SomaSpace Teachers

Jacqueline Rubinstein

Director of SomaSpace & Move with Ease

Jacqueline Rubinstein is dedicated to creating space for profound healing through embodiment and awareness. She brings the wealth of knowledge and experience that she has gathered over the last twenty years training and working in creative dance, somatic bodywork, and women empowerment.

Since 2014, she has been the proud owner and director of SomaSpace, a movement arts & healing center. Through the last decade, SomaSpace has evolved into a robust community of embodiment facilitators and healing arts practitioners. Under her guidance, SomaSpace’s offerings have expanded to include not only movement and somatic arts but also sound healing, breathwork, meditation, and authentic connection workshops.

After 20 years of traditional dance training as a child and young adult, Jacqueline fell deeply in love with the innovative and life-affirming world of improvisational movement. Since achieving a bachelor’s degree in dance with a focus on choreography from Wesleyan University, she has led hundreds of creative and embodied movement classes.

Suffering from a severe concussion and a pinched cervical nerve, Jacqueline found a powerfully gentle and insightful somatic healing education called the Feldenkrais Method. She completed the practitioner training and opened her practice in Portland, Oregon in 2011.

After a decade of being in private practice as a Feldenkrais practitioner, Jacqueline craved to reach more people and to introduce them to the opportunities for more holistic, mindful living. She decided to go back to school to complete a master’s degree in the studies of Physician Assistance in order to learn more about the body and medicine, as well as expand her opportunity to teach people who might not otherwise seek out holistic care. 

By day, she serves as a Physician Assistant in cardiology, helping people recover from heart attacks and heart failure and introducing ideas of healthy living through diet, exercise, and stress reduction. And by night, she offers contact improvisation workshops, women’s circles, and clothing swaps among other special events at SomaSpace.

To contact Jacqueline: jacqueline@somaspace.us

Carlton Grew

On a humid summer day in 2000, Carlton Grew walked into Scott Kelman’s free introductory improvisation workshop. Carlton joined Kelman’s workshop simply for a new, creative experience. What he discovered led him on a transformational journey that continues today.

Originally uninterested in performance, this improvisation practice led him to perform with The Tuesday Group, the Agnieszka Laska Dancers, and to create an autobiographical piece entitled Bag of Hammers. He is thrilled to have the opportunity to guide others through their own inspiring journeys into creativity, presence, and connection.

To contact Carlton: riffline@yahoo.com

Laura Li Fong Yee

Laura Li Fong Yee offers sound healing from a place of gratitude, drawing from her practices in breath, sound, yoga, prayer and meditation. She values community, communication, connection, and inclusivity, and strives to create an experience that will leave participants feeling connected, grounded and whole. Laura has worked in the nursing profession since 2004, became certified as a Kundalini Yoga Instructor in 2016, had the honor of learning gong techniques with Don Conreaux, completed a crystal bowl immersion training with Shalom Mayberg in 2018, and completed Tibetan Singing Bowls Level 1 Atma Buti Sound Healing Method in 2022, Level 2 in 2023, and a 300-hr YTT with Sattva Yoga Academy in India in 2024.

To contact Laura: laura@crownandhearthealing or VISIT crownandhearthealing.com

Karla Lancaster

Karla Lancaster is passionate about leading women in the sensually, embodied movement of S Factor. As a licensed instructor, Karla guides woman through body-led movement focused on sensuality, body ownership, and sisterhood. 

By removing distractions from our everyday lives, like mirrors and the male gaze, she leads her students through discovering their own sensual movement, strengthening the physical body, and gaining greater self-love and confidence. Come join this sisterhood and unlock your feminine, sensual movement!

To contact Karla: karlatamay@gmail.com

Amy Terepka

Amy Terepka is a bodyworker, earth medicine practitioner, priestess, and teacher in Portland, OR. She has been an avid student of the plants and the Earth, the body and energy, for the last 20 years. She is passionate about helping individuals reconnect with the wisdom that resides in their bodies and in the consciousness of Earth, particularly with the support from the plant realms.

Amy offers a unique, holistic approach to healing through her bodywork practice, Groundwater Healing, and she runs The Golden Stone Wisdom School, a place for folks remember their belonging to themselves and the wider forces of Life, through embodied spiritual medicine, and the animistic perspective. She offers a free online community, and hosts monthly, in-person, Plant Wisdom Circles to ceremonially learn from the spirits of local, non-psychedelic plants.

To contact Amy: amy@groundwaterhealing.com or VISIT www.groundwaterhealing.com

Melissa Felsenstein

Melissa Felsenstein, founder of Inner Sounds Meditation, is a professional sound practitioner with over ten years of experience. A self-proclaimed rest advocate, Melissa delights in helping others feel an inner calm, destress naturally, release physical tension, and just feel a whole lot better.

Melissa used sound to heal herself of a vicious anxiety depression cycle. She founded one of the first 200hr sound healing certification programs in the country and has a trademarked technique designed specifically for the nervous system.

To contact Melissa: www.InnerSoundsMeditation.com

Roxanna Gates

Driven by mystery, wonder, beauty, and the natural world, Roxanna Gates has spent the last two decades exploring the therapeutic notion of dance. Her ideology is firmly rooted in personal agency, creativity, and enchantment in the mundane. Roxanna is a dance practitioner with a clinical doctorate in Occupational Therapy (OTD, OTR/L). Her curiosity strives to understand the clear resonance between the science of our aliveness and our conscious experience of living.

DanceLab is the premier integration of her individual brand, essence, and expression as a life-long learner with a unique message in joy, sovereignty, and community. Come join Roxanna and others in a co-creative dance experience that is designed for spirited dancing, mindfulness, and personal meaning making!

To contact Roxanna: www.roxannagates.com

Natasha Jones

Natasha Jones has guided others in deepening their connection to themselves for more than twenty years. She began her journey as a yoga teacher in 2001, teaching throughout Portland for over a decade with a focus on the mind-body connection. As she approached 40, she felt a deep calling to live a more magical life. She committed to a devoted spiritual practice of meditation—one that soon blossomed into mediumship, channeling, and multidimensional healing.

Now, as a shamanic practitioner, awakening activator, and energy healer, Natasha helps intuitive souls remember, activate, and embody their spiritual gifts. Through light language activations, energy healing, and quantum guidance, she creates sacred spaces for transformation, empowerment, and profound, energetic shifts.

She is passionate about helping others on their awakening journey move beyond fear, self-doubt, and past-life wounds so they can confidently trust their intuition and fully step into their power. Her offerings include 1:1 sessions, immersive gatherings, and sacred circles that support spiritual expansion and multidimensional awakening.

✨ Join Natasha for The Temple of the Cosmic Heart – a monthly gathering at SomaSpace to awaken your gifts and step into empowerment.

To contact Natasha:  www.cosmicheartpriestess.com

HitchinKitten

HitchinKitten (she/they/it) is a queer rope educator and movement enthusiast that loves incorporating song and dance into rope practice, relationships, and performance. Her approach focuses on functionality and playfulness to encourage accessible, connective, and collaborative improvisation in rope practice and beyond. HK is a former facilitator of Hitchin’ Bitches PDX, a rope group for women and gender expansive folks, as well as an event consultant and education professional. She loves to connect people with rope, themselves, and their communities, offering classes, tastings, identity-based socials, and program support at events.

To contact HK: hitchinkitten@gmail.com

Willow Merveille

Willow is the founder of Naked in Motion. She and her team have been creating spaces for body-acceptance, empowerment, and self-compassion through Naked! Yoga & Pilates classes since 2016 in New York, Boston, Seattle, and now, Portland! She is a yoga teacher and fully-certified Pilates apparatus instructor with roughly 1,000 hours of teacher training and over 10 years of teaching experience. Her movement training includes 20+ years of classical ballet and jazz, plus a decade of theatre performance. She is fiercely passionate about improving inclusivity and accessibility in both yoga and social nudity. Specializing in a trauma-informed, “open-level” teaching style, her classes offer many physical varieties and options to make movement accessible to all types of bodies and abilities. She has learned enough relevant ASL to make classes easier for Deaf students to follow. She is currently based in Seattle and is excited to bring her offerings to Portland!

To contact Willow: willow@nakedinmotion.com