Yoga gently crept into my life in 2000 while I was training for the New York marathon. After each training session, I would drop into a yoga class at my gym to stretch out, but I soon found that I enjoyed the yoga class more than the running itself! After completing the marathon, I stopped running but carried on exploring yoga, trying out different popular styles such as Hatha, Astanga and Iyengar yoga.

When I found myself pregnant in 2001, I turned to yoga for some time out and found it an excellent way to bring calm into a hectic day and enjoy some bonding time with my baby. I sailed through the pregnancy, naively thinking that my labour would be equally straight forward, but came out of the birthing experience with complications, narrowly escaping a C-section. In part, my negative experience was due to my ignorance of the birthing process and the options available to me and I felt compelled to help other women avoid the traumatic time that I had endured.

I trained as a yoga teacher with the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centre in 2003, then furthered my training with Birthlight as I wanted to specialise in pregnancy, birth and postnatal yoga. I was privileged to be tutored and inspired by Francoise Freedman and Uma Dinsmore-Tuli and it was with them that I truly discovered my passion for teaching pregnancy yoga and the huge benefits that it can provide to a mum-to-be.

Being a mum of three has taught me to cherish and appreciate the miracle of pregnancy and accept that each pregnancy and labour is as unique as the resulting child. My second baby was born with my two year-old as my main birth partner (not by design, I assure you!) and my third baby arrived very calmly, surrounded by her loving family. Each birthing experience has left me with a great respect for our capacity to create a miracle and I now feel very privileged to help pregnant women understand their changing bodies and the options open to them as they prepare for the most significant events of their lives.