Work Out Your Mind: Wake Up Yoga Opening Rittenhouse Studio

Wake Up Yoga | Photo courtesy Corina Benner

Anyone who’s walked around Rittenhouse can tell you: There’s no shortage of yoga studios. So why did Wake Up Yoga owner Corina Benner decide to open her third Philly yoga studio at 2030 Sansom Street? Well, as she tells us, the studio was actually sort of a “‘whoops’ baby.” The new studio space, located in the same building as the Shambhala Meditation Center of Philadelphia, where she practices meditation, just kind of fell into her lap. But she did consider whether setting up another studio in the neighborhood, which already has a good number of them, made sense. In the end, she decided it did.

As she says, “There’s so much yoga in Center City, so it was a big consideration: Does Center City need another yoga center? And my hope is that we’ll be able to reach people who might not already be served by the current offerings.”

So what kind of offerings can folks expect? Well, as Benner explains, Wake Up Yoga, which currently has two locations — one in Fairmount and one in South Philly — does offer some physically rigorous classes that will get you a workout, but their philosophy is not that yoga has to a be a workout; a big focus at the studio is “how movement can both benefit your body and help you calm your mind,” she explains.

Benner, who’s been teaching yoga for 18 years, says many, but not all, of the classes on Wake Up’s lineup are strongly influenced by Buddhism, and her goal with all of her studio locations is to provide a space where “people can take off their armor and masks and feel safe and supported enough to really see how they are living and to see how their own actions are contributing to the very things they are trying to avoid in life.” So think of Wake Up Yoga as the spot to go to work out your mind. As Benner says, “To practice yoga just to get better at yoga is really missing the point.”

Benner says the new studio, which features lots of exposed brick and natural light (oooooh!) is roughly 1,500 square feet in size and will have two classrooms, a few changing rooms, and two bathrooms. They’ll start with around four to five classes on the schedule a day. The Rittenhouse studio is slated to open its doors in July. Until then, if you’re aching to get woke, you can get your downward dog on with Wake Up Yoga at their Fairmount or South Philly studio locations.

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