Shelley Masar began dancing as a child, especially in the water. She folk danced Saturday Nights in University City community center in St. Louis, studied concert dance forms at Oberlin College, The California Institute of Arts, Case Western Reserve University and The University of Illinois where she eventually earned her MA in Dance.

Her first introduction to Yoga was via dancers from NY who loved Yogic insights about the breath, and it’s transformational psychology. She found solace in Yoga as a not-competitive INTERNAL movement practice.

In 1986 Shelley and her husband Terry Masar opened the White Street Arts Center and invited now master Iyengar teacher, Lois Steinberg, to make it her teaching home. Terry and Shelley studied with Lois at White Street for 10 years, through pregnancies and other life cycle changes.
Shelley has taught yoga, and dance influenced by yoga since 1969. She was certified at the Himalayan Institute at the 200 level and continues to deepen her training with teachers like Erich Schiffmann, Judith Lasater, Saul David Raye, Richard Rosen and Tias Little. In 2008 she studied the Yoga of Sound in Tamil Nadu India with Russell Paul. Most recently she has returned to the Somatic investigations (the study of the body) insights of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Irene Dowd, Mable Ellsworth Todd, Moshe Feldenkris, and the practitioners of contact improvisation.

A lover of jazz, Shelley believes in the courage and risks of improvisation, and loves when insights channel through her to meet the shared curiosity of a yoga class or a dance rehearsal.

As someone with serious dyslexia, and anxieties about balance she has learned to cue movement with patience and acceptance.

Her classes are an invitation to trust the curiosities of deep satisfaction, explored, moment by moment, with breath-filled patience.