Mindful Yoga and
Embodied Dharma

Djuna Devereaux has more than two decades of experience teaching the integration of Yoga and Buddhist Dharma. At Spirit Rock, she teaches on retreat and leads the Dharma and Yoga Teacher Trainings. She supports her primary Dharma teachers, Thanissara and Kittisaro, as a core teacher and Board Chair for Sacred Mountain Sangha. Djuna is also faculty for Prajna Yoga, offering events internationally, and is a certified Yoga therapist and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner in private practice.

Djuna weaves asana training, with somatic movement, biomechanics, and the wisdom of the Buddha Dharma, into her offerings. Her sessions are intelligently crafted to cultivate embodied awareness, strength, and mobility, while supporting the body’s innate capacity to heal. As a long-time Dharma practitioner, she approaches the asanas as vehicles of insight, inviting us to awaken to present moment experience through the intelligence of the body.

Booker is a heart-centered, spirit-driven activist and meditation teacher committed to creating a culture of belonging through her teaching and writing. She trained at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in their Mindful Yoga and Meditation (2012), Community Dharma Leaders (2017), and Retreat Teacher training programs (2020). Outside of her formal training, she shared the practices of Yoga and mindfulness with New York City’s most vulnerable populations for over a decade, and served as the Director of Trainings for Lineage Project for 10 years.

She spent many years sharing her expertise nationally as a guest lecturer at conferences such as Mind & Life Institute’s International Symposium, Wisdom 2.0, and Mindfulness in Education—expanding our vision around culturally responsive teaching, and changing the paradigm of self and community care. Booker has been a featured speaker and facilitator at the Fetzer Institute, Vassar, and Pitzer Colleges, and at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia. She’s especially passionate about supporting the sustainability of folks on the front lines including activists, organizers, and educators, and has trained future teachers through the Peace Corps’ Jaffe Fellows and Teaching Residents at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College.

Booker collaborated with long time friends and co-conspirators to create the trauma-informed anthology Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing & Systems Change, and its accompanying workbook for folks working towards social justice. Booker has also co-authored and contributed to several publications including Best Practices for Yoga in a Criminal Justice Setting, Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality’s report on Gender & Trauma: Somatic Interventions for Girls in Juvenile Justice, and Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad’s book Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition. She is a co-founder of the Yoga Service Council at Omega Institute and the Meditation Working Group of Occupy Wall Street. In 2020 she was invited to be a Sojourner Truth Leadership Fellow through Auburn Seminary and was voted by her peers as one of the 12 Powerful Women in the Mindfulness Movement.

Booker moved to Philadelphia in August of 2020 to vote in a swing state, and currently serves as the Guiding Teacher of New York Insight.

As a teacher and writer, Anne Cushman explores the intersection between meditative practice, creative expression, and the down-to-earth details of embodied human life. A practitioner of both Dharma and Yoga since 1982, she is a Spirit Rock residential retreat teacher; core faculty for Spirit Rock’s Dharma Yoga Mindfulness Training; director of mentoring for the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program; and a founding teacher of Cloud Sangha, an online mindfulness community.

She is the author of the memoir The Mama Sutra: A Story of Love, Loss, and the Path of Motherhood; the novel Enlightenment for Idiots; the India pilgrimage guide From Here to Nirvana; and Moving Into Meditation, a mindfulness manifesto for Yoga practitioners. Her essays on spiritual practice in daily life have been widely published in venues that include the New York Times; Yoga Journal; O, The Oprah Magazine; Tricycle: The Buddhist Review; Lion’s Roar; and many other publications. She mentors writers and practitioners of embodied mindfulness worldwide, teaches retreats in person and online, and leads courses that combine creative writing, meditation, and Yoga.

Rolf Gates is the author of the acclaimed book on yogic philosophy, Meditations from the Mat: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga, and the newly released Meditations on Intention and Being: Daily Reflections on the Path of Yoga, Mindfulness and Compassion. He conducts Yoga workshops, retreats, teacher trainings, and coaching and mentorship programs throughout the U.S. and abroad—and online.

Rolf and his work have been featured in numerous media, including Yoga Journal, ORIGINS, Natural Health, People Magazine, and Travel and Leisure’s 25 Top Yoga Studios in the World. Rolf is also the co-founder of the Yoga, Meditation and Recovery Conference at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts. A former addictions counselor and U.S. Army Airborne Ranger who has practiced meditation for over twenty-five years, Rolf brings his eclectic background to his practice and his teachings. Rolf and his wife, Mariam Gates, author of Good Night Yoga: A Pose by Pose Bedtime Story, live in Santa Cruz, California with their two children.