Training and experience

I began practising meditation in 1983 and started going to weekly Satyananda yoga classes with Swami Vedantananda and Swami Pragyamurti in London is 1989.  I trained to be a yoga teacher with Swami Vedantananda between 1996 and  2000. Upon qualification I left my work as an IP Litigation solicitor and legal skills trainer, and I have been teaching yoga full time since then. My teaching certificates are from the Bihar School of Yoga and British Wheel of Yoga and I am insured by the British Wheel of Yoga.

I am also an assessor and teacher trainer and in the past I have worked on Satyananda yoga teacher training programmes in India, Portugal and the UK and more recently for the Mandala Ashram in Wales. I am delivering the Yoga NIdra teacher training element on the 2019-2022 Mandala Yoga Ashram teacher training course.

I have further specialist training for teaching antenatal yoga and postnatal yoga with Birthlight, and optimal foetal positioning with Jean Sutton. I trained with Fiona Agombar to teach yoga to people with ME and CFS and have completed a short course with Julie Friedburger (yoga teacher trainer and author of A Visible  Wound: A Healing journey through Breast Cancer and The Healing Power of Yoga.) for teaching yoga to people living with cancer. I have  also completed the Yoga for Healthy Backs teacher training. 

As well as the required First Aid and Safeguarding training, I regularly attend training courses for teachers and yoga workshops to consolidate my learning and for my own benefit. I particularly enjoy exploring the scientific underpinning of the practice of yoga and am fascinated by modern pain science and how much of this relatively new knowledge in the western world can be applied to our practice of yoga for rehabilitation and recovery from injury and surgery. In 2019 I completed a one year Humanistic Yoga course with Pete Blackeby . I now attend regular mentoring sessions with him and weekly yoga classes on Zoom.

To re enforce my learning about the most recent findings in pain science I  attended an “explain Pain” course in March 2019 with the Neuro Orthopaedic Institute.  

During 2019, 2020 and 2021 I have done workshops with Monica Voss and Lisa McRory and continue with regular mentoring sessions with Pete Blackaby and regular classes with Pete and Lisa McRory.

More recently I have done a  CFS & Long Covid Workshop with Fiona Agombar,  and a course on yoga for Insomnia with the Esther Myers Studio in Toronto. Of course,  much of my training has had to move online now, but that means that distance is no impediment and so I find I have access to even more training than before!

So far in 2022, I have done a face to face Yoga anatomy and physiology questions and answers session with Les Dike in which we looked in depth at issues with shoulders, knees and hips and explored the wonder of the human body in action.