That said – I think I also know why you’re here.  You’ve come across my writing, or you’re thinking of taking a retreat or workshop with me, or hiring me as an consultant, or asking me to work with you one on one to support your meditation practice and your life.  You want to know a little about where I come from, what my credentials are, what I believe in, and how it is I came to do what I do.  That makes sense.  I read “about” pages for exactly the same reason.  So I’m going to do my best not to overthink this.

I’ll do my best to tell you, but I’m warning you right now – it’s going to sound like I had a grand plan, which I absolutely did not.  Or, it will sound like I am just lucky – which is absolutely true, but not the whole truth. 

The truth is: I am a breadcrumb follower.  Trailing the scents of the things that I love, the things I’m good at, and the things that the universe seems to want from me has shaped my life into basically three threads that weave themselves, braid-like, through almost everything I do.  If you asked me today – Kate, what are you about? – I’d answer – meditation, art, and activism.  

Meditation

I started meditating in my teens, following instructions from a book.  This was the 90’s ;-)  I had been a nerd for contemplative philosophy and iconography since middle school, and I was especially drawn to the Buddha’s teachings, because he led with the observable fact that this life can break your heart.  I’d seen and felt enough heartbreak by that time to feel wary of any spiritual system that glossed over this salient feature of the human experience.  But it was his follow-up statement that really got me – that it is possible to be free.  That suffering has an end.  And that meditation is a part of the path that leads there.  These teachings held enough promise for me that I was willing to try the practice for myself.  Albeit in secret, in my actual bedroom closet.

I finally set foot in a Buddhist meditation class in my early 20’s, after a major injury sidelined me from a career in modern dance.  I needed people I could be still with.  I wandered into the Interdependence Project and ended up taking my first year long meditation teacher training with founding teacher Ethan Nichtern in 2011.  It was a about learning to teach – at that point I was already teaching yoga in public schools and teachers and students were requesting meditation too – but it was also about being a part of a cohort of people who wanted to take the same quiet road to liberation, and who wanted to bring all our quirks and our politics and our passions along for the ride.

I was eventually drawn to deepen my practice in the Western Theravada/Insight Meditation tradition, with encouragement and inspiration from teachers in that lineage, especially Gina Sharpe and Sharon Salzberg. I completed a year long Mindful Yoga and Meditation Training, followed by the two year Community Dharma Leader training, both at Spirit Rock Meditation Center.  I began a period of intensive silent retreats going from weeks to several months in length, with guidance from Thanissara, Kittisaro, Spring Washam, DaRa Williams, Anne Cushman, Phillip Moffit, Joseph Goldstein, Guy Armstrong, and many others.  In Fall 2020, after four years of advanced retreat teacher training at Spirit Rock with core faculty Gina Sharpe, Larry Yang and Lila Kate Wheeler, I was authorized as an independent Buddhist meditation teacher.

My longing for liberation remains steady, and my sense of what it means continues to evolve. On good days, I notice that my moments of freedom feel indistinguishable from my deepest experiences of love.  I became a stepmother in 2017, and had a baby in 2021, and now, in addition to sitting in silence (when I can!), parenting has become a primary practice.  There’s no way I could have done all this without my meditation training.  And while much of my early experiences of healing and opening up came by way of long silent meditation retreats, I am more and more dedicated to the paths of awakening in and through relationships.  I believe in the liberation that is always already here, right in the middle of our busy, messy, beautiful lives.  

You can find more info about upcoming mediation classes, workshops and retreats with me right here

Art

Dance was my first art form, and I consider it my very first mindfulness practice too.  As a kid I found refuge anywhere I could align my mind, heart, and body with sound while moving through space. I danced my way from Chicago to the Bay Area to New York City, where I eventually earned a BFA in Modern Dance from the Alvin Ailey School/Fordham University.  

I worked as a modern dancer and teacher for the better part of a decade before attending NYU in 2010 to earn a MA in Performance Studies – an academic discipline that uses performance as a concept to analyze and understand art, as well as politics, culture, the law, and other topics.  I define Performance Studies here because I myself did not in fact understand what I was studying until I was midway through my first semester…  I had met a tenured professor at NYU’s PS department while performing at a festival in Berlin, and when he told me about his work I knew it was my next right move. I fell in love with the idea that I could both perform and write about performance, instead of leaving the writing and speaking to someone else.   And while I realized fairly quickly that academic life wasn’t for me, being in that space helped me articulate the embodied intelligence of dancers and movers in a way that brought dignity to my experience.  

When I was young I was told I was too smart to be a dancer.  But dancers know something uniquely valuable about tapping into the wisdom of the body, about how emotion travels, about what moves in political movements. Performance studies gave me a new language, and it was a joy and a relief to name these things.

After grad school I returned to teaching dance, yoga and meditation in public schools, and by 2013 I was searching for a way to integrate my dance and embodiment practices with the activism and political education work I had started to do within spirituality and wellness spaces. A friend suggested I check out an arts retreat with Arawana Hayashi, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition who was also a longtime dancer and choreographer.  She had pioneered a methodology called Social Presencing Theater (SPT) with an action research organization called the Presencing Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  Arawana wanted to train coaches and consultants to use this embodied mindfulness technology with their clients, and I was in her first cohort of trainees. I saw how SPT was able to quickly surface unacknowledged or unconscious dynamics in systems, as well as allow people in that system to embody more healthy, generative ways of working together.  I became Arawana’s student, then assistant, then co-teacher in these trainings, from 2013-2019.  SPT has proved to be an invaluable tool in my consulting practice, and for me it is and will always be a social art form, rooted in dance improvisation, capable of making the invisible visible in the way that all dance does.

These days, writing and facilitation are my main public art forms (though I still dance unprofessionally whenever I can).  

I wrote a book called Radical Friendship: Seven Ways to Love Yourself and Find Your People in an Unjust World and you can find it at your favorite independent bookstore here

I publish a short essay in my newsletter about once a month – you can sign up to receive it in your inbox here and find past writings in the journal here

For more on facilitation, read on (and, thanks for staying with me)

Activism

“Activist” is an identity that doesn’t always feel like it's mine to claim, though I dedicated a good portion of my early life to movement work.  I left college and hopped on a bus full of anarchists to attend the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 – my first major march.  I ran with a radical Black artist collective in the Bay Area, doing arts activism and working with youth.  In New York, I was a founding member of the Meditation Working Group at Occupy Wall Street.  I helped organize yoga and meditation communities in service of fair labor and economic justice campaigns, including the “Fight for $15.”  I traveled to Rome with a delegation of young faith leaders to help articulate a faith-based global environmental justice campaign ahead of the COP21 climate summit.  But, did I do enough?  

I always felt like I could have and should have done more.  This was partly the culture of the movement at the time – it would accept nothing less than everything you had – and partly my deep down knowing that I wasn’t actually well suited to movement leadership or direct action work.  I’d experienced harm inside of political communities and in interactions with police, and my nervous system couldn’t handle the pace, the vibe, or the level of risk I felt pressured to take in order to be a real activist. 

I found my true home at the intersection of spiritual and political practices when I began working with Buddhist Peace Fellowship, under the brilliant leadership of Dawn Haney and Katie Loncke.  BPF had a long lineage of ground-breaking work bringing meditation into prisons and protest spaces, and Dawn and Katie were ushering in a new era of joyful, creative skill building and political education within western Buddhist communities.  I had been doing some organizing and racial justice/DEI work in those spaces already.  Together with LiZhen Wang, we created online programs exploring spiritually driven political action, in person dharma + direct action training, and yearly retreats called Block, Build, Be where we explored the diversity of roles and energies in movement work.

I learned that we all have a role to play in the revolution, and that it’s not only ok that these roles are distinct – it’s imperative.  It would be a mistake to value front-lines work over care-giving work or administrative support.  Social change work is like a symphony, and each of us is an instrument, playing our part.  And as with all identities, characteristics and roles, as with all things in general – our roles in the revolution are subject to change.

For now, my role is a supporting one.  I do political education, equity and strategic change work within spiritual organizations, I do wellness and sustainability work within political organizations, and I offer spiritually and politically inspired coaching for movement leaders who want to prioritize wellbeing and the practice of wise relationships.

If you’re interested in working with me as a coach or consultant, you can reach out to me directly at kate@katejohnson.com