Yoga Day

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Nisha Devi Rodrigo, an Eastern Medicine practitioner, focuses on remedying the deepest of human conditions by amplifying the connection between physical, emotional & mental health.  

By informing medical science with Lineage Medicine™, Nisha Devi is dedicated to advancing prevention, longevity, and total wellbeing across the globe. In 2012, she founded KALA Wellness for this sole purpose. Her company provides wellness programs utilizing chi practices anchored in Lineage Medicine™ to captains and captainesses of industry including those in government, entertainment, and sports.  

Committed to health equity and access, KALA Wellness works weekly with the United Nations and other NGOs to boost resilience and individual voice, resulting in decreased stress + a stronger connection between physical and mental wellness.  

Those incorporating these wellness strategies in their life also foster a sense of belonging and community. Given this, KALA Wellness also provides wellness curriculums to LA School districts through organizations, like Our Own, to ensure California youth learn breathwork and mindful movement as a tool for releasing unwanted emotion. Equally important, youth learn to prioritize stillness, so action is ignited from fullness, rather than deficiency.  

In February of 2022, the Governor of California appointed her to the California Council on Physical Fitness and Mental Well-Being - a council tasked with exploring strategies to promote health and wellness among Californians of all ages. This was followed by an appointment to the executive board for the Yoga Alliance in 2023 . In recognition of this work, Nisha Devi received an award from Shaolin Temple for bridging the gap between eastern and western mindful movement. In 2023, she received the “Global Entrepreneur of the Year in Wellness Care” award from the int’l organization Women in Management at the Top 50 Global Professional & Career Women Awards. In February of 2024, Nisha Devi was appointed to the Commission on the Status of Women and Girls.  

Prior to founding KALA Wellness, Nisha Devi was the founder & CEO of InFocus Wellness Institute from 2004-2012. Before 2004, and promoting health through Lineage Medicine™, Nisha Devi did Communications for MP Graham Allen in the House of Commons in the UK Parliament as well as for the White House Counsel’s Office. She was a Hansard Scholar at the London School of Economics & Political Science, earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications from Loyola Marymount University, and has studied Eastern Medicine Modalities since 2001. 

Outside of KALA, Nisha Devi is an adjunct professor at Loyola Marymount University educating on the importance of Qi flow connecting our internal and external health through Lineage Medicine™. Her passion lies in empowering women, prioritizing Yin (stillness/female chi) in medicine, and celebrating voice.

PANELISTS & PARTICIPANTS

Susanna Barkataki (she/her) has been called “a trailblazing yoga leader and visionary for our times.” An Indian teacher building bridges in the West, she is known for her work in decolonizing and embracing the roots of yoga. She is tech founder of Yoke Yoga, a free yoga app of micro practices for more peace in seconds. Bringing yoga socially to all people to help solve everyday problems.

She also founded Ignite Institute for Yogic Leadership and Social Change, award winning programs in yoga and wellness, to train students in using authentic spiritual tools to create positive social change. She’s author of #1 international bestseller, Embrace Yoga’s Roots: Courageous Ways to Deepen Your Yoga Practice.

Susanna’s trainings merge authentic yoga and social justice. She runs award winning 200/300 Embody Yoga’s Roots Yoga Teacher Training programs and Yoga Class Curator, a year long training to deepen beyond YTT that are changing the face of yoga today. She consults with organizations like the UN, Yoga Alliance, TEDx.

Learn more at SusannaBarkataki.com, and join her on social @SusannaBarkataki

Veena R. Howard, Ph.D., is Professor of Asian Religious Traditions in the Department of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno She also holds the Endowed Chair in Jain and Hindu Dharma. She also serves as the director of the M.K. Gandhi Center: Inner Peace and Sarvodaya. Her publications include the books, Gandhi’s Global Legacy: Moral Methods and Moral Challenges (Lexington, 2023); The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Philosophy and Gender (ed.), (Bloomsbury, 2019); Dharma, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh Traditions of India (ed.) (IB Tauris, 2017); and Gandhi’s Ascetic Activism: Renunciation and Social Action (SUNY Press, 2013). She has also authored numerous peer-reviewed articles has served on the Board of Trustees of the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Howard is also a Tedx speaker: https://www.ted.com/talks/veena_howard_truth_force_love_force.

De Jur Jones came to yoga after major surgery in 2001. Using yoga as therapy to recover post op led to her becoming a devotee. That path inspired her to become a Loyola Marymount University trained yoga therapist. This specialized training aided her in finding her niche to serve at-risk, under-resourced and highly traumatized communities and populations that show up with a myriad of emotional, physical and psychological damage that yoga can help. She teaches youth in the juvenile justice system, probation camps and its staff, shelters for the unhoused, group homes, mental health centers, direct services programs, and incarcerated and formerly incarcerated adults around LA County. She loves the work that she does. De Jur is a contributor to the Yoga Service Council’s best practices book series “Best Practices for Yoga in the Criminal Justice System”. She is a lover of theater, books, cats, and music and moonlights as a flight attendant. 

Amara Miller was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2019 and is currently an Assistant Professor in Sociology at California State University, East Bay. Her research explores mechanisms and impacts of social change, with an emphasis on how power relations and inequality regimes give rise to and ultimately constrain movements for social justice. She is currently working on a book draft about the popularization of yoga in North America across the last sixty years. The cultural history explores how secularization, professionalization, and commodification have impacted yoga and how diverse teachers aim to address contemporary concerns of inaccessibility and cultural appropriation. Her main interests include cultural sociology, social movements, and complex organizations, as well as post/colonialism, feminist theory, critical race theory, environmental sociology, and historical/field methods.  

Maureen Shannon-Chapple has been a practitioner of yoga and meditation since her teenage years. She has worked as an educator in a variety of roles, including classroom teacher, parenting instructor, teacher training and college teaching. She is a graduate of the 2008 Spirit Rock Meditation Center's Community Dharma Leader Training and has led mindfulness classes and trainings at InsightLA, Loyola Marymount University, and Mindful USC, as well as other community settings. 

Judith Simmer-Brown, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies Emeritx at Naropa University, where she has taught for over 45 years.  Simmer-Brown is the founder of Naropa's Center for the Advancement of Contemplative Education (CACE) and is a compassion trainer and researcher for the Compassion Initiative.  She has taught Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, interreligious dialogue, Buddhist chaplaincy, and contemplative education subjects.  She is a Team Leader for Fetzer Institute’s Sacred Story project and is a Fellow for the Mind & Life Institute.  She is author of Dakini’s Warm Breath:  The Feminine Principle in Tibetan Buddhism (Shambhala) and editor, with Fran Grace, of Meditation and the Classroom:  Contemplative Pedagogy for Religious Studies (SUNY).  She serves as co-editor, with Hal Roth, of a Contemplative Studies book series for SUNY Press, and is Guest Co-editor of a Special Issue on Compassion and Skillful Means for Mindfulness Journal (Springer).  She and her husband Richard have two children and four grandchildren.  

Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. She received a Ph.D. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching center community-engaged, decolonizing, and dance studies methodologies to examine the politics and practices of dance and other movement modes—such as theatrical productions, athletics, and yoga—for Indigenous peoples in and beyond structures and institutions of confinement. She is a mother, scholar, poet, and practitioner of Indigenous dance, North American Hand Talk (Indigenous Sign Language), martial arts, and yoga. Her first book project, Choreographies in Confinement: Native Children in Institutions of Education and Incarceration, historically and politically contextualizes dance, theatrical productions, basketball, and/or yoga at two sites on Sicangu Lakota lands: a former Indian boarding school and a contemporary tribal juvenile hall. Her writings have been translated into French and Portuguese and appear in academic journals and books. In addition to her research, she is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Race and Yoga, the first peer-reviewed and open-access journal in the emerging field of critical yoga studies. 

LMU FACULTY

Dr. Judith Pinn Carlisle began practicing yoga with her grandmother when she was a young child. Judith completed the MA in Yoga Studies in 2020 with a thesis focusing on yoga philosophy and death and teaches as an adjunct professor in the program. Previously, she taught computer information systems and computer science focusing on issues of ethics, epistemology, and linguistics. Drawing from her years in information systems, where she examined philosophical and ethical considerations of computer-based information technologies, she now questions how computer, information, and yoga technologies can be combined to create a good life. 

Dr. Christopher Key Chapple is the Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology, the Direct of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at LMU, and originally brought Yoga Day to LMU!  

A specialist in the religions of India, he has published more than twenty books, including the recent Living Landscapes: Meditations on the Elements in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain Yogas (SUNY Press). He serves as advisor to multiple organizations including the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale), the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), the Dharma Academy of North America (Berkeley), the Jain Studies Centre (SOAS, London), the South Asian Studies Association, and International School for Jain Studies (New Delhi). He teaches through the Center for Religion and Spirituality (LMU) and YogaGlo. 

Dr. Kim R. Harris is the Associate Professor of African American Religious Thought and Practice in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University. In addition to teaching courses on Black liberation and Womanist theologies, Harris leads music in a variety of liturgical and academic settings. She is a liturgist, composer and recording artist, presenting lectures on the music of the Black Catholic experience, the spirituals of the Underground Railroad and the freedom song of the modern Civil Rights Movement.  

 Harris is a member of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium and the North American Academy of Liturgy. She is an academic member of the African American Catholic Center for Evangelization in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, as well as a liturgical coordinator for the Archdiocese of New York Office of Black Ministry. A gifted cantor, leader of song and a passionate cultural advocate, Harris earned a PhD in worship and the arts from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. In fulfillment of her degree, she composed Welcome Table: A Mass of Spirituals, one of the complete Mass settings included in the Lead Me Guide Me Black Catholic Hymnal 2nd edition and the new Gather Hymnal 3rd edition (GIA Publications Inc). 

Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa-Baker is a Sikh kirtan musician, scholar and practitioner. She is currently Senior Instructor Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, where she also served as Clinical Professor Jain and Sikh Studies and Acting Director Graduate Yoga Studies. Her ethnographic research and publications investigate Sikh kirtan through a decolonial lens to explore diversity in Sikh identity, pedagogy and practice. Throughout her scholarship, teaching, and music, Nirinjan highlights the importance of embodied practices to cultivate ethical action in daily life. She currently serves as co-chair Sikh Studies Unit at the American Academy of Religion, is part of various interfaith initiatives, and recently toured the country sharing ancestral music and wisdom to cultivate communities and courageous hearts as part of the Revolutionary Love Tour. Her CV and publications can be found at https://lmu.academia.edu/NirinjanKaurKhalsaBaker  

Tracy Sayuki Tiemeier is Professor of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. She specializes in comparative theology, interreligious dialogue, Asian/Asian American theology, and Hindu-Christian Studies, with a focus on gender, race, and liberation. A mixed Japanese-German American Catholic background full of saints and ancestors, a Midwest upbringing, and an abiding love of science fiction/fantasy/horror makes her particularly interested to examine the relationship between other and Other in her Catholic theological work. 

LMU GRADUATE YOGA STUDIES STUDENTS (PAST & PRESENT)

Alona Gibson (she/her) aims to help people reconnect with their bodies through holistic, nature-inspired practices. Certified in various yoga styles and Fascial Stretch Therapy, she strives to create inclusive spaces for healing. Alona has taught at Arizona State University, co-created Arizona’s first Spanish-language Yoga Teacher Training, and developed programs for ASL, LGBTQ+, and neurodivergent communities. She holds a degree in Nutrition Sciences and is pursuing a Master’s in Yogic Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Currently, she works at Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, where she supports formerly incarcerated and gang-affiliated teens in completing their education and building pathways to freedom.  

Amanda Goe is an esteemed educator of twenty-two years. Her undergrad work was completed at The University of Arizona and she holds a Master of Arts Degree in Cross-Categorical Special Education. Amanda studied Traditional Chinese Medicine at The International Institute of Chinese Medicine and yoga and Traditional Japanese Reiki at Southwest Institute of Healing Arts. 

Amanda earned her Master of Arts in Yoga Studies from Loyola Marymount University in 2022. Her yoga therapy project utilized yoga to improve collegiate and professional basketball players' overall performance and her MA thesis was on Rap and Yoga as a means of expanding yoga's reach of wellness, specifically, to address health issues rooted in generational trauma. 

Marley Ralph, known as Namaste Marley Rae, is a 500-hour yoga certified instructor and a driving force behind WalkGood LA, her family-founded nonprofit. As COO and Director of Health and Wellness, she oversees programming at The WalkGood Yard, leads community yoga classes, and curates' wellness experiences worldwide. Marley is also a co-founder of Umah Retreats and is pursuing an MA in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University, deepening her commitment to holistic well-being and community. 

Gayatri Sehgal is a graduate of the Yoga Studies program focused on intersectional animal and environmental justice. Their spiritual practice consists of activism based in dharma and yogic ethics, yogāsana, mindfulness, bhakti, mysticism, and the vegan lifestyle.

Serenity Tedesco (she/her) is a visionary, storyteller, and life-long practitioner dedicated to healing, community, and transformation through Buddhist and Yoga traditions. As co-founder of Yoga Mārga School, Serenity leads 1:1 coaching, yoga teacher trainings, retreats, and group classes focused on living yoga off the mat for liberation in body, speech, and mind. She helps students develop self-compassion, reconnect with their true nature, and heal from anxiety, depression, and unconscious habits, empowering them to serve the greater collective. Nearly 90% of Yoga Mārga’s students are BIPOC, reflecting Serenity’s dedication to inclusivity. 

Inspired by the Bodhisattva vows, Serenity founded the Temple of One, an interfaith sanctuary in Escondido, CA, dedicated to the interconnected liberation of all beings. A heritage Buddhist, she was born into a family of yogis, was raised by a Buddhist scholar, and is a direct disciple of the Senior Archbishop of the Taego Buddhist Order of South Korea. She co-founded Haus of Liberation, a vegan intentional community for Queer BIPOC, and collaborated on the film Good Death, Auspicious Rebirth, which focuses on care for the dying in Dharma traditions. A self-proclaimed HEARTist, Serenity finds joy in wisdom through narratives, the arts, medicinal plants, animal companions, and communal relationships. 

PERFORMANCE

The Anti "Yogi" is a multimedia solo performance that dismantles Western misconceptions of yoga while exploring its true ethos. The piece follows Mayuri, a yoga professor in crisis, as she encounters Kali, the Goddess of Death, to question the commercialization of yoga in the West and its nationalization in the East. Through a unique mix of dance, dramedy, live percussion, and spoken word poetry, this interactive experience calls for the decolonization of yoga and amplifies South Asian and BIPOC voices.

• Mayuri Bhandari (Playwright/Performer/Producer) is an actress, dancer/figure skater, storyteller and yoga professor at Loyola Marymount University (and BCLA Yoga Studies Alumni). She has starred in film, television, and theater in both Indian and American industries. She has starred on Netflix, FX/Hulu, ABC, and Prime, and voiceover for Spider-Man and Ms. Marvel. Her short film BINDI received international recognition and was featured at UN Women (LA).
  
  
• Neel Agrawal (Percussionist) performs with artists L. Shankar, Lord Huron, and Young the Giant. He has received the 2021 COLA Master Artist Grant, and is recognized in South Asian arts and education.
  
  
• Shyamala Moorty (Co-Director/Co-Dramaturg) is an award-winning director/choreographer, known for her work with the Post Natyam Collective and TeAda Productions.
  
  
• D'Lo (Co-Director/Co-Dramaturg) is a queer/trans Ilangai Tamil-American actor/writer/comic, known for the solo show To T, or not To T?. His work has appeared in NPR, LA Times, and CNN.