Lead Trainers
Alex Phelan, E-RYT 500
As a Yoga Alliance certified E-RYT 500, Alex has been teaching yoga since 2009 and completed over 1,000 teaching hours. In 2017, Alex helped to launch the 200HR Circle Yoga Teacher Training. In her role as teacher trainer, she is passionate about providing trainees with the skills they need to offer yoga beyond the confines of a traditional studio or gym setting. This includes understanding the anatomical basis for asana in a holistic, mindful and balanced way. Alex is also a certified Yoga Therapist with a Masters of Science in YogaTherapy from the Maryland University of Integrative Health. As a yoga therapist she works to ensure that each student or client is offered a balanced practice that is appropriately challenging and matched to their needs and goals.
Bonnie Foote, PhD, E-RYT 500
Bonnie’s teaching is lighthearted but focused: she wants her students to understand the principles of healthy alignment and be able to treat their bodies well, not just in class, but in their daily lives. Bonnie uses her rigorous training at the original YogaWorks in Santa Monica and her current interest in biomechanics to make sure that each session combines classic asana with innovative approaches to movement, alignment, and breath. She also uses her academic background (Humanities at Yale, English at UCLA) to give her classes a clear intellectual structure. But most of all, she uses her own experiences with chronic pain and gradual recovery to anchor her compassionate, individualized approach to teaching. She loves it when her students take charge of their own practices! She always encourages them to ask questions, make up modifications, and steal anything they like and take it home.
Eduardo Guedez, MS, E-RYT 500
Eduardo has been practicing Hatha yoga since 1994, teaching since 2007, and co-leading the YTT programs at Circle Yoga since 2017. He has been initiated into the Sri Vidya lineage of the Himalayan Sages. Eduardo’s teaching approach is grounded in the biomechanics of alignment, functional movement, pranayama, and yoga philosophy.
In addition to being a Certified Vishoka Meditation Teacher by the Himalayan Institute, Eduardo is an E-RYT 500, YACEP and a certified Steel Mace instructor. He is also a dedicated student of Karlakattai (wooden Indian clubs), a functional practice of body-mind-breath conditioning developed by ancient Tamil warriors of southern India. Eduardo holds a Master's degree in Computer Science and recently retired from Corporate IT after a 30 year career. He is co-owner and executive director of StoneSong Awareness & Nature Center where he leads programs that integrate yoga, meditation, and forest stewardship in the Allegany mountains of Western Maryland.
Special Topics Trainers
Annie Mahon, MA, MS, E-RYT 200, C-RYT
Annie Mahon is an author, ordained Buddhist mindfulness teacher and founder of the Circle Yoga Cooperative in Washington, DC. Annie has been writing about mindfulness, parenting, stress and yoga since 2004. Her blog, rawmindfulness.com, led to a book of Annie’s collected essays, Words to be With. Her most recent book,Things I Did When I was Hangry (Parallax Press, September 2015), documents Annie’s search for sanity in her eating disordered family life and reveals how mindfulness helped her go beyond the search for perfection and learn to love the moment as it is. Annie holds certifications in yoga, focusing and massage therapy and dabbles in Nonviolent Communication (NVC). When not visiting her children, teaching, traveling the world with her husband, drinking jasmine tea with honey, writing or walking her dogs, she practices yoga and mindfulness with her community in DC.
Cinema Wood
Cinema Wood loves the art of yoga. She believes in the medicine of movement and has been fortunate to find initiated teachers of an unbroken, beautiful lineage to guide her along the path. She met her Master Teacher, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait in 2003.
Rooted in a rigorous tantric tradition, Cinema is committed to sharing all of the limbs of yoga. Her classes are influenced by her work as a writer, her passion for dance and her mixed African, European and Indigenous North American heritage. Cinema blends movement and meditation, poetry and stillness. Her classes are infused with a lighthearted and laid back sense of pace merged with a disciplined and wholehearted focus on the unappropriated message of the Vedas. She is honored to share her knowledge of the sacred texts and practices of the Himalayan sages with students of all ages, abilities and backgrounds.
Denise Alston, PhD, E-RYT 500
Denise trained as a Kripalu teacher in 2003 and later received her Level 1 ParaYoga teacher and Four Desires coach certifications. She also is an Ayurveda Yoga specialist with training at the Himalayan Institute. She blends these and other experiences to provide guidance to clients seeking resonance of spirit, mind, and body.
Liz Butler, E-RYT 200
Liz has been practicing and teaching yoga for over a decade. She came to yoga to address chronic back pain and stayed because of all the other possibilities revealed. Liz teaches playful, irreverent, physically-challenging, alignment-focused classes. Each class is intended to foster connection, self-awareness, equanimity and a love of learning. Her three children and their unique relationships with the universe are a constant loving inspiration. She brings the experience and perspective of having taught in many venues: schools, studios, homeless shelters, gyms, corporations and the great outdoors. She also brings the experience of serving in many roles: studio director, owner, teacher, trainer and student. Liz is passionate about using yoga knowledge to help others to be more compassionate to themselves and others.
Mercedes Santos, E-RYT 200
Mercedes Santos began practicing yoga 30 years ago and has been teaching for 15. Mercedes teaches Hatha yoga that is primarily a blend of Iyengar and Classical Ashtanga styles, spiced up with some Vinyasa (flow). She teaches in a way that helps to keep an ever present awareness of the breath in the practice. Mercedes is committed to teaching yoga that is accessible to every body. She especially enjoys teaching older students, and has developed programs for a variety of age-related needs. Mercedes uses her knowledge of anatomy and therapeutics to help students practice with discernment and interoception. Mercedes also enjoys teaching the physical practice (asanas) as a pathway to concentration and meditation. She encourages students to explore how their body, breath and mind work together to cultivate a focused awareness that leads to the release of muscle tension and psychological resistance.
Michelle Brooks, RYT 500
Michelle Brooks (she, her, hers) has lived in a larger body for the 10 years that she has been practicing yoga, and she has been teaching folks that live in larger bodies for 4 years. She is passionate about inclusivity in the yoga space and in bringing joyful movement to those folks who may not have connected to their bodies for multiple reasons. Her classes are welcoming to all and she cultivates a brave space for her students by providing modifications and props to help students find ease and strength in the poses. Her training as an RYT500 yoga teacher has been through Circle Yoga and she’s a Curvy Yoga (TM) certified instructor who has worked with Anna Guest-Jelley. In her spare time, she enjoys riding her bike, kayaking, watching her partner play music, and cuddling with her basset hounds, Boo Radley and Scout.
Michelle Cohen, CBD, RYT 200
Michelle received her vinyasa yoga teaching certification from Tranquil Space in 2007 and taught flow, restorative and mixed level classes. During her first pregnancy in 2008 she began to teach prenatal yoga. Completely transformed by her experience of pregnancy, labor and birth, Michelle found her greatest passion in teaching prenatal and postnatal yoga. She completed Conscious Birthing Prenatal Teacher Training with Janice Clarfield in 2010 (4 months after giving birth to her second son!) to deepen her knowledge. She then felt called to serve and support her students, and other clients, in a full-circle process of birth and motherhood and trained to become a birth doula through ToLabor in 2012 and a postpartum doula through Birth Arts International in 2015. Michelle is deeply passionate about helping women have their best birth and strongest start to motherhood and feels the best way to do this is through yoga, mindfulness, contemplative practices, education, and hands-on support. To learn more about Michelle, visit www.savoritstudios.com.
Yael Flusberg, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT, MS
Yael is a sought-after yoga therapist, writer and coach who helps people find relief, resiliency, and creativity in the midst of transition and the aftermath of loss. For her, post traumatic growth is akin to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which mends broken pottery by filling in the cracks with gold, and treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. In her individual sessions, classes and training, Yael helps students assess their physical, psychological and spiritual health; learn evidence-based techniques that help them with their particular issues and conditions; and ultimately engage in sustainable yoga and other healing practices that helps them experience every season and stage of life as meaningful. Prior to becoming a full-time yoga educator, Yael spent 20+ years working with hundreds of grassroots, philanthropic, and creative communities through capacity building, community development and strategic planning consultation. The daughter of Holocaust-surviving immigrants and the first in her family to earn a college degree, Yael began her nonprofit career engaging in community organizing and social justice advocacy with refugees.
