Retreat Leaders
Traverse host international retreats with numerous modalities including yoga, Pilates, somatic therapy, adventure therapy, wellness and women’s retreats. The passionate and knowledgeable retreat leaders we partner with are a key component to the transformation experienced while also immersing in nature and local culture. Interested in leading a Traverse Journeys retreat? Contact us to learn more!
Current retreat Leaders
Jade Pleming
Feb 2024 Morocco Yoga Retreat / March & Sept 2023 Morocco Yoga Retreat
As an avid traveler, Jade has spent the majority of her adult life exploring far beyond her native Texas. Despite all the time spent far away, the one thing she never leaves home without is her yoga practice, which has been a huge part of what keeps her grounded and healthy no matter where she is. Jade has been a practitioner of yoga since the age of 18, but began teaching professionally in 2015. She has completed over 1000 hours in yoga training programs ranging from Hatha, Vinyasa, and Yin yoga styles. Jade provides an energizing & inclusive yoga experience to help stay happy, healthy and centered while on the road. She is a lover of food, dogs, storytelling - and might be able to tell a few jokes as well!
Leti Alvarez
May 2024 France Retreat / November 2024 Guatemala Retreat / Oct 2023 Mexico Día de los Muertos Trip / June 2022 Guatemala Retreat / Dec 2022 Dominica Jungle Island Retreat / March 2022, May 2021 & June 2019 Mexico Yoga & Cooking / March 2020 Morocco Yoga & Art
Leti began her yoga journey years ago and has remained deeply committed to living her yoga. She offers empowering, inspiring flows that encourage students to explore and connect with their deeper authentic self. Leti meets students exactly where they are and encourages them to embrace their own unique experiences. Leti loves yoga for all its transformative powers –physical and spiritual - and emphatically knows yoga is her “health insurance.”
Lee vallely
Mar 2023 & Oct 2024 Mexico Pilates Retreat
Lee’s entire professional career has been about the pursuit of movement with great precision and intention. As an athlete and a Master Pilates teacher with a background and degree in dance, Lee has applied her 30 years in professional movement conditioning to form a powerful methodology and unique practice: The Lee Pilates Method.
You can experience Lee’s method through her online platform and Austin-based studio with Pilates Mat, Pilates Reformer and dance-based toning classes. And of course, join her Pilates retreat in Mexico!
ClémEntine Casafina
June 2024 Costa Rica Retreat
As a transformational breathwork facilitator, integration coach, artist, and conscious event curator, Clémentine has a gift for hosting, and reviving the fire within you. Her magic lies in helping you shed limiting beliefs through embodiment and mindfulness practices, healing with softness and kindness, and remembering the power that truly having fun has in our lives.She reconverted in 2020 from the hospital life as a healthcare professional in busy London and started to run her own retreats helping clients to reconnect with their playful side which can be suppressed due to many conditionings and stressful lives. She also focuses her work on using dance and breathwork to help finding answers naturally rather than escaping difficult situations.
Michelle Fajkus
March 2024 & Aug 2022 Guatemala Yoga Retreat
Michelle is a writer, editor, translator, yoga teacher, and retreat leader. A native Texan, Michelle is a lifelong student of hatha and dharma yoga. She has been teaching yoga since 2002. In her former working lives, Michelle has been an advertising copywriter in Austin as well as a school teacher in Guatemala City and Panajachel. For the past decade, Michelle has lived and breathed deeply with her husband, daughter, and fur family on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. Her yoga style is slow flow, and she incorporates hatha, vinyasa, and yin yoga; chakra energies; pranayama (breathing practices); dharma (Buddhist teachings); mindfulness; and laughter into the classes she leads.
Gigi Mao
March 2024 Mexico Yoga & Cooking Retreat
2019 Discover Nepal / 2018 Morocco Yoga & Art / 2017 Yoga + Surf Nicaragua
Gigi has been a devoted practitioner of yoga for more than a decade as an extension of her belief that persistent dedication to the practice of yoga enhances everyone's experience of life. She teaches alignment-based flow and her classes are strong and focused while also offering support and introspection. Gigi believes that both yoga and travel are a means of connection and is passionate about creating spaces for adventure and growth. Although she hails from Shanghai, China, Gigi considers Austin, Texas her true home. When she isn't downward dogging, you can find her running the Lady Bird Lake trail, belting out 90s Hong Kong pop songs at karaoke, or planning her next international adventure.
Kim Jeffs
April/May 2024 Machu Picchu Women’s Adventure Retreat / May 2023 - Iceland Women’s Retreat
Kim has been a psychotherapist, teacher, healer and mental health entrepreneur for nearly 20 years. Kim's background and training is in somatic psychotherapy and transpersonal psychology and her specialty is helping people heal from trauma and move them to triumph in both their personal and professional lives. She has post graduate trainings in several different nervous systems therapies.
Kim is the co-founder, with her husband Dr. Patrick Jeffs, of the NC Center for Resiliency and The Resiliency Solution in Chapel Hill, NC. Her goal is to help people who are suffering feel at home in their bodies, connected to others, their environment and inner spark, so that they can live their very best lives and flourish in their careers.
Allie Reily
April 2024 Dominica Yoga Retreat
Allie began her study of yoga a decade ago while living and traveling through Central America. Years of learning the arts of Ayurvedic tradition and daily practice of Hatha & Ashtanga at a center in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica grounded Allie’s passion in holistic transformation and the healing properties of a consistent Yoga practice.
Since 2015, she has worked and taught Yoga internationally gaining her YYT 200hr and heavily integrates breathwork practices in her teaching series to complement physical movement with the fundamentals of mediation and mind-body connection. Allie hosts holistic retreats on the beautiful island of Dominica, where she also teaches the sport of freediving as a professional instructor and athlete. Through her platform, Samudra Flow, Allie organizes annual Yoga + Freediving retreats in the Caribbean, Maldives and Indonesia.
Maria brito
May 2024 Morocco Retreat
Maria is a women’s empowerment coach from the island of Puerto Rico and has made her home in Huntsville, Alabama. She believes that we all have the magnificence to provide healing to our own bodies. Through her programs and workshops, she provides women with tools to empower themselves to be the "cura" (healing) for their inner shrines. Maria is a certified RYT-500 yoga instructor in the lineage of Tantric and Kundalini yoga. She infuses her workshops with ancient practices and tools which assist her clients in dealing with anxiety, depression and fear-based mentality. She is also a certified trauma-release breathwork facilitator.
Past Retreat Leaders
Jennifer Turner
Oct 2021 Mexico Yoga & Cooking / June 2021 Dominica Jungle Island Retreat
Jenn is an Austin-based yoga teacher, group fitness instructor and holistic health coach. She has over 500 hours of yoga education and experience specializing in vinyasa, power, yin yoga and functional movement. She approaches her practice, teaching, and all of life with a sense of curiosity, playfulness and joy. She holds sacred space for dynamic movement, transformative breathwork, and the innate healing powers of the body. Her greatest honor in life is sharing the practices that have profoundly healed, shaped and directed her life.
Kara Folkerts
Oct 2022 Mexico Yoga Retreat / December 2021 Dominica Jungle Island Retreat
Working in sustainable travel, as an outdoor guide and international yoga teacher, Kara enjoys connecting her passion for purposeful travel with environmental and personal health. As a 500-hour RYT, Kara has taught in India, Indonesia, Costa Rica, the Caribbean and throughout North and South America. She teaches a blend of Vinyasa, Hatha, Power, and Yin, and approaches each practice with curiosity, joy, playfulness and gratitude to create a welcoming and safe space for all. Kara brings her zest for life, the natural world, and true wellness to every class for students to connect deeper to the environment, within their body and breath, and ultimately, to feel at home within themselves.
Meg gray younger
November 2023 Mexico Yoga & Cooking Retreat
March 2024 Guatemala Yoga Retreat
Meg has been teaching yoga since 2012. She did her formal 200 hour training in San Francisco at Yoga Tree, and then completed her 500 hour certification with Janet Stone. She owned & operated Urban Yoga Charleston up until their forced COVID closure, where she also led their 200-hr YTT program.
She is known for her “slow burn” teaching style with extra attention to safe anatomical alignment and balanced sequencing to a peak or theme.
Her classes are accessible to EVERY body and as challenging as you want to make them!
Meg is also a physical therapist, practicing for 20 years.
Angelena Stokes-Wickersham
April 2023 Dominica Yoga Retreat / 2019 Yoga & Art Morocco / 2018 Yoga + Surf Nicaragua
Growing up in Hawaii, Angelena spent her days outside hiking in the mountains and on her board at the beach. Her love for this mindful practice began in 2007 when she went with her dad to her first yoga class. She saw yoga as a way to stretch her body and support other activities. Yoga taught her to hold space for herself, listen to the needs of the body, and stay present throughout constant change. Angelena’s classes focus on alignment, breath technique and self-awareness. Expect to sweat, move through dynamic postures, and find grounding in your body. Classes usually end with a short mindfulness meditation and singing bowls.
