Movement Instructors

Beau Demkar

Beau has been practicing yoga and meditation for nearly 20 years. He has trained in the U.S as well as several South Asian countries, including a Yoga Teacher Training Course in India, and numerous extended silent meditation retreats. He has taught in a diversity of settings and recently has served as the resident mindful movement teacher at the IMS Forest Refuge for one year. In teaching movement practice he likes to emphasize subtle mindfulness, well-being, play, and self-compassion.

Chia-Ti Chiu

Chia-Ti Chiu (she/her) has over 18 years of experience teaching movement, mindfulness and resilience building in NYC. Her movement modalities include Hatha yoga, Vinyasa yoga, Restorative yoga, Qigong, Somatics, and Pilates. Chia-Ti leads domestic and international yoga retreats through her business onelovewellness. She provides mindfulness consulting and public speaking services on belonging and flourishing. She is a senior teacher with the Lineage Project, offering mindful movement and meditation to young people and direct service staff in detention centers and public schools. Chia-Ti facilitates Lineage’s 20-hour trainings, which offers mindfulness practices through a trauma-conscious, anti-oppression, and social justice lens. She leads mindful movement for the Garrison Institute’s Contemplative-Based Resiliency Project, which trains humanitarian aid workers and social service providers to cope with burnout and vicarious trauma. Chia-Ti runs an annual yoga and arts program in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and established an educational fund program that supports Haitian children to attend school. She is a certified yoga teacher through the Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana in Bangalore, India, the Trauma Conscious Yoga Method, and has extensive training in trauma-informed care, resiliency theory, and qigong. You can find out more information about Chia-Ti at www.onelovewellness.com and on IG: onelovewellness.

Emily Carpenter

Éowyn Ahlstrom

Franz Moeckl

Franz Moeckl has practiced Taiji (Gia-fu Feng) and Qigong (Ken Cohen) for more than 40 years. He lived in a Taoist hermitage ( Stillpoint ) in the Rocky Mountains for many years, has been a Buddhist monk in Burma and Thailand and trained and taught at Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Stress-reduction clinic in Worcester, MA. Franz now lives at the holy mountain of Arunachala in Southern India and teaches world-wide.

Hakim Tafari

Hakim Tafari is originally from the UK and currently resides in the Los Angeles area. In the mid 1990’s, after an injury and illness that led him to acupuncture, he was introduced to a life of mindful movement and herbal medicines that helped him to adopt a lifestyle that supported his wellbeing.

For over 20 years Hakim has been practicing martial arts, specializing and sharing the practice of Tai Chi Chuan and Qi Gong as well as studying Praying Mantis Kung Fu, Arnis, and Aikido. He has also become vastly skilled in Eastern bodywork of Shiatsu/Thai Yoga Massage and the Five Element Theory.

Among other expertise, Hakim is a Buddhist Dharma practitioner and meditation facilitator blending his meditative practice with street and trail running. He shares how the practice of running and mindfulness blends and offers a place of refuge for those seeking more peace and balance in their lives.

Isabelle Frenette

Isabelle has been praticing yoga for more than 25 years, and teaching it since 2008. She is a certified Advanced Yoga Teacher (RT-500) from the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Massachussetts. She is a massage therapist, and tai chi and chi kung are also part of her pratice. She has been the movement teacher for retreats in Quebec organised by Association de méditation Parami since 2017. Her approach has been to guide gentle yoga and chi kung movements, as well as some acupressure points that people can do themselves to relieve tension and bring vitality. She sees the movement practice as part of the mindfulness continuum of a retreat, where we slow down and turn inward. In her work with at-risk youth and also with groups 65 and up, she has been introducing the trauma-sensitive approach by carefully choosing the movements and using an invitational language that allows the participants to feel empowered.

Juan Sosa

Juan C. Sosa is a Puerto Rican yoga instructor-200 RYT (Registered Yoga Teacher), a community social worker, a meditator, a gardener, a cyclist, a cook, a father and a husband. He became a practitioner of yoga and meditation after reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living, which helped him learn to manage stress using yoga and meditation. A few years later, he completed the MBSR training at UMass Worcester Medical center. He has practiced mostly a vinyasa flow with his yoga teacher Terry McGrath at the Blissful Monkey Yoga studio in Boston, MA. He has been practicing vipassana meditation practice with Narayan Liebenson at CIMC for over 22 years.

“I enjoy the flow of movement in yoga because it helps me to focus on body awareness. After 19 years of practicing yoga, I decided to become an instructor to share with others my love for the movement and the breath during yoga. I was trained by Daniel Orlansky who teaches Yoga of Energy Flow and introduced me to a wide variety of yoga practices that I incorporate into my teaching. After entering my old age, I have modified my practice to be slower, gentler and compassionate flow rooted in the present moment.”

Malaika Tabors

Malaika Tabors, RYT 200, has studied various forms of yoga (Ashtanga, Anusara, Yin, Mindful Yoga, Kundalini) since 1997, and has a lifelong history of movement practices. She has been a dedicated Insight Meditation practitioner and student of Larry Rosenberg’s since 2005, and has experience with Tibetan meditation and Dzogchen with Kilung Rinpoche. She has sat many periods of retreat in both traditions. Malaika is also a mother, physical therapist, craniosacral therapist, and acupuncturist with a full private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Marci Moberg

Marci Moberg is a senior yoga and meditation instructor who sees mindful movement as one gateway to bring us back home to ourselves. She teaches movement classes on monastic retreats with the nuns of Aloka Vihara at Spirit Rock, and served as a senior faculty member for Yoga District’s teacher training in Washington, DC.  Marci is an experienced 500-Hour Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT), completing Sri Dharma Mitra’s 500– and 800-Hour Life of a Yogi Teacher Trainings. Also a long-time meditator retreating at Spirit Rock, Insight Meditation Community of Washington, Bhavana Society, and Yogaville.  Marci spends her days as an intuitive coach and healer with a passion for reconnecting people to their intuitive nature. Her work includes coaching individuals and groups to develop their intuition and alchemize their past. Her popular online course “Intuition Unlocked“ is a life-changing course on practical intuition development, and she is the podcast host of Tune In with Marci.  Marci has been featured on MindBodyGreen, the Huffington Post, Reader’s Digest, Bustle, ThriveGlobal.com, LifeHack.org, television, and many podcasts. Her movement classes are full of warmth, love, practical wisdom, and deep relaxation. You can follow her inspiring tips and writings on her website, www.marcimoberg.com

Mary Paffard

Mary Paffard has been teaching yoga and training teachers since 1985 nationally and internationally. She co-founded Yoga Mendocino, a non profit yoga center and was Director of Teacher Training 2000-2010. Mary completed the Dedicated Practitioners Program at Spirit Rock in 2007 and is currently part of a Buddhist Ecology Chaplaincy program at the Sati Center; she has taught gentle movement at many meditation retreats over the decades for teachers such as Ajahn Amaro, Christina Feldman and Narayan Liebenson, and delights in weaving the teachings into a cellular experience. For the last 24 years, Mary has been part of a cross-cultural exchange with Cuban yogis and meditators (www.yogavalatino.org)

Mary lives on a collective apple farm in rural Northern California with her partner and family, blending outdoor life, caring for grandkids, and continuing this meandering, humbling and inspiring path in the yoga, eco and meditation worlds!  (www.maryyoga.com)

Natasha Judson

Tasha began her yoga asana practice while in high school, and started offering Hatha Yoga in 1999. She completed a Teacher Training in Iyengar Yoga with Patricia Walden, and a 200-hour, Anusara™ yoga teacher training, becoming certified in this method in 2007, and in 2017 became certified with the International Association of Yoga Therapists. She has travelled to India on multiple occasions including leading trips for Williams College students.

She has been offering yoga full time since 2003 and is currently the Founder/Director of Tasha Yoga studio in Williamstown, MA, where she leads teacher trainings and hosts workshops.

Tasha is a long-time meditation practitioner including many retreats at IMS. She regularly volunteers with the Teen Retreat, which she is grateful to have been involved with now for over 25 years.

Rasika (Martha) Link

Rasika has been teaching Mindful Yoga at Spirit Rock during the February monthlong for 20 years. Her first trainings were from Kripalu followed by a certification in Iyengar Yoga in 1990. She began blending these two very different styles (yin and yang) and brought them to Spirit Rock.

During Covid she discovered a style of yoga from Brazil that focuses on the joints. The intention of this approach is to support functional mobility throughout our life as well as relax our nervous system. She discovered for herself that this was true and she taught this approach on zoom during the February and March Retreats at Spirit Rock in 2021.

She has led Yoga and Meditation Wilderness Retreats in the Interior of British Columbia, Woodacre and Oregon Coast for 20 years. She currently has an active zoom Mindful Yoga Sangha.

Rasika lives in Portland, OR near her two awesome grandchildren, named after trees, Juniper and Yewen. They remind her often of the preciousness of this human experience.