About ART
Our Team
We are a team of experienced and passionate facilitators, leaders, coaches, entrepreneurs, and volunteers dedicated to the practice of authentic relating and the production of authentic relating trainings. We’re committed to bringing about a world of healthy, conscious, connected, revealed, enlivened, and intimate relationships, with both self and others.
We live and breathe this work in our own lives, and have watched ourselves and each other radically transform toward greater and deeper connection with all those with whom we’re in relationship.
From breakthroughs in intimate partnerships to profound connections with absolute strangers (who rapidly become friends and allies), we’ve all seen how hugely impactful and immediately applicable this work and practice has been.
If you’re interested in working with ART in any creative capacity, get in touch with us anytime at info@authenticrelatingtraining.com.
Ryel Kestano
CO-FOUNDER / SENIOR COURSE LEADER
Ryel is the lead designer of ART’s curriculum, develops the company’s long-range growth strategy, and is a Senior Course Leader. Prior to co-founding ART International, Ryel oversaw all training operations at the Integral Center in Boulder, a world-renowned leader in transformational workshops. He has been a course leader, course supervisor, facilitator and coach since discovering authentic relating several years ago. Ryel is also the co-founder and visionary behind Virtuance, one of the largest providers of real estate photography in the world, and the co-founder and visionary behind Pink Mammoth, one of the Bay Area’s largest and most successful creative arts collectives. Ryel has four very authentic kids and lives in Boulder.
Jason Digges
CO-FOUNDER / SENIOR COURSE LEADER
Jason leads ART’s sales, marketing, and business development efforts, manages enrollment, and is a senior course leader. He also makes major contributions to the curriculum based on his unique background and expertise. Jason is a modern renaissance man: Equal parts artist, philosopher, teacher, and video producer. From 2003-2012 he worked for Ken Wilber and other clients to create thousands of hours of educational media on the topics of transpersonal psychology, spirituality, productivity, and personal growth. For the past 4 years he has been a trainer and facilitator for groups within the authentic relating and circling realm and is obsessed with how humans can live and relate optimally.
Jamie Grant
DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Jamie manages ART’s operations, communications and administrative projects, focusing on the internal execution essential to the company’s big vision. Prior to joining the team, Jamie supported various nonprofit organizations dedicated to empowering individuals, families and communities through mentoring, education and employment training for nearly a decade. Her professional impact has since merged with her own personal transformation, having spent the past five years supporting the very teachers and programs that paved her way to a more authentic life. With a keen eye for the details and a big heart for this work, Jamie is on fire behind the scenes in Bellingham, Washington.
NATASHA FIGUEROA HUSTED
EU OPerations Manager / COurse Leader
Natasha is an instrumental part of the European leadership team, running all EU course operations and facilitating ART Level 1 courses throughout Europe. They have been on a path of Authentic Relating for over 20 years by integrating honesty practices, dance, tantra, shamanism, improvisation, and more. Their main passions are intimacy, communication, vulnerability, gender balancing, and love. As a person of mixed heritage and raised in multiple cultures, Natasha is focused on representation, accessibility and inclusivity in the self-development world. Based in beautiful Copenhagen. Read more here at https://www.jellyfishheart.com
Rick Smith
senior COURSE LEADER
Rick has spoken to over 100,000 people on five continents in areas of teaching skills, public speaking, and facilitation. His best-selling book Conscious Classroom Management has now sold over a quarter million copies, and continues to touch the lives of teachers and their students. Throughout these past twenty years, in addition to training teachers, Rick has also been teaching workshops in consciousness, embodiment, personal growth, and meditation. He now brings his experience in teaching and facilitation to ART, offering practical ways for participants to know and love themselves, and remember their own innocence, wholeness, and “enough-ness,” especially in all the tight corners of their inner and outer worlds.
DANIEL BROOKS
senior COURSE LEADER
Brooks has experience from quite diverse avenues of life; over the years he’s been trained as a physicist, a soldier, and a zen monk. In 2010 he discovered authentic relating and was immediately hooked on the vast potential of it. He’s since made it an integral part of his personal and professional practice. He lives in some weird superposition between Stockholm and Copenhagen, where he consults, facilitates and builds community.
Dayna Seraye
senior COURSE LEADER
Dayna facilitates transformational experiences for groups and individuals through embodiment practices, therapeutic coaching, authentic relating and integrative healing arts. She has guided retreats, trainings and immersions for nearly two decades and has taught at renown festivals and conferences throughout the world. Her passion lies in supporting people to experience embodied connection – where healing occurs and wholeness is remembered, and is honored to serve ART as a course leader. Dayna is the Co-Founder and Director of Hanuman Academy, which offers soul-based yoga education. She is also the Creative Director for Hanuman Festival, and you can find her classes online through gaia.com and hanumanacademy.com.
Christopher Gray
COURSE LEADER
Christopher is a course leader of The ART of Being Human Level 1. He’s spent 20 years in the software world as a leader in educational technology, most recently at Facebook. During that time, Christopher has also been doing extensive work supporting people struggling with alcoholism, substance abuse, and codependency. Since discovering and immersing himself in the practice of Authentic Relating, he’s transitioned to coaching and working with ART to bring this transformative, humanizing practice to the world. He teaches Bikram yoga, and, most importantly, is from New Jersey.
Ranjit Krishnamma
COURSE LEADER
Ranjit has 30 years experience of personal development; as a large group facilitator, trainer of facilitators and creator of unique experiential workshops. He is also a rock-climbing instructor, a professional actor, and leader of Circling and Authentic Relating group experiences. “I sometimes get the sense that we are already deeply connected and that this work helps us to rediscover…this.”
Jesse nolan
COURSE LEADER
Sydney McGary
COURSE LEADER
Lorraine Clarkson
COURSE LEADER
Stephanie Dickinson
COURSE LEADER
Stephanie Dickinson is an inspiring feminine leader and a meditation and mindfulness mentor on a mission to dispel the myth that mindful leadership is dry, stoic and straight-up boring. She specializes in bridging mindfulness practices, even the ancient and esoteric, into people’s modern lives and businesses. Having worked with clients ranging from reformed Wall Street head honchos to Olympic athletes, her magic is igniting people’s juicy aliveness and revealing their untapped reservoirs of energy just waiting to spill over! She lives in Bali and shares her work worldwide, in feminine leadership trainings, authentic relating trainings, mindfulness workshops and retreats.
KATE MIDDLETON
COURSE LEADER
