Stephanie Kelley, Instructor

As a physical therapist first, Stephanie blends her knowledge of human movement and disease with yoga to provide classes for healing of injury and for chronic disease management. She graduated from Ohio State as a physical therapist in 1990. In the ten years following, she earned a MS in Orthopedic Physical Therapy and a PhD in Education. Throughout her career she has been a clinician, an educator, and a researcher. Through this she has built a health and wellness practice specializing in the treatment of people with musculoskeletal conditions with a particular interest in spinal disorders. Her years as a physical therapist influences her yoga practice to be focused on alignment, muscle activation consistent with functional movement patterns, and modifying poses to meet the needs of each person.

She came to the healing potential of yoga following the birth of her first child. Pain limited other forms of exercise, so she renewed her personal practice in yoga and was amazed as the post-partum aches and pains slowly dissipated. It was then that she began developing the idea to blend physical therapy and yoga to provide classes for specific groups of people with injury and/or disease. Following the birth of her second child, she started working toward a yoga instructor certification with Aura Wellness Center and became a 240 hour Hatha certified yoga instructor in October 2010. She has since studied with Judith Hanson Lassiter and done intensive self-study of the Iyengar style of yoga that is predominant in the research on Yoga for Low Back and Neck Pain.

Stephanie continues a home practice of yoga to manage her own back and neck pain and to keep up with her husband and 2 children as they play in a variety of ways, such as swimming, hiking, biking, and camping.