Yoga-Teacher Bios

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN KITWOOD/GETTY

Mary-Sage Porter

Mary-Sage began her yoga journey at sixteen, while recovering from a groin injury sustained at an Up With People concert. Her SpiritTone™ system, a movement technology that polishes the aura while simultaneously increasing the thigh gap, came to her in a vision after she made the painful personal decision to sneak into the employee bathroom at Bali’s famed Ubud Monkey Forest. Mary-Sage recently got her real-estate license and was called to combine sacred movement and property sales for her popular Yoga for Real Estate class.

Garrett Snowcorn

An Air Force brat who grew up in Italy, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Bulgaria, Garrett immersed himself in the languages and spiritual traditions of each of his adopted native lands. On the eve of his seventeenth year, he committed to secluding himself in a Nepalese monastery until he could recite all Mahayana sutras in perfect Sanskrit. On the eve of his fiftieth birthday, he abandoned that quest to attend the two-hundred-hour Hatha course at Yogalicious in Austin, Texas. There, Garrett came to understand that his life’s purpose was to bring the wisdom of the Four Noble Truths to a physical yoga practice centered on the core, and so CoreFourTruth™ was born. Now there are forty-eight CoreFourTruth™ studios throughout Texas and the Southwest and, with every breath, Garrett internally bows in gratitude for the sacred teachings that brought him such abundance.

Due to a heavy travel schedule, Garrett is no longer teaching his regular classes, but he will be in the studio the last Thursday of every month for his signature Candlelight Six-Pack and Booty Bash™.

Shanti Cassidy

I was an overachiever. Daddy’s little girl. In my thirties, I found that I was miserable despite having the Right Job, the Right House, and the Right Guy. I would ask myself, “What is it that I truly love?” But the only answer I could come up with was “having a clean car.” I turned to alcohol, but drinking hurt my nose. In 2002, a dear friend, who saw that I was in pain but knew that saying anything would just elicit bitchy, defensive attacks on her shortcomings, brought me to my first yoga class. During child’s pose, it hit me like a thousand lightning bolts—I was still a child. I knew at that moment that I was going to have to start over, rebuilding myself breath by breath, asana by asana. I made the painful personal decision to use the proceeds from my divorce as an investment in my wellness, and started going to Garrett Snowcorn’s Yoga Booty Camp every single day at 6 A.M. Even when I had my spleen laparoscopically removed, in 2010, I got up the very next morning and attended class. My own class, Vinyastical Booty Power Hour™, honors my teacher, but it incorporates crucial new scientific discoveries about the muscles of the abdominal region.

June (Junebug) Mortimer

Mortimer grew up on a farm and was christened Junebug by her dad because the mischievous glow in her eye reminded him of the adorable insect’s carapace. She started practicing yoga at eight, when she was assigned a book report for school and decided to go to the library, close her eyes, and write about the first book that she grabbed, which just happened to be B. K. S. Iyengar’s “Light on Yoga.” Ever since, she has been enchanted by the idea of serendipity and magic, which has led her to wonderful relationships and on vacations to amazing, unique places like Tulum and Bali. Inspired by this idea of trusting the universe just to “do what it does,” Mortimer created her Unintensional Intension™ workshops. She would like to end with a testimonial from a student who has attended several:

“For most teachers, a pose is just a pose. For Junebug, every pose is a doorway, and a student who is willing to knock on, open, and go through that door has the potential to enter a room where Fate has provided an abundance of native plants from which that student can create a wreath to adorn the very door she just walked through.”

Michael Mini-Blessings

Greetings, beautiful community! It was only after twenty years of studying that it became clear to me, a lifelong yogi, that no person, no matter how much he meditated or practiced yoga, could hope to clear any karma without first clearing the dark energy of the Poop Chakra™. My four-day workshops incorporate chanting, asana, prayer, quinoa pizza balls, and teachings from the five-thousand-year lineage of Poop Chakra™. Only when the Poop Chakra™ is cleared can we learn to see ourselves as we truly are.

Poop Chakra™ workshops are booked through December, 2016, but there is a waiting list. I am also conducting an intensive seventeen-day, four-hundred-hour training session for those wishing to become certified Poop Chakra™ workshop leaders. Go to getpoopchakra.com for details.