Teacher Training Instructors
Alex Pfeiffer
21CYM YTT Director
Alex left Engineering in 2004 to dedicate his life to the modalities that healed his back pain: yoga & bodywork. Alex is best known for his ability to make sense out of elusive experiences, whether they be biomechanics, alignment, creative consciousness, yoga history, traditional yoga methods, or their interaction with 21st Century realities. In the words of his students, he sets an ideal space for inner growth and insight to thrive.
Having taught many styles of yoga, dance, and other embodiment disciplines over the years, Alex started the 21st Century Yoga on the Mat Yoga Teacher Training in 2010 in an effort to create a more universal system of yoga that could make sense of and help link multiple modalities of yoga and other movement disciplines.
“It didn’t seem right that all these different modalities should exist on an island,” he says of his early yoga days. “Through my study of bodywork, dance, and multiple styles [of yoga], I discovered a deeper rooted commonality among all of them. There is a deep core connection within the diversity of styles and to land in this core is to not only understand all styles of yoga, but it is to connect to the essence of embodiment. After all, every yoga style comes from being a human being with a body.”
After leaving his career in Engineering in 2003 to explore yoga, Alex spent years traveling to find the best teachers to learn from in yoga, dance, and bodywork. With the heart of a philosopher, the soul of a mystic, and the mind of an engineer, Alex was dedicated to an Integral approach that could find the depth of and connect all these modalities. This led Alex to create the training that he wishes had existed when he started exploring embodiment practices, since, as he says, “Not everyone has several years to live on what they built in their engineering life to dedicate to yoga for the sake of discovering the roots of all of it.“
Valerie Hesslink
Yoga Teacher Trainer
Valerie embraces coming into her own at her own pace with all that she does. Yoga teaching and training is no exception. While she has had a personal practice since her 20’s she did not teach or consider it until much later in life. What is truly a gift of taking your time is that when you do decide to embrace your path, it can seem as if it was waiting for you all along and it’s exactly where you need to be. Valerie has a great passion for teaching accessible yoga, yin yoga and teacher training. While learning to become a teacher is challenging being able to understand how to apply movement and postures to various bodies, Valerie is great at helping guide other teachers in training to be well equipped to teach with adaptions and a solid foundation of safety.
Matt Lerner
Continuing Studies Trainer
Matt came on to the yoga scene early in its blossoming in the United States. He has been teaching yoga since 1976 and training yoga teachers for many years. He trained with many of the early teachers who helped introduce Yoga to the States: Yogiraj Behramji, Swami Rama, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Swami Veda, Rudolph M. Ballentine, MD, Swami Shantanand, and Swami Ajaya. He lived and trained at the Himalayan Institute for a total of one year.
Matt has served as the president of the Yoga Meditation Society of Madison and is the Director of Yoga Teacher Training at Spiritual Life Society. He has a wealth of yoga knowledge and wisdom to share and loves teaching all aspects of traditional Astanga Yoga including meditation, Yoga Nidra, and asana classes.