MEET THE INSTRUCTORS

Jason Ray Brown, E-RYT500, LMT (Co-Owner, Founder)

Jason has been teaching yoga since 1998.  He created Zenyasa® Yoga in 2007 as a way to synthesize his interests in Zen Buddhism, vinyasa yoga, and mindfulness-based conditioning exercise.  Prior to opening the Zenyasa® Yoga & Wellness Studio in the Fall of 2010, he taught Zenyasa® at Pure Yoga, Yoga Works & Reebok Sports Club; vinyasa yoga at OM Yoga and  Equinox; and hatha yoga at the Integral Yoga Institute.  Jason was on the teacher training faculty at OM Yoga from 2002-2005, has taught the anatomy component of yoga teacher training programs at Yoga Works and Pure Yoga, and is the creator of Anatomy Studies for Yoga Teachers & Movement Professionals (ASFYT), a comprehensive, 108-hour course in musculo-skeletal anatomy, injury prevention, and the anatomy of yoga asana.

In addition to teaching yoga, Jason enjoys offering therapeutic massage and 5-element shiatsu, studying, practicing and sharing the teachings of the Buddha, and spending quality time with his wife, Frances and their two adorable kids, Gabriel and Mikaela.

Frances Taylor-Brown, E-RYT500 (Co-Owner)

Frances is originally from Los Angeles, where she earned her B. F. A. in dance from California State University at Long Beach.  She has been performing and dancing for over 20 years, and teaching dance and movement since 1987.  Frances' diverse background in the exercise and movement arts includes certifications in Hatha Yoga (Integral Yoga Institute), Structural Yoga Therapy (w/Mukunda Tom Stiles), Yogilates (w/Jonathon Urla), Pilates Mat and Equipment (Kane School of Core Integration), Thai Yoga Massage (Lotus Palm School), Muscle Ballet (w/Stephanie Herman), Holistic Health Counseling (Institute for Integrative Nutrition), Pre-natal Yoga (Pre-Natal Yoga Center), Personal Training (ACE), and most recently, Zenyasa® Yoga.

Her personal and professional philosophy focuses on balancing body, mind and spirit through the creative connection of movement, exercise, holistic health, personal empowerment and supportive community.

Lynda Sing, RYT500, E-RYT200 (Studio Manager)

Lynda found yoga over 10 years ago while trying to find a way to keep her body healthy, balanced and injury free for her career as a professional dancer. She discovered that yoga not only helped her body but greatly improved the quality of her mind and spirit. Her passion for yoga grew and lead to do her certification with Prana Yoga Teacher's college and a Pre-natal certification with Yogaworks. She is continuing her studies with Jason Brown to deepen her understanding of anatomy and Zen practices.

Lynda is truly honored and excited to be apart of the Zenyasa® sangha. In her classes, she strives to create a safe space to help all students find ease, strength, and connection in body, mind, and spirit with her positive and down to earth presence.

Catherine Kapphahn

Catherine began her yoga adventure ten years ago on a visit home to Colorado.  She’s been practicing ever since.  She completed a Vinyasa Yoga Teacher Training, a Prenatal Yoga certification, and Yoga for Breast Cancer Survivors at Om Yoga Center.  She continues to cultivate her yoga practice with her teacher Jason Brown, who has helped her discover the calm steadiness of a meditation practice, and how to listen closely to the wisdom of the body.  Catherine developed her imaginative, energetic teaching style as she ventured off yoga’s beaten path and taught yoga to inner city high school students, recent immigrants, cancer survivors, expectant mothers, and toddlers. As a yoga teacher, she values the community of a class and she enjoys helping students play energetically with the shapes and lines of the poses.  Her dance background allows her to see yoga as an art form, a space to experience movement, and lift the spirit.

Catherine has also received her MFA from Columbia University and her BA from Hunter College.  She teaches Narrative Medicine writing workshops that explore the patient and caregiver perspective at Lehman College, City University of New York in the Bronx.  Her writing has appeared in CURE Magazine, Sunday Salon, and Ars Medica: a Journal of Medicine, the Arts, and Humanity, The Wanderlust Review, and is forthcoming in the anthology This is the Way We Say Goodbye (Feminist Press).  She is a 2011 Individual Artist Grant recipient from the Queens Council on the Arts.  She lives in Astoria, Queens with her husband and son.

Grace Perez

Grace first tried yoga in 1997 through an 8 week course at Sivananda Yoga Center. She remembers first learning about savasana, where there was a focus on being awake, at rest, and at peace, all at the same time, and thinking “these yogis are on to something.” In the years that followed, she took classes whenever she could and soon started a small collection of yoga books and VHS tapes.

In 2007, after ten years in New York City public schools, she made the difficult decision to leave her job as a high school English teacher. The time seemed perfect to further her study of yoga so she enrolled in a 200 hour teacher training at YogaWorks. Upon completion of the training, she realized that her teaching career wasn’t over, it was transforming. She was so hungry for more that she immediately followed with a 300 hour program and Jason’s Anatomy Studies for Yoga Teachers course!

She has since taught yoga at various facilities around New York City to a wide range of children and adults. Her teaching encourages mindfulness, alignment, and smiling at intensity. She feels honored to be a part of the Zenyasa® sangha, and looks forward to watching this beautiful community grow. 

Jessica Phillips

Having completed her initial training at OM Yoga Center, Jessica has been teaching yoga in NYC since 2001. She entered this tradition as a dancer looking to rediscover the simple joy of movement. She found not only a way to bring balance to her body but a lifelong practice that encourages a deepening relationship with oneself, both off and on the sticky mat, and an ever expanding sense of our interdependence.  She continued to further her knowledge in both yogic and Buddhist traditions with Cyndi Lee, Susan "Lippy" Orem, Larry Rosenberg, Barry Magid and the many students who continue to inspire her to show up and listen. Having found Zenyasa® she is excited to be a part of this new sangha which brings together two traditions that she holds so dear.   

In continued exploration of bringing health to our lives she completed her culinary degree at the Natural Gourmet Institute for Health and Wellness in 2009. Now a health-supportive chef, she spent a year learning and working in NYC's original sustainable restaurant, SAVOY, and a summer in the kitchen of San Francisco's Zen Center's Green Dragon Monastery and Farm. She continues to be excited by the different choices we can make to bring clarity and joy to our lives and those around us.

Kathe Hannauer

Kathe went to her first yoga class in 2001, hoping to find relief from the chronic neck and repetitive motion issues she had incurred during her years as a professional violinist. She found so much more than just pain relief, and was soon hooked on yoga. Within a year she enrolled in her first 200 hour Teacher Training, with Charlotte Hamsa Stone and Elissa Rosch, in Structural Yoga.

When she moved to NYC in 2003, she felt like a kid in a candy store, and spent a few years sampling liberally from the myriad styles of yoga available, taking classes all over the city in such diverse styles as Vinyasa, Bikram, Astanga, Jivamukti, and Tai Chi-Yoga fusion, along with occasional workshops and retreats.  The day she wandered into Jason Brown's class at Yogaworks, she knew that she had found a teacher and style that truly inspired and resonated with her.  She enrolled in his anatomy course, and soon after, became a participant in the first-ever Zenyasa® Yoga Teacher
Training (2010-2011). 

Meghan Nichols

Meghan started to teach yoga in 2007 because of the great physical benefit it had on her life.  Since her training with Yoga Works, she has continued studies in Restorative, Pre/Post-Natal, Infertility, Kids Yoga, and the Melt Hand and Foot Treatment. She came to Zenyasa® because of the belief in better knowledge of the body, equals better quality of life for herself and students. 
It is a great pleasure for her to be a part of the Zenyasa® community.

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Caitlin Casella, RYT500, ERYT200

After moving to New York from Nebraska in 1999, Caitlin turned to yoga for stability and solace. Inspired by the alignment and precision of Iyengar yoga, combined with a meditative union of movement and breath, Caitlin's yoga classes are both physically challenging and quietly introspective. After yoga, Caitlin's second great passion is for photography. She considers herself lucky to have the opportunity to practice yoga and photography every day. The two disciplines are closely tied together by clear perception, moment to moment awareness, and a recognition that life is happening now.

As a teacher trainer with YogaWorks, Caitlin leads 200 hour trainings in the US and Japan.

Helene Kerherve

Helene, born in France, discovered the beautiful practice of Yoga in 2002 in Tokyo, where she was working as a journalist and photographer. First, she used it as a means of therapy and rehabilitation to resolve serious back problems, then she began to see its tremendous benefits, both physical and spiritual. She was initiated into Ashtanga yoga by Michel Besnard and Alexander Medin and completed her teachers training at Yogasana Hong Kong in 2007. Helene is certified as E-RYT 200 by Yoga Alliance USA and has been teaching yoga for 4 years. She regularly enriches her skills through continuing study with well-known teachers, such as David Swenson, and she is currently pursuing a 108-hour course in anatomy with Jason Brown, the founder of Zenyasa. Helene believes that yoga develops strength, flexibility, focus, and both physical and spiritual balance. Her classes are vigorous and challenging but she takes care to adapt them to every student's capacities, always focusing on breath and alignment and providing students with clear and sensitive guidance. Her style is inspired by numerous sources including Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Hatha and Yin yoga, as well as by her own personal daily practice. She always brings a passion for communication and great enthusiasm to her classes and donates all class proceeds to a nonprofit organization, www.fondationrainbowbridge.org.

Ariana Rabinovitz

Ariana is a graduate of the YogaWorks 200-hour teacher trainer program, and the 108-hour Anatomy Studies for Yoga Teachers certification. With more than 17 years of formal training, her studies began while in college at the Columbia University Iyengar Yoga program. Her flowing classes tap into the mind-body-breath connection with a focus on anatomical alignment, joy and mindfulness.

Shell Merrill

Shell Merrill has always enjoyed expressing herself physically; from her career as a modern dancer to her later adventures as a zany spinning instructor and cycling trainer.  While cycling made her feel strong, Shell soon realized that she still had a brain that was moving far too fast inside a body that was quickly getting too stiff and inflexible. A friend offered to take her to yoga class, and Shell has been learning to slow down (in mind and body) ever since.  For Shell, yoga is all about the knowledge gained through trying new things, learning to practice rather than trying to be perfect, and most of all being able to laugh through the whole experience. She brings a sense of fun, joy and compassion to all of her classes for both adults and children.

Shell is an E-RYT 500 hour certified teacher. She is also a RCYT (children’s teacher), a RPYT (prenatal teacher) and teacher of restorative yoga. She has studied to teach yoga to kids at Karma Kids Yoga, Little Flower Yoga and Street Yoga which brings the benefits of yoga to homeless and at-risk youth. Shell is an ISHTA Yoga Senior Teacher trained at Be Yoga and calms her own “bouncing off the walls” energy by continually reminding herself to "be happy where you are and breathe."    

Laurel Beversdorf, RYT500, ERYT200

Originally from Wisconsin, The Land of Cheese, Laurel made her way to New York City as an actress.  In the exploration of her craft, she discovered yoga.  Today Laurel teaches yoga in NYC as well as teacher trainings for YogaWorks. Her classes balance playfulness and discipline and are an even synthesis of breath-centered flow and precise alignment instruction. As an anatomy student of Jason Brown’s, Laurel is inspired to raise her students’ awareness of practical anatomy and its implications for the art of yoga. She invites students to cultivate a light-hearted attitude toward taking risks and letting go, and to more fully inhabit their bodies by focusing attention on the marriage of conscious breath and movement.  An inquisitive being at heart, Laurel seeks answers to questions like, how do the superficial aspects of ourselves relate to the deeper aspects, how can discipline be playful and playfulness be disciplined, and how can we learn to be more intrepidly open to receive the truth of each present moment.