Sighle Mc Donnell y.h.r.t (c)

Sighle has been teaching yoga for over 20 years and is an experienced instructor in many schools of Yoga. It was as a result of her own difficulties with Yoga Asanas (after spinal fusion in the 1980’s) that she embarked on a training in Remedial Yoga with Howard Kent at the Yoga Foundation For Health, Ickwell Bury, England .The “essence” of the classical postures is respected in Remedial Yoga, yet these movements have been creatively modified for the less able bodied.

As a Remedial Yoga teacher Sighle has been able to create a safe, gentle yet effective approach to the practice of Yoga. This has naturally evolved over the last 16 years in the form of Yoga for Pregnancy classes. Over the years, these classes of Yoga for Pregnancy have proved to be of great benefit to many Irish women and have successfully provided these women with a “bag of tools” for motherhood. Sighle has helped to guide women successfully through their pregnancies, with the confidence to birth well, and later recover the strength and well being needed for motherhood.

Sighle as the mother of 3 adult sons, feels that now she can provide for other women, that support which was not available 30 years ago.
It has been wonderful for Sighle to bring Yoga into the labour ward, to be present in assisting labour and to witness several Yoga Births.
 
More recently, Sighle completed training in Contemporary Yoga, which has helped her to look at the Therapeutic benefits of Yoga, and to acknowledge the many ways that this ancient wisdom is relative to our lives today.

It is Sighle’s wish now, to extend her years of experience and knowledge to you - and hopefully reach out to many more pregnant woman in the form of this DVD, enabling them to reap the many benefits of Yoga for Pregnancy in the comfort of their own home.  

Dee O'Rourke

Dee O’Rourke gave birth to her first daughter Petra seventeen years ago. It was an induced birth with intervention and an epidural. When Dee was having her second daughter Toni she was practising yoga and found it enormously helpful and gave birth naturally within ten minutes of arriving at the hospital. When her Son Jonah was born she practiced yoga every day and again this encouraged her to have another natural birth in Mount Carmel. When Dee came around to having her last baby she decided to give birth at home with the assistance of the community midwives.

She had been teaching yoga for pregnancy for six years at this stage and she felt this gave her the confidence to have a home birth. Something she would never have considered seventeen years previously. She found the experience to be empowering and was enveloped in care from the community midwives.

She found the recovery from the birth to be fast and painless compared to previous experiences. She was older but now much fitter the main difference was her legs she had no leg cramps during the fourth pregnancy and after the birth no “jelly legs”.

Today Dee enjoys teaching yoga and pregnancy yoga in the Dalkey yoga studio. Particularly passing on her knowledge and assisting women to have a more enjoyable pregnancy and sometimes a better birth. Dee has attending many births including Blathnaid ni Cholaighs(of the afternoon show) last baby boys birth, she helped blathnaid in a doula role.

Dee has trained with Marie Quail yttc, Marion Kilburn Iyengar Yoga level 1 cert. More recently Dee trained with David Swenson in Goa India. She also teaches mum and baby classes with postnatal yoga exercises.