Kathleen is the founder and Director of the Bay Area Yoga Center in Green Bay, which she opened in May of 1994. She has been practicing the art of yoga for the past 23 years, and has been a teacher of Astanga yoga in the Vinyasa tradition since 1993. Kathleen is registered with the Yoga Alliance, a national non-profit organization designed to support quality yoga instruction for the public, at the Advanced level. In May of 2005 Kathleen took her priest vows in the Hollow Bones Zen Order, an American Zen Buddhist Community.
Kathleen combines the practice of Astanga Yoga and Zen Meditation in her teachings and as her life’s practice. She is a native of Green Bay, and graduated from the University of Wisconsin Green Bay.
She received her first yoga teacher certification from the White Lotus Center in Santa Barbara, California. Kathleen has studied with senior teachers from many different schools of yoga. As a result, her teaching style is a blend of fluid movement breath and postures known as vinyasa, with the attention given to alignment of the Iyengar and Anusara schools. Kathleen puts high emphasis on her status as a student of yoga and teacher apprentice to her teachers: Michael Stone, Ranjani Cobo, Tracey Rich, Ganga White and Junpo Denis Kelly.
Kathleen is always seeking out her current teachers and experiencing the wealth of knowledge from new ones. Kathleen continues to grow along the path of yoga and in her role as a teacher of this expansive art form. Her passion for the yoga practice is reflected in her warm and friendly teaching style, along with her ability to inspire her students.
Kathleen completed a three year grant program sponsored by the 3M Corporation through St. Norbert’s College in De Pere, which studied the affects of yoga on mentally and physically challenged teens. She currently teaches yoga classes at her studio in Green Bay, at area businesses in her community. Kathleen has worked with Bellin Health and the Prevea Health Clinics to put together programs of wellness through body and mind connection.
Kathleen also teaches yoga/meditation workshops nationally with her teacher Junpo Denis Kelly, teaches one on one sessions privately and gives talks to groups in the community. Kathleen is currently studying the science of Ayurveda, which is the sister science to yoga. She will be appenticing with Blair Lewis PA, author of Happiness: The Real Medicine and How it Works, and the co-founder of Blue Sky School of Massage and Alive and Healthy Institute which is based in Madison, Wisconsin.
Kathleen lives in Green Bay with Doug, her husband of 27 years, and her two cats, Bodhi Dharma and Milo. She has two beautiful grown daughters, Kirsten who lives in Minneapolis and Shannon who lives in Green Bay.
In November 2007, I received registration with the Yoga Alliance at the 500 hour level. My teaching embraces the knowledge I have gained from many excellent teachers while helping students achieve a balanced practice including breath awareness, mindfulness, strength, flexibility, flow and the ageless principals passed down through the ancient yoga lineage. Opportunities continue to arise which allow me to share my skills as a yoga teacher and dietitian through programs that integrate the various limbs of yoga complemented by lifestyle and nutrition education.
The roots of my yoga practice reach back into the 1970’s. I took my first yoga classes as a college student. These classes became the foundation for the exploration of yoga through the wisdom of many teachers. These teachers represented Yogi Bhajan’s 3HO Foundation, Yoganada’s Self Realization Foundation, Swami Rama’s Himalayan Institute, B.K.S. Iyengar and the Siddha Yoga Foundation.
I participated in a yoga teacher training program in Madison WI in 1980 which led to teaching weekly yoga classes in 1981. My daily practice developed further while studying under various teachers, several whom had been trained by Iyengar. During the next two decades, teaching yoga was secondary to developing my professional career as a Registered Dietitian and nutrition consultant and raising two wonderful daughters. However, I continued to teach occasionally at the YMCA, local churches and schools.
In 1998, I began a teaching apprentice program based on the Vinyasa and Ashtanga traditions with Kathleen Kelly Hoffman, owner of the [Green] Bay Area Yoga Center. She recognized my dedication to the practice of yoga and acknowledged the depth of my previous structured and independent studies. I have been teaching weekly classes at the Center since 2002. We have been blessed with workshops conducted by Dr. Mari Elaine Cobo (Ranjani) from Encinitas, California and Michael Stone from Toronto, Canada, who have greatly influenced my personal practice and teaching.
Carol has been practicing yoga for over fourteen years, twelve of which have been as a student of Kathleen Kelly-Hoffman, director of the Bay Area Yoga Center. Her training is in the Ashtanga system and form of yoga, utilizing the vinyasa style. Additionally, she has deepened her understanding of the practice by attending numerous workshops with Michael Stone from Toronto, Canada, as well as with Dr. Mari Elaine Cobo (Ranjani) from Encinitas, California, and others. She has completed her RYT 500 training with Kathleen and has been teaching at the center for nearly a year and a half. Even though she has completed her training, she continually seeks to learn more by attending workshops, studying on her own, and most importantly by teaching others.
Her practice of yoga has had a transformative and healing effect on her life both emotionally and physically. For many years people had asked her if she taught yoga after learning about her dedication to her practice and she always answered, “No, I’m only a student, there’s so much more I need to learn before I could ever teach.” Then she realized that she will always be a student, just as her teachers are still students, and that she already has years of knowledge and experience that she can share with those interested in learning yoga. For her, yoga is a life-long and dynamic practice, continuously growing and changing. One can never finish learning, which is one of the reasons she embraces it. It will always be an evolving, intrinsic part of her life.
Besides yoga, Carol’s other passion is interior design. Her career began over twenty years ago and encompasses both residential and commercial design for existing structures as well as new construction. She believes that there is a strong connection between the spaces that we inhabit and the way that we feel. Form and function, as well as harmony and balance pertain not only to the places we occupy, but also to our bodies and our minds. This suggests that there is a link not only between yoga and design, indeed there is a link between yoga and all other aspects of our lives.
Mardi’s first introduction to yoga was in 1997 when Bay Yoga was near the Greyhound station. Life got busy and she let yoga take a back seat for a while until her back seat got too large to ignore. Mardi began supplementing her regular fitness routine with classes at Bay Yoga. She began pursuing teaching as a way to keep herself fit. She has maintained a 40 pound weight loss for 2 + years. Mardi has taught at the YMCA and the YWCA since March, 2008, and in 2009 is working with Kathleen to earn her 200 R.Y.T. Mardi says, “I used to do yoga once in a while and really look forward to the classes; now I do yoga every day and really miss it when I don’t. Yoga has changed my life.”
Ryanne Cunningham is a nationally registered and certified yoga instructor through the Yoga Alliance and Integral Yoga, Yogaville, Charlottesville, VA.
Stacey started doing yoga in a modern dance class while attending the University of WI – Milwaukee in 1992. She started her training in 1996 at an intensive weekend of Hatha Yoga teacher training, and then revisited the practice with Kathleen when she had her massage business at Bay Yoga by the Greyhound bus station in 2000. Stacey realized what the yoga practice meant to her life while teaching an anatomy course to some of the other instructors at Bay Yoga in April 2008. Since then, the dedication to her practice has grown immensely and in 2009 she started her journey toward RYT 200 with Kathleen. Stacey is proud to have her massage business adjacent to Bay Yoga once again.
In addition to her love of yoga, Stacey has passion for deepening her understanding of anatomy and its function. As a dancer of 28 years, it started with the experience of taking movement to extremes. Seminars at Blue Sky Educational Foundation (an area massage school) are where the scientific understanding started to take shape. This continued through a B.S. degree in exercise science at the University of WI – Green Bay. Stacey has instructed students in biology, anatomy, physiology, kinesiology and massage since 1999. She is currently teaching the anatomy portion of the RYT 200 program. The passion for understanding further depths of muscular function has brought her to embark upon certification in yoga and neuromuscular therapy.
Stacey shares her passion for life with her husband Andres. In her spare time, Stacey enjoys being outdoors and traveling.
