Our Teachers
Hannah DeFranzo
Hannah is a lifelong dancer with a love for movement practices. She completed her 200-hour yoga teacher certification through Yoga Vida NYC and her Trauma Informed Yoga Training through SoleMarch. She has a B.A. in Dance, concentrating in Body, Science, and Motion, from Marymount Manhattan College, which she uses to inform her knowledge of movement and bodily awareness. Her mission is to provide the tools for her students to grow their internal sense of empowerment, integrity, humility, and awareness, as well as their connection to the world around them. She respects and acknowledges yoga as a South Asian discipline and aims to sustain its cultural ties within the practice.
Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman
Jocelyn Casey-Whiteman is an educator and poet living in New York City. In her yoga classes, she integrates a love of fluid movement with a mindful, creative, and introspective practice that creates space for students to learn, explore, and transform. She’s earned advanced yoga certification with Kofi Busia and an MFA in Poetry Writing at Columbia University. Her poetry appears in journals such as Boston Review, Hong Kong Review, Poetry Ireland. She has served as a mentor for Girls Write Now and teaches writing and yoga in New York.
Kara Gordon
Kara came to yoga over a decade ago to deal with injuries from years of overtraining as a competitive swimmer. She quickly fell in love with the healing and restorative magic of yoga. She received her 200-hour teacher training at Yoga Vida and advanced her studies through their 300 hour program, including SoleMarch. Since then, she continues to pursue her yoga education with Nikki Costello and Amy Wolfe, with whom she searches for more integration between the mind, body, and spirit, as well as interrogates modern yoga pedagogy and power structures in the current system. She believes that yoga as a practice that honors its South Asian heritage is inherently trauma-informed and meets each individual where they are. This philosophy is the foundation of her classes, which are intuitively sequenced and inspired by the Iyengar lineage. She aims to foster joy, wonder, and curiosity every time she comes to her mat.
Saroj Sedalia
Saroj is a believer in the power of self-love and mindful movement. She completed her 200 hour yoga teacher certification through Himalaya Yoga Valley and trauma informed yoga training through SoleMarch. She has been a student of yoga for twenty years, has taught in both North America and South Asia, and considers herself a lifelong learner. Her approach to teaching focuses on building trust in your body and comfort in both stillness and motion.
Sasha Sigel
Sasha Sigel (she/her) is a white, queer, cis woman. She honors yoga as a pathway to self healing + liberation, as well as collective transformation. She invites a deeper relationship to ourselves, communities, and the world through this practice. Sasha celebrates exploration and personalization of the practice, and honors the student as the expert on their own body. In addition to her personal relationship with trauma, she trained in yoga for trauma with The Trauma Center at JRI’s Trauma Sensitive Yoga program, and continues to learn through organizations like Accessible Yoga.
Susan Raposo
Susan first discovered yoga as a compliment to her professional modern dance career and has been a student and teacher of yoga for almost 20 years. Her classes focus on physical and mental awareness inviting more ease and clarity in both mind and body. Her primary yoga studies have been in Ashtanga, Vinyasa, Pre/Postnatal yoga and Yoga For Trauma, receiving her certifications from Greenhouse Holistic, The Shala, Sonic Yoga, Yoga Medicine and Solemarch. She is also a certified Pregnancy and Postpartum Corrective Exercise Specialist (PCES) and completed an online birth trauma training program through Make Birth Better to help support parents impacted by perinatal trauma. As a survivor of birth trauma herself, this is an area near and dear to her heart. Her personal experience has also given her the insight into the importance of supporting those who have experienced any form of trauma while on their healing journey.