East London yoga teacher Anne Byworth has kick-started The Space East, an all-new yoga, Pilates and Wellness studio, catering specifically for people with learning disabilities.
The 45-year-old has designed the centre to suit members of the community who find visiting traditional health and fitness centres intimidating, and have difficulty mixing with other users.
The centre presents the local people with a one-of-a-kind facility, geared at helping vulnerable people in the community in an all-new way, and Byworth hopes that her outside-the-box thinking will catch on further afield.
Byworth has worked with people with learning disabilities for more than 20 years, specialising in PMLD (profound and multiple learning disabilities) and support work alongside people on the autistic spectrum. Yet the entrepreneur says that the initiative was something that “came along later in life”, as opposed to a lifelong dream.
Byworth has said: “I did not discover yoga until I had my first child and thought it was amazing and loved it from then on”.
“It was after I had a bad back when I started, because I thought I’d have a bad back forever, and then yoga changed that”.
Clearly, Byworth is a firm believer in the benefits of health and wellness for all and, over the past 12 months, she has dedicated her life to setting up her new specialist centre.
“Last year I took redundancy, and started to set up my own sessions – I trained in yoga and did more specific training, for learning disabilities, Power yoga, ADD, ADHD and autism as well as Teen yoga and Yoga4Autism.”
The exciting new facility, The Space East, is already operational in East London. Byworth and her team are currently running “sessions for teens, Pilates and yoga for over 50s, yoga4autism, sensory massage and relaxation, music and movement for learning disabilities, pre and postnatal, back kind yoga and Pilates, parent and baby yoga, and hot, and power yoga”.