Make your restless, sleepless nights a distant memory –
Join Deirdre O’Connor at The Ananta Yoga Studios, The Tap, Kilbride, Co. Wicklow for her popular Deep Sleep Yoga Workshop which has been well received many times in other yoga studios throughout the country.
Workshop details and description –
Date – Sunday 22nd May
Time – 2.00pm – 4.30pm
Cost – €30
Bookings – Call/Text Liz Richards
Tel – 086 8963425
Email – anantawicklow@gmail
About –
This Deep Sleep Workshop will help find the sweet balm of sleep that many desperately crave. Through these sessions you will learn the best and most effective tools and techniques to ensure you experience deep, restful and calming sleep, night after night.
This 8-step programme, created expressly for those who suffer from disturbed and unrefreshing sleep, will guide you gently into deep natural sleep, leaving you feeling revived, restored and ready to face your day with renewed energy.
Topics/Work included in the workshop –
Bedtime Yoga – Soothing Yoga that you can do in the comfort of your own bed to calm and nourish.
Embodied Mindfulness – to tame the ‘monkey mind’.
Deep Zen Breathing – for those nights you are wired to the moon
Self-massage with Therapy Balls – to iron out tight knots of tension and release painful symptoms
Somatic Movement – to release the ‘muscles of anxiety’ in our chest and abdomen
It is the combination of all these methods that make this programme so unique and effective – no one thing works on its own, but bring them all together and you too can make your sleep sweet and dreamful.
Deep Sleep is an integration of Deirdre’s 20 years training in Yoga, Mindfulness, Somatic Psychology, Trauma Resolution, Swedish Massage and Cranio-sacral Therapy.
About Deirdre O’Connor – Holistic Sleep Therapist, Yoga Dip, Craniosacral Therapist CST-T, CST Paedriatics DTR movement Dip, and Advanced
For over 20 years Deirdre has been exploring, training, teaching and experiencing Yoga – initially with the Bihar School of Yoga in India where she trained and lived for almost 3 years exploring many different Yoga styles – Hatha, Bhakti, Jhana and Karma Yoga.
She trained further in Meditation and Buddhist Philosoply, living in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, Thai forest retreat centres and Yogic ashrams in Rishikesh . During that time she undertook many intensive 10-day silent meditation retreats, and wishing to take her practice deeper – undertook three separate meditation retreats of over 3-months duration , one of which was under the guidance of teachers of the Dalai Lama.
“My deep love of movement rests on my faith in our ability to foster a natural self-balancing and healing awareness in ourselves”.
Deirdre’s own awareness in this capacity grew exponentially through a four-year advanced training with Dancing The Rainbow. This training was the ground for all her future work and taught her more about embodiment and being present than any previous trainings had up to that point.
It taught her that Yoga is not about doing the poses perfectly but rather showed her the necessity for slowly releasing and undoing the places in her body that remained tight, painful and downright grumpy!
After her training she continued to be mentored by her teacher, Lani O’Hanlon, for a further two years, while assisting on their two year training. Deirdre spent a further two years with this deep body based exploration working alongside her teacher and mentor, as an assistant teacher.
Her current teachings are based on a merging of the traditional yoga teachings and the intuitive awareness of what our bodies and minds need to heal and replenish themselves. Having trained also in Massage, Homeopathy and Craniosacral Therapy she has a strong basis in therapies which promote this awareness.
Further trainings with Shiva Rea and Twee Merrigan, who both embody this way of teaching Yoga, has deepened her own experience and has shown her many ways to encourage the body and mind to come to a place of calm and deep rest.
Over the years, different forms of movement have allowed Deirdre to relax deeply in the moment, and to uncover the places of holding and resistance in her body and psyche. The practice of 5 rhythms movement meditation has sustained her many times, as has the practices of Movement Medicine, the work of Ya’cov and Susannah Khan , and as well as attending workshops in both she continually draws inspiration from these wonderfully playful and exploratory methods .
Lately she has been inspired by the teaching of Thomas Hanna, and his work of Somatic Movement. With its roots in Feldenkrais movement, Somatics has added a new understanding to how our psyche can hold patterns of anxiety and resistance in the body – and more importantly how we can release these old patterns. Deirdre has completed the initial stage of her training in Clinical Somatics and has been introducing Somatic Movement into her classes and my individual work with clients.
In 2013 she created and developed her Deep Sleep Workshops and Trainings. This was initially in response to her own experience of restless, sleepless nights, and wanting to find a way through them without resorting to sleep medication . After finding her own way back to restful, deep sleep Deirdre decided to offer these solutions to anyone out there who was experiencing similar difficulties, and now runs her own Deep Sleep Clinic in Dunlaoghaire, offering individual consultations as well as workshops and on-line offerings.
“For myself, I continue to practice and train in Yoga, Somatics, and Craniosacral Therapy, simply because all of these wonderful practices make me feel happy and at ease in my body and mind. In many ways and at different times they have been real life-savers. Yoga and exploratory Somatic movement have turned my anxiety into contentment, and has allowed the stiff, tight places in my body and mind to melt and release so that I feel good inside and out.” Deirdre O’Connor