Faculty and Graduates

Mukara Meredith, MSW

Mukara has 40 years experience in teaching, consulting, and working with the healing arts. A practicing Buddhist, she is a certified Hakomi Trainer and Therapist. Mukara integrates Living Systems principles into a new model of Leadership she developed called MatrixWorks™.

The MatrixWorks model of Leadership rests on the foundation of the experiential Hakomi Method and is used in conjunction with an understanding of Groups and Organizations as Living Systems. In our approach, we can experience the emergence of ‘Group Genius’ that supports transformation of the individual and the group. The relationship of the individual and the group becomes collaborative rather than conflictual. Mutuality and cooperation become new norms that support well-being at work.

Gwen Hill-Pollara

Gwen brings warmth, clarity, humor, and deep listening to her work as a coach and trainer.

She is passionate about creating safe, courageous spaces where people and groups can grow, connect, and learn together.

Brenda Isherwood

Brenda Isherwood is an exuberant, loving, joyful student of life, and an inquisitive, articulate seeker. Her impassioned work includes teaching yoga, consulting to families in need of community-based rehabilitation therapy programs, and facilitating groups. She has developed her distinctive approach to embodied leadership and yoga instruction through the profound work of MatrixWorks.

Brenda holds a Bachelor of Science in Rehabilitation Medicine (Occupational Therapy), has completed graduate studies in Somatic Psychotherapy, is a trained Hakomi Therapist, and a seasoned birth doula. Her heart is primarily captivated by her family, her community, and the majestic backdrop of her home in British Columbia’s Coastal Mountain Ranges. She is passionate about bringing the MatrixWorks mandala to Canada.

Russell Jones

Russell has been studying and experimenting with mind-body coordination and human dynamics since adolescence. He has studied Shin Shin Toitsu Do, the art of mind and body coordination, and Shin Shin Toitsu Aikido for over 35 years. He has been intensively studying trauma and its effects with Peter Levine for over 15 years.

Russell currently teaches Somatic Experiencing, Peter Levine’s therapeutic system for working with trauma, on four continents. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology and has been accepted into a graduate program. Russell has studied MatrixWorks directly with Mukara since 2005 and applies the principles with all the groups he works with.

Together with Lael Keen, he operates a healing center on the island of Santa Catarina off the south coast of Brazil. Russell and Lael combine their skills and efforts to bring MatrixWorks to the Brazilian culture.

Lael Katharine Keen

Lael has been fascinated all her life with how situations of conflict can transform into situations of harmony. This interest led her to study the Japanese martial art of Ki-Aikido at an early age, and she has continued to study and teach Aikido all her adult life. She currently holds the rank of 5th degree black belt.

Her interest in group dynamics led her and her husband Russell Jones, also a MatrixWorks Trainer, to bring Mukara Meredith to Brazil for the first Brazilian MatrixWorks training in 2006, and since then they have actively used MatrixWorks in all the groups that they work with. They began teaching MatrixWorks in 2011. Lael works with Rolfing® and Somatic Experiencing® and teaches these approaches all over the world. She also recently completed a five year training as an Art Therapist.

Paula Mattoli

I met Mukara 20 years ago in Brazil. Our Rolfing Faculty community was interested in improving the quality of our connection and of our teaching — that’s how I fell in love with MatrixWorks! I’ve been part of many classes, did all my training in Brazil, and stayed deeply connected with Mukara and the EFL.

From this expertise, I began to facilitate groups always trying to bring this somatic, energetic and affective connection to different groups and communities. My somatic and educational approach led me to deepen my studies of trauma, and I’m also part of the Somatic Experiencing community as a body-oriented facilitator, instructor and therapist.

I really do believe that we need to open to the world a broader dimension of education — one that can honour body, mind, soul, the group, the planet … this amazing matrix of connectedness and compassion. I’m very honored to be part of this community.

Kate Mazuy

Kate has been involved with MatrixWorks for 7 years. She is an extraordinary teacher of the work and an excellent group facilitator. She teaches at Naropa and leads Wilderness Therapy trips. Kate has joined Mukara in doing organizational facilitation and is helping groups and teams transform and organizations become more healthy.

Sarah Oswald

Sarah fell in love with MatrixWorks in 2009 during her master’s program in Environmental Leadership at Naropa University. She has since participated in, assisted with and taught numerous MatrixWorks classes, and served as professor for MatrixWorks at Naropa University in the program she graduated from. Since 2011, she’s worked closely with MatrixWorks in a multitude of capacities.

Sarah has a strong passion for the power of groups, building resilient communities, the Earth, localization, jazz and the performing arts, and helping people discover and live into their full potential. She’s primarily focused on helping couples grow more sustainable and satisfying romantic partnerships.

Anne Parker, PhD

Anne Parker is passionate about serving life and renewing our connection to and deep reverence for the Earth. She applies working with groups as living systems in her teaching, her organizational work, in her community and in connection with the “more than human world” of the living earth systems. She is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where she has taught in the BA in Environmental Studies and MA in Environmental Leadership programs since 1996.

Anne sought a path to more harmonious human relationships with the earth in living with and learning from indigenous traditions in Australia and Asia. She has a BA in Conservation of Natural Resources from UC Berkeley, an MA in Inner Asian Studies from Indiana University, and an MA and PhD in Geography from the University of Oregon. She has worked and done research on ethnobotany, land use, agriculture, community organizing and sacred landscape in central Australia, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and the Himalayan region.

She has studied and practiced for more than thirty-five years in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, as well as for the last 9 years in European earth-based traditions. Her books include Stories from the Origin and Earth Alchemy.

Alex Peterffy

MatrixWorks was transformational for Alex when she first experienced it in the Environmental Leadership masters program at Naropa University in 2008. While previously shying away from group work, she discovered that participating in a group that has come alive with collective intelligence is one of the most important and satisfying human experiences. Over the last 12 years she has participated in, assisted, and led a variety of MatrixWorks trainings and programs.

As a lover of systems thinking, Alex is fascinated by the ways in which supporting groups of people to function as living systems invites higher consciousness, novel creativity, and incredible opportunities for personal transformation. She is passionate about helping create a world in which humans live in symbiotic harmony with one another and with natural systems.

Alex has training in Hakomi therapy and engages in group facilitation and activism with an aim to support a more kind, just, and healthy human presence on the planet. She is also the founder and director of The Living Forest Project, an initiative that works closely with indigenous communities to protect rainforests, promote indigenous rights, and uplift cosmologies that celebrate interconnectedness.

Heidi Piper

During Heidi’s three decades living in Europe, she led teams to deliver innovation for some of the world’s most iconic brands, as an executive at Fortune 50 company Procter & Gamble. She now coaches, consults and speaks internationally through her Boulder-based company, PhoenixRising. Heidi published her first book, Choose Love: How to move through heartache with grace and rise like a phoenix, in Fall 2019. She is passionate about the calling for all of us to choose love every day, particularly in the most trying situations. Heidi is very grateful for her role as mother of two young adults and very happy to be collaborating with MatrixWorks to support personal transformation.

Mariana Raymundo

Quando conheceu Mukara na Imersão MatrixWorks de 2008, Mariana soube que algo realmente transformador estava prestes a acontecer. Foi amor a primeira vista! Desde lá, ela tem acompanhado Mukara e seu trabalho de perto como aluna, assistente e especialmente como líder. O modelo do MatrixWorks enriqueceu profundamente o trabalho de Mariana com indivíduos, casais e famílias como psicoterapeuta sistêmica e Somatic Experiencing practitioner. Mariana vive em Porto Alegre e coordena o Solar do Caminho.

Lisa Rome

Lisa Rome is a loving, joyful, and inquisitive storyteller and seeker. She works as a writer, blogger, and editor for a popular health and wellness website. Her commitment to well-being led her down a path to combine her love of healing with her love of the environment, and she finds many synchronicities between planetary, personal, and systemic sustainability.

Lisa first experienced Groups as Living Systems in 2011 as a part of her Environmental Leadership Master’s program, where she first met facilitator Sarah Lila Oswald. Since then she has participated in several MatrixWorks classes and trainings, and applied the process in her own leadership work.

Kat Shea

Kat is an extraordinary dancer, healer and group facilitator. She has been involved with MatrixWorks for 8 years and knows how to keep a group alive with fun, insight and movement.

Adriana Cury Sonnewend

Adriana dreamed about working to make a better world. That led her into private education, where she’s worked as a school leader for 24 years, leading and developing teams, working with group facilitation, strategic planning, decision making processes, conflict mediation, crisis management and parent orientation.

She’s been studying and practicing different approaches and methods to improve her work with individuals, groups and organizations. Getting to know MatrixWorks in 2012 and learning with Mukara in different trainings and workshops gave her new tools and possibilities to work even better and closer to her purpose of helping people to be more human and true in groups, at work and in life.

Having worked as a leader and now as a consultant and conflict mediator, Adriana believes in conflicts and crises as opportunities of growth and connection.

Sook Yee

Sook Yee is a certified public accountant with more than 30 years of experience spanning the profession, governance, corporate, investments and strategies, and for most parts of her career leading businesses with wide geographical operations. She is culturally attuned, having worked for family businesses and multinationals based in Malaysia, USA, United Kingdom, Mexico, Singapore and China, and has served as non-executive director on entities listed on the stock exchanges of Australia and Malaysia.

She was the Chief Operating Officer of a lifestyle business in China and Group Managing Director of a large industrial group with operations spanning 16 countries and more than 10,000 employees. Prior to that, she headed a country operation for a global heavy building materials business, where she broke new ground as its first female and Asian country head. She has seen businesses through economic bear and bull runs, operating through the 1997 Asia financial crisis as well as the shipping and resources boom and bust of the 2000s.

Her personal journey has led her to believe that leadership in the 21st century is one that needs development of a whole self, so leaders can harness the wisdom from an inner self that is well. Only leaders who are healthy as a being can express themselves as part of a collective and collaboratively with the external world, to flourish in an evolving world order today.

Anna Chitty, RCST, RPP

Anna has a wide and diverse training in body-centered psychotherapy systems, including Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Character Structure Work and Pia Mellody’s Family Systems Therapy. She has been an extraordinary and distinguished teacher of Polarity and Craniosacral Therapy since 1979.

Anna brings her high sense of perception, clear ability to read the field, and wide, loving heart to help us integrate the experience of being human.

Mia Bolte

Mia Bolte has a Buddhist-inspired therapy practice. She has been around MatrixWorks since the beginning and is an avid supporter and teacher of the work.

Doug McLean

Doug has studied groups and communities for more than twenty years and assisted the MatrixWorks trainings for six years. He holds degrees in Math and Transpersonal Psychology, and currently owns a software company. Drawing on both theoretical understanding and meditative awareness, he brings attunement, clarity, open-heartedness, directness, and humor to his work with groups.

Doug has been on sabbatical from MatrixWorks as he recovers from a serious automobile accident. His commitment to his own health is an inspiration to all who know him.