Lona Kovacs, certified yoga instructor, dietary consultant and clinical herbalist, has been practicing and teaching in her community for over twenty years. Lona maintains a daily yoga practice in the Ashtanga tradition. Her yoga practice and training began with Yogi Amrit Desai and holds Certification in Integrated, Kripalu and Amrit Yoga Teaching. Since 2001 she has integrated traditional Ashtanga Yoga into her personal and teaching practice. Her teachers include Shri K.Pattabi Jois, Nancy Gilgoff and Kimberly Dahlmann of the Yoga East community of Portsmouth, NH. She devotes her life to the practice of compassion, the study of yoga philosophy, herbal medicine, nutrition and healing.

For the last eight years, Lona has been a teacher at Dover Yoga and teacher/practitioner at Yoga East Studios in New Hampshire. For five consecutive years, Lona also taught at the annual Star Island Yoga Retreat offering a variety of yoga classes and workshops on nutrition, Ayurveda and herbal medicine.

Lona has a four-year certification in Health Education as a dietary consultant and macrobiotic cooking instructor. She apprenticed with a Kushi Institute councilor for ten years, beginning when she was an early teen. She is a Certified Herbalist, having studied with Rosemary Gladstar and with as many herbalists as possible over the last ten years. Lona enjoys spending time learning and exploring clinical and botanical medicine and is working toward professional membership in the American Herbalist Guild.

Lona is happily married to her sweetheart, Suddhayu.

Michaela Phaneuf began the Ashtanga practice in 2001 in Berlin Germany. She continued with Yoga East in 2002, trained with O2 Yoga of Portsmouth, Sivanada Yoga Farm of Grass Valley California, where she worked for the teacher training in 2007. She has been teaching since 2005. She believes Ashtanga is a practice that changes lives; she is excited to build a strong community in the Dover area, and encourages new students to practice at home, at the studio and everywhere they can!

Suddhayu developed an interest in Eastern philosophy and meditation as a teenager. In 1992 he attended his first meditation retreat at Aryaloka Buddhist Retreat Center in Newmarket, NH. Soon after, he moved in to the residential community there, where he lived for the next eight years. During this time, he also lived in England for six months where he worked for a Buddhist Right Livelihood project, and attended a four month retreat in the mountains of Spain where he was ordained into the Western Buddhist Order. While at Aryaloka, he introduced hundreds of people to the practice of meditation and the teachings of the Buddha. In the new century, Suddhayu married Lona Kovacs and began work as the greenhouse manager for the Flower Company in Kittery, ME. This year he helped expand that business by cultivating the surrounding fields to grow vegetables, thus founding Touching Earth Farm, a CSA responsible for feeding fifty families. Suddhayu is the author of many unpublished poems and a handful of published ones, as well as two unfinished novels. He is very pleased to be a part of Green Lotus Yoga Studio.

Sharon Spickler discovered yoga as a path to health after suffering a debilitating illness in the mid 1990’s. Yoga not only restored her health, but also provided a method for finding inner strength and balance. Sharon’s belief that yoga can help others has fostered her dedication to teaching.

Sharon has taken her initial teacher training with Doug Swenson and has practiced with Lona Kovacs since 2001. She has also taken workshops with many nationally prominent teachers including, Lillias Folan, Patricia Walden and Judith Lasater. She admires these women as role models for how to age with wisdom, beauty and grace through yoga. It gives her hope to keep improving as she explores the “fabulous fifties.”

Sharon rejoices in the opportunity to share the wondrous transformation that the practice and study of yoga can bring to body, mind and soul. Sharon has offered a Community Class in Dover since 2003, and she hopes to welcome back old students and meet new ones at the sunlit and cheerful Green Lotus Yoga Studio.