OUR TEAM
As a Yoga Alliance registered school, Bhava works with, trains and certifies highly skilled teachers who guide students to feel better in their bodies by teaching them how to practice yoga mindfully and inspiring them to practice consistently. We welcome you to join our uplifting community of yogis.
Bhava Yoga is the perfect place to find and live from your center. Find your yoga home at Bhava.
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Marisol Brito
OWNER & TEACHER Marisol Armijo Brito is a lifelong resident of Albuquerque’s North Valley and is the owner of Bhava Yoga Studio with over 30 years in the fitness industry. Before becoming a full-time yoga instructor and entrepreneur, Marisol earned a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA. After a 20-year professional career as a process and quality engineer and then as a quality manager in the manufacturing and health-care fields, she purchased Bhava Yoga Studio in 2016. She enjoys helping people discover how to move in their bodies without pain and live a life that feels good. She brings enthusiasm and a sense of humor to her classes, creating an atmosphere that helps students stretch beyond what they think is possible with more ease than expected. She believes that the pure enjoyment of practice is where peace is found. Practicing yoga will help one realize an incredible life that is both satisfying and surprising…. Step into your practice today
Pam Hong
TEACHER Pam gently weaves the flowing currents of Qigong—an ancient art of cultivating life force—with the fluid rhythm of Vinyasa Yoga, creating a spacious and revitalizing Qi Flow practice. Each movement becomes an invitation to gather and circulate energy, awakening vitality, nourishing the immune system, steadying the emotions, and opening into a quiet sense of ease. With clear and attentive guidance, and optional hands-on support, students are guided to feel more deeply into the subtle language of the body and breath, enriching the energetic experience from within. Teaching with compassion, clarity, and seasoned presence, Pam welcomes all bodies and all levels. Her greatest joy lies in helping students remember their own inner intelligence—where grace, resilience, and vibrant well-being naturally arise. Shorter version for Walla: Pam weaves Qigong—an ancient practice of cultivating life force—with the fluid rhythm of Vinyasa Yoga, creating a spacious and revitalizing Qi Flow. This practice invites energy to awaken and circulate, supporting vitality, emotional balance, and a deep sense of ease. With clear guidance and optional hands-on support, students are gently led back to their own inner wisdom—where grace, resilience, and well-being naturally unfold.
Fateesha Graff
TEACHER I am a registered nurse with a passion for health and wellness promotion. Connecting the physical body and the spiritual body through healthcare and holistic health care, through movement and breathing that is part of our wellness journey.
Lori Armijo
TEACHER Lori is RYT 500 hour certified with Yoga Alliance. She has completed two 200-hour teacher certifications and a 300-hour certification. Lori is an alignment-based teacher and teaches many styles of yoga including hatha, flow, vinyasa, chair, gentle, trauma informed, prison yoga, yin and restorative. She enjoys teaching a wide range of students from beginners to advanced practitioners, and currently works closely with seniors and those with special needs. She began teaching in 2008 and has been practicing for 20 years! Lori’s love of yoga and passion for teaching inspired her to become a teacher trainer. She has been co-leading 200 hour teacher trainings since 2018. Lori believes that remaining a student is essential to teaching. She remains devoted to learning and creating new pathways for teachers with all levels of experience. Lori practices yoga daily and it looks different every day! Maybe she’s working on a sequence for a class or a lecture for teacher training or just doing what feels good on the mat! Maybe it’s a mindful, meditative walk along the bosque. Lori still very much enjoys being a student and takes classes as well. Lori teaches with a compassionate heart sprinkled with humor. She holds space for her students to journey deeper into body, mind, heart and spirit.
Martha Pino
TEACHER I am a Native New Mexican, my passion is in guiding and supporting others through the healing practice of yoga. As a breast cancer survivor yoga helped me heal, not just physically but mentally and spiritually. I enjoy teaching embodiment based, slower and gentler classes. I believe we are all students of yoga no matter what your limitations may be. My classes are accessible for all levels. Exploration of the breath and compassionate awareness will help guide you through a healing inward journey. Since my Alliance approved 200hr teacher training in 2018 I have studied Yin yoga with Kari Kwinn & Bernie Clark and Restorative yoga with Judith Lasater.
Julia Glover
TEACHER Julia found yoga at the age of 15, it was about how she felt after class and the people she practiced with. Flowing from one studio to the next she practiced many varieties of yoga. In 2017 she found Bhava Yoga Studio’s 200hr teacher training and at this moment she did not know she would be a teacher, but knew she needed to learn more about yoga. Fast forward through the training and she began to teach, and over the last 7 years she has taught in studios and gyms, attended Inner Peace Yoga Therapies 300hr training and has cultivated her skills to bring the experience of joy through practice. Julia teaches with the intention of alignment and self-love. She believes Yoga nurtures our awareness so that we may tune into knowing ourselves, and we can act in the true nature of who we experience ourselves to be.
Linda Brody
TEACHER Linda’s inspiration and passion for teaching yoga comes from her personal experience of how the transformative power of yoga sustained her through successful treatment for breast cancer and continues to empower her mentally as well as physically. Linda strives to empower her students to experience how yoga meets them where they are – to make their practice their own. Linda is passionate about sharing the benefits of yoga with adults as well as children and teens, who remind her to cultivate joy, laughter, and playfulness in her own practice. Linda brings her sense of humor, laughter, and playful exploration, along with precise alignment cues into her well-crafted flow-style classes.
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Franchesca Montoya
TEACHER Franchesca has been practicing and teaching yoga since 2016. Certified in Hatha yoga, Kids Yoga and Aerial Yoga, she creates classes that blend breath, movement, alignment, and affirmations. She enjoys helping students to feel confident and find their own flow. Her classes are accessible to all levels through suggested modifications and designed to meet students where they are, while strengthening the connection between body and mind. 200 hour hot yoga certified 95 hr kids yoga 50 hr- Aerial Yoga certification
Cascade Lineback
TEACHER Cascade has been practicing yoga regularly since 2006. Throughout graduate school, a career in education and various international moves, yoga has been her anchor. She began guiding yoga classes in 2012 and completed her 500 hour Advanced Teacher Training with Sattva Yoga in 2017. Cascade relocated to New Mexico in 2019 and has also lived in Spain, Costa Rica, Myanmar and Mexico. She studies and practices yoga wherever she travels and lives. Cascade teaches vinyasa, yin, restorative and meditation classes and designs unique sequences to work body and mind. Students appreciate her playlists and that she gives options to find what works and feels best. She also supports teacher trainings and curates retreats.
Erin Hansbrough
TEACHER Erin began studying yoga in 1995, and has been teaching since 2001. Her work encompasses a variety of modalities, but what ties it all together is basically this: Erin loves sharing tools and practices that invite people more deeply into the experience of being human. Whether that comes in the form of decreasing pain and stress, learning to do a handstand, or getting comfortable with vulnerability...she's into it! Erin's approach to movement, whether it's yoga or strength training, is always about loving bodies first. She's never met a movement or a pose that couldn't be modified for the person doing it, and loves the creative process of customizing exercise to make it accessible, appropriately challenging, and fun for everyone. Erin Hansbrough E-RYT 500 Certified Personal Trainer and Corrective Exercise Specialist Wellness and Relationship Coach E-RYT 500 Certified Personal Trainer Certified Corrective Exercise Specialist Certified Nutrition Coach Certified Thai Massage Therapist
Raquel Burt
TEACHER Starting as a complement to her regular fitness routine, Raquel began dabbling in yoga in 2008. Drawn to the intensity and challenge of movement, she discovered hot yoga and developed a dedicated practice that inspired her to explore other styles of yoga that lead her to Bhava where she completed her first round of training in 2014. Her physical practice transformed into a deep overdue healing. Through yoga, she came to understand that the struggles we face—past and present—can also become the very experiences that guide us toward growth, resilience, and self-discovery. Raquel believes everyone deserves to experience kindness, compassion, and connection within themselves. Her intention as a teacher is to create space for students to retreat, rejuvenate, and reconnect through the powerful tools of yoga—movement, breath, mindfulness, and stillness. In a demanding and fast-paced world, she believes yoga offers a pathway to greater vitality, balance, and resilience. Her classes are grounded in authenticity, healing, and self-awareness, encouraging students to cultivate a more loving relationship with both life and the bodies they live in. While her personal practice continues to evolve, she has found herself increasingly drawn to the grounding stillness of restorative and yin yoga as a way to support balance, nervous system health, and overall well-being. “Let’s get Zen!” RYT-200Hr
Alicia Lueras Maldonado
TEACHER Alicia joined the Bhava team in 2021, after years of practicing at the studio and beyond. She has since completed her 200 YTT, and continues to expand and explore her practice. Alicia's love of movement, music and spirit is lifelong, and has led her to engage in community, the arts and social change work. In addition to her yoga practice, she is also a Level II Reiki Practitioner, a certified transformational life coach, and the owner of Atlixco Productions, LLC, which serves nonprofits, individuals and businesses to achieve positive community engagement, social change, and cross sector relationships that build towards equity, and the greater good.
Erin Easley
TEACHER Erin has been part of the Bhava community since 2019 and finally found time and space to complete the 200 YTT program in 2024-25. She’s been practicing yoga for over two decades and has been a teacher and administrator in public education for about the same amount of time. Being able to now teach yoga is a full circle moment combining two things that have had a profound effect on her life. She’s been primarily drawn to vinyasa flow in her personal practice and in her teaching. She believes the intentional connection of breath with movement leads to a meditative quality that guides our lives on and off the mat. She likes to incorporate some strength based movement into the class and will also often include a few restorative poses as well. Erin’s classes are creative, welcoming and accessible to all students.
Kellee Larison
TEACHER Kellee is a Certified Yoga Therapist, RYT-500, Pain Care Certified teacher, and trained in Trauma-Informed Yoga and Functional Yoga Therapy. She teaches a grounded therapeutic practice that blends ancient yoga, modern nervous system science, and real-life tools. Her classes support students in understanding their bodies, feeling more at home in themselves, and building awareness, choice, and steadiness. Kellee’s teaching is shaped by curiosity, humor, lived experience, and her own ongoing practice of learning to listen to the body. She has practiced yoga since 2007, with a deeper therapeutic focus beginning in 2017.
Arjuna Ra
TEACHER Arjuna Ra is the founder of Sacred Activation Institute and creator of Sacred Activation Yoga, a methodology exploring the relationship between breath, physiology, attention, stress adaptation, and human behavior through the lens of Kundalini Tantra Yoga. Over the past 15 years, his work has evolved through direct study, international teaching, and immersive practice environments spanning India, the Middle East, Mexico, and the United States. Rather than treating yoga as fitness, performance, or spiritual identity, his approach examines practice as a technology for developing awareness, resilience, adaptability, and nervous system capacity. His work integrates traditional yogic disciplines with modern frameworks in somatics, behavioral patterning, and human performance while remaining rooted in direct experience rather than ideology. Arjuna developed Sacred Activation Yoga School’s 200-hour and 300-hour trainings as educational frameworks for facilitators working at the intersection of movement, breath, psychology, and transformational process. He also guides immersive tantric pilgrimages through India focused on experiential study within the cultural environments that shaped the traditions informing his work.
Zhenya Novareign
TEACHER Zhenya Novareign is a 500 Hr+ trauma-informed yoga instructor, licensed massage therapist, somatic coach, and intimacy educator with over 15 years of experience supporting individuals and groups through embodied healing practices. Her work weaves together therapeutic yoga, nervous system regulation, emotional integration, and coaching to help people cultivate deeper connection with themselves, others, their bodies, their creative expression, and nature. Drawing from extensive training in yoga, somatics, trauma integration, and ancestral healing modalities, Zhenya creates inclusive spaces that welcome people of diverse backgrounds, abilities, identities, and experience levels. Her work has included teaching therapeutic and restorative yoga, prenatal yoga, stress reduction practices, and movement-based workshops in studios, hospitals, community wellness programs, recovery settings, personal development retreats, and educational spaces. Zhenya is a devoted to Bhakti yoga, devotional practices that nurture healing and spiritual connection through music, movement, voice & ritual. She regularly incorporates chanting and embodied practices in her work and in her life. She is currently pursuing a degree in art therapy and interdisciplinary arts. Restorative Yoga – Andrea Pelosi, 2015 Trauma-Informed Yoga – Street Yoga, 2014 500 Hr - Therapeutic Yoga – High Desert Yoga 2011-2013 Kids’ Yoga – Circus Yoga, 2010 Prenatal & Mom & Baby Yoga – Seattle Holistic Center, 2011 CircusYoga - 2011
Shelly Ley
TEACHER Join a class with Shelly to combine strength and breath. Fall into flow state and feel the power of being here now. Whether teaching steel mace vinyasa, pranayama, or a vinyasa flow class Shelly creates a safe space for learning. Shelly Ley is a head Steel Mace Vinyasa Coach, with 100 HR Yoga & Functional strength certification and a 200 HR RYT, and a holistic strength & mobility coach. @shellyleymoves