Poster presentation for Clear Sky

IEC Conference: 2025

CRYLE, Duncan Dr.

Canada

Duncan Cryle is co-executive director of Clear Sky Retreat Center in Canada, student of founding teachers Qapel and Catherine Pawsarat Sensei, and founder of consciousorganizations.com

He blends years of co-creating Clear Sky’s integral and awakening community with an international career as an executive with major technology companies. He was a co-creator of IBM’s mindfulness community, and led a successful global mindfulness program at SS&C Technologies.

His mindfulness and organizational development work is based on 30+ years of personal practice, and 20 years co-developing Clear Sk as a “living lab” for integral and awareness-based approaches to team learning, communication, organization development, and personal transformation.

He holds a Ph.D in philosophy and publishes in the academic field of workplace spirituality.

He is passionate about the potential of heart-based leadership and practices to transform work cultures to a healthier way of working together for positive impact.

DIAVOLITSIS, Evangelos

Italy / Canada

Evangelos Diavolitsis is a Dharma teacher, behavioural money coach and a certified 5Rhythms® movement facilitator. He has a passion for integrating the path of awakening with movement, meditation, art and business. He has been continuously studying with meditation masters Qapel and Catherine Sensei of the Namgyal Lineage since 2002.

Evangelos regularly mentors people on the art of integrating a spiritual path with a financially balanced material life through somatic expression and radical self-inquiry. His conscious leadership skills have led him to work with notable companies and innovators such as Google, Engineers without Borders, Mandali, Findhorn Foundation, Fairtrade Canada and the Sameness Project.

He has an honors degree in Urban Sociology and Policy making from the University of Toronto, a master teacher certificate in Behavioural Money Coaching from the Money Coaching Institute in California and directly trained under the tutelage of 5Rhythms movement founder, Gabrielle Roth. fourwaystofreedom.com

FEDER, Lisa Dr.

France

Lisa Feder is an American cultural anthropologist based in France specialising in embodied practice. Her book, entitled “Jeliya at the Crossroads” (Palgrave Press 2021), describes the West African culture of jeliya, a musical and verbal art from the Mande region of West Africa. Using an embodied practice as her methodology, Lisa reveals how she and her music teachers live “in between” local and global cultures. Through deepening friendships with balafon teachers, the author learns to embody West African values such as patience, courage, concentration, and generosity, qualities that she also learns in her Buddhist practice. Both of these roads lead to the same result: the sculpting of a more graceful and integrated human being. Lisa is the founder of Manding Grooves, a French-based company that organises balafon workshops and makes video content that supports cross-cultural learning through music in Africa, the US, and France.

LEWANDOWSKY, Maya

France / Canada / Israel

Maya Lewandowsky, visionary artistic director of La Caravan Dance Theatre, is a multi-disciplinary performer. Her “Free Your Natural Voice” method, a unique blend of dance, voice, and meditation, unlocks profound creative expression. With decades of experience, she’s garnered acclaim for groundbreaking, multidisciplinary works. A pioneer and master of the performing arts, Maya’s work inspires and shapes the field. Trained in ballet, opera, and diverse arts forms, she’s worked globally with esteemed teachers. Her performances, transcending styles and infused with deep emotion, have graced stages across continents. Inspired by meditation masters Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat, she integrates artistic and spiritual pursuits—a holistic approach fostering creative expression and profound self-discovery. A leader and innovator, Maya empowers artists and audiences to achieve their creative potential and become a work of art.

MATARESE, Nishta Maria

Italy / United States

Nishta’s teaching style is heartfelt, humorous, clear and transformative. She works with people to cultivate their highest conscious creative compassionate potential, so it spreads like wildfire. She uses movement, mindfulness meditation, humour and matters of the heart as a ground for exploration into deeper states of being. She teaches the art of clear communication and how to cultivate healthy dynamic honest relationships.

She is dedicated to her own personal awakening and supports communities that are passionate about a paradigm shift. She has been a lifelong meditator, traveler and business leader for 25 years.  Nishta is committed to her unwavering path of helping people get over the biggest obstacles of their lives. Most notably aiding people in transcending their blind spots and learning to be their own best friend.

She is a transformational coach, founding member of Four Ways to Freedom and a certified International Open Floor teacher. She co-founded Conscious Dance Italy, a resource, education and production association for Italian dancers. She is a regular guest teacher at the Mandali Foundation Retreat Center. fourwaystofreedom.com

MCALLISTER, Karen

Canada

Karen McAllister is a co-founding member and leader at Clear Sky Retreat Center, where she has lived year-round in a residential spiritual community since 2004. Trained by Clear Sky’s co-founders and spiritual teachers, Qapel and Catherine Sensei, she not only studies the map of integral theory but actively walks the territory, embodying its principles in daily practice.

Rooted in this lived experience, Karen, her teachers, and their community move together as a collective—helping both themselves and newer members move beyond an overemphasis on the “I” quadrant—developing the “we,” “its,” and “it” quadrants through collective practice, service, and financial maturity. As the community’s money coach and founder of The Mindful Money Coach, Karen works on both growing up—supporting vertical development into mature adulthood—and cleaning up, helping individuals integrate their financial shadow so they can resource their path rather than bypass it.

This work extends beyond Clear Sky to the wider international community through Qapel and Catherine Sensei’s Planet Dharma, where Karen supports seekers in bridging the gap between spiritual aspiration and financial engagement—making money a tool for awakening and meaningful impact.

For those ready to deepen their spiritual and financial maturity—sustaining both inner and outer evolution—she offers a lived pathway to wholeness.