Graduates
Sonya Luz Hinton Costanza
Sonya has been practicing yoga and mindfulness since her late teens, and began teaching yoga in 1996. She specializes in Yoga for Back Care and Scoliosis as well as Four Seasons Yoga, which combines deep, fluid breath and movement with precise alignment. Her studies with the Sage Institute have deepened her understanding of Buddhist philosophy, fortified her personal practice, and provided practical skills to share these life-enhancing tools with others. Sonya continues this journey with gratitude tall of the teachers who guide the way. www.sonyaluz.com
Hannah Rappaport
Hannah came to Sage Institute from a 25 year Western Gnostic and Hermetic mystical initiatory tradition. She was looking for a way to teach a non-mythic, non-symbolic way of accessing internal states of consciousness. She is a spiritual counselor, certified meditation teacher, and works with hospice patients and in various care-giving capacities. She can be reached at loveonthebrink@gmail.com or by phone at 575-613-3841. She is bi-local between Taos, NM and California and can work with students by phone or Skype. www.loveonthebrink.com
Jessica Gaddis
Jessica is continually on the search for light and laughter. Based in the Hudson Valley, she finds parallels between sitting meditation and her art studio practice – both involve process and noticing. See what she is up to at www.jessicagaddis.com
Jim Cardone
Jim had 8 years of Zen meditation practice before entering the 200-hour Meditation Leader Training Program. His background is in Clinical Psychology and as Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, NY. Drawing on 35 years of experience, he taught numerous classes on meditation for parishioners before deciding to deepen his practice with a more formal and advanced program of meditation training. After completing the program, Jim and his wife Sue began Silent River Meditation. They offered classes on various aspects of meditation, mindfulness, and spiritual development, including weekend workshops, 8-12 week courses, and spiritual direction (certified through the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Direction). Later, Jim and Sue decided to travel the world extensively. No matter where they went, they managed to meet people who were interested in learning meditation. They were quite happy to instruct these beginners in the fundamentals.
“The 200-hour program at Sage Institute was perfect. The combination of being exposed and experienced in a variety of meditative practices, combined with research, class work, supervision, and tutelage was superb. It permanently enriched my life.”
Richard G. Pelfrey
Richard is a LADAC and NCACI. Over the course of his career, he has worked to empower others to begin the process of change in their lives through recovery from addiction. Richard believes that recovery is available to and possible for all people, regardless of severity. He believes recovery begins with healthy connections, and as such, he places high value on the importance of modeling healthy relationships and fostering safety in a therapeutic environment. Richard also brings a passionate belief in the holistic nature of recovery to substance abuse treatment, and with that he places strong emphasis on the “bottom-up” approach to the treatment experience. Three years ago, Richard began a personal meditation practice and started bringing mindfulness meditation practices to the treatment environment. He has seen great success and change both personally and professionally since incorporating these practices, and joined Sage Institute in 2017 with the intention of deepening his practice as well as his ability to lead others away from suffering via meditation practice.
Bonnie Burton
Bonnie arrived at Sage Institute through her work as a spiritual director and retreat facilitator. Originally from Canada, she has spent the last ten years carving out a life and vocation in beautiful Southernmost Illinois. Bonnie shares her gratitude for the gift of Thich Nhat Hahn’s book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, that sparked a journey of coming home to herself. Thirty years later, her vision of creating a “home” immersed in nature, with space for conversation and spiritual practices has come to fruition. Center For Lost Arts is that home — a place of retreat, learning, contemplation & community in Cobden, Illinois. Through her offerings, Soul in the World, Bonnie leads personal and group retreats in mindfulness, meditation and expressive arts as well as offering individual sessions of “Mindful Living” and a seasonal group series called “Mindfulness & Meditation. She continues with Sage Institute as a lifelong learner and mentor for incoming students.
Kiersten Figurski, LMHC
Kiersten is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, with an active practice through Golden Willow Counseling. She is also Adjunct Faculty in the psychology department of Northern New Mexico College. Kiersten became more deeply interested in mindfulness and meditation in graduate school while learning about the myriad of ways mindfulness can increase our profound sense of well-being. Sage Institute provided a structured framework in which she could deepen her own practice and learn how to share it with clients and students.
Jennifer Wood
Jenn serves as Education Director for Sage Institute. She has worked with adults and youth in diverse educational settings for 30 years as a teacher, workshop facilitator, public historian, researcher, and coach. She is passionate about mindfulness as self-care for educators and caregivers. Jenn lived in Berlin, Germany for many years and worked with migrant and refugee communities, where mindfulness was an essential part of her efforts. Currently, she provides immigrant support as an Education Specialist for UNM-Taos.
Anahi Russo Garrido, PhD (Myozan)
Anahi began practicing meditation in 2001 in Mexico City and is now a Zen student at the Great Mountain Zen Center in CO. She graduated from the Sage Institute Meditation Leader Training Program and has developed a course directed to college students entitled “Meditation and Activism,” offered at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where she is a professor in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies. In “Meditation and Activism,” students learn basic lay meditation techniques and explore how these practices may support their involvement in activism. She is the author of Tortilleras Negotiating Intimacy: Love, Friendship and Sex in Queer Mexico City (Rutgers University Press, 2020). She teaches and writes on transnational feminist and queer theories, immigration, and is developing a new writing project on meditation and activism.
Karen Lasker
Karen serves as Program Director of Sage Institute. She has been a Buddhist meditation practitioner for approximately 23 years and a Zen student for approximately 13 years. She is a graduate of the Sage Institute’s Meditation Leader Training Program and teaches weekly to an on-line group of beginning meditation practitioners. Karen is semi-retired and lives in Asheville NC where she enjoys spending time with her family, gardening, cooking, reading, and hiking. Prior to retirement, Karen was the director of a non-profit organization utilizing therapy animals in medical settings.
Lauren Phelps
Lauren has been practicing meditation for over 30 years, primarily in the Insight meditation tradition. She is a multi-faith spiritual director/companion with a full-time practice, Spiritual Direction for the Spiritually Curious. Her eclectic background supports her work with clients from all spiritual traditions as well as those outside traditional religious structures, all of whom seek to deepen their particular sense of the spiritual. She uses the training she received at Sage Institute to offer one-on-one meditation guidance to her clients as well as to small groups. Lauren’s focus is bringing a non-judgmental awareness and welcoming presence into meditation and carrying that into daily life. She lives in Pennsylvania and works with clients online or in person. When not working or meditating, Lauren loves to hike, cook, grow things, and hang out with her family and two German Shepherds. Lauren can be reached at laurenphelps@icloud.com or 267-415-6168, or visit her Facebook page.
Amy Newell-Large
Amy is working towards ordination to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church and continues her Master of Divinity work in Berkeley, CA. She is also a Zen Buddhist in the White Plum lineage. Summer of 2021 she is working with the San Francisco Night Ministry providing multi-faith spiritual care for the unhoused in downtown San Francisco. She plans to bring her meditation instruction training to group meditation practices with the Night Ministry and to the street ministry interactions. As Amy continues her commitment to contemplative paths, she strives to offer mindful practice wherever her ministry leads.
Andres Ariza
Andres was born in Colombia, South America. He received his BS and MBA from Pontifical Xaverian University in Bogota, Colombia and a Masters in Business Administration from Florida Gulf Coast University. Andres and his wife, a psychotherapist, moved to Southwest Florida in 2004 where they currently live with their 2 children.
Andres and his wife operate a mental health counseling center in Bonita Springs FL, where they serve a largely Spanish-speaking community. Andres entered Sage Institute’s Meditation Leader Training Program with the intention to teach meditation in Spanish at their clinic. Since his graduation, Andres has been leading weekly meditation sessions which are available to clients of the clinic as well as to the larger community.
When asked how Sage Institute’s program impacted him, Andres replied, “The Sage training definitely had a positive impact on my personal practice since it gave me a solid base of evidence-based meditation techniques. Also, it gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in different meditation modalities. Due to the way the course is designed, I definitely gained more self-confidence to lead others. We learned not only to lead meditation sessions but also to play the role of a student in different scenarios. The “hands-on” element of the course’s program was very productive for my personal practice and leading others as well.”
Andres spends his spare time with his family, playing soccer and training for marathons. He is a formal Zen student with a daily meditation practice.
Nita Sweeney
Nita is the award-winning wellness author of the running and mental health memoir, Depression Hates a Moving Target: How Running with My Dog Brought Me Back from the Brink and co-creator of the writing journal, You Should Be Writing: A Journal of Inspiration & Instruction to Keep Your Pen Moving. A long-time meditator, mental health advocate, ultramarathoner, and former assistant to writing practice originator Natalie Goldberg, Nita founded Mind, Mood, and Movement to support well-being through meditation, exercise, and writing practice, and The Writer’s Mind, to share using writing practice to produce publishable work. Nita also publishes the writing resource newsletter, Write Now Columbus. Nita lives in central Ohio with her husband, Ed, and their yellow Labrador retriever, Scarlet. Download your free copy of Nita’s eBook Three Ways to Heal Your Mind.
Nita is excited to add meditation leader skills to the wellness toolkit she uses for her own self-care and in the books and articles she writes. Nita will continue to teach meditation in her writing classes and share meditation techniques with people in the recovery community and mental health programs. A retired attorney, Nita also teaches continuing legal education programs. She is available for keynotes, workshops, and conferences as well. Please visit Nita’s website to follow her future offerings.
John Mantz
John Mantz is a career Attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, and served as the Agency’s in-house union president for five years. He has been practicing Yoga for 15 years and became a certified Yoga Instructor in 2014. Beginning in 2019, John served as Legal Advisor to the Yoga Service Council, an educational and service body for yoga practitioners, out of a desire to give back to a practice which has given him so much. John is also an experienced Transcendental Meditation practitioner and participates in a Metta Meditation group. When employees return to the office after mandatory work at home ends, he intends to continue to teach Solidarity Yoga to his colleagues at the National Labor Relations Board. Upon retiring John will be focusing on making Yoga and Meditation accessible to members of the labor movement and labor law firms in the D.C. area. Recently certified to be a secular meditation leader by Sage Institute, John also intends to investigate the various media formats, such as Zoom, so that meditation can be more broadly accessed by different sectors of society including in government and politics.
Anne-Marie Emanuelli
Anne-Marie is a 2021 graduate of the Sage Institute 200-Hour Meditation Leader Training Program. She believes that mindful meditation is a holistic practice beneficial to human consciousness and personal growth. Her philosophy of wholehearted living includes the tenets that humans can learn from Nature and that we are forever expanding our capacity for compassion and knowledge.
With a personal practice spanning over 20 years, Anne-Marie has been teaching mindfulness to children since 2016. Her credentials come from Mindful Schools and Sage Institute for Creativity and Consciousness as well as an 8-week course in MBSR. She deepens her regular personal practice with silent and guided meditation retreats. Having retired from full-time classroom teaching in July 2020, she created Mindful Frontiers, an education-based meditation center in Taos, NM.
Mindful Frontiers welcomes a mindful future — one child, family, adult, educator, community — one present moment at a time. Anne-Marie teaches mindful meditation through Mindful Frontiers, Be Meditation, and privately. Class schedules and resources can be found on the Mindful Frontiers link tree. Anne-Marie lives in Arroyo Hondo, NM with her husband, Bruce Gomez, daughter Marielle, and their cat, Princess Grace of Hondo.
Luke Bruggeman
Luke is an artist, tattooer, and student of a handful of contemplative traditions. His curiosity about meditation was born out of his early exposure to the mystical dimensions of Catholicism during his upbringing. Inspired by the depth of experience and insight represented by the Christian mystics, but desiring a broader sense of things, Luke studied comparative religion, philosophy, and theology. In 2019, he received an MA in Art & Religion from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, where he focused on modern and contemporary strands of American religious, spiritual, and artistic cultures. As a graduate of the Sage Institute, Luke aims to share mindfulness skills with his artistic communities, particularly in his home of Tucson, AZ. He’s especially interested in using his position as a tattooer to provide enduring images and themes that can offer space for others to empower themselves on their own journeys of expanding self-understanding.
Tiffany Ferguson
I’m a creator
A poet, a painter
A free spirit campaigner
A goofy dance trainer
A mom of 2 and therefore an arbitrator
A moderately meditated fun instigator
A feisty caffeine and alcohol abstainer
A tree hugger? No-brainer
A proud preschool educator
A children’s book activator
The worst time estimator
You will never not meet.
Sage Institute’s Meditation Leader Training Program touched every aspect of my life. I have no doubt that it will continue to shape interactions I have with myself and others. While I have no specific plans for my newly acquired meditation leadership skills, I am open to where and when they manifest, to how they will develop over time and space.
Margarita Monleon
Artist, meditation facilitator, and human being.
A graduate of the College of Santa Fe, Margarita holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts and embraces her creative skills as a contemporary abstract landscape painter. Through her art as well as a life driven by a passion to heal and help others, Margarita turned inward and found herself a graduate of Sage Institute for Creativity and Consciousness. She regards herself as a “steward of sound and breath,” regularly sharing her meditations in Northern New Mexico and the Western Slope of Colorado.