On the Bristol Yoga Trail 2018

Five yoga studios around Gloucester Road, from Stokes Croft to Ashley Down, will be opening up their doors on Saturday, October 13 for Bristol Yoga Trail. The trail offers a chance to try various yoga styles and practices for free, as well as raising money for local mental health charity Off The Record.

Along with Bristol YogaSpace, Yogasara, Bristol City Yoga and Yogafurie, one of the studios that founded the trail six years ago and will be participating again this month is Yogawest in Bishopston.

Diana Penny runs the studio and teaches classes at Yoga West

Making your way along the leafy path to the yoga studio, run by Diana Penny, feels like a trail in itself. This is one of the oldest studios in Bristol, set up in the mid 80s when yoga was a recent phenomenon. “It’s so different now: now on every street corner you see someone with a yoga mat tucked under their arm,” says Diana. “It’s a bit like New York.”

It seems people are often led to yoga via meandering paths, and Diana is no different, having started out in theatre and graphic design before moving to Bristol to set up the studio, while her colleague, John, discovered that he was already half-way to mastering yogic breathing because of his his deep-sea freediving adventures.

At Thursday morning’s female advanced class, you could have heard a pin drop as women of all ages moved through some impressive choreography. All the classes being put on for the Yoga Trail will include mixed abilities and experience levels. The motto is there is no one way of practicing yoga and no one type of person to practice it.

“There are lots of lots of different styles of yoga,” Diana says. “Yoga all comes from the same family originally, written down by the ancient sages in India, but in coming to the West it has taken different paths. That’s one reason we have the yoga trail: as a newcomer you think, ‘OK, well, yoga is yoga’, but we would always encourage people to try different styles.”

Diana Penny set up her Bishopston yoga studio in the 80s

From Iyengar (known for its use of props and equipment) to fast-flowing vinyasa and hot yoga, each studio takes a different branch of the family tree. On the day of the Yoga Trail, the timetable is structured so attendees could do yoga from morning to early evening if they choose. There will be the option to attend a talk or just come and chat with a teacher over a cup of tea and a piece of cake, if you’re not feeling like taking up your mat just yet.

“It’s a bit like all the museums opening on one day with free entry – wouldn’t that be marvellous!” Diana says. “It just seems like a lovely thing to do to give back and perhaps reach some people who think yoga’s too expensive or not approachable or too scary.

“People quite often say they’d like to try yoga but feel too stiff or too old or too fat, and I always say that’s exactly where you need to be starting. It’s very inclusive and it’s not competitive.

“If you look at Instagram and see people doing mad poses, that’s not yoga. Yoga comes from inside. People come to yoga for all sorts of reasons and there’s a big difference between somebody’s first class and their tenth class and their hundredth class. I think the sort of people who live in Bristol are very open minded, they’re very interested in wellbeing and in the connection with other people.”

The yoga trail opens up studios to those who may want to try a class for the first time

This year, like in 2017, the trail is supporting young people’s mental health charity Off The Record. The therapeutic effects of yoga are widely acknowledged, with Off The Record among its advocates; they include yoga classes in their programme for young people.

“Last year, between the five studios, we raised over £700, and that was just from people coming through the door donating on the day, which is really great,” Diana says. “We’re hoping to double that this year. It’s a marvellous way of supporting the local community.

“All of us are very passionate about about young people’s mental health. I teach teenage classes and growing up is fast and furious. When they get to about 15, it’s all about stress and anxiety; what they are interested in is some way of calming down, particularly around exam time. It’s also about body image, and yoga can help with feeling comfortable in your own body and seeing the bigger picture.”

As Diana puts it: there is more to yoga than “wearing a skin-tight leotard and jumping around the place” – that’s one mortal fear that won’t come true, then, so giving it a go could be well worth it.

Bristol Yoga Trail will run from 8.30am-8.30pm on Saturday October 13. All classes are free with any funds raised going to Off The Record. Attendees are adviced to arrive 15 minutes early. Find out more about class schedules and locations at www.bristolyogatrail.wordpress.com