Teacher Feature: Get to Know Seán Johnson

I’ll be honest— I was really turned off by my first experience with yoga. After having many friends tell me how I should try yoga for its peaceful benefits, I signed up for an Intro to Yoga course. As I lay down on my mat preparing for class to begin, the teacher walked over, stomped his foot onto the floor next to my mat, leaned over, and yelled at me to move my mat so that it was in precise alignment with the wall. When I moved it, he yelled again saying it was still a millimeter off. Shortly afterwards, he started walking on his hands around the room, admonishing other students for various inadequacies in the way they were practicing. After the class, I walked out and thought to myself, “what an @#$%&!, if this is yoga, it’s not for me.” I had paid in advance for the course, but didn’t return, and based upon that experience, planned on staying clear of yoga in this lifetime…

Thankfully, awhile later, I was invited into a very different approach to yoga that would transform my life in profound ways. While I was in school at The Evergreen State College, I met a professor named Doranne Crable who would become a friend, mentor, and my first yoga teacher. I was in a heartbroken place after the ending of a partnership and thirsty for inspiration and healing. Doranne was an amazing woman who traveled all over the world studying dance, meditation, yoga, and literature. She was deeply spiritual, creative, eccentric, kind, a fellow imperfect human. Her classes were like a spiritual/art laboratory where we studied and practiced yoga, meditation, poetry, singing, dance, literature, and more. I read Rumi and Mary Oliver for the first time, went on a 10 day silent meditation retreat, chanted mantras and knew immediately it would be a life-long practice, dared to challenge the self-conscious awkwardness I felt in my body through yoga, dance, and other movement practices, and so much more. She guided many reflective processes to help us garden the fertile soil of our inner lives. The experiences Doranne curated gradually helped to turn my heartbreak into spiritual fuel, and I began learning how to honor and transform grief through spiritual practice and art. Eventually, Doranne encouraged me to teach yoga which opened up a whole life path. She helped plant the seeds for so much of what has given my life meaning, and I’m incredibly grateful for her.