was involved in the
OTO, which is an initiatory order that blends freemasonry, ceremonial magic and
eastern practices. It was started in the 1890's. It was a great group, but I
eventually left because I was more and more drawn to the earthy and ecstatic
practices of paganism and yoga. Since that time, the more I learn about tantra,
the more I see what I perceive to be tantric ideas and symbols embedded in the symbols and text of public OTO rituals! It's crazy to think of some freemason traveling east in the
1890's, learning tantra, starting an order, and here we are all this time later, coming full circle.
Would you mind discussing your background
in tantra yoga, and whatever kinds of practices led you to where you are now?
CB: When I was 19 I took one of
my very good friends to a festival called 'Starwood' for her high school
graduation present. She used to go when
she was little and she talked about it all the time, so I thought it'd be fun
to take her. I hadn't ever really
considered myself spiritual, it just wasn't something I thought about. I was raised in a strictly atheist
household. Any religion or spirituality
was considered very unintelligent.
Little did I know this was a Pagan festival. Mostly I just partied and drank and
danced. I didn't care about ritual or
the really informative workshops they have on all sorts of spiritual practices. I felt oddly connected to dancing around
their nightly bonfires but I didn't know why.
The last night was the climax of the festival, a massive bonfire was
built and everyone would dance around the fire with drumming and rituals going
on. I decided to take psychedelic
mushrooms, which I had a couple times before.
This trip was different than any I’d ever experienced. I felt so connected to the ritual, the fire,
and the drumming. I felt as if I was
worshiping the earth as I danced around, and I felt the fire cleansing and
transforming me. I also saw a vision of Shakti
and Shiva in the sky. I had no idea the
meaning, or that this would be the first sign of my spiritual path.
Every year I returned to Starwood and felt
that spiritual connection with the fire and the earth. But all year that was the only spiritual
experience I had. I never looked for
another form of practice, or a way to maintain the feeling I had at Starwood in
my daily life.
Years went by and I had a
lot of ups and downs. I was at a
particularly low place in my life. I had
become an exotic dancer, which is a fine career but wasn't working for me. I was drinking too much and not feeling good
about myself. At the beginning of one of
the shifts a good friend of mine brought in a copy of Journey magazine, the
local new agey magazine. On the cover
was a beautiful woman doing a yoga pose.
As I waited for the shift to start I read the whole article of her transformation
in life. How low she felt, and how she
changed her life with tantra and yoga.
This woman's name was Psalm Isadora.
I thought about the article a lot, I thought about tantra, and how I
wasn't sure what it was but it interested me.
My shift started and one of my first customers was a reiki master. We talked for a long time about spirituality
and in the end, I had to manipulate him so I could make money off of our time
together. I mean, I was at work. By the end of shift I felt so terrible, the
lowest I had ever felt. All at once I
decided to quit everything. I quit
drinking, I quit stripping, and I just started doing yoga. I meditated, I practiced, and I got a regular
job. I started looking for information
on tantra and I only found a little bit.
The image of Shakti and Shiva embracing, that I'd seen years ago came
back to me, and the year before a shaman had told me that my quest would lead
me to finding a balance between light and dark.
There were so many signs. I saw
that Psalm was coming to Youngstown to do a teacher training. I was broke and didn't have a car. Youngstown was an hour and a half away. I called the guy organizing the teacher
training and we worked out a plan. He
would pick me up and I would just stay with him the whole weekend of the
teacher training. It was a big
commitment, I worked the weekends, but I was willing to be broke and stay with
a stranger just to learn from this woman.
I was pulled strongly in this direction.
A week before the training started a friend sold me her car for 200
dollars, so I was able stay in my own home throughout the training.
That was the beginning! Sorry to be so long winded, there's just a
lot to say!
ARH: One empowering thing
I love about Tantra and Paganism is that they are based on direct ecstatic
experience rather than dogma, and so, in addition to not lending themselves to
corruption and manipulation, they also aren't necessarily in opposition to a
materialist point of view. Would you mind discussing how that works for you?
I'm wondering in particular how you've reconciled your atheist upbringing with
your experiences?
Would you discuss your music and how that relates to your
practice? Do you find performance to be a ritual?
Performance for me is an ecstatic practice, and being raised in an agnostic home, I've had to dig deep into my own direct experiences to remember the possibility of gnosis. So, I was wondering about your take on those things.
CB: Whoa, these are hard questions. I battle with the materialist thing. I am not a materialist, but I know many great tantra teachers who are. Osho had
several Rolls Royce vehicles, and right now Psalm is teaching workshops on how
to take these practices and make money off of them. I find myself getting angry about this stuff,
I think, 'that's not what this should be about.' But then I think, are there lessons and
learning within that? Survival is
important, that's all root chakra, money and security. But it's also about balance. I'm still working on that.
As far as my atheist upbringing, I think in
some ways it was OK. It was a good place
to start from, and I think it helped me pick a spiritual path that is true to
who I am. It taught me to be skeptical,
and think logically when it came to any religion or spiritual practice, so when
I had energetic experiences, I was like, Ok, this is really happening. I think because I was brought up atheist I
needed that physical proof to start a practice.
I had to battle against doubt a lot, and I found myself always making
fun of my own spiritual practice when talking about it with other people. Almost saying, I know this is ridiculous and
stupid but this is what I do...
I lose myself when I sing, a lot of times. Not every time. But I guess that goes back to meditation and
tantric practices in general. Not every
practice is going to give you an ecstatic experience, sometimes they do,
sometimes they don't. If I am practicing
tantra regularly, my voice is noticeably more open, and I can feel my creative
energy as this strong force inside myself. This usually leads to more
songwriting, more practicing, more energy and motivation.
I have never looked at my performance as a
ritual. I'm not sure why, I guess I've
just never thought about it that way.
The closest thing I have done on my own that I consider ritualistic is
dancing. I feel like letting go of all
your inhibitions and dancing can be very cleansing and spiritual. In India I was present for many rituals and
the amount of preparation and energy that went in to them was amazing. Usually it was a whole day of
preparation. I can't say I put that much
energy into anything. I'm just happy if
I do my tantric practice and music practice every day! Maybe I'll get to that point eventually,
where I have the focus to create my own ritual.
ARH: Would you
mind defining tantra Yoga by giving a rough explanation of its theory, practice
and cosmology for readers who may not know?
Also, what
projects are you working on these days, and what are you excited about in the
future?
CB:
Tantra is always so difficult to
explain. When I was visiting Sri
Amritananda's ashram in India I realized that it was a very involved practice
for a lot of people. Many people
practiced rituals that were hours long and knew all the names of all the
goddesses and all the mythology. I'm not
much of a scholar when it comes to things like that. I have learned tantra from Psalm, and my
understanding of it might be much different then the devoted tantric that has
every book memorized. My favorite
explanation was from Psalm's guru, Sri Amritananda, he would say, 'It's love,
it's all just love.'
My tantric practice is finding liberation through my
experience in this life. Every physical and energetic practice is my
mediation. The more I become aware of my
body and the energy that resides inside it, the more aware I become that
everything is love and that we are all connected. Not just with other humans but with
EVERYTHING. Tantrics worship the human
body, not just sexuality, but every part, we are the gods and goddesses
embodied. I think that's one of the most
beautiful parts of this practice, we worship the bodies of each other because
we are all part of the divine. There is
no hierarchy, our beings are just as important as any divine entity. I find it so empowering.
So there are many ways to achieve this
empowerment, even within the tantric practice there are so many different
paths. The big separation would be the
left hand path, which breaks many social and spiritual taboos, and the right
hand path, which stays within the confines of what is socially acceptable. Even within this separation there are different
levels of how far right or left you can go.
My path includes a focus on opening the first three chakras in order to
find that power within myself. Everyday
I work on opening and strengthening these areas.
My plan for right now and the next couple
months is to maintain a daily practice.
I want to spend 40 minutes a day on my tantra practice so I can be
strong enough to start helping others awaken their inner goddess. My life has changed so much because of these
practices. I have faith in myself, I
have so much power in myself, which wasn't always the case. I really want to share that with other men
and women. I want to hold a really
strong space for people to open up and grow.
I've slowly started taking on yoga therapy clients, and I hope by the
beginning of next year to be fully recovered from my pregnancy and to be
teaching classes and workshops.
ARH:
Thanks so much, Corissa. I greatly appreciate your ideas. And I got so much out
of the yoga therapy session and the tantra yoga class I attended. I'd love to do a follow-up interview in the future!
