About me

Kathleen Kesson

As a scholar and researcher, I am accustomed to listing books and journal articles that establish my credentials, but you can find some of that, if you’re interested, in my Books and Selected Essays. I am guessing you would rather know about me as a person.

In the mid-1960’s, I was working as a dancer on a movie set at the old Allied Arts Studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The leading actors in the film were reading to each other from a very thick book with a picture of a long-haired Yogi dressed in orange on the cover.  I was intrigued, as I had bought a paperback book on Hatha Yoga and been practicing the Yoga poses (asanas) in my studio apartment in Hollywood for some time. The actors invited me to lunch at a vegetarian restaurant that was associated with the Self-Realization Fellowship next door to the movie studio, and I experienced my first soybean pattie, brown rice, and herbal tea. I was hooked. I bought the book, Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yoganananda, and thus commenced my lifelong study of Yoga.

For the next few years, as I danced professionally and traveled abroad in between jobs, I studied the work of many spiritual teachers: Yoganananda, Master Subramuniya, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meher Baba, Ramakrishna Paramahansa, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, and others. I had a successful career as a dancer, working in opera, musical theater, large Nevada showrooms, television, and movies. But I felt empty inside—none of the glamour, parties, or excitement was enough to bring me contentment and the Hollywood lifestyle was eating away at my soul, with its competitiveness, its disappointments, its shallowness, and the drugs and alcohol that fueled so much of the “scene.” In one of my major life changes, I left “show business,” which had constituted my entire life experience since my early days as a child performer.

What to do? A self-educated philosopher and highly trained professional dancer with no skills that might get me a job in the real world! I did what many of my peers did at the time, hooked up with the counterculture and its exhilarating social, spiritual, and political experiments. I worked with the University Without Walls to establish a free university in partnership with Native American activists in Oklahoma. It was here that my ideas about education began to be shaped. I immersed myself in Native American history and current Indian politics. I met the person who was to become the father of my four sons, a man of Chickamauga Cherokee, Shawnee, Scotch, and Abenaki descent. Earl happened to have been initiated into Kriya Yoga by Roy Eugene Davis, a spiritual teacher who had been ordained by Paramahansa Yogananda in 1951.

When we met, Earl was emerging from a 6-month stay in an ashram where he practiced Yoga, following a couple of years engaged in the anti-war politics of Berkeley, California and a sojourn on the beaches of Maui. During his lengthy and solitary period of Yoga practice and reflection, he had decided to become a history teacher. We met outside the University Without Walls Center where I had found work that I enjoyed in education and community organizing. Given our many common interests—Yoga, organic food and gardening, food cooperatives, free schools, environmental activism, and radical politics, we became a couple.

Together we discovered a group of Yogis living near Tulsa, Oklahoma. They farmed 65 acres, supplied natural food stores and co-ops all over Oklahoma, and held weekly meditations (dharmacakras) at their farmhouse. They welcomed us into their community. It was here that I encountered the teachings of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar (1921-1990).  I was drawn to the teachings; it was the first teacher I found who integrated deep spiritual guidance and a well-developed, practical social/economic theory that was aligned with my own beliefs and commitments. I became a lifelong student of Shrii Sarkar’s ideas.

In graduate school, I brought to my studies in curriculum theory and educational philosophy my long term interests in contemplative spirituality, self-directed learning and freedom in education, and progressive social change towards the creation of a society that is just, sustainable, and joyful. In the following decades, these ideas were shaped and reshaped, challenged and tempered by innumerable conversations with students and colleagues.  But I must credit my four sons with the best of my learning; watching them grow and develop, and teaching and being taught by them, has provided me with more understanding than any book or course has given me, and I am grateful for the good fortune to have raised them.

After many years of teaching in a variety of higher education sites preparing teachers and school leaders – a progressive, experimental college, a large urban university, and a rural state university, I now live in the mountains of central Vermont, where I am currently directing a global teacher preparation program through the Neohumanist College of Asheville. I spend my days reading and writing, and as much time as I can in my garden tending fruit trees, perennials, vegetables, and oodles of bee and butterfly attracting flowers and herbs.  I care deeply about the future and the legacy we are leaving for our children and grandchildren, and try to do my very small part to keep the Earth habitable for humans and all the other species with whom we share this fragile and beautiful planet!

Influenced by Shrii Sarkar’s ideas about education, part of his more general theory of Neohumanism that he wrote about in his 1982 book The Liberation of Intellect: Neohumanism, I have spent much of the past five decades working out the details of a holistic paradigm of education that would incorporate spiritual development and the cultivation of human potential, the healing strategies of decolonization, deep learning, and a critical social theory. My most recent book, Becoming One With the World: A Guide to Neohumanist Education, is my effort to synthesize these ideas into a dynamic model of education that might meet the imperatives of our current era. I truly believe that we are at a point in our collective human development that presents us with something of an evolutionary “bifurcation” – a term from chaos theory that suggests two branches leading in very different directions. We can continue down the path we are on — increasing the extraction of the Earth’s wealth to subsidize relentless consumerism, engaging in global conflicts, tolerating widespread inequality, and hastening the extinction of multitudes of species (the list is long) — leading to the vastly diminished quality of life, if we manage to sustain life at all. Or, we can choose to build a life-affirming ecological civilization, bring about a society of radical equality, co-create a world grounded in ecological ethics and natural abundance, and realize that the sense of deep interconnectedness is the place from which all right action grows.

My bias is clear in my new book: I believe that we need to educate young people in ways that provide them with the insights and the practical wisdom to change course, to choose the evolutionary pathway towards a more just, peaceful, and sustainable world. A more gentle world, a partnership model rather than a dominator model, as theorist Rianne Eisler proposes. I believe that we need to cultivate the “new human,” beings who care deeply about all life and feel the connection with all of creation; that’s the simple version of Neohumanism.