Kansas City Yoga Tour

Dance and yoga mix in this artsy city.

By Victoria Moran

Kansas City surprises people. First, most of it isn't in Kansas. A relatively low cost of living means Kansas Citians can work at what they love and have time for an inner life. Because the Unity movement was founded here in 1889, the open-minded spirituality many cities this size regard as New Age is old hat here.

Kansas City loves yoga, and its thriving art, theater, and dance communities funnel students and teachers into myriad classes kept track of by www.yogakc.com. If you stay downtown, you're near The Yoga Gallery, where Patricia Gray and Kathleen Kastner teach 23 Bikram and Ashtanga classes weekly. Yoga Gallery's ample, art-laden, and deliciously urban loft space is in the Crossroads Art District adjacent to newly restored Union Station, with restaurants, live theater, and a science-based theme park for children.

A few minutes south is historic Westport, where plentiful yoga classes coexist with coffee houses, nightlife, and distinctive shops. The Westport Ballet School hosts Yoga for EveryBody, dancer Arielle Thomas Newman's eclectic hatha blend. Nearby at the Acupuncture Society of America, Sujata Stephens, another former dancer, offers the area's only Anusara Yoga classes, blending biomechanics and inner-body awareness.

Westport's Holistic Therapy and Training Center provides comforts from reflexology to Reiki, and houses Bikram Yoga Works, where Kate Papineau Reece and Joe Reece offer daily classes. A few blocks west is 39th Street "Restaurant Row," featuring eateries of every ethnicity: Asian, Ethiopian, Indian—and those are just the vowels.

In a residential area beyond the Plaza, you'll find Body and Soul, where Barbara Anderson offers classes from prenatal to Power Yoga, along with Feldenkrais instruction. Not far away at Heartland Yoga and Acupuncture, Kathleen Coleton sees patients for Chinese medicine and students for Iyengar-based yoga.

Yoga has also made its mark in the suburbs across the Kansas line. The Yoga Studio of Johnson County is a 2,100-square-foot haven where Suzette Scholtes, author of the audiotape Yoga Balance, heads a four-instructor staff emphasizing the healing and transformational potential of yoga.

And based in Overland Park, Kansas, is Wyatt Townley, an erstwhile dancer who devised a system she calls Yoganetics to "extend yoga into motion." Yoganetics includes powerful visualization and the kind of stretching that makes you leave class feeling taller, looser, and downright radiant.

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