Meet the Faculty

Michael Mackintosh is the founder of Awakened Academy® and Awakened Meditation®.

At eighteen he had a profound spiritual awakening. He was pulled out of his body, and shown two possible futures: one where he lived a spiritual life, and one where he carried on the way he was. He took the first step on the new path, and was pulled back into his body. His life has never been the same since.

He has spent the twenty-eight years since helping others to deepen their spiritual awareness and align their lives with their highest calling.

In 2004 he pioneered spiritual life coaching, when his meditation students began asking him for help with their lives. He moved to Hawaii in 2007, and has been certifying coaches, writing books, teaching meditation and creating courses and guided meditations that have helped people all over the world.

He founded Awakened Academy in 2014 with Arielle Hecht and has been helping certify coaches ever since.

His mission is to support as many people as possible to awaken to who they are, discover their Dharma and share their gifts with the world.

Arielle is a spiritual mentor and meditation teacher who shares gentle courses and classes focused on inner stillness, surrender and prayer. Her approach helps students step into the truest version of themselves while keeping their nervous systems balanced and free from burnout.

A devoted teacher and singer-songwriter, she has created programs including A Course in Surrender and A Course in Love, helping listeners connect with the quiet of the heart. Her meditations on Insight Timer and Aura have millions of listeners worldwide, and she is the founder of Pilates & Prayer.

In 2014 Arielle co-founded Awakened Academy with Michael, where she guides the deeper inner work alongside the certification program. She brings a steady feminine balance to the curriculum, focused on presence, embodiment and the unhurried work of integration.

Mary Despe de Echemendia is an ICF PCC-credentialed coach who helps people reconnect with who they are beneath their roles and titles. Over the last 15 years, her own path moved from the corporate world into business and then into work of her own, so she knows how easy it is to lose yourself in a job, and how the question of “what now” tends to surface.

She works with quiet achievers, introverts, and people in the second half of their careers who feel overlooked or unsure of what comes next. Her focus is presence and self-trust, giving clients room to see what they have been carrying and move forward from steadier ground.

She believes clarity comes from the inside out, not from pushing harder, and she brings the same care to the coaches she mentors. A Chicagoland native, Mary is a graduate of the University of Illinois and Hult International Business School, and the Symbiosis Coaching Life Coaching program. She lives with her family on the North Shore of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi.

Jenai Lane is the founder of Spirit Coach Training, an intuitive coach and trainer who certifies other coaches in a method of being spirit-led. Her Spirit Coach® Methodology has been used for more than 15 years with clients one-to-one, online, in retreat settings, and to train master coaches.

She also knows the business world from the inside. Named woman entrepreneur of the year, she started her first award-winning company, Respect Inc., at twenty-four, and became the inventor of a number of patented and trademarked products.

Jenai is the author of Spirit Led Instead: The Little Tool Book of Limitless Transformation and The Spirit Led Instead Playbook, and a contributing author to Meditation: Intimate Experiences with the Divine Through Contemplative Practices. She lives in Sedona, where she coaches and writes.

Tanya Taylor Rubinstein is a writing mentor and storyteller, and has lived for thirty years in the high desert of northern New Mexico.

Over the past twenty-six years she has helped thousands of people write their stories as books, monologues and one-person plays. She founded the Somatic Writing process, practises Family Constellations, and edited The Cancer Monologue Project, published by MacAdam Cage.

Her work has been featured on NPR, the CBS Early Show and ABC News, in The Dallas News, The New Mexican and the Albuquerque Journal, in Spirituality and Health and Backstage, and on dozens of podcasts and radio shows across three decades.

After a life given to the craft, her premise is simple: a true story comes from the body rather than the head, out of what a person actually knows about who they are.

Kazemaru's path started in childhood, with spiritual encounters and messages that showed her events before they happened. She has kept a daily meditation practice since 1982, and trained under high masters in Eastern healing, in traditional Hawaiian spirituality, and in psychic mediumship.

From 1992 to 1998 she apprenticed full time in Japan, in an Eastern healing modality and the education of the subconscious mind. Between 2004 and 2016 she studied with Hawaiian teachers: the chants, hula, Lomi Lomi, the path of aloha, and hoʻoponopono.

Her sessions bridge the two worlds, shaped each time to what the person in front of her needs, and she leads workshops and retreats in Japan, Europe and Hawaiʻi. Her aim is plain enough: to help people find the love already inside them, and to make the mystical an ordinary part of being alive.

Mayke Niestadt is the founder of Inner Beauty Retreat. Her own turn came in Bali in 2015, after a rupture in her life and the loss of people she loved. The first Inner Beauty Retreat ran a few weeks later, and began what she still calls the most beautiful period of her life.

She had built the outer success first, running a hostess, recruitment and modelling agency, and closed it to follow the calling instead. What she teaches is the move she made herself: from a life built by the ego to one led by the soul, and what becomes possible on the other side of that.

Her speciality is clarity and intuition, helping people hear their own guidance well enough to build the life their heart actually wants. Today she runs retreats, courses and private sessions, making spaces where people remember who they are.

Dr. Disha Philip, MD, FACC, is a board-certified cardiologist with more than thirteen years in practice, and the founder of The Awakened Heart. Years of treating hearts taught her how much of what arrives in a cardiology clinic begins with stress, and how often medication and surgery treat the event rather than the life around it.

She now works chiefly with physicians, and with a small number of high-achieving women carrying heavy responsibility: people who are competent and trusted, and privately exhausted by over-functioning.

Her approach combines clinical reasoning with nervous-system regulation and identity work, rather than mindset tools laid over the top. When the nervous system settles, she says, clarity comes back, and decisions stop being made from urgency or fear.

Joshua Benavides has been coaching men and women around the world for over twenty years, helping them wake up, grow up and show up fully for what they are here to do. He founded Profound Well-Being and the Transformative Coach Institute.

He is the bestselling author of Break The Worry Habit, The Sun Seeking Light and Overlooking Happiness, and wrote the ebook The Inner Secrets of Fearless Living.

His work is experiential rather than theoretical, built around the Enneagram as a map of consciousness and drawing on self-inquiry, breath practice, meditation, shadow work, movement, writing and ceremony. His training includes EFT, hypnosis and NLP alongside shamanic and energy healing. He is indigenous, and comes from a line of healers in Chile.

Deborah Burnham is a physical therapist with fifty years of experience, living on the island of Kauaʻi. She now works globally with people carrying physical and emotional pain, guiding them to become free of it.

Her work is collaborative rather than done-to: each person is guided through a safe, personalised healing journey and learns to regulate their own nervous system. She practises within Trauma Healing Accelerated, an integrative programme applying the Biology of Trauma® methodology founded by Aimie Apigian, MD.

Her sessions draw on Raja Yoga somatic meditation, trauma-informed CranioSacral therapy, somatic Tai Chi and trauma-informed AquaCranial therapy.

Joey Lott spent more than a decade looking for a way out of anxiety, chronic pain, exhaustion and fear. What finally changed things were not more techniques but a set of plain spiritual insights, arrived at when he had run out of ideas.

For the past thirteen years he has coached hundreds of people using those same principles: simple, down to earth, and aimed at what is already true rather than at self-improvement.

He is the author of You're Trying Too Hard, Already Awake Already Free, Freedom from the Approval Trap, and Not All It's Cracked Up To Be, a conversation about non-duality written with Graham Ellis. He lives in New Mexico with his partner and children.

Fabiola Merchant is a longtime meditator and spiritual teacher. She leads retreats and meditation sessions, and it is that work she brings to the Academy.

Her other calling is midwifery, and it started early. She had her first child at sixteen, and even then trusted what a woman's body knows, and saw for herself what motherhood changes in a person. She moved to Sedona at twenty-four and began again: community college, registered nurse, a nursing degree at Grand Canyon University, then a master's in nursing and midwifery at Frontier Nursing University. Ten years, while married, working and raising three girls.

She spent eighteen months as a hospital midwife. Then her fourth child was born and it became clear that was not where she wanted to serve. In July 2021 she opened her own home-birth practice in Sedona, and now helps women give birth in the sacredness of their own homes.

Steve Prussack has three decades of experience in juicing and holistic nutrition. He first partnered with Jay Kordich, the original Juiceman, and went on to develop the Juice Guru Method®.

He is the number one Amazon bestselling author of Juice Guru: Transform Your Life by Adding One Juice a Day and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Juice Fasting. Through the Juice Guru Institute he has certified more than 1,500 juice therapists across the United States and a dozen other countries.

Alongside the teaching he has built several wellness businesses, from online summits to a number one digital magazine, and trains other health entrepreneurs to build a practice around a single specialism.

Tom Corson-Knowles is the international bestselling author of 28 books, including Secrets of the Six-Figure Author, The Kindle Publishing Bible and Rules of the Rich, and the founder of TCK Publishing, an independent publishing company that specialises in digital marketing.

He wrote his first book as a freshman at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, where he took a degree in entrepreneurship, and founded TCK Publishing in 2011. The company has since published hundreds of books and helped hundreds of authors get their work into the world.

Tom has taught more than 100,000 authors how to write, publish and market their books, through his online courses and his Ebook Publishing School free training. He hosts the Publishing Profits Podcast and lives in Indianapolis.

Steve “S. J.” Scott is a two-time bestselling author who has spent his career on one question: how a small change, repeated, becomes a different life. He founded Develop Good Habits to give people the practical side of that answer.

He writes about building habits that hold, morning and daily routines, goal-setting, and the ordinary organisation of a working life. His books are short, plain and built to be acted on, which is also how he writes them: consistently, in the early hours, one small block at a time.

He lives with his wife and two young sons, and the family runs, hikes and travels together.

Nick Good spent twenty-five years as a personal trainer, teacher, motivator and mentor. In his own words: “I have guided many to go deeper into themselves and experience their true power within.”

He understood life as the journey of a spiritual warrior. “This journey, this quest, is a series of initiations through trials, tests and challenges.” He taught it that way, with practice at the centre of everything.

Nick co-created Superhero Training with Michael and appears throughout its recorded library. He leads the Essential StoryTelling material, and co-authored Amazing Grace: The Nine Principles of Living in Natural Magic with David Wolfe.

Nick has since passed. His teaching stays exactly where he left it, in the recordings, and students are still learning from him.