Marlene Boyette is a trauma-informed healing arts facilitator, ceremonialist, yoga and meditation teacher, sound healer, and community leader with nearly 20 years of experience across education, wellness, and collective care. She holds degrees in early childhood education and psychology. Her first certifications were in children's yoga, and she has since completed multiple trauma-informed 200 and 300 hour trainings for both adult and youth practitioners, totaling more than a thousand hours. Her work rests on one conviction: yoga belongs to everyone, and every person deserves to move at their own pace and leave a room more connected to themselves than when they walked in.

Marlene's practice reaches across community rooms, university campuses, nonprofits, and corporate spaces. She has served as wellness practitioner in residence at Purdue University and brought workshops and residencies to Harvard, MIT, Simmons, Boston College, and Boston University. She has also taught in her own community for over a decade, believing that the most meaningful support is the kind offered close to home.

For the past decade she served as the full-time yoga and meditation teacher at a private elementary school in Boston's Beacon Hill, building curriculum for preschool through sixth grade rooted in social-emotional learning, social justice, yoga, and mindfulness, and founding the school's first Students of Color Affinity Group after four years on its Social Justice Task Force. Marlene continues to create programming for middle and high school aged young people, teaching healthy, sustainable, and accessible habits.

Her practice, Leela Yoga + Wellness, takes its name from the Sanskrit lila, divine play, and has grown from the energy of the children she teaches. That youthful spirit stays with her in every room, whatever the age of the people gathered in it. As creator of Yoga for Us, a monthly BIPOC-only offering that gathers beyond yoga for collective wellness and joy, and Grief & Praise, a series making room for mourning, joy and celebration to sit together, Marlene redefines wellness as a liberatory, communal practice.

Her choice-based approach centers marginalized communities, especially Black identifying communities, and challenges hustle culture by advocating for balance, presence, and community care.

A former Reggio focused early childhood educator, curriculum developer for charter schools, and music event producer, Marlene has facilitated offerings in Boston, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, St. Thomas, and beyond, collaborating with the City of Boston Mayor's Office, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Spotify, and Nickelodeon. Her work has been recognized by The Boston Globe, Lululemon, and Getaway House.