Lauren Hanna

Director & Founder

My inspirations:

My family, my beautiful, joyful, big hearted baby girl, our radiant Sonic Yoga community, nature and all of her glory.

My goals as a yoga instructor:

To practice daily, to maintain strength, inspiration and integrity to support my students on a path of inner peace and love.

A little about me:

Lauren began a serious study of Yoga with Sri Dharma Mittra in the early 1990′s. Since then she has studied with many of the great masters, but has been most profoundly influenced by the brilliance and spontaneity of Shiva Rea, the devotion of Dharma, the bhakti of Jai Uttal and Krishna Das, the unconditional love of Amma, and the radiance of Sri Swamini Mayatitananda. She is always in the current of studying Prana Flow with her friend and teacher Shiva Rea, who inspires her to live her life with spontaneity, to remain close to the source and to move deeply in tune with the pulse of the universe. Lauren  is a devoted Yogini whose deep love of nature inspires her practice and her life. She humbly aspires to share the insights of her teachers and to encourage her students to celebrate life, with an open heart and mind. She shares her passion with her students on Yoga surf retreats, from Montauk to Morocco. When not practicing or teaching, she spends her free time enjoying life with her family, JJ, her partner and her baby girl Jaya Lynn. She can also be found communing with nature, riding waves and snow, developing her inner creativity, dancing, chanting, gardening, cooking,  & playing djimbe in her home in the surfside village of Montauk, Long Island.

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Johanna Aldrich

Co-director & Studio Manager

My inspirations:

My teachers. All beautiful souls who enter my life, my family & Mark. The magic of Life in all it’s colors, shades and melodies.

My goals as a yoga instructor:

To be a deeply human river guide inspiring practitioners to build bridges between their higher wisdom and the body/mind continuum.

A little about me:

Johanna’s yoga journey started when she was a wee tot, dancing to express the things that had no words, writing to find the images that evoke… These loves carried her through years of training as a classical ballet dancer, a degree in theatre with an emphasis on literature and a successful career as an actor, singer, dancer, choreographer in New York and on the road. Her dabbling into yoga turned serious when she discovered Sonic and the expressive joyful, forgiving energy of the space. She graduated from the 200-hour program under the guidance of Lauren Hanna and Jonathan Fields and soon realized that the teachings made sense of everything she ever believed in and brought all her separate pieces together. She’s never looked back…becoming teacher and manager of the 2nd Sonic Space in Westchester almost immediately…guiding that studio through it’s transition to Quest Yoga Arts, Joining The Sonic Training Faculty and ultimately stepping into her home base in NYC as Co-Director in 2009. In the midst of all that, she was blessed with a 500-hrour certificate under the guidance of the incomparable Sri Dharma Mittra and has continued to be inspired through the lineage of Shiva Rea and the wisdom of the Tantra.  Johanna’s classes are sweaty soulful voyages into the heart of what it means to be human.

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Our Senior Teaching Training Staff

We are blessed with an amazing and dedicated group of teachers who study yoga beyond their certifications. Below are our Senior Teacher Training staff  that are here to share their love of yoga and are continuously inspired by our students.

Tracy Mohr

Always a dancer in body and mind,Tracy has been practicing yoga for over 20 years, and has been teaching for over 10. She began her journey in college studying Kundalini Yoga. Her studying continued with Alan Finger and ISHTA Yoga where she received her first 500 hour certification through the Be Yoga School. Tracy met Shiva Rea in 2001 and became a devoted student and friend, eventually receiving her 500 hour Prana Flow certification. She began assisting Shiva in 2002. Tracy feels blessed everyday to be a part of such a dynamic and wonderful community in which she can liberate both herself, and her students in finding their infinite potential. She currently teaches at both her home studio in Westchester, NY and Sonic Yoga in New York city, where she teaches Prana Flow and is part of the teacher training program. She is also a mentor for Shiva Rea’s Prana Flow program.

Jeffrey Duval

Jeffrey also teaches at Columbia University, and instructs private clients. Registered as a 500 hour yoga teacher with Yoga Alliance, he completed his teacher training at Sonic Yoga, NYC and Shiva Rea’s Samudra Global School of Living Yoga. Jeffrey also has a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and currently dances with Tiffany Mills Company in New York. Jeffrey teaches and is inspired by Prana Flow®, developed by Shiva Rea, which sources the prana or vital life force energy, to initiate flow and a state of unified consciousness. Jeffrey has assisted Shiva Rea at Kripalu, Yoga Journal Conference New York, and at Omega and has lead a monthly Yoga Trance Dance™ since 2009.

Lori Mcallister

A staff member of Sonic’s teacher training faculty, I’ve been offering classes here since 2005. I completed my 200 Hour certification with David Hollander at New York Yoga, a 300 Hour certification in Prana Flow with Shiva Rea and Sonic Yoga, and a 75 Hour Advanced Kula Flow certification with Schuyler Grant. I’m a former modern dancer and gymnast turned yogini. A natural born mover and bona fide vinyasa junkie. A sacred activist serving up some altruistic truth for spiritual evolution. The choreographer in me geeks out on innovative and creative vinyasa sequences, the pitta in me likes a juicy, sweaty flow, the straight A student needs intelligent anatomical alignment, and the New Yorker I’ve become craves sweet relief from the battlefields of Manhattan streets in a blissed-out savasana. I’m honored and blessed to be part of this community. www.loriyoga.com

Stacey Sperling

Teaching yoga since 2003, she considers it an honor to introduce and guide others yogis in these incredible practices that, while deeply transformative, also powerfully affirm our own innate wholeness and beauty. She teaches Vinyasa-style classes in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and incorporates restorative yoga, pranayama and meditation into her work. Under the auspices of the Shambhala Meditation Center of New York, she was one of the founding teacher-members of the Riker’s Island Project and taught yoga to incarcerated youth for two years. Stacey completed training through the OM Yoga Women Cancer Survivor program with Tari Prinster, and brought that healing practice to Brooklyn survivors. Stacey completed her 200-hour certification with NYC’s Sonic Yoga, with Lauren Hanna and Jonathan Fields, a 60-hour certification program at OM Yoga Center in Manhattan with Sarah Trelease and Cyndi Lee, and Relax and Renew, a Restorative Yoga training program with Judith Lasater. Stacey has worked extensively training new yoga teachers in New York since 2005 with Sonic Yoga’s Center for Yogic Studies 200-hour training program, work she is so grateful to do. Having completed the Street Yoga Teacher Training in NYC in 2010 with Mark Lilly, Stacey is humbled to have taught homeless youth through the mental health program at Covenant House in Manhattan, and to continue to contribute to Street Yoga’s efforts in NYC.

Richmond Dixon

I began teaching yoga and bodywork in 2003 after completing a 650 hour course of study at the CORE Institute School of Massage Therapy and Bodywork. To gain further insight into the many ways to heal the human body, I completed a Bachelor’s Degree in Alternative Medicine in the spring of 2007. My teaching grows from a love for movement, music, and artistic expression, which spawned from working as a nationally touring club DJ and the many theatrical performances from my youth. I began studying Vinyasa Flow Yoga in 2004 with Shiva Rea at Kripalu in Lennox, Massachusetts. Later that year I traveled with her on a 10-day immersion to Kerala, India; a life changing experience that taught me to enjoy every moment as if it were my last. I have been influenced by the teachings of Mark Whittwell, T.K.V. Desikachar, Sri Dharma Mitra, Patricia Walden and, most recently, Scott Blossom as a reminder of how I wish to present this ancient teaching. I offer a class of explorative movement with a focus on the subtle shifts in the body’s movement and posture, and I encourage students to find their own way by tuning into their unique sensational experience. My wife, Kate Greer, and I lead yoga teacher trainings and retreats, and I continue my work as a manual therapist to relieve the patterns and postural distortions that come with living and moving in a field of gravity. My ultimate goal is to provide a safe and sacred space where teachers, students, and clients can interact, grow, and heal, and, in doing so, learn from one another, and find freedom and ease in movement, and a posture that brings balance and peace to their day-to-day lives.

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