Raising The Barre

Feeling groovy… THURS21SEPT23

henever we’re having a momentary lapse of glee here at GG HQ, one surefire way to jolt the happy back is to pop over to The Yoga Barre’s social media.

Those feckers are always up to something, and it tends to largely involve dancing like a loon and smiling like a full moon on a clear night.

“It’s important to point out that this isn’t just Instagram happy,” says head honcho Caroline Whelan when we swung over to Yoga Barre’s Kilcoole HQ this afternoon. “It’s all about that room, at that moment, the dancefloor killer blasting out, and all of us just being together…

“It’s about having fun without any filters.”

Caroline Whelan first starting having fun without filters back in the 1990s, when she grabbed a six-pack of Tayto and her trusty bottle of massage oil, and headed out the door. Studying massage in Melbourne acted as a springboard to New Zealand, Japan, Thailand, South America and beyond. And given that massage is a gateway drug into yoga, it wasn’t long before Caroline found herself living in an ashram in India, learning it from a master.

“When I moved back here to Ireland, and started a family, that got me into pregnancy, pre-natal and post-natal yoga, and as I was studying that whole area, I stumbled upon barre yoga – which was just a revelation. I had finally found my calling…”

A combination of yoga, pilates and ballet, barre is where the workout meets the space-out – so, naturally, Caroline was instantly hooked. And when she opened The Yoga Barre in 2017, the place didn’t so much hit the ground running as hit it grinding, and grooving, and shaking all over.

Today, The Yoga Barre is one notion under a groove, a place where men and women mix their fitness with some funkiness.

“It’s important to me that this place is for everyone,” says Caroline. “So, besides my own classes, we have pilates with Shannon, ballet with The Wicklow School of Dance, over 65s yoga with Hazel and yoga with Gilly Bow Yoga.

“We also believe in supporting other small businesses like ourselves, so we have LaLuna Goodness, Be Kind Incense, The Journal Company, Up Cushions, Ecoset water bottles and Shorebird customised t-shirts and yoga mat bags.”

Which means The Yoga Barre is pretty much a one-stop shop for getting your chakra and your Christmas shopping sorted.

Just how Caroline got from way out there to right over here though, we decided to find out…

If there’s YouTube tomfoolery afoot, you can catch it here. You can find out more about Caroline’s happy haven right about here, follow on Instagram right here, and get in touch directly on info@theyogabarre.ie or 0871501375.