Courtesy Photo
The Arkansas Yoga Center has two yoga studios. The one pictured in the photograph can hold up to 50 more people on a busy day.
Twenty years ago, Fayetteville’s culture wasn’t as into yoga as it is today.
“People I talked to about yoga didn’t want anything to do with it,” said Andrea Fournet, the founder of the Arkansas Yoga Center. “They thought it was some kind of religious cult.”
Last month on Oct. 1o, Fayetteville Mayor Lioneld Jordan proclaimed the day to be “Arkansas Yoga Center Day” for its decade of successes and recognized Fournet as the “torch bearer” of yoga in the city since moving here with her family in 1993.
Fournet herself was skeptical of the “hippie thing” that yoga seemed to be until she tried it to help heal her whiplash back injury. It proved to be therapeutic.
After training and becoming a teacher, it wasn’t long before she formed a dream to create her own yoga studio and take on the task to make yoga accessible, sustainable and safe for everyone. But, she had to start somewhere first when she moved to Fayetteville.
“I wasn’t going to just start something and not complete it,” she said. “I wasn’t going to be like let’s do this because it’s a fad, because it’s fashionable right now — and it wasn’t a fad then.”
The first big yoga splash in northwest Arkansas occurred after her husband gave her the idea to get in with the Razorbacks athletic program to help shift the mindset. Fournet was able to snag a meeting with the esteemed former men’s basketball coach Nolan Richardson in January 1994.
After discussing the benefits of yoga for injury prevention with Richardson, she offered to give a session for free and the team ended up loving it, she said. Her big break came when the press attended the practice session she was teaching at. The next day’s paper featured a big photo the headline “Hogs Do Yoga.”
Riding off the success of introducing the Razorbacks to yoga, Fournet pitched a yoga class idea to Washington Regional and landed a gig leading a program there for nine years.
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The Arkansas Yoga Center does a yoga class with the Arkansas Razorbacks men’s basketball team each year as a part of their conditioning training.
During that time Fournet started her television show on the public access network, “Yoga with Andrea” in 1997. This gave her the opportunity to bring yoga to people’s living rooms and teach them yoga and show that it wasn’t such a weird, off-beat thing as it was made out to be. They figured out these were just stretches, she said.
Before long, headlines reading “Is Yoga Against My Religion?” started to appear in the Democrat-Gazzette, and with the testimonies of many celebrities and athletes speaking about its benefits, yoga started to ease its way into the mainstream.
While teaching at Washington Regional, Fournet met Jimmye Whitfield, who’s became a longtime friend and fellow yogi at the Arkansas Yoga Center.
“Andrea is a perfectionist, she has a knack for details,” she said. “She brought a kind of seriousness to yoga (in Fayetteville). She made it a bit more mainstream. Andrea was a stabilizing force. She also presented yoga in a different way, she reached a broader clientele involving the corporate and university crowd.”
Still, the hospital wasn’t enough for Fournet, she wanted to build her own place. So, she did. Behind the AQ Chicken on College Ave., she had found the future home of her yoga center and had it built to her specifications with eco-friendly methods and recycled materials in 2005. The building houses two studios and features a outdoor oasis area with man-made stream for ambiance.
Courtesy Photo
The Arkansas Yoga Center has two yoga studios. The one pictured in the photograph can hold up to 30 more people on a busy day.
“What she’s created here is the only studio that’s built with yoga in mind,” Whitfield said. “Everyone else either rennovates or remodels. What makes that building so special is that everything is so supportive of the yoga practice. The builders got sick of her being always down there telling them to redo things.”
The center’s yoga teacher program has trained more than 100 yoga instructors, many of which Fournet retained at her studio. For 8 years in a row, the center was voted the best yoga studio by Citiscape Metro. It was also featured as one of the “Top 5 Yoga Centers” in Vogue Magazine.
“I tell people you can do it, you just need to have the staying power,” Fournet said. “I’m all about helping people work for themselves.”
The Arkansas Yoga Center provides dozens of styles of yoga for students of all levels, shapes and physical ability. Fournet specializes in VariYoga, a style that incorporates several other forms and focuses on linking breath with poses, and can be modified to meet the needs of the individual. Fournet recently wrote and published a book about VariYoga, and is available online through the center’s website at aryoga.com.
