Elaine Musselman – Founder/President

Elaine is the founder and president of Akasha Project. She comes from a background in art and architecture and has also worked for nonprofit organizations. Her personal interests include philosophy and self-care of the body and spirit. She completed yoga teacher trainings with Tias Little, Zhenja La Rossa and Ross Rayburn, Restorative Yoga with Jillian Pransky, and Trauma Sensitive Yoga with Bessel Van der Kolk and David Emerson. It is her hope to provide yoga to communities that will benefit form its practice but may not otherwise have access to it. Starting Akasha Project has been a wonderful journey and a coming together of her many passions. She is extremely grateful for this opportunity to give back some of what she has been given from all of her amazing teachers, family, and friends.
 
 
 

Lilly Bechtel – Tribeca Twelve

Grappling with the question of how alternative forms of healing can address social justice, Lilly has brought poetry, theater and yoga workshops into correctional facilities for the past six years. A graduate of Bard College, she has published in “Field Notes”, in the anthology Creating Behind the Razor Wire: An Overview of Arts in Corrections in the U.S. and the online periodicals The Brooklyn Rail and elephant journal. She is currently offering Trauma-Sensitive yoga classes at a veteran’s hospital and a sober house for young adults as well as serving as programming assistant for the online radio show ‘Where is My Guru.’ She is a writer for the Give Back Yoga Foundation, conducting interviews and working towards a book length project about the effects of yoga on veterans with PTSD. In her free time, Lilly dances around the house and is one of the proudest, if not the brawniest, member of The Five Borough Ladies Arm Wrestling League.
 
 

Donna Bouthillier – Chinatown YMCA

Donna Bouthillier found yoga long ago in her final year of college. She’s quite certain that adolescence would have been a heck of a lot easier if she’d discovered this practice sooner! The way yoga calms the nervous system, allowing us to dwell more fully in our bodies – and showing us that we do actually have some say over how we feel – makes this practice a great tool for young people. Donna is thrilled and honored to bring yoga to middle schoolers at the Chinatown YMCA through the Akasha Project.
 
As a yoga teacher, LMT, certified Zero Balancer, and Ensemble performer Donna brings to her classes a multi-dimensional knowledge of the body and a great enthusiasm for helping students tap into their natural radiance. Donna’s classes invite a spirit of playful curiosity and aim to balance detailed attention on alignment with a deep experience of the breath.
 
In her classes for Akasha Project, she uses games as well as a straightforward asana practice to invite young students into the fun of yoga as well giving them tools they can use to find stability and openness.
 
 

Eliza Cantor – Safe Horizon and Validus Preparatory Academy

Eliza Cantor recieved her 500 hour certification through YogaWorks, where she currently teaches several weekly classes. Before teaching yoga, Eliza taught awareness and communication skills based in the tradition of nonviolent activism, in prisons with incarcerated individuals. She was drawn to teach yoga as a way to incorporate the body for a more direct path toward transformation of inner, and by extention outer, violence and oppression. Eliza teaches a number of weekly yoga classes with ‘at-risk’ populations in a juvenile detention center, with adults who have experienced domestic and sexual violence, and with teenagers living in underserved and depressed communties. Whether she is teaching at a yoga studio or in a locked facility, Eliza is inspired by the relief that the yoga practice offers its practitioners through the simple but profound experience of touching into the present moment again and again.
 
 

Geoffrey DeVaul – Harlem Renaissance High School

Geoffrey DeVaul has been practicing yoga since 1998. His story is one of inspiration and joy. Geoffrey was fortunate to find yoga as he was rising from the ashes of his life. As such, he has fully enmeshed himself in the healing and therapeutic benefits of the practice of yoga on and off the mat. Over the last 10 years of alignment and heart-based practice, he has transformed his physical, emotional/mental, and spiritual life. Now, Geoffrey is on a mission to eradicate unnecessary suffering on this planet, one breath at a time. He studied with Nobel Prize winners while getting his Economics degree from Columbia University and now spends his time economizing body, mind, and spirit for himself and his students.
 
He specializes in creating yoga practices for new students in fun, energetic, and informative sessions. Students count on Geoffrey to assist them in aligning to their highest selves. He has helped numerous people to transform their physical selves for long-term betterment. He predominantly works with private clients and occasionally travels to offer his calming, healing services to those in need. Geoffrey is grateful for the opportunity to work with the Akasha Project and create yoga programs where there was little access previously.
 
 

Taylor Garrabrant – The Young Women’s Leadership School

Taylor connects deeply to Anusara® Yoga in its ability to always offer more. By weaving the principles of alignment with an invitation to step into one’s heart, Taylor offers a playful and precise approach for students to feel expansive through their own possibilities. Her enthusiasm to teach grew from a teaching background in dance to completion of an Anusara teacher training at Virayoga with Zhenja La Rosa.
 
Off the mat, Taylor works for an NGO that provides small grants to grassroots projects that empower women and children in developing countries. Bridging these passions is her work with Akasha Project, teaching yoga to young women at The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem (TYWLS). She enjoys watching the students connect to themselves and each other through yoga. She is enormously grateful for all of her teachers who continue to support her along this journey!
 
 

Julia Haramis – Common Ground

Julia is an NYC native and has been practicing yoga since 1997. She began teaching Vinyasa flow in 2007 after completing her 200-hour teacher training at Yoga People in Brooklyn and completed her advanced 500-hour teacher training at ISHTA Yoga in 2010. She continues to study at ISHTA with her mentor Mona Anand as well as Yogiraj Alan Finger and Senior Teachers Sarah Finger and Melissa Brasier. She is registered at the E-RYT 500 level with the Yoga Alliance, and her classes are in an alignment based flow style. She strives to make yoga accessible to students of all levels and currently teaches children, adult, corporate and senior citizen classes. In addition to teaching, Julia attended the Institute of Integrative Nutrition where she trained to become a certified Holistic Health Counselor and owns her own counseling business called Nutritionista®, www.nycnutritionista.com. She is a firm believer in integrating yoga and healthy behaviors throughout all aspects of life.
 
It was Julia’s involvement with Off the Mat Into the World (OTM) that led to her first yoga class for seniors. She immediately knew this was a population that she was meant to work with and could help. She has seen firsthand how beneficial yoga and mediation can be for them and truly loves offering these classes. She has been teaching at the Fort Greene Remsen Center since the summer of 2009 and at Common Ground for Akasha Project since the fall of 2011. You can learn more about Julia and her work at www.brooklynyogini.com.
 
 

Kevin Lamb – The Ali Forney Center

Kevin began practicing yoga with the dawn of the new millennium and has been deeply in love ever since. He completed his first hatha yoga teacher training in 2005 at Yoga on Main in Philadelphia, studying under of David Newman, Shiva Das and Ed Zadlo. From Philadelphia to Hawaii, Kevin has been expanding his practice and teaching through the years, now blissfully aligned with a passionate Anusara practice and working toward full Anusara certification. He completed the first level of study within this divine methodology in August 2009 at Virayoga, studying under Zhenja La Rosa, Eric Stoneberg and Douglas Brooks. He offers immense gratitude to his family for all their love and support, Elena Brower for her generous spirit shared so freely, and his friends and teachers who allow him to see himself more clearly each and every day. Much, much love!
 
 

Sara Neufeld – Groundwork Inc.

Sara leads two weekly Akasha Project yoga classes at the non-profit Groundwork, Inc. in East New York, Brooklyn. One class is for teens in their after-school program, and the other is a community class where participants range in age from young children to parents and even grandparents.
 
A certified Anusara teacher, Sara developed her passion for working with urban youth while covering public education as a newspaper reporter for over a decade. She continues to write about education – and now yoga – as a freelancer. In addition, she serves on the board of the Lineage Project, which provides yoga to at-risk and incarcerated youth in New York City.
 
She is also a teacher and program coordinator at Abhaya Yoga, an Anusara studio in Dumbo. She has accumulated more than 1,000 Anusara credit hours and completed youth-specific trainings with Street Yoga and Full of Joy Yoga. She is proud to be a third-generation yogini: her mother is a yoga teacher in Connecticut, and her grandmother is her mother’s most loyal student. saraneufeldyoga.com
 
 

Lora Nelson – Validus Preparatory Academy

After practicing yoga for many years, Lora was drawn to the heart-centered and life-affirming approach of Anusara yoga. She is proud to have completed her teacher training in Anusara yoga with Zhenja La Rosa at Virayoga in 2009 and is thrilled for the opportunity to teach at Validus Preparatory Academy, an Outward Bound Expeditionary Learning High School in the South Bronx. This class, sponsored by Akasha Project, combines her passion for the transformative power of yoga with the rewards and challenges of her work with young people at New York City Outward Bound.
 
Lora is honored for the chance to impact the lives of these students, as well as her own, through a practice of yoga that challenges and supports us to recognize our own true nature. She feels much gratitude for the Anusara Kula and, in particular her teachers and fellow students at Virayoga and Akasha Project.
 
 

Julia Pearring – Private Sessions

Julia would like to thank Akasha Project for the opportunity to work one-on-one with students who are unable to attend public classes. These sessions have been an incredible space of transformation as she meets the student’s willingness and effort with the therapeutic tools of Anusara Yoga. The result has been the student experiencing joy, strength and fulfillment by successfully increasing their range of movement and accessing their deep inner well-being. Julia has studied Anusara Yoga for over 8 years and has also completed over 250 hours of anatomy studies with Amy Matthew of the Breathing Project and Tom Myers of Anatomy Trains, integrating the profound revelations that are on the forefront of holistic research into her teaching.
 
 
 

Tim Seiwerath – Parkinson’s Disease

Tim Seiwerath learned the deepest and most powerful aspects of yoga from his family, people who do not study the Indian discipline but who live their lives serving others. He was carried by this spirit of service into founding the Yoga for People with Parkinson’s program, which for the past five years has brought daily classes to students in Seattle who have Parkinson’s Disease. He came to New York City to share adaptations of the physical yoga practice that are accessible to and beneficial for everyone, regardless of ability. His three formal paths of study have been through Samadhi Yoga, Acro Yoga, and as servant to the “Teacher’s Teacher,” Dharma Mittra.
 
 
 

Ola Widera – Private Sessions

Ola’s classes combine the knowledge of yoga, science and human anatomy to explore the power of the body. Her students learn how to use their inner resources, breath and internal awareness, to discover their full potential. Her first training was in vinyassa at Sonic Yoga Studio in New York. That led to her studying Ashtanga Yoga under Pathabi Jois in India. Finally, the elegant arrangement of the principles of Anusara Yoga became her foundation and passion. She continues to deepen her study of Anusara Yoga under the guidance of a great community of teachers: John Friend, Elena Brower, Zhenja La Rosa and philosophy teacher Douglas Brooks. www.yogaola.com