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Ann-Marie McKelvey, Level 3, LPCC

Ann-Marie McKelvey, Level 3, LPCC

Founder and Director of Mindfulness Coaching School

Buddhist Chaplain • Mindfulness, Somatic and Wellness Coach
Psychotherapist • EMDR Consultant • Artist

Ann-Marie lives and breathes George Eliot’s quote, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” As a result, she leads a rich and colorful life pursuing her interests and passions in her coaching and psychotherapy practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As a Buddhist Chaplain, Artist, and Mindfulness, Wellness & Somatic Coach she has coached TedFellows individually and in groups, as well as retreatants at Upaya Zen Center.

In the 1970′s Ann-Marie traveled nationally with the legendary Ken Keyes, author of Handbook to Higher Consciousness, facilitating workshops and conferences residentially and throughout the country.

In 1979 she moved to Santa Fe and began working as a fiber artist. When her work was discovered by Lord & Taylor, her small studio grew into Santa Fe Yarns aka CMD, Inc. – an international texture and textile business with 40 full-time employees and distribution to over 600 US retail outlets.

Later, as Marketing Director for New Mexico Magazine, an affiliate of the New Mexico Department of Tourism, she developed tourism initiatives which were implemented by the State of New Mexico in cities and communities throughout the state.

Ann-Marie has a rich and rewarding coaching business. Her classes, groups and coaching sessions are mindful, skillful, playful, and steeped in positive psychology. She is a graduate of Marty Seligman’s 2002 vanguard Authentic Happiness program. She is a gifted, intuitive teacher who also uses her background in marketing and business development to help her students create thriving coaching practices.

Ann-Marie lives in the high desert country surrounded by pinons and junipers at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, outside of Santa Fe. She enjoys writing, painting, hiking the arroyos and mountains, practicing Qi Gung, Tai Chi and yoga, and talking to the ravens and great horned owls. She is ready once again to be a Beekeeper and garden tender.

Mac Dryden, Level 1, BS

Mac Dryden, Level 1, BS

Teacher Mindfulness Coaching School

Raised as a Buddhist practitioner, Mac Dryden enjoys being identity-less. This means many identities have been placed on him: Bee Shaman, Celtic and classical violinist, visionary, writer, teacher and a Mr. Nobody-with-a-big-sense-of- humor!

A graduate of the College of Santa Fe in Global Ecology and Politics, Mac has pursued his passion of permaculture and farming to this day. Growing up in the high desert of New Mexico, a multi-cultural land, has given him the experiences needed to integrate and adapt to many landscapes and cultures.

Mac loves to study various structures of reality and the patterns of humanity. He coaches clients to break through old belief systems into lighter, joyous ways of living and experiencing the world.

Philip Joudrey, Level 1, D. Min.

Philip Joudrey, Level 1, D. Min.

Advisor & Past Faculty Member

Phil loves teaching. Creating communities for learning has been a priority for him throughout his long academic career, and the moments when students’ eyes open wide with the joy of grasping a new skill are more important than anything else for him. He’s had some great teachers along the way; people who’ve had no degree or credentials but have been generous enough to teach him about the reality of their lives. Through that generosity, they have deepened whatever innate capacity Phil had for compassion, and nourished his commitment to be present with others in moments that have been most alive, and often most challenging for them.

In the first twenty years of ministry, Phil has worked as a prison chaplain, and later with people with AIDS in a university teaching hospital where, at the outset of the pandemic, his challenge was to develop a response of spiritual care. He later specialized in spiritual care for those afflicted with ALS.

For the last nineteen years of his career, Phil has served as Principal of a small progressive seminary affiliated with McGill University, a position that has involved everything from overseeing building projects to revamping curriculum, from fundraising, to being up close and way too personal with plumbing that was ancient, and cursed! And always teaching, and always being a student himself.

Phil maintained a private practice in pastoral psychotherapy for almost thirty years. In shifting his practice to coaching, he is finding a whole new sense of vocation, engaging others in the midst of their strength and health and encouraging them to recognize windows of opportunity that are often right before them. Clients in his private practice are most often those on the edge of change, or in the whirlwind of it, and who have sought out the strength of a seasoned coach to help keep them on path, and connected to their values.

Phil makes his home in Montreal with his partner, Martin, and always at least one shedding canine teacher.

Checkout Phil’s website: http://livingintochange.com

Meg Hess, Level 2, D. Min.

Meg Hess, Level 2, D. Min.

Faculty Member

Meg feels called to support people in their efforts to “make gladness” in their lives, no matter what their circumstances. Helping people build on strengths, nurture creativity, identify and live into meaningful life goals, and contribute to the world from a place of well-being is work that Meg loves.

Meg’s training and experience as a Pastoral Psychotherapist, Ordained Minister, Pastor, Teacher, and Leadership Coach gives her a deep well of personal and professional resources to draw on for coaching. In addition to her Masters of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees, Meg is also a trained Labyrinth Facilitator, Certified Zentangle Teacher, and has a certificate in Homiletic Peer Coaching from Vanderbilt Divinity School. She coaches Ministers to be more effective leaders using Bowen Family Systems Theory.

Meg has trained with the Mindfulness Coaching School and is an Professional Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation. She is committed to the professional and ethical standards of the ICF, and is constantly adding to her coaching knowledge and experience. As a Life Coach, Meg is especially interested in how mindfulness practices and positive psychology contribute to people’s personal and professional well being.

Check out Meg’s website at www.makegladness.com.

Matthew Rezac, MPS Level 2

Matthew Rezac, MPS Level 2

Adjunct Faculty Member

Matt Rezac is passionate about the inner life as a catalyst for transforming work and society. As an empath and creative, Matt is highly attuned to how self-limiting beliefs and habits keep us from creating positive change. He believes dominant society creates harmful, widespread trauma…but we’re learning to heal it! As we do, life-giving possibilities multiply within and around us.
 
Matt’s career has focused on leadership and community development. He started as a professional social justice advocate and found his way into the rarified air of philanthropy. The former taught him that “no one likes a grim do-gooder.” The latter taught him “culture eats strategy for lunch” and all the money, talent and good ideas in the world fall flat without tried-and-true, trusting relationships. He now works as a mindfulness-based coach and consultant via his company, Blue Dot Consulting.
 
Matt loves learning at the Mindfulness Coaching School. He integrates an eclectic set of approaches as a coach and consultant, including effortless mindfulness, internal family systems, EMDR, somatic awareness, creativity research, complexity theory, Nature’s design principles, intercultural competency, and conflict resolution. Matt is a Certified ToP facilitator, Qualified Administrator of the Intercultural Development Inventory, certified practitioner of the Conflict Dynamics Profile and a certified meditation instructor.
 
Checkout Matt’s website: https://matthewrezac.com/
Yael Dubin, MD, PhD, Level 2

Yael Dubin, MD, PhD, Level 2

Adjunct Faculty Member

Yael is a graduate of Mindfulness Coaching School, and a former psychiatrist with a doctorate in theology, and over a decade of experience in higher education. These experiences provide her with a wide variety of knowledge, tools, and spiritual practices to help students and clients alike connect to their own deep wisdom and sense of purpose.

Through all each these career and academic transitions, she has been inspired by a vision of helping people awaken to the divine spark within themselves. It was finally when she took her first course at Mindfulness Coaching School that she felt she had “come home” professionally, recognizing her calling as a mindfulness-based coach.

Yael is passionate about cultivating the highest potential in each student who crosses her path, no matter the subject matter she is teaching. She feels intensely grateful to teach students at Mindfulness Coaching School, with its mission to help others adapt, integrate, and flourish in a world that is reinventing itself on a daily basis. This sort of inspired world-building is a project near and dear to her heart.

Yael now works exclusively as a mindfulness-based coach at her own private coaching practice, Bechira Coaching, where she helps people improve their relationships with their careers, their inner selves, and their romantic partners.

Kristin Moody, Level 1, EdD

Kristin Moody, Level 1, EdD

Adjunct Faculty Member

Kristin Moody is a proud graduate of the Mindfulness Coaching School and an enthusiastic member of the International Coaching Federation. She joined the MCS family after a 20+ year career in education, during which she served as a high school English teacher, peer counseling director, principal, school founder, board member, and consultant. She has dedicated the last decade to supporting public education institutions and non-profits with start-up, replication, and improvement planning and implementation support, and has worked with organizations ranging from the US Department of Education, to the National Council for La Raza, to independent charter schools on reservations across the southwest. In this role, she has helped to open more than 50 schools nationally and has coached nearly 100 board chairs, principals, department chairs, and executive directors through the leadership of their organizations.

Her areas of scholarship and practice are focused on the role of empathy in effective leadership and diversity in effective organizational cultures. She holds a BA in English and Urban Secondary Education from Hunter College, an MS in Educational Leadership from Pepperdine University, and an EdD from University of Southern California in Organizational Leadership and Change. She serves as adjunct faculty in the USC Rossier School of Education’s online MAT program and in Morehouse College’s Leadership Studies Program. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she is active in her local PTA and volunteers as a youth boxing coach.

Checkout Kristin’s website: http://empathyatwork.net

Sherri Felton, Level 1, LPCC, Performance Coach

Sherri Felton, Level 1, LPCC, Performance Coach

Adjunct Faculty Member

Sherri’s experience as an elite athlete sparked a passion in her that has become her life work. She genuinely believes this is why she is on earth. Her mission is to work with high-achievers who want to shine bright and realize their highest potential.

Sherri’s path is not a typical one for an athlete. She began her athletic career in the 1970’s, retired once at age 20, then returned at age 31 as a mother of 3 to complete her undergraduate degree in psychology on scholarship in women’s basketball at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She knows perseverance!

Sherri is a life-long learner with a love of teaching. She has specialized in clinical practice with performers in the field of trauma while becoming a Certified EMDR practitioner. In graduate program, she completed a case study using the EMDR Performance Protocol. She is also trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and is a recent very proud graduate of the Mindfulness Coaching School. She has numerous post-graduate trainings in the field of performance. She maintains memberships in many institutions, including the International Coaching Federation, EMDRIA, SPI, ACA and is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the State of Arizona where she resides now after living 26 years in Alaska.

Sherri offers students who desire success in their craft, helping them find within themselves the confidence, knowledge, intuition and belief necessary to realize their deepest coaching dreams so they can shine bright in the world.

For more information about Sherri: https://sherrifeltonperformancecounselor.com

Liv Syptak, Level 2, M.Ed., MBA

Liv Syptak, Level 2, M.Ed., MBA

Admissions Coach, Adjunct Faculty Member

Liv is a coach, facilitator, and writer who creates heart centered sacred and fun space—for individuals, groups, and communities—where awareness expands, vision roots down, and where full expression of pure potentiality becomes real.

Having taught literature and writing in public schools, designed training programs for professionals, and coached leaders and their teams through change adoption, Liv’s coaching is a blend of creativity and practicality. She is passionate about the power of coaching to invite clients to the edge of what could be, to walk with them as they move toward what will be, and to ultimately recognize that they’ve crossed the threshold into a bright new reality.

Liv earned certification through International Coach Federation and launched her coaching practice in 2014. This marked an important return to living by her signature strengths and core values. It also rekindled the flame of her passion for creativity as a way of living…not something that one has or doesn’t. This move further allowed her to reconnect with the wisdom that stories, poems, scriptures, and myths offer us for life in the modern world.

Liv encourages radical curiosity with her clients who often come feeling stuck in the swirl of life. She holds the light while her clients find their way into the dawn of new possibilities for fulfillment and joy.

She is a contemplative, a scratch-cook, and a compulsive writer. She is a cyclist, yogini, and wisdom seeker. She lives in the Colorado Rocky Mountains with husband Brian, and feline soul friend, Uno.

Check out Liv’s website: https://www.livsyptak.com/

Srdjan Vukcevic, Level 2, MSc Econ, Exec Coach

Srdjan Vukcevic, Level 2, MSc Econ, Exec Coach

Adjunct Faculty Member

For over 20 years Srdjan has been practicing and teaching mindfulness through leadership and coach training. His background in teaching at University of Montenegro in Economics, Psychology, Entrepreneurial Economy and Philosophy of Business enhances the training he does with executive and management teams worldwide.

Through practicing Kendo and Aikido for more than 20 years he also has an extensive Zen meditation practice.

For the last 15 years Srdjan has been working with executives, business owners and their teams to measurably improve their leadership and organizational effectiveness through various mindfulness-based interventions integrating with coaching. Srdjan has trained and coached various age groups, sports coaches and professional players, executives and senior managers.

He is a Marshall Goldsmith certified executive coach, Nonviolent Communication (NVC) certification candidate, and is Hogan Assessments Certified.

Srdjan is passionate about sharing NVC to build prosperous and continuous relationships in organizations and businesses.  Throughout his classes he draws on his extensive experience as a business trainer and executive coach.

Check out his website:  https://bluecoach.me/

Mary Ann Iyer, MD

Mary Ann Iyer, MD

Adjunct Faculty Member

Board certified in Internal Medicine with a Masters in Psychology, Mary Ann Iyer, MD has taken a uniquely psycho-spiritual  approach to healing since 1982. She developed the Integrative Medicine Program for Samaritan Health Services in Oregon and was the Medical Director for 9 years. In 2004, she created a Mindful Eating series to address the burgeoning problem of obesity as a cause of illness, and taught these classes regularly for over a decade.

Dr. Iyer recently retired from practice as an Internal Medicine physician and now travels, lectures and leads workshops in Mindfulness based topics as they relate to health and wellness. She is author (Mary Ann Wallace, MD) of The Heart of Healing and Mindful Eating: Mindful Life. Her most recent book, My Mother’s Daughter: Healing the Pain of not Feeling Good Enough, is currently in the hands of her agent pending publication.

More about Dr. Iyer can be found at www.maryanniyer.com.

 David Ponder

David Ponder

Staff Member – Business Manager and Bookkeeper

David Ponder has over 20 years of bookkeeping and office management experience and is a member of The American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers (AIPB). His business acumen comes from the University of Baltimore and Community College of Baltimore County.

David is a person with many diverse interests and skills. Besides his bookkeeping work, David is also a freelance harpist holding a masters degree from the prestigious Peabody Conservatory and is also a pianist with a masters degree from the University of Iowa. He teaches both instruments privately. And if that were not enough to keep him busy, David also tunes pianos, plays the viola and cello, and throws pottery on the wheel.

A regular attendee of the Santa Fe Opera and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, you might see him volunteering as an usher at chamber music concerts.

David also bikes, hikes, enjoys skiing, plays tennis and most likely holds the record as the world’s tallest competitive gymnast.

Travis Fife

Travis Fife

Staff Member – Director of Information and Technology

Directs all our systems.  He loves technology and is always exploring ways to improve our student’s experience.  He also has a background in sales and marketing.  He is our technology guru.

Checkout Travis’ website:  https://fifelogic.com/

Canton Becker

Canton Becker

Web Developer

This website was designed and built by Canton Becker in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Canton has been building elegant and intuitive websites since 1994.

Rhonda Simpson, ACC, M.D.

Rhonda Simpson, ACC, M.D.

In Memoriam

Dr. Rhonda passed away on February 9, 2018. We remember and honor who she was as a woman, a teacher and a doctor as well as the many contributions she made to our school and our lives. She is missed…

After receiving her undergraduate degree in biology from Harvard University and her MD from University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, Dr. Rhonda Simpson completed her internal medicine residency training at University of California, San Diego. Her 25+ years in traditional internal medicine were marked by a thriving practice and rich, long-term relationships with her patients. In addition to maintaining her internal medicine practice, she became the medical director of a clinic focusing on weight loss. In this role, she has assisted thousands of people in exploring their personal path to losing weight.

In 2004, challenges with her own health led her to explore integrative medicine – a holistic healing system that cares for the mind, body, and spirit. Recognizing the power of also integrating ancient healing traditions in caring for her patients, she transformed her traditional practice by adding expertise in botanical medicine, mind-body-spirit medicine and ultimately, a board certification in integrative medicine to her list of credentials.

In 2014, Dr. Simpson founded HeartSong Enterprises, LLC, an organization providing life and professional coaching. As a Certified Professional Coach, she now integrates her experience and expertise in medicine with proven coaching techniques to work with those seeking a more fulfilling and accomplished life. Through one-to-one coaching, group coaching and intimate retreats, she assists professionals in creating lives in alignment with their deepest desires and values. She has spoken nationally on topics such as building personal resilience, emotional eating, integrative approaches to health, and physician wellness.