Next year will mark 20 years since I qualified as a Birthlight teacher, so I have recently been reflecting on my journey. I can honestly say that when sharing these joyful practices with women at various stages of life, I still get the same fulfilment as I did when I first started teaching.
Sarah Bickley shares her story….
I discovered Birthlight when I was pregnant with my first child 23 years ago. As there were no local pregnancy yoga classes, I sought out resources to guide my practice and stumbled across Francoise’s Yoga for Pregnancy book. Using the book and the corresponding VHS video, I practised daily and was able to use a lot of the breathing techniques and movements during labour. While the birth did not go exactly as I had planned, the yoga gave me plenty of self-help techniques to call upon in order to make it the best experience.
When my baby was four months old, I joined a Birthlight Baby Yoga class which we both absolutely loved. It deeply resonated with me and I left the very first class knowing that this was what I was destined to do one day. In the meantime, I explored my yoga further, completing a BWY foundation course and gaining a baby massage qualification. I then had a wonderfully calm second birth, which was helped immensely by the yoga techniques. When my son was eight months, I talked my husband into a family trip to Center Parcs in Suffolk. The only catch was that I would disappear each day to do my Baby Yoga teacher training course, which was conveniently located very close by. I was very grateful to be accepted onto the course as even though I was not yet a yoga teacher, Birthlight were very inclusive.
I subsequently set up my first Baby Yoga classes from my home. These were very small groups who soon became very close friends. Nearly 20 years later my classes are still going strong, having quickly moved out to local halls to accommodate more mums. I still have fond memories of those early classes.
Drawn to helping women achieve the best birth experience for them, I went on to train as an antenatal teacher with the NCT and taught birth preparation courses to couples. In 2012, I started the Birthlight Yoga for Maternity Professionals diploma, and learnt so much from the amazing Wendy Gadsden and Alison Fiddler. I will be forever grateful to Birthlight for creating this course as certainly at the time, as a non-yoga teacher, there was no other route for me to train in pregnancy yoga and I would have missed out on teaching this very special class. I truly feel honoured to be a small part of the amazing journey the women take from pregnancy to motherhood, and have seen many return with their second or third pregnancies. It’s wonderful seeing so many coming back to classes with their babies and forming strong friendship networks.
In 2017, I completed the Birthlight Well Woman diploma, as so many have said how much they missed the pregnancy yoga, so I wanted to create a class for women at any stage of life. The course was wonderful and the rich experience was enhanced by having the chance to share and connect with other amazing Birthlight teachers. It offered so many tools that enhanced all of my Birthlight classes and enabled me to set up a new one. My classes have evolved and are now a mix of strength and nurturing practices, based on the best parts of many training courses I have taken over the years. However, they are still very much underpinned by the Birthlight values of offering supportive, nurturing classes that holistically enhance the well-being of women.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Francoise and all the other amazing tutors for the wonderful work you have done over the years and continue to do, enabling teachers to make a difference to so many women’s lives. I hope I will be lucky enough to continue sharing these wonderful practices for many years to come.
Sarah Bickley – Birthlight Teacher since 2007, teaching Women’s Wellness Yoga Classes, Pregnancy Yoga, Mum & Baby Yoga and Hypopressives (for pelvic floor) in Bracknell (Warfield and Winkfield), Berkshire