Music

YM: What is Kirtan all about?

SJ: Kirtan is connecting to the Spirit of Life through singing. It's stretching and expanding the heart, and our capacity to love, like when we stretch our bodies in asana. Kirtan is a love song to Life, offering whatever is in our heart as food, nourishment to the Universe. Kirtan is a form of love-making with the world, and a celebration of the sacred presence within us. Kirtan is prayer, worship of the life force through song. Kirtan is meditation-- the repetition of the mantras washes the mind and helps us remember who we really are. Kirtan is a practice for cultivating spiritual and emotional freedom. Kirtan is medicine-- the sound tones our bodies, and feeds the brain electrical potential.� Kirtan is an opportunity to share YOUR voice with the Universe.

YM: Who/What is the Wild Lotus Band?

SJ:Many kirtan wallahs travel with a single percussionist-- but I love to tour with the band who bring so much life and spirit and depth to our kirtans. They are a joy to travel and hang out with. We have developed a really sweet musical chemistry over the years and it keeps getting juicier and juicier. And we all bring different influences to the mix that keeps the music fresh.

The Wild Lotus Band is vocalist and percussionist Gwendolyn Colman who plays cajon, frame drums, high hat, bass drum, cymbals and assorted other percussion instruments. Gwendolyn is the mother-engine of the band, a magical drummer who can play so sweet and subtle and also rock the house with her fancy fingerwork. She's also has a gorgeous singing voice. Gwendolyn has a strong background in middle eastern rhythm and flamenco so she brings those flavors to the band.

Alvin Young is our fretless bass player and he also plays guitar. Alvin is a really humble wicked bass player!� Back in the day, he used to have jazz titons Wynton and Branford Marsalis in his band, and has played with some of New Orleans greatest musicians. He's one of the most melodic bass players around and when it's time to get funky, watch out!

You'll also hear my brother Matt Johnson playing guitar and tenor sax on "Calling The Spirits". I have fond memories of us as kids when I'd sing Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin songs while he played the guitar parts. Call me biased because we're brothers, but he's one of the most soulful musicians I've ever heard. Matt plays music full-time on the New Orleans jazz scene.

YM: How did Kirtan discover you?

SJ: I went to a really amazing alternative college called The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA where I first discovered yoga, mysticism, and connected with sacred chant. I was enrolled in a program called "PATH: Practices Acknowledging The Heart" where we were engaged in spiritual practices from different traditions: yoga, Buddhist meditation, sacred dance and art. A group of Sufis came to work with us and shared their chanting practice called Zhikr-- the incantation and repetition of the divine names. It blew my mind and heart wide open. I was immediately hooked and went on a quest to learn more about sacred chant. That quest led my to a graduate program at Naropa West where I did an apprenticeship in the yoga of sound with Russill Paul for two years. Russill is a really great musician and vocalist from south India who wrote the book "The Yoga Of Sound" and has released several cds. After leaving Naropa, I moved back home to New Orleans and started teaching yoga and sharing kirtan full time. Jai Uttal has also been a great inspiration and friend along the way.



YM: Please tell me about this "funky twist" you put on Kirtan.

SJ: Rather than trying to sound like an Indian-born kirtan band, we respect and honor the tradition, but seek to channel kirtan through the authenticity of where we come from, and our influences. Alvin and I grew up in New Orleans so you can hear jazz, funk, gospel, rock, and street rhythms. Gwendolyn has a strong background in middle eastern rhythms and flamenco percussion so she adds even more spice to the mix. Instead of straight ahead call and response chanting with little variation, we like to create spacious arrangements and dynamics that serve to deepen the experience of the mantra. We also try to celebrate the relationship between soul and spirit in our music. The soul quality is about moving deeper, into the mystery, into the roots, which is so present in day-to-day life in New Orleans. While the spirit quality is about elevation and transcendence, which is usually more present in this genre of music. We want to bring the two together, seeking to explore the dark and the light in our music. Get down and get up!



YM: How do you create a song, from start to finish?

SJ: I feel like a vessel, a channel for the music. A melody "comes through" and I can feel this little tingle of excitement inside as it arrives. In gratitude, I'll sit at the harmonium and flesh it out a little bit, do a rough recording. Then I'll bring it to the band and we play with it, give it more shape and nuance. It really comes to life and gets "cooked" when we start to share it live with people and interact with the energy of the chanters.


YM: What is your favorite part of working in the yoga scene?

SJ: That's an easy answer. The vast majority of yoga people are super cool, kind, open-minded, positive, open-hearted, generous, creative, loving people. It's such an honor to meet and share yoga and kirtan with so many beautiful people who are hungry to transform their lives. One of our favorite parts of touring is the community that is created, particularly when you return to a place again and again.

Just as an example, after Hurricane Katrina I got e-mails from yoga studios nationwide who wanted to help. Many of them ended up hosting fundraising kirtans and putting us up in their homes. I was so touched by their generosity. We have also helped to host several karma yoga groups who have come to New Orleans to do service work.


YM: You also own a yoga studio in New Orleans, Wild Lotus Yoga Studio. Please tell us about the importance of mantra and your studio after Katrina hit.

SJ: For me personally the kirtan got deeper after Katrina. I was able to channel a lot of the feelings at the time into the music as we did an extensive cross-country tour raising money for hurricane relief. My family home where I grew up and where my parents lived took 10 feet of water and they lost almost everything. The neighborhood I grew up in is still a ghost land now, nearly three years after the storm. We did a lot of Shiva and Kali mantras, tapping into the creative universal power behind destruction. I felt like the chanting was very therapeutic for everyone who felt that sense of loss, grief, and anger.

Wild Lotus was the first yoga studio to reopen after the storm. Katrina hit August 29, 2005 and the city didn't really open up to the public until October. We reopened on November 1st. Much of the city still did not have electricity. None of the traffic lights worked. There was a lot of storm debris everywhere, trees, abandoned cars. The city was a refrigerator graveyard, as everyone put their rotted refrigerators out on the sidewalk. There were very very few children in New Orleans at that time and very few elderly people. Most of the street traffic consisted of out-of-state contractors. Signs were posted everywhere for contractors and house gutting services. Few restaurants and grocery stores were open. There was a curfew in place at night. It was a bizarre time. As you can imagine, people were incredibly grateful to come to the studio and practice yoga. Lots of tears and lots of joy. We all know that yoga is therapeutic and we know the importance of satsang-- but this added a whole new meaning to those words. The studio was a place to grieve, to process what had happened kinesthetically, to reunite with old friends, to reconnect with a some semblance of normalcy, to pray, to breathe, to find refuge at a chaotic time. We also had a population of relief workers who came to class as well.

So many New Orleanians lost the things they relied on for stability in their daily lives-- family, loved ones, homes, jobs, a sense of normalcy-- and turned to yoga for sustenance. The devastating experience of the storm amplified the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of yoga for all of us. I believe the storm also awakened us to the preciousness of life and invited us to pay more attention to what we really value, to how we devote our energy, and to the gifts and blessings of life we shouldn't ever take for granted. While the population of New Orleans has been cut in half, the enrollment at Wild Lotus has mushroomed. We have more students now that we did before the storm, including many beginners. Many people have told us they don't know how they would have survived mentally and emotionally over the past two years without yoga and the presence of the studio.




YM: You often travel and teach yoga classes with the live band. Tell us about this experience.

SJ:I've been feeling really inspired to bring more bhakti yoga, devotion, heart, and more imagination to asana practice. Sometimes when we are over-emphasizing the physical experience, we forget what it's really all about- tapping into the creative love power within. Our practice can become mechanical or even dry up. My goal is to bring more juice to the practice through bhakti yoga. I've been teaching workshops at yoga conferences with the band playing a live soundtrack, so there's a live groove, a living relationship between the musicians and the yogis. I love to integrate ecstatic kirtan, storytelling, mythology, mystical poetry, creative movement, imagination, and play into the workshops. The practice became an offering, a blessing to the Universe, a body-prayer. I believe the most important alignment is alignment with the Heart. My study of Creation Spirituality, which celebrates the spiritual power of art and our innate creativity has been a strong influence. Yoga teachers who have been an big inspiration to me in this way include my friends Dana Flynn and Jasmine Tarkeshi of Laughing Lotus Yoga and Saul David Raye.



YM: Who can sing kirtan?


SJ: Anybody and everybody!!! If you're self-conscious about singing, even better! It's an opportunity to set that inhibition free and be yourself, offer your authentic voice to the Universe. It's incredibly liberating!



YM: Can mantra save the world?

SJ:What's beautiful about kirtan and mantra is that it unites us! We all sing together. And diverse beings coming together to celebrate life, nourishes, sustains, and saves our world.

Even in the microcosm of the yoga world, it doesn't matter if we're an Anusara yogi, an Astanga yogi, an Iyengar yogi, etc-- when we come to a kirtan we leave behind the brand names, the philosophical differences, allegiance to the alignment principles of our school, the tribalism, and we join voices with our fellow yogis and celebrate life!


YM: What's next?

SJ: We are fleshing out material for a new album and are really excited about it. We've grown a lot as a band since recording Calling The Spirits and I'm so stoked to record and share the new music with everybody.

I will be guiding a teacher training program called Wild Lotus Soul School in New Orleans in the fall 2008. It's an interdisciplinary yoga and spirituality teacher training program that will guide aspiring teachers into the wilderness of their own spirit so they can teach others to travel there. There will be a great emphasis on the art of teaching yoga and bringing hatha and bhakti together. We'll explore the relationship between yoga, art, music, mythology, philosophy, dance, play, and more. We've got some great teachers who are going to be a part of it including Dana and Jasmine from Laughing Lotus, James Bailey, Lorin Roche, Mitchel Bleier, and others.

We'll also be opening up a second Wild Lotus Yoga in downtown New Orleans in late 2009 as part of a special project called The New Orleans Healing Center. The New Orleans Healing Center is being developed in a 55,000 sq. foot building in one of the recovering neighborhoods in New Orleans near the 9th Ward. Plans for the three story building include a natural foods grocery, healing arts rooms, gallery, performance space, street university, women's center, labyrinth, offices for local green businesses, organic cafe, and arts bazaar. One of the main purposes of the center is to bring healing arts practices to people in downtown New Orleans who don't have access to them. So many of the services will be offered on a sliding scale and we'll have a number of community yoga classes we'll be offering specifically focusing on post-traumatic stress relief. Shortly, we'll be creating a fundraising program to raise scholarship money for neighborhood residents to attend yoga classes and we'll be inviting yogis nationwide to contribute.



YM: Where can people buy your cds and find out more about you and the band?


SJ: Visit www. seanjohnsonkirtan.com for cds and kirtan info.
Visit www.wildlotusyoga.com to check out info about the studio.




YM: Thank you for joining us and sharing all your gifts and music with our community.


SJ:� Thank you, Kasey! And for all the vision and energy you put into Yoga Mates. The site is like an online village for the yoga community. Really great work!


JAI MA!