Fierce Grace Brixton

       Can you touch your toes? Fierce Grace Yoga Brixton is holding a free outdoor class in Windrush Square as part of a 30 Day Challenge to limber up locals, writes Laura Burgoine... The 20 minute yoga class, lead by Fierce Grace founder Michele Pernetta, promises to be a mass celebration of yoga, as well as raising money for a good cause. As part of the challenge founder of the Brixton Soup Kitchen, Solomon Smith, is attending a Fierce Grace Yoga class every day for 30 days in the lead up to the open air event, in the hope he can touch his toes on the day. Money raised on the day will go towards Brixton Soup Kitchen’s crowdfunding campaign to buy a mobile soup kitchen. “Fierce Grace approached us and I thought it was a brilliant idea”, Solomon tells the Weekender. “All of us at the Soup Kitchen are always around food and we’re always trying to lose weight. It’s a constant battle. This is a good way to put the weight back in motion”, he says. “I’ve never done yoga before”, he laughs. “I’m very far off being able to touch my toes!” Fierce Grace founder Michele Pernetta says she’s delighted by how quickly Brixtonites have taken to the new studio on Coldharbour Lane. “We somehow seem to have struck a chord with the “old” and “new” Brixton community, reaching out to all elements”, Michele tells the Weekender. “People love our vibrant but cool studio situated just past Brixton Village with our excellent and consistently reliable facilities and friendly and well trained staff who members look forward to seeing." Introducing Bikram Yoga to the UK in 1994, Michele has been teaching yoga in a heated room for over 20 years. “After teaching over 200,000 people and opening four studios, I decided I wanted to teach in different ways, to a wider audience, and also vary the temperature of the room in order to provide both Warm and Hot classes,” she recalls. “I love a heated room for yoga, it relaxes the muscles, as well as the mind, and you are not stiff the next day if you do yoga in a hot room as opposed to a cool room. The sweating is cathartic, and the body and mind feel open and receptive.” Fierce Grace offers both warm and hot yoga classes and the heat is “moderate not overwhelming,” Michele says. One of the club’s members, a senior teacher, used a Fierce Grace teacher to introduce yoga to her GCSE students to help them cope with stress and anxiety leading up to exams and has found it so effective that she is now rolling it out throughout the Academy, Michele says. “This is really what the Touch Your Toes campaign is about:

18 October 2 2015

    

whatever your shape or size or age or level of fitness, you will find that you will benefit enormously from regularly practising Fierce Grace yoga - and have some fun and meet some great new people doing it!” After 23 years in the hot room, Michele admits she is a devotee. “I am a Fierce Grace devotee not a “hot” yoga devotee as not all hot yoga is created equal,” she admits. She says Fierce Grace builds strength, endurance, fitness, flexibility and vitality. It promotes weight loss and healthy toned muscle, as well as fluid flexibility and a full range of movement. “I am not a fan of overheating, it’s not conducive to a great class if you are just struggling to survive the heat,” Michele explains. “Fierce Grace’s best selling points are that it prevents injury by allowing the muscles and joints to operate at their optimal working temperature, it aids detoxification through sweating and it makes stretching easier.” Michele created the Fierce Grace system of five classes after fifteen years of research, studying with different teachers and attending as many yoga classes as possible.

“I feel my Fierce Grace system allows our different energies to be addressed, and the over 150 poses in the system allow us to move the body in every different way, and bring out its different possibilities energetically,” she begins. “Without sounding too strange, this means that we need different classes to express ourselves fully: a slow relaxing stretch class to get connected and sensitive, a fiery energetic class to ignite our energy and stamina, a pleasurable, easygoing, flowing class to help us become relaxed, graceful and opened on every level, and a linear more disciplined alignment class to bring power and form.” “I felt the human body was too complicated to be sentenced to one way of moving." Fierce Grace Yoga’s Touch your Toes class is on Saturday 17 October at 2pm. Admission: free. All ages and levels are welcome; all you need is a yoga mat! Fierce Grace is at 372A Coldharbour Lane, SW9 8PL. Phone: 020 3719 3394. www.fiercegracebrixton.co.uk

[email protected] /

www.weekenderlife.co.uk