Multi-Skilled Braintree Yoga Instructor also a Playwright While Teaching Across Europe

Success has come to Braintree native Brian Culkin in a variety of ways throughout his relatively young life – as a NCAA Division 3 basketball player, a financial executive, and now an inspirational leadership consultant to high-powered clients across Europe.

Recently, Culkin turned his energy and intellect toward a new endeavor that combines his experiences. The graduate is using philosophical ideas about the potential of human beings, emotional lessons from teaching intense, mind-opening seminars, and his sense of humor to write plays that he hopes to publish and produce for wide audiences.

Culkin has also written articles focused on yoga for national online magazines, and one of his plays, No One Leaves This Place Dead, is currently available on Amazon. Right now, Culkin said in a recent phone interview from Oslo, Norway, he is working to find a publisher for it and two other projects.

"It’s almost inescapable," he said of the interaction between life and art. "You’re the creative agent informing the context of the whole play.”

After graduating from Thayer Academy, in 2001 Culkin earned a bachelor's degree in American Studies from Skidmore College in upstate New York. There he was an NCAA Division 3 Regional All American basketball player and Skidmore's all-time leading scorer.

Back in Boston after a stint playing basketball across the Atlantic, Culkin entered the mortgage industry, eventually running a firm serving commercial and residential accounts and overseeing several hundred millions of dollars in loans. But in 2008, just as the global economy began to collapse, Culkin decided he'd had enough of that world, quit and began traveling, and studying yoga, organizational theory and executive training.

At that point, Culkin "was ready to go live in a monastery," he in a 2010 interview marking the opening of his studio in South Braintree Square. After deciding against pursuing an MBA, Culkin wound up studying at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, where yoga became an everyday part of his life. He lived, trained and taught there over the course of a year.

"Teaching at Esalen is like teaching English at Harvard," Culkin said.

He has since brought his yoga lessons to Europe, along with multi-day seminars (Culkin will be hosting several in Russia and Lebanon next fall) as a senior associate for the Open Mind Training Institute, a boutique consulting firm based in Santa Monica, CA. The sessions typically last from Friday night through Sunday morning, Culkin said, and include videos and other presentations on being "in the zone," as well as intensive probing of his clients one-on-one and in groups.

Real human emotion and ideas come out of every session, Culkin said, adding that “it’s quite compelling and beautiful to see."

“I have a special connection to every single one of these people," he said.

Those insights – along with his passion for American history, philosophy and psychology – help inform how Culkin's characters come to life on the pages of No One Leaves This Place Dead.

Take Jennifer, a young PR executive from Boston. She can't seem to stop thinking about the social media reaction to her death even as St. Peter describes the next step in her fate.

"I would be happy to answer any and all questions after we go through a few introductory steps," St. Peter says. Would that be all right with you?"

"My Facebook wall!" Jennifer cries out. "Oh, my God! I can only imagine what people are writing. 'RIP, Jennifer. We love you and will always miss you.' All in the open, my life, my death ... for everyone to mock. My friends. My mother.  Oh, God! My mother!"

No One Leaves This Place Dead explores what would happen if you were escorted into a waiting room upon your death and told only to wait. As Culkin's description on Amazon, where the play is available digitally, puts it: "In this play you will meet three individuals grappling with some of life's most conflicting experiences: Morality. Human suffering. Responsibility. Relationships. Freedom. And ultimately, the very nature of existence."

Another play, Words of Wisdom, to be released soon, takes place inside a psychiatric hospital where the protagonist finds the staff to be crazier than the patients. Whereas No One Leaves This Place Dead is about existence, Words of Wisdom is a look at how society determines mental illness, Culkin said, and the nature of alienation.

"I consider myself an artist," Culkin said. "Even though I have the capacity to work from a corporate environment, I don’t like it. It became suffocating. There were tremendous financial benefits, but an emotional and spiritual downside."

He has been working with an editor to clarify his ideas, and plans to meet with a theatre company in Iceland, where he has been teaching yoga at one of the country's only studios. Ultimately, Culkin said he would like playwriting to be an integral part of his life, expanding the reach of his ideas on mindfulness and human potential.

"I don’t do anything unless I know I’m going to be good at it, and I’m going to like it," he said.

David Dionisio contributed to this article.