Harry Taylor

200 Hour TT Simply Embodied Yoga (Holly Warren)

85 Hour Pregnancy, Postnatal & Mum&Baby Yoga (Sally Parkes)

50 Hour Yin and TCM training (Caroline Layzell)

Postnatal / Pelvic Floor (Lynn Murphy)

I live for most of the year in Larkhall, Bath, but spend a lot of time at our home in the French Alps during school holidays, immersed in the beauty of nature - practicing yoga, skiing and hiking.  I’ve been inspired by some incredible teachers to date which have helped shape my ever-evolving yoga practice to date. I enjoyed the meditative stillness of Billy Doyles’ classes back in Highgate in the early 90s, an antidote to my hedonistic and hectic life pre-children!

But then on my journey into parenthood I found Janet Balaskas and the wonderful teachers at the Active Birth Centre (including Lynn Murphy and Lola Alcaraz-Perez). The nurturing, supportive community there touched me deeply. Despite aspirations to train as a yoga and active birth teacher back in my 20s, motherhood took me on a very different path.

Raising four daughters in North London whilst publishing a parenting magazine was all consuming. During  these intense nursery/school years of breastfeeding the babies, parenting, running the busy household smoothly and keeping my magazine afloat, the peaks and troughs of daily life began to take their toll and I developed an auto immune condition. The pattern then emerged, which, looking back with wisdom (and general life experience)  I see that those ‘troughs’, where I struggled physically (and sometimes mentally), were always when my yoga practice wasn’t as consistent…

So, as the children got older, and we decided to relocate back to my home town of Bath – I firmed up my relationship with yoga again, and began a more regular practice. A private lesson with Simona Hernandez at Yoga Bodhi, back in 2016 was a turning point for me in my yoga practice. This was the first time anyone had ever guided me not to ‘lock my joints’, something as a hyper-mobile yogi I had been doing without even realising, ever since I was a child! I needed to build up my strength drastically, especially after a knee injury from skiing. I started to take regular classes with several Bath teachers, and was particularly inspired by Ruth Timms and her gorgeous balance of mindfulness and movement.

From here, after two of my daughters had flown the nest, and 25 years of parenting, a chance half day retreat at Well Bath with Holly Warren and Ruth Timms, led me to sign up once and for all to Holly’s 200 hour Simply Embodied Yoga Teacher Training. It was an incredible year of deep learning.  The depth and intricacies in Holly’s beautiful teaching ensured my relationship with yoga could really start to unfold, ensuring the little shoots had transformed into solid roots. Towards the end of our course when we were ask what yoga meant to each of us, I pondered, and replied “finding the stillness within each pose, and the depth and space beyond that…."

Shortly after qualifying, I signed up for Caroline Layzell’s Yin Yoga and TCM training, having benefitted from several years of Traditional Chinese Medicine getting my auto immune condition under control. This was closely followed by my 85 hour Pregnancy Postnatal and Baby Yoga qualification with Sally Parkes, to finally complete the qualifications I had set out to gain all those years ago! And now, the enthusiasm and love I have for yoga and sharing its benefits with the wider world, are what came to inspire me to start the Holly Tree Yoga Collective. Passionate about continuing my learning journey, we come together here and embody Energy, Sangha and Growth, perfectly illustrating what I feel is important in our one life!