LoveYourBrain Training Faculty

Level 2 - Yoga & Facilitation Trainings

Guest Faculty

Michelle Johnson

Pronouns: she/her

Michelle is an activist, social justice warrior, author, dismantling racism trainer, yoga teacher and practitioner, and an intuitive healer. With over 20 years experience leading dismantling racism work and as a licensed clinical social worker, she has a deep understanding of how trauma impacts the mind, body, spirit, and heart. Michelle’s awareness of the world through her own experience as a Black woman allows her to know, first-hand, how privilege and power operate.

Michelle has a Bachelors of Arts degree from the College of William and Mary and a Masters degree in Social Work from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She has worked in several non-profits and served as an elected official and on many non-profit boards of directors. Michelle has led Dismantling Racism Trainings with large corporations, small non-profits, and community groups, including the ACLU-WA, Duke University, Google, This American Life, The Center for Equity and Inclusion, Eno River Unitarian Universalist Church, Lululemon, and many others. Michelle published Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice to Create a Just World in 2017 and Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief in 2021, and created her own podcast, Finding Refuge, which explores collective grief and liberation.

Tristan Katz

Pronouns: they/he

Tristan Katz (they/them) is a writer, educator, digital strategist, and equity-inclusion facilitator who holds space for learning and unlearning about gender as it relates to trans inclusion and queer competency. They also teach marketing practices to foster business growth from a justice and equity-focused perspective. Their intention is to offer this work with an anti-oppression and intersectional lens.

Tristan was named one of Yoga Journal’s 2021 Game Changers and they were awarded the Reclamation Ventures grant in Spring 2021 to expand their offerings and dedicate time to writing their first book.

Tristan is proud to serve on the Board of Directors at Accessible Yoga, a non-profit working, through education and advocacy, to share the teachings and benefits of yoga with those who have been marginalized, and to identify and remove barriers to access, build strong networks, and advocate for an accessible, equitable yoga culture.

Karla Johnston 

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Karla Johnston is co-leader of Wise Caregiving, a non-profit dedicated to helping people become effective, sustainable, and empathetic caregivers. She is a certified mindfulness facilitator with a degree in counseling, passionately serving families and their loved ones in hospital, education, addiction/recovery, and incarcerated spaces for over 30 years. Karla is a TEDx speaker and a writer, ordained in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing. She is a Zen Peacemaker.

Teaching: Jackie's goal as a teacher is to encourage her students to tune in to the way their body changes everyday, and to empower her students to feel comfortable in modifying their practice based on their current needs. Jackie contributes to the LoveYourBrain Meditation Movement and LoveYourBrain Tips, both available for free on the LoveYourBrain website. Since 2016, Jackie has offered the LYB ‘FUNdamentals’ series on a quarterly basis to individuals with a TBI and their caregivers in the Boston area and now leads LYB's newest program, the virtual LYB Mindset Program. She also offers adaptive yoga classes in the Boston area in partnership with Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. She has experience teaching yoga both in-person and virtually.

Training: Following the completion of her 200-hour training, Jackie has completed over 80 hours of training in adaptive yoga through Mind Body Solutions under the direction of Matthew Sanford and is currently enrolled in their Opening Yoga Instructor Certification. She has completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course as a participant as well as received a certification in MBSR. She has taken courses related to the experience of trauma through the lens of a yoga teacher and a clinician including the International Trauma Conference and Neurobiology of Trauma through the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine. Through her training and experience, Jackie truly believes that everyone can do yoga.

LoveYourBrain Training Faculty

Kyla Pearce, MPH, PhD, E-RYT-200, CBIS

Pronouns: she/her

Kyla has blended her expertise as a yoga teacher and researcher to develop a TBI-focused yoga curriculum that integrates gentle yoga, meditation, pranayama, and psychoeducation. This curriculum, now offered in yoga studios across the United States and Canada, is designed based on the science underpinning resilience, and empowers people with TBI to become more active participants in their healing process.

Training: Since the inception of the LYB Yoga program in 2015, Kyla has trained over 1,500 yoga teachers and clinicians in how to adapt yoga, meditation, and pranayama for TBI, including physical, cognitive, and social modifications. Specifically, Kyla leads comprehensive in-person and online trainings designed for yoga teachers, clinicians, and TBI advocates who want to gain knowledge and skills in how to adapt these practices to address the unique needs of those with brain injury. Kyla is currently in the two-year intensive Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program overseen by Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. She has completed trainings in vinyasa, ashtanga, adaptive yoga with Matthew Sanford, Lakshmi Voelker Chair Yoga, iRest Level 1 and 2 yoga nidra, Advanced Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness with David Treleavan, Yin Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation with Sagel Urchel, Self-Compassion with Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer, among others.

Teaching: Kyla has been teaching yoga, pranayama, and meditation to groups of individuals with TBI and their support people since 2014. She has been an invited faculty at several conferences related to using yoga for improving physiological and psychosocial outcomes, including at the Yoga for Traumatic Stress Conference in Sedona, AZ and the Yoga Service Conference in Rhinebeck, NH. Kyla also curates and contributes to the LoveYourBrain Foundation’s Meditation Movement, a series of TBI-focused audio-recorded meditations available for free on the LoveYourBrain Foundation’s website.

Research: Kyla is a post-doctoral research scholar at Dartmouth College, through which she investigates the effectiveness of yoga for populations with different neurological conditions, including TBI and MS. She also leads LoveYourBrain’s research portfolio in the application of yoga and meditation for community-based rehabilitation for TBI. She was the Primary Investigator on the largest published study of yoga for TBI, which found significant improvement in quality of life, resilience, cognition, and positive affect among 705 people with TBI who participated in the LoveYourBrain Yoga program. She also led the design and implementation of a pilot evaluation of an 8-week gentle yoga program from people affected by brain injury, published in the peer-reviewed journal, Brain Injury. She also led a qualitative study, published in Disability and Rehabilitation, exploring the experiences of participants in the LoveYourBrain Yoga program. To support clinicians to integrate yoga and meditation into their clinical practice, she also conducts academic presentations (e.g., Brain Injury Rehabilitation Conference) and in-service presentations (e.g., Craig Hospital, Shepherd Center, Scripps Memorial Hospital) describing the evidence of using these practices to support TBI rehabilitation.