ADVISORY COUNCIL

Sri Swami Sitaramananda

Acharya, Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers

Swami Sitaramananda is an Acharya of the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centers and is from the lineage of Swami Sivananda & Swami Vishnudevananda for more than 40 years. She is based in Sivananda ashram Yoga Farm in Grass Valley, USA as well as in the Sivananda yoga Resort and Training in Dalat Vietnam. She has travelled and taught in many countries besides USA and Canada including India, Japan, China, Vietnam and Russia. She has deep interest in teaching of classical yoga and vedanta as well as interest in health and healing, especially in mental and emotional healing, and is an advocate of the effects of yoga and meditation in health. She created the Sivananda Yoga Health Educator Training Program, a 800-hour intensive program to help bridging medical sciences and classical Yoga. Her background was in social and community work in Canada.

Dena Merriam

Author & Spiritual Leader

Dena Merriam has been an interfaith leader for over two decades and Vice Chair of the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious & Spiritual Leaders held in 2000 at United Nations headquarters in New York. Two years later, she convened a meeting of women spiritual leaders in Geneva and from that meeting founded the Global Peace Initiative of Women (GPIW). She is a longtime student of Paramhansa Yogananda & practitioner of Kriya Yoga meditation. She holds a MS from Columbia University and an honorary doctorate from MCU. In 2014 she won the Niwano Peace Prize for her interfaith peace efforts. She is the author of My Journey Through Time, The Untold Story of Sita, When the Bright Moon Rises, Rukmini and the Turning of Time and To Dance with Dakinis.

Yogacharya Ellen Grace O'Brian (Uma-Ji)

Director, Center for Spiritual Enlightenment

Yogacharya Ellen Grace O'Brian is a Kriya Yoga meditation teacher, poet, writer, and spiritual director of Center for Spiritual Enlightenment, a Kriya Yoga Meditation Center with headquarters in San Jose, California. She has taught meditation retreats and workshops nationally and internationally for more than four decades.

Along with her service as a meditation teacher, Yogacharya O’Brian is the founder of Carry the Vision, a community nonviolence education project bringing meditation instruction to staff and children in schools, the prison population, and other segments of society. Her work on behalf of global peace through interfaith cooperation includes several years of service as Vice-Chair of the Parliament of the World’s Religions and Chair of their Partner Cities Program, supporting collaboration between interfaith groups in cities around the world. She is the founder of Meru Institute, providing healthy lifestyle education and leadership training in yoga studies, Ayurveda, and community service. She is also the founder of two podcasts: The Yoga Hour and Kriya Yoga Today with Yogacharya O’Brian. Her published works include Living the Eternal Way: Spiritual Meaning and Practice in Daily Life and her latest bestselling book, The Jewel of Abundance: Finding Prosperity through the Ancient Wisdom of Yoga.

Yogacharya has received many community service awards, including the prestigious Mahatma Gandhi Award for the Promotion of Religious Pluralism from the American Hindu Foundation. Ordained to teach in 1982 by Roy Eugene Davis, a direct disciple of Paramahansa Yogananda, Yogacharya’s message is “engaged enlightenment.”

Kathryn Peothig

M.Div, Ph.D, B.A

Dr Poethig is Professor emerita of Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. She has lived and worked in Southeast Asia for over thirty years. Her main areas of research are work transnational religion, citizenship, and conflict in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and the Philippines. In Cambodia, she has published on the citizenship debates during Cambodia’s transition to democracy as diaspora Cambodians returned in the early 1990’s. She has consulted for the World Bank and published on the development of Cambodia’s peace regime, primarily focusing on the Dhammayietra, a Buddhist peace walk, most recently in History, Buddhism, and New Religious Movements in Cambodia. She has written on, Filipino feminist theologians' frameworks for 'just peace' for both Communist and Muslim insurgencies in light of the US war on terrorism.

Her current work, Invisible Aid, embarks on an ‘anthropology of the imagination” which takes seriously the social imaginary of local religious communities and those who seek out the invisible world for guidance and solace. My current research consider how the religious imaginaries of communities at the margins of power often include non-human actors (spirits, animals, plants) who offer various forms of invisible aid through dreams, occult signs, possession, apparitions and amulets.

Dr. Poethig has been advisor to Peace Institute of Cambodia, and research consultant to the Applied Conflict Transformation Studies MA program also in Cambodia. She has served on the boards of Peace Summer Interfaith Institute for Justice, Peace and Social Movement in Vancouver, Canada and the People's Forum on Peace for Life, a Global South-based Muslim-Christian initiative resisting Empire and militarized globalization, She is on the steering committee of the new Muslim-Christian Feminist Alliance. Through Peace for Life, she has joined delegations to the World Social Forum in Nairobi (2007), Nepal (2006), WTO in Hong Kong (2005), Philippines (2002), and has led study groups to Cambodia/Vietnam (1992), and to the NGO Forum of the 4th U.N. Conference on on Women in China (1995).

Dr. Poethig is a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church USA and currently on the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) and Peace Discernment Steering Team with a mandate to design and implement a broadly participatory four-year process for church-wide discernment on current matters of peace and violence.

Victoria Rue is lecturer emerita at San Jose State University in Comparative Religious Studies. As a theatre writer/director of forty years, her work has been seen in NYC, LA and San Francisco. She has written numerous articles as well Asher book Acting Religious: Theatre as Pedagogy in Religious Studies. Victoria is an ordained Roman Catholic woman priest. She founded the faith community Sophia in Trinity in 2009 in San Francisco which continues to meet today. Victoria has written numerous articles on being a woman priest as well as on the movement for women priests globally.

Victoria was a Fulbright scholar in Bethlehem, Palestine 2018/19. Her verbatim play Maryam: A Woman of Bethlehem premiered in Bethlehem and toured Palestine. In March 2022 the 75 minute play premiered in San Jose, CA. It was performed in English and Arabic by two Palestinian

M.Div., Ph.D, rcp

Victoria Rue

actresses who play 22 characters. Film director Jules Hart has created a 22 minute documentary of the play’s creation “Mary Under Occupation.” To see a video of the full play:www.maryamawomanofbethlehem.org

Victoria’s ministry continues to be as a theatre writer/director. It is where she experiences the Spirit and creates communities of shared imagination. Her most recent play is Voices from the Silenced: Pre-Roe Stories from Rossmoor. This was done in 2023 in collaboration with Martha Boesing. It is the subject of a new documentary.

Victoria’s spouse of thirty-one years is Dr. Kathryn Poethig. She is proud to be on the Advisory Council of the Arsha Shakti Trust.