Join us

Sara Jobling

Sara Jobling founder and director of YogaWellbeing and Great North Yoga. Qualifications-B.Ed (1st Hons), Adv Dip Ed., LLB, Senior Yoga Teacher and Yoga Teacher Trainer – Yoga Alliance Professionals, Yoga Teacher – (RIMYI) and Qualified Yoga Therapist – British School of Yoga.

As a teenager I longed to become a vet. However, life doesn’t always go to plan so I began practicing yoga at the age of 18 while at university training to be a science teacher. While teaching biology in secondary schools I trained as an Iyengar yoga teacher and qualified at the age of 26. I have worked with world-renowned yoga teacher and guru B.K.S Iyengar.

Originally, a biologist, I taught science and health education to A’ Level standard for 22 years and worked as a health education specialist for the National Healthy Schools Award. I am a qualified counsellor and professional legal consultant and lectured at universities in science, health and law.

After teaching yoga part-time for 24 years I finally took a leap of faith and began my full-time yoga teaching and therapy business in May 2011. I have loved every day since. I am teaching what I love and it’s a great pleasure to watch my students get fitter and improve their health. Seeing my students transform into stronger, healthier, calmer people is a huge reward that brings a great sense of satisfaction.

I also qualified as a professional yoga therapists, having gained a Level III Professional Yoga Therapist qualification through the British School of Yoga and qualified teacher status with the Institute of Yoga for Healthy Lower Backs UK. I currently run 200 hours accredited Yoga Teacher Training Courses. I didn’t get to be a vet, but I still love all creatures great and small.

Home

Adele Plummer

• Yoga Teacher
• Founder of Yogadoxford Ltd
• Accredited Yoga Alliance Professionals
• Accredited British Wheel of Yoga
• Hatha Yoga

‘Yoga is for everyone regardless of age or fitness level’

My journey began because of my own mental health. I was always on the go and it was time to rebalance, learn to slow down and train my mind. Yoga brought me benefits both physically and mentally. It changed how I see and do things in everyday life. I know my passion and enthusiasm shine through and my reward is sharing with others.  Namaste!

Adrianne Nightingale

Adrianne trained as a professional ballet and contemporary dancer, but following a serious back injury during her five-year full time training she was forced to give up dancing and seek an alternative career path. While working as a Freelance Event Director in a demanding corporate and stress-filled environment for 30 years, Yoga became part of rehab to manage chronic back pain along with general well-being. Adrianne’s love of movement was discovered once more and the back pain diminished!

Now, as a ‘Real Flow Yoga’ trained Vinyasa, Hatha, Yin, Restorative, SUP Yoga, Paddleboard instructor and a Reiki Usui II Practitioner, her approach to life and teaching is fun, energetic and refreshing. Bringing free and functional movement using breath control, introducing the chakra system and adopting positive psychology to give a balanced yoga sequence to any level of practitioner wishing to find their ‘Flow state’ through Yoga on and off the mat with her yoga company ‘Indyoga’.

Donna Ward

Namaste, my name is Donna Ward. I offer yoga and wellness activities in County Durham area and I run Blue Skies Yoga North East. My classroom is nature.

Yoga has been a part of my life for over 15 years, my practice has helped me grow stronger, more flexible, and it has given me a deeper understanding of yoga philosophy, spirituality, psychology, and subtle energies. Yoga inspires me to live compassionately in the moment and has deepened my connection to nature.

I completed my 200-hour Hatha Yoga Teacher Training and Children’s yoga in 2021 and have continued expanding my trainings since.

I will always be a student of the practice and I am deeply grateful for all of the wisdom shared by all of my teachers. In my classes, I love to explore creative sequencing with compassion and playfulness, I also enjoy alignment focus and playing with props. I add a dose of inspiration to help you deepen your practice. I aim to help others thrive in life by nurturing body, mind, soul and subtle energy with yoga and mindfulness. My hope is that you step off the mat feeling refreshed, nourished and balanced.

Dovilé Gandhi

Namaste! I am Dovile Gandhi. I’ve been teaching yoga in Newcastle upon Tyne since 2021. I believe in living a life free of judgement, filled with joy and gratitude. These feelings inform and guide my teaching and practice, which is focused on helping my students better connect to themselves and their surroundings, creating space in their own body to live, and move their bodies comfortably and competently.

At the Great North Yoga Show, I welcome anyone who is ready to relax, work hard, laugh and let go.

Gary Walker: White Tiger Yoga

Georgia Giannopoulou

I am Greek and have been residing in the UK since 2001. I have been practising Hatha yoga for over 20 years, in various styles, mainly with the Dynamic Yoga school, a somatic awareness form of yoga. Yoga has supported my growth and embodiment as an individual alongside my training as a psychotherapist, in living an authentic and embodied life and supporting others in their individual journeys.

I see the yoga mat and the yoga session as a microcosm of a person’s life and way of going forth in the world where all challenges and strengths manifest in the body and the way of approaching the practice. I have undertaken training with Yoga Alliance Professionals and have qualified as a yoga teacher in 2022.

I am a practising psychotherapist and an experienced teacher and group leader of experiential training in a variety of topics. I have taught several yoga classes and workshops and I am continuously in an iterative process of learning from experience and developing my style; my classes incorporate themes that pertain to the attainment of authenticity, acceptance, self-actualisation and resilience through asanas, meditations, imagery, pranayama and chanting.

I bring the whole of myself to the teaching and I attune with care to the students’ needs; I aim to create a holding and inclusive environment for people to explore themselves through their bodies, develop their strength and flexibility, a mindful presence and a calm and resilient way of being. My understanding and therapeutic skills inform my yoga teaching and yoga informs my therapy practice and living.

Gloria Neves

I am a Brazilian native. I’ve practice yoga for many years and I am constantly nurturing my being so as to develop a vibrant soul and greater inner peace.

In 2021 I graduated from my 200-hours Yoga Teacher Training Course with trainer Sara Jobling. Since then, I have taught yoga, meditation and pranayama both in Portuguese and English. I teach mainly vinyasa, gentle yoga and Yin yoga (Paul Grilley’s teachings) incorporating all of these styles with an emphasis on breathing and meditation.

My focus is to bring my students to a greater bodily awareness, to give fully of themselves and to live a life that is empowered and enriched.

For me, yoga is a continually fulfilling path towards physical strength and spiritual wonder.

Kainara Motta

Kainara has almost 25 years of yoga practice. She is a qualified Yoga Alliance Professionals UK Teacher for Yoga and Pregnancy Yoga with interesting in the studies of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Chakras subtle energies. In addition to MeditYoga classes, she offers guided meditations for the InsightTimer app.

Mark Sidney

I was taught to meditate in 1979 and practiced occasionally for the next 30 years. In 2010 I started practicing mindfulness on a regular basis. I worked in homelessness, mental health and addiction services for 28 years. During this time I became frustrated at the ‘revolving door’ service users and became increasingly aware of the power of mindfulness-based interventions inn enabling long lasting change. On a personal level I benefitted from my mindfulness practice in dealing with the stress of redundancy in 2010 and 2012, the closing of my business in 2014, being diagnosed with a chronic illness, Crohn’s Disease in 2015 and managing the pain and other symptoms for the past eight years. I completed my mindfulness teacher training with the Mindfulness Association in 2017.  I qualified as a yoga teacher in 2020.

Mindful Therapies was founded as a social enterprise in 2013 with the mission to bring affordable mindfulness-based interventions and counselling to those who faced financial and other barriers to accessing services.  I joined Mindful Therapies as a director in 2014.

Mindful Therapies provides mindfulness-based training, courses, workshops and classes to the general public on a donation basis. We offer counselling services on a donation basis. We also provide wellbeing training for workplaces and deliver mindfulness and yoga sessions for service users of voluntary and community-based organisations.

As well as delivering services from our centre in Carliol Square in Newcastle city centre, we also deliver sessions in workplaces, community centres etc. Our centre is also used by other organisations through which we offer yoga, acupuncture and other wellbeing related activities.

MeditYoga

MeditYoga is a 2-year-old business offering a combination of yoga, pranayama and guided meditation. We teach online, in English and Portuguese-Gloria and Kainara are both Brazilian- for women or all ages.

Our mission is to guide the students in search of their own inner journeys of well-being and spiritual living.

Gloria Neves is a 200h qualified yoga teacher accredited by Yoga Alliance Professionals, psychologist, a keen explorer of the natural world.

Kainara Motta is a yoga student of a couple of decades and is currently undertaking her 200 hours yoga teacher training. Being deeply interested in understanding human nature, she believes the yoga philosophy can support the path towards a meaningful life.

Pam Snowball

I trained with the British Wheel of Yoga and have been teaching for eight years. I have always had an affinity for yoga and have practiced for over forty years.

I used to have quite a high-pressured management job and yoga became more of a saviour to me. I began by spitting my time between work and yoga and discovered that the person doing yoga was by far happier and content, compared to the person holding down a stressful management job. So I decided yoga was my calling and took early retirement and started to ‘Live & Breathe Yoga’ which is where my business name was founded.

I do a wide range of classes that include the elderly in care homes, one to one sessions, large specific group sessions and my weekly Hatha yoga classes both face to face and on line, where I have a very loyal yogi following. I make it my business to ensure that there’s something for ‘every body’ in yoga.

I never stop learning and embrace new yoga experiences regularly and share these in my own classes. I’m passionate about the feet, the pelvic floor and the beautiful spine and work with Somatic and Myofascial release principles.

Peter Eyre

As a youngster I was a gymnast then pole vaulter and always loved moving my body in different ways. But when I started surfing the deeper connection between movement and the environment felt truly special. As I developed my surfing I became aware of yoga as a means initially to recover/prepare for this activity.

After many years of inconsistent but useful practice, and a career move into teaching ultimately to senior leadership levels, I finally put all the pieces together of the importance of mindful movement, connecting to something that felt internal yet also embraced my space within the wider world and yoga became a much more important part of my regular life.

We discovered Hotpod Yoga in 2018 and the additional benefit of the heat and its influence on the body and mind was transformational, although I still love practicing on the beach. My partner has psoriatic arthritis and the positive reduction in inflammatory response was marked.

I trained with Hotpod Yoga in 2020 and stepped away from teaching to open our studio in Morpeth. Seeing the impact, people feeling more able to connect to their mind and body no matter their conditions or experience, has been such a wonderful step.

Sarah McLusky

I teach relaxed and friendly yoga classes at The Yoga Station Whitley Bay, Linskill Centre North Shields and Cullercoats beach. I discovered yoga in the early 1990s whilst a student in Edinburgh. I’ve been practicing regularly ever since and in 2020 I trained as a hatha yoga instructor with Newcastle Yoga School. I teach a relaxed style of yoga and I am particularly enthusiastic about making yoga more inclusive and accessible.

Stacey Olsen

With over 500 hours of training, I’ve has taught many styles of yoga all over the world including Bali, India, Thailand and her hometown Montreal.

I began teaching eight years ago in 2014, while travelling and currently live in the Northeast where I have a yoga studio. Hotpod Yoga Gateshead is on the Gateshead quayside.

I love to teach both powerful, dynamic flows as well as restorative, nurturing classes to as many people as I can reach.

Tara Sellers

I always say my Yoga journey was one from YANG to YIN, in my younger years I enjoyed running competitively, followed by martial arts and acquiring a few injuries along the way. I immediately felt the therapeutic and healing benefits of a yoga practice and along with an encouraging mentor I soon realised I too wanted to pass the gift of yoga to the masses.

I embarked on my initial teacher training with the British Wheel of Yoga, followed by extensive training with Gentle Somatic Yoga and becoming a member of the teaching faculty. I teach regular classes from a studio in Darlington, and I also love sharing my work through workshops and retreats.

I enjoy a teaching style that offers movement opportunities that encourage the body to unravel postural habits, reflex patterns and much more. I aim to share practices that meet personal needs, an antidote to one’s work environment, stressors, chosen sports and so forth.

I wish to share practices that facilitate moving away from pain, discomfort and disconnect, and enable the practitioner to re-learn, re-organise, and re-connect with the many parts and pieces of themself.

Vicky Nicholls: Yoga Embrace

Zoe James

Zoe James has been teaching for over ten years and her teaching has evolved greatly in the last few years. Encouraging students to find a quieter, calmer and more easeful state of being. Zoe leads Yin, yoga nidra and sound bath workshops all over the Northeast. She also supports yoga teachers at any stage of their own teaching journey through her coaching and mentoring programme. Check out her stand at the show to find out how she can support you on yours.