Hi! My name is Macha. I am a C-IAYT yoga therapist, yoga teacher, and music teacher from the beautiful island of Inis Mór, on the West coast of Ireland. This is a little bit of my story.

I was first introduced to yoga as a young teenager when I was at Cólaiste Lurgan, a Gaeltacht summer camp in Connemara. In a sweaty student hall, riddled with social anxiety and migraines, I was herded onto a filthy yoga mat and instructed, as Gaeilge, to breathe and put my head beneath my heart. It was an instant relief, and the practice stepped inside me, turned, winked, and clicked into my soul like a key unlocking a door.

Immediately, I was looking up videos on youtube and practicing them in my kitchen. I came across a 30 day yoga challenge, and I leapt into a daily practice with the relief of someone finding their feet again. The videos were just under an hour a day, and the sole purpose was to show up for yourself and to notice how the generosity of that gesture made you feel. Those first 30 days of consecutive yoga seamlessly became what is now over 13 years of daily practice on my mat – and counting!

Almost from that first conscious breath, yoga became one of the most important things in my life. It was a refuge, a sanctuary. I would come to my mat each day and sink into it, settling, with such gratitude, knowing that for this hour I was finally allowed to exist without pretence, to move with honesty, to face up to all I was feeling and sit with it, knowing that a forgiving awareness was usually enough to shift it. I was lucky to find teachers who allowed me to do this, and I decided that this was the kind of teacher I wanted to be.

After six years of practice, I said I would start teaching. Almost immediately, I was serendipitously granted the UL40 entrance scholarship, which covered the entire cost of travelling to India and enrolling in an intensive yoga teacher training programme. It was miraculous, and two months later I went to the Rishikesh Nath Yogshala School of Yoga and received my RYT 200 hour qualification for Hatha Yoga instructing. I was 19 years old and in my first year of a bachelor’s degree in music at the time. I went to India for six weeks during my winter break. 

When I came home, I was offered a job as a yoga and meditation teacher at my university. I couldn’t believe my luck! I remember the classes cost just two euros to participate in, and I was paid twenty euros per class. I loved every second of it.

All the while, I was studying a degree in voice and performing arts. I now teach singing professionally at The Music School in Delgany, which is great craic! I love to connect yoga and singing and have written several case studies and papers on the great potential for vocal freedom that yoga can offer. I was even invited back to UL as a guest lecturer in 2023 to speak on the topic. Now, that was magic! But I’m skipping forward a bit…

After graduating university, teaching yoga, and traveling for several years, I made the decision to move to Vancouver and enrol in a two-year C-IAYT Yoga Therapy programme to become a certified Yoga Therapist. After a sudden and complete recovery from chronic patellar tendonitis in 2020, I became fascinated by psychosomatics (and still am!). As I also wanted to deepen my understanding of yoga philosophy, I felt that yoga therapy would be the right course for me. This turned out to be an incredible journey, full of intensity, difficulty, and transformative teachings in Canada.

Becoming a yoga therapist has completely shaped how I facilitate and share yoga in my classes. I now live in Greystones with my lovely partner and our small dog, Coco, and I teach classes locally here. My mission is to make yoga more fun, accessible, well-informed, light-hearted, and more allowing of the different moods and bodies that may come to class. I try to hold a space for people that is honest and intentional - a space where they can be completely themselves, and enjoy the art of cultivating a relationship to their body that is positive, curious, and full of reverence. Your body is amazing, your energy is powerful, your mind is a tool, and you have the ability to change your life for the better. I have found that yoga really helps.