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Health & Fitness

Francophone Fairfield 2: Le Yoga

Want to be more flexible? Evelyne Serais can show you how

Feel you need to relax more? Wish you were more flexible? Then you might find yoga helps. Yoga for Everybody in Fairfield might seem an unlikely business to be run by a Frenchwoman, but Evelyne Serais has been its owner for the last year and a half, and clearly loves it. The studio is situated above , the coffee shop on Unquowa Road, and Evelyne is often to be seen there, sipping at her tea as she relaxes with her yoga aficionados.

She was born on the borders of Brittany and Normandy in Northern France, and arrived on these shores 20 years ago. She lived in Boston and New York before finally settling in Fairfield, where she decided to become a yoga teacher. She’s studied at several yoga schools, including Kripalu, a well known yoga retreat in Massachusetts, and started teaching at Yoga for Everybody seven years ago. Since taking over the studio in 2010, Evelyne has added a second practice room and a small shop, where anyone is welcome to check out the yoga clothes, cards, jewelry and other great gift items, like the Buddha bookends that might help you with your meditation.

“It’s not just yoga people who wear yoga clothing,” she says with a gentle French accent, “it’s so comfortable you can wear it any time.”

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Small wonder that YforE has won the ‘Best Yoga Studio in Fairfield County’ for the last seven years running. There are 44 classes a week taught by 18 different teachers, and the yoga students include girls from middle school who have their own class on Tuesdays after school, to women in their 80’s, still staying flexible as they stretch into the various yoga positions. And it’s not just women. “We used to run separate classes for men, but now they’re blending right in with the other students, and seem to prefer it that way,” explains Evelyne. The classes range from an Introduction to Yoga (every Monday night at 7:30) to Kundalini yoga classes (yoga that includes postures and dynamic movement and chanting) to yoga on the beach in the summer, and classes for mothers and babies and cancer patients.

Once a month the studio runs a healing circle, which consists of a 30-minute meditation in the form of a healing mantra, followed by relaxation. An enormous gong in one corner of the studio had me wondering what it was for. “It helps with some forms of meditation,” says Evelyne. “Actually, I don’t play the gong, the gong plays me. The deep vibrations that resonate from the gong penetrate the body and help to clear the mind.”

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In addition to the classes Evelyne has recently started a new not-for-profit initiative called Yoga for All Co-op. “I wanted Yoga for Everybody to be truly for everyone, so I am designing programs that will be for populations coming out of prison, veterans and for women at the Mercy Learning Center.”

If you think you’d like to try yoga but aren’t sure how to begin, the studio has a $30 for 30 days card, which gives you unlimited access to any classes for 30 days. This is an unbeatable offer that will let you find out which type of yoga is for you. I’m planning on buying one myself. After all, there’s no such thing as being too flexible.

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