EPISODE 36
October 27, 2022
Introduction
British-Australian, Georgia Marnham, is an Iyengar yoga instructor whose story is full of twists and turns and fateful events that caused her to make dramatic shifts in her life’s direction, including country moves with extreme consequences: When in Sri Lanka, the 2004 tsunami struck; while living in Johannesburg, and with 2 young babies, her home was violently burgled; in Brazil, she and her husband chose to live in an isolated eco village in Bahia where Georgia was often solo-parenting her 3 young children while her husband traveled. Georgia credits her success navigating these challenging circumstances, including the impact of surviving a near-fatal car accident as a 20-year-old, with her daily yoga practice, saying that it’s the reason for her spiritual, psychological and physical well being.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Louise: Welcome to Women Who WaIk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom – reminding us that women can do extraordinary things. You can find a transcript, with pictures, to each episode, and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:52] Louise: Hello listeners. Welcome to your Episode 36 of Women Who Walk. This episode is the last in a series of interviews that I’ve been doing with women who’ve moved to Portugal, women who are self-employed in the healing arts as holistic, alternative, or non-medical practitioners.
[00:01:08] Louise: The theme will shift in my next interview with Landis Wyatt, a Canadian living for the past 15 years in Liberia.
[00:01:19] Louise: And now to today’s guest, British-Australian, Georgia Marnham, an Iyengar yoga instructor whose story is full of twists and turns and fateful events that caused her to make dramatic shifts in her life’s direction, including the numerous country moves she made independently, and then with her husband.
[00:01:43] Louise: One of those events was a horrendous car accident at age 20, which left her with injuries that to this day, almost 40 years later, impact Georgia’s physical wellbeing. But she credits her daily yoga practice with her recovery and the mental and spiritual serenity she embodies today.
[00:02:05] Louise: Georgia spent her first seven years in the UK and then her family moved to Australia. Though she says she always longed to go back to the UK, which she did, as is the case for many dual-passport holders, she has a foot in both countries.
[00:02:25] Louise: And certainly Australia is where she made her mark with a stellar career in broadcast journalism. She is the recipient of the 1994 ABC Radio National Prize for Excellence in a Radio Documentary, titled, Suffering in Silence, which she independently researched, wrote, edited, and produced. Five years on, she was principal staff writer at Australian Geographic, a pictorially gorgeous world-class publication.
[00:02:59] Louise: And so I was eager to learn why she’d left this all behind for London, followed by a move to Johannesburg and then Sri Lanka, and then a remote ecovillage in the light jungle of Bahia Brazil, where she and her family lived for 10 years before another relocation to Portugal four years ago.
[00:03:21] Louise: Georgia’s is one of the more intense, perhaps extreme stories I’ve had the honor of assembling for the Women Who Walk podcast. I’m sure you too will come away wondering ‘how on earth.’ how did she manage, survive, find the courage to continue saying ‘yes’ to challenging situations? In response, I’m sure she’d say that her daily yoga practice is her saving grace.
[00:03:58] Louise: Welcome Georgia. Thanks for joining me on Women Who Walk this morning.
[00:04:01] Georgia: Happy to be here.
[00:04:02] Louise: As we get started, I, I usually have guests set the scene and tell us about their country of origin, perhaps some early childhood memories. So your childhood was split between two countries, the UK and Australia. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood in the UK and then what it was like moving from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere when you were only seven.
[00:04:29] Georgia: Yeah. Okay. I was born in London, had early years there. I don’t have much memory of that, maybe the first two years there. And then we moved to Wales and lived on a farm, with a lot of animals. I have incredibly fond memories, 3, 4, 5, 6, I guess four years there. Most children love animals, but they really were my life. I spent my time outdoors. I had two elder brothers, so I kind of just fitted in with them and was constantly up trees or down in the river. We had two horses, we had sheep, we had a lot of dogs and a lot of cats. That was my life.
Georgia and her stepsister on the farm in Wales
[00:05:06] Georgia: In fact, I was just in the UK last week and I went and took my kids to see the farmhouse I grew up in. It was identical. It was very strange to go back. I, I was in heaven in, in Wales. I loved it there.
[00:05:18] Georgia: I had quite a complicated family story. When I was two, my mother and father separated so, I, I didn’t have really any memories of my blood father. And my mother was quickly married to an Australian who’d been previously married with two children. It’s, it is complicated. So my, my mother was married and had two sons and then they were divorced and then I came along with her next partner. So my two older brothers were actually half-brothers. I never really understood that till I was much older. They were always felt like my full brothers. Anyway, after my mother married an Australian, his ex-wife died, and overnight, his children from his previous marriage came to live with us. While living in Wales, I suddenly had a sister who was 22 months older than me and a brother who was three years younger than me.
[00:06:07] Georgia: And at the same time my mother became pregnant. So the sixth child of the family arrived within a year. So there were six of us from three fathers and two mothers. And then suddenly one night it was announced that we were moving to Australia.
[00:06:23] Georgia: This was after a house fire. Our lovely cottage in Wales. We woke up in the middle of the night and it was on fire from a thunderstorm, got struck by lightning. And after that, we moved to Australia. I’d just had my seventh birthday and I was quite distressed. All the rest of the family were absolutely delighted to be going to Australia and I was devastated because I didn’t wanna leave all my animal friends.
[00:06:47] Georgia: To answer the second part of your question of moving to Australia, it was such a huge contrast. The climate, the environment. We went from the depths of winter to baking summer. It was a big, big shock to the system. I can remember the first night we stayed in Sydney in a family friend’s house, and there were cockroaches everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it, and all the other locals would say, ‘No, no, that’s, that’s normal. That’s normal.’ I do remember that first impression being quite, you know, not impressed.
[00:07:21] Georgia: From there we moved up to Grafton, where my stepfather’s parents lived. My stepsister, the one just slightly older than me, and I, were put into a catholic school that was run by nuns. It was such a contrast to this little Welsh public school that we’d come from. It was quite a shock. And I think we were there for about six months and neither of us liked it at all. We’d hold hands, maybe it was quite a good bonding for us to look after each other cuz they were quite scary. The teachers. From there we then later moved down to Nelson Bay in Newcastle, closer to Sydney for those who don’t know.
[00:07:55] Georgia: And we spent a year going to, uh, a public school in Nelson Bay, which was a lot of fun. We lived by the beach and the joys of Australia started to open up a little bit for me. From there we moved to Sydney and life became a bit more stable. And I went to primary school and high school in North Sydney. And we did move a couple of times during school, but I didn’t change school.
[00:08:18] Louise: The one thing that strikes me as you talk about these early childhood experiences is the very different cultures that you moved from and to, and then even in Australia, the different cultures of the schools that you attended. Do you think those early childhood experiences set a precedence for you to then explore in the way that you have with the travel that you’ve done.
[00:08:47] Georgia: The truth is that I never enjoyed Australia. I always longed to go back to England. I always longed for that, that farm life, which was such a childhood thing. I, I never got back to it. But also I think the fact that once I was eight or nine and I learnt that my stepfather wasn’t my real father, I then put this intention that when I was 18, I was gonna go and find my real father, who I knew was in England.
[00:09:16] Georgia: Late childhood, teenage life, I knew that the day I could get on that plane, I would be out of there even, not necessarily to leave forever, but just to go back and recalibrate. I always felt a little bit lost in Australia and I was always the other, the English child, and at first, I didn’t get it.
[00:09:35] Georgia: I can remember it was hard for my mother. When we first got there was a parent-teacher night and they said, ‘Bring a plate.’ And so she turned up with a plate and she was so embarrassed because it meant bring a plate of food, like bring a contribution and she’d come with an empty plate. And that’s the kind of example of many things in those early years where we just, Yeah, like you say, the cultural differences, even though it’s both English speaking countries, the cultures, especially in the seventies, were, were very different for sure.
[00:10:03] Louise: That’s an awkward story, I should say.
[00:10:05] Georgia: Yes. Yeah.
[00:10:06] Louise: Something I’m sure that many people who’ve moved countries can identify with. Well, just before we started recording, we had a brief chat and we talked about you taking a gap year at 18, and in fact you did leave Australia and off you set. Can you tell us about that gap year and where you went.
[00:10:27] Georgia: I worked for that gap year from the age of 13. I started saving up, first doing a paper round and then working in the supermarket of Woolworths and the chemist. I worked, every Thursday night, Saturday morning, all the way through high school, when I was allowed to. So I had good savings by the end of high school. And also the gift from my mother and stepfather to all of us is those of us that did the HSC were given a ticket.
[00:10:53] Louise: I’ll just clarify for listeners that HSC in Australia is the Higher School Certificate.
[00:10:57] Georgia: Yes, the baccalaureate. Exactly. My older brothers didn’t do that; my older sister did and she went to England when she turned 18, and then it was my turn. But once I had the ticket and I’d done a course in how to serve drinks, like a bar course, and a few things that I could work, I then actually set off to North America to Canada, because I had a nannying job. I finished my, my High School Certificate. I did a week’s bar course, and then I got on a plane and I went to Toronto and I worked for two months as a nanny. And then I went on a big adventure.
[00:11:30] Georgia: For $99, you could buy a ticket on a Greyhound bus and go west, from Toronto and get off as many times as you liked. I did that and I crossed all the prairies and Saskatchewan and all the provinces in Canada. And then when I got to Calgary, I started heading north and I ended up hitchhiking. I was only 18-years-old and had all sorts of scary and wonderful adventures, and I ended up getting a ferry up the inside passage and then hitching all the way across to Anchorage, all the way across Alaska. Once I got back down to Vancouver, this ended up being a four month journey, I worked again as a bar maid and you were supposed to be 21. I told fibs and said I was 21 and I managed to get a month’s salary before they said, ‘You really need to show evidence of your age.’ So I said, I have to go now.
[00:12:19] Georgia: I then bought another 99 dollar bus ticket and I managed to go all the way from Vancouver down to San Diego. I saw all of that west coast of the USA and then continue across the bottom across the Jacksonville, in the top of Florida, all for $99. And I got off and on all the way along. So that was exciting. From there I got the train back up to Toronto, to fly to Europe.
[00:12:43] Louise: You flew to Paris?
[00:12:45] Georgia: Yeah to meet my father. He doesn’t say meeting cuz he of course knew me, but for me it was a re-meet, shall we say. That was wonderful because when I got to the airport in Toronto to get on the plane, the check-in lady said, ‘No, no, you’re not on today’s flight. You’re on tomorrow’s flight and I’d said goodbye and I told my father I would be there the next day. At that point I lost it, you know, 16 years of emotional anticipation caught up with me.
[00:13:12] Georgia: I told them my story and they said, ‘With that story, you can fly first class.’ So for the first only time in my life I got put into first class of Air Canada and flew across to Paris to reunite with my father, which was a wonderful experience. He was there waiting and it was all you could have asked for, and we became very close.
[00:13:34] Louise: That’s a lovely story.
[00:13:35] Georgia: Yeah, it was really. I felt like I was the queen, flying in style. It was really, really wonderful. I spent some time there, and then I also traveled around Europe.
[00:13:44] Louise: Is your father French or was he just living in France?
[00:13:47] Georgia: His wife was French and he’d had a daughter the previous year. He said, he’s suddenly got two daughters in one year, cuz I’d come back. They since had another child, who are all grown up now of course. He was working as the French correspondent for The Independent. He was based there as a journalist and he’s a writer and a journalist. I did some research and worked for him, saved up some more money, and then backpacked around Europe.
[00:14:12] Louise: That’s the career that you went into, isn’t it? Journalism?
[00:14:16] Georgia: Yes. Yes, Exactly. Maybe inspired by him, I would imagine. Because I’d read some of his books as a teenager and I’d, I’d seen what he did.
[00:14:25] Louise: Well then you head back to Australia, and you’d sent me a bit of information about your journey and I was awe struck by what you’ve packed in. But one of the things that you indicated is that you had, um, a very serious car accident at 20. Now that was back in Australia?
[00:14:44] Georgia: After that exciting year of exploring North America and Europe and meeting my other part of my family, I went back and I went to university in Bathurst and I did my first year there studying communications. It was the second year of my degree, I’d finished my exam, it was June, it was the end of that first semester, and my mother had in the meantime moved up to Byron Bay and I was driving back with a friend from Bathurst to Byron Bay. We were driving through the night and I was actually asleep and my friend was driving and there was a head on collision somewhere outside Glen Innes. And both the drivers were killed.
[00:15:24] Georgia: I was the only survivor. It was, it was terrible. They took me to the local hospital and then took me by helicopter down to Sydney’s Royal North Shore, and I was unconscious for a couple of days. And yeah, I had serious long, well lifelong injuries from that.
[00:15:37] Louise: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:37] Georgia: But survived, you know?
[00:15:39] Louise: Mm-hmm. So when you say serious injuries, were there broken bones or internal injuries?
[00:15:46] Georgia: Serious head injuries. Friends that came to visit me in hospital had to be counseled before seeing me cuz my head was so full of fluid. It was actually almost as wide as my shoulders. All this side of my face was injured. I had very bad brain bruising across here. Even to this day, this side of my head is numb. I fractured two vertebrae in my spine. My back injuries back and neck whiplash were quite serious. They talked about putting a metal rod in my spine at the time, and I just wasn’t having any of it. It was many years of, of recuperation and even now, I mean, it led me into where we’re probably headed towards is, is this Iyengar yoga system that I practice and teach. It really, it really saved me spiritually, I mean mentally, psychologically, and also physically.
[00:16:32] Louise: Yes. Yes. That is where we’re heading. We’re going to talk about you as an Iyengar yoga instructor. That accident was a turn, the first turning point in your life because it, it ultimately set you on the road to practice Iyengar yoga .
[00:16:48] Georgia: Yeah. I mean, it was huge. It, it was probably the biggest, it was like a 45-degree turn. I was traumatized because of my friend dying. I was traumatized because I felt like I’d finally been starting life from a very tricky childhood, with such a mixed family and parental separations and all sorts of things having to deal with there. And I felt like I was just starting life, you know? And it just felt like youth had been ripped away from me. I was very active runner and a lot of, did a lot of sports. None of that could be continued. It changed everything. Forever really. But in time I can see I made it work for me, or I can see why it happened, or whatever your philosophy is and looking at these things, it, it, yeah, it was just a whole new, new road for me.
[00:17:35] Louise: Mm-hmm, indeed.
[00:17:37] Georgia: Yeah.
[00:17:37] Louise: One of the interesting things about interviewing the last four women, and now you are the fifth woman who has chosen to work in the area of non-medical or holistic health as a practitioner, is that each of you have had some kind of event in your life and often some kind of health event or epiphany that has been a crossroad. In other words, you’ve sort of left the life that you were leading behind in order to pursue this life of healing. First, your personal healing, and then, uh, supporting others in their own healing journey.
[00:18:16] Louise: I’ll just clarify for listeners, so that they can perhaps visually place where this happened, you mentioned that you were driving down to Byron Bay, so this is on the east coast of Australia, isn’t that right?
[00:18:29] Georgia: Yeah, it’s not up the coast, cuz Bathurst is three hours inland from Sydney. It was in the country but it definitely was northeast. So heading to the coast on a diagonal line as it were.
[00:18:40] Louise: I see. Okay. Thank, thanks for putting it in place for us.
[00:18:44] Georgia: But also, just to backtrack, I just wanted to agree with you in that I think most therapists, they do come to that therapy for that very reason. They found something that’s worked for them, well this is how it works for me, but I think it’s very common, like you’ve said, the previous women you’ve interviewed are the same, found something that’s worked for you and then you find you wanna share it and help others with something that’s helped you.
[00:19:07] Georgia: Even when I meet psychiatrists and psychologists, you dig a little bit deeper and they’ve come from a background that they’ve needed some help, and then they’ve ended up, not always, but I think it, it’s quite far across a lot of therapies that happens.
[00:19:21] Louise: Quite right. But what is unique, of course, about each of you is that, um, you’ve moved countries and have evolved your practice, as you’ve crossed borders, and cultures as well. So we’ll get there when you tell us about the work that you do now, but so after this accident, what happens? Do you go back to university?
[00:19:43] Georgia: After the car accident, once I was released from hospital, I went to my mother’s in Byron Bay and I was told to take at least six months off from university and to rest and recuperate and I guess I must have been a pretty determined young woman because I didn’t wanna do that. And, in fact, in Australia there’s this wonderful system called the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service who assisted me in my recovery financially and with a lot of services. Quite incredible actually, now that I’ve experienced developing countries and different health systems. It was extraordinary. But I said I wanted to go back to university, even if I failed, I wanted to be doing something.
[00:20:26] Georgia: I didn’t wanna be lying on my back and just waiting for recovery to come. Also, I wouldn’t say I was depressed, but I was pretty low. I mean, depression is something more serious, but I was heavy spirited, let’s put it that way, and I didn’t wanna dwell on it, and I just wanted to face what had happened. I wanted to go back to Bathurst. I wanted to go back to the house that I just got in that car and, you know, it was part of my, my mental recovery. So they let me do that.
[00:20:52] Georgia: I spent a couple of months resting, it happened in June. July, we were off for the university break and by September I was back in Bathurst. But they put me on campus in a room, cuz I wasn’t walking easily, so I could easily walk to the classes. I was given all the equipment, like a, a kneeling chair and a height for the computer and a better computer. I mean, extensive services to assist me.
[00:21:19] Georgia: I mean, the whole of the university knew about this. When it happened it was big news across the state. It was on headline papers and everything. It was a very dramatic car accident, so everybody knew about it. So I had a lot of support from the students and the Chaplain, from the lecturers. Everyone was looking out for me. It was quite amazing.
[00:21:37] Georgia: Also, because I was going for insurance, every six weeks, I had to travel down to Sydney and have a whole series of medical appointments and have IQ tests done because they were trying to establish the amount of brain damage I’d experienced. All of that was going on at the same time as well, for quite a long time, maybe two years, I think. Of course, the insurance companies didn’t wanna pay out and, and it was clear that I had serious memory problems. I had no short term memory at all. People would see me the next day and say, I saw you yesterday, and I wouldn’t remember. I couldn’t ride my bike anymore because I’d get dizzy and fall off. It was a long recovery.
[00:22:13] Louise: But you were able to graduate from university despite all the …
[00:22:17] Georgia: Yes. In the end it was like only six months later. I didn’t do it within the three years, so that, that semester that I did basically didn’t count. I did somehow get through American politics and I don’t know what it was, existential literature or something, but I, I don’t remember much about those courses. I just scraped through basically, but because I dropped two subjects, I, I then just took a lighter load, I think three subjects and slowly built up, and in the end did it in three and a half years instead of the three years.
[00:22:47] Louise: I’m just thinking again, our pre-show chat when we were talking about the chronology of events of your life, you, you said that after the accident you then went abroad again at, at what point did you do that or did you feel even able to travel?
[00:23:01] Georgia: Well, that’s a bit of a love story cuz what happened when I went up to Byron Bay and was in recuperation, I met someone who’s now my husband, and he is from South Africa. His name’s Michael, and when I went back to university, he was working in Byron Bay and then when I finished that semester in November, he’d finished his contract in Australia and was heading back to a job in Zimbabwe and invited me to go with him.
[00:23:30] Georgia: I went to Zimbabwe for a couple of weeks and then South Africa, and then the big exciting adventure to the Okavango swamps in Botswana. And then another trauma in my life where either stay in South Africa and leave my degree and everything and, and continue life with him or break up, cuz he had work in South Africa. So we split up at that point and went on with our separate lives. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been traveling at that point. It was because he was South African. He knew the regions. I was with him.
[00:24:01] Louise: Ultimately you got back together again. But it sounds like you made the decision to split up so that you could at least, um, pursue the work that you had trained to do and establish a career for yourself back in Australia.
[00:24:15] Georgia: Yes. I was only 21 and I wanted to finish my degree. If it’d been later in life, maybe I would’ve, It just wasn’t time to settle down for me.
[00:24:23] Louise: Mm-hmm. I understand. You did have quite a career back in Australia. You made an award-winning documentary, and you were working in radio. Fill in the blanks there for me.
[00:24:35] Georgia: Sure, sure. I went back and finished my arts degree and then started working at Australian Consolidated Press in the marketing department. By that time I wasn’t doing journalism. I’d just done a major in English and politics. Graduated with arts and didn’t really enjoy working for glossy magazines in a marketing department and wanted more. So then decided to go back to Bathurst University; it specialized in communications and media, so it was the place to go.
[00:25:06] Georgia: I did my Master’s in Journalism specializing in broadcast journalism. For my Master’s, that’s when I made the documentary, which gained the award. After that, it was about 1992 and we were having the recession. It was very hard to find a job. One of my father’s cousins worked for AMP, a big Australian finance company, and got me work. That’s how I ended up working in the finance industry. I was very grateful to just get a job. And once I was there, I was then able to transition back into journalism through finance journalism, having worked at AMP. And from there I slowly got out of finance or journalism into working for Australian Geographic, which was much more my cup of tea.
[00:25:50] Louise: I remember when that was first produced, Australian Geographic, it was a fabulous publication.
[00:25:56] Georgia: Really, It was a wonderful job. Yeah, it was great.
[00:25:59] Louise: But then in your early thirties you moved back to the UK, specifically London. Why when your career was apparently prospering in Australia, did you make that move back to the UK?
[00:26:11] Georgia: Again, personal reasons. I was really happy with my career and my work. But two things happened: in the meantime, I had got married and that marriage wasn’t working out, and I felt I needed a break from that. But most of all, I’d always intended to move back to England, to build a relationship with my father. Since that gap year when we’d spent a few months together, I’d been back a couple of times, but I hadn’t really spent any significant time with him. And also he’d had two children, as I explained, and I really wanted to be a part of that family.
[00:26:48] Georgia: And then when my marriage wasn’t working out so well, I took that opportunity to go. I thought it was just for a year. I remember I had my 30th birthday and said to all my friends, see you in 12 months and bought return tickets that have that 12 month validity, and set off for England.
[00:27:03] Louise: I’m gonna fast forward to the next turning point, which is in your, uh, late thirties when you have your first child. You and Michael, who you mentioned earlier who’s from South Africa, you got together again in London and started a family. Is that right?
[00:27:19] Georgia: Yeah. So after, after that first year or two, slowly accepting that that first marriage was finished. I was happily working in publishing, had a great life in London, was doing the yoga teacher training, after the 10 years of practice. So all, all was going swimmingly. And then out of the blue, Michael contacted me 13 years later. And I was like, Oh no, this guy, I didn’t want my heart broken all over again.
[00:27:44] Georgia: But as soon as we saw each other there was no going back. We went to Sri Lanka on a holiday just to see if we did wanna be together. It was the Christmas 2004. And then the tsunami hit and we both like really lucky to survive that. I mean, that’s another big story. After that, I just became a bit fatalistic and thought, okay, it’s meant to be. Let’s be together.
[00:28:05] Georgia: I was someone who never wanted children. I think because of my very mixed upbringing and looking after my little brother and sister a lot growing up, I felt like I’d done that journey. And so ask any school or university friends, I was always the one who wasn’t gonna have children. But Michael twisted my arm and I kept saying, You can’t have one. You’ve gotta have brothers and sisters cuz my brothers and sisters are so important to me. Within a year, I had three children in four years.
[00:28:32] Louise: So did you have your first child with you when you were in, uh, Asia? During the tsunami?
[00:28:38] Georgia: I became pregnant after the tsunami. We were living in Sri Lanka working with the recovery. And in fact, Oliver was due on the anniversary of the tsunami. And the belief there in Sri Lanka is that the souls stay for 12 months. So the Sri Lankans couldn’t believe that, I was carrying a baby that was due on boxing day a year later. I ended up going to South Africa just on week 36. The last day you were allowed to fly because Michael had work in Botswana.
[00:29:10] Louise: So from Sri Lanka, your back in South Africa where your second child was born, were, were you living there because Michael’s family is from South Africa.
[00:29:22] Georgia: No, it’s kind of ironic because when Michael and I got together the second time, I said, I’m not the person for you because I will never live in your country. I can’t live in South Africa. I don’t agree with the politics. And he said, No, no, no, no, no. We’ll never have and that’s why we tried to live in Sri Lanka. And then when we did end up going back to South Africa, it was a, a promise of only for six months, and it was true; the first year of Oliver’s life, he went to 16 different countries.
[00:29:49] Georgia: So we traveled a lot that first year. So even though we were based in Johannesburg, we weren’t there very much. And then the second baby came, but having two babies slowed me down a little bit. Also, what happened is that we had three or four break-ins, couple of them quite serious, while we lived in Johannesburg, which I couldn’t deal with at all. I think if you’ve grown up there and you’re used to this kind of violence, but for an Australian moving in there, I, I couldn’t cope at all. Especially having these two young babies in the house and robbers in the house. And so we stayed longer than we intended, but it was never a plan to, to live there. It was always temporary.
[00:30:31] Louise: Then there’s a third baby that’s born in Brazil where you and your growing family, were living in a remote eco village. Now this, to me, was one of the fascinating segments of your story. Can you tell us about this 10-year period when you lived in this remote village?
[00:30:50] Georgia: I guess this is another big, big turn. So I was constantly saying to Michael, I don’t wanna live in South Africa. We have to get outta South Africa. And he’s very keen to live in community and to teach the children to share resources and show them that the, the way this planet can only sustain itself in the future is if we all begin to share resources. That was his primary goal to live in an eco village.
[00:31:14] Georgia: If he said to me we’re moving to Antarctica, I would’ve said yes. I just was not, not happy with the situation in South Africa. And I didn’t want my children to grow up as the sort of the white privilege to South Africans, which Michael had grown up as and it just didn’t work for me.
[00:31:29] Georgia: He had a conference in Brazil. My mother came over from Australia and stayed with my two year old, and I took the newborn baby with me, because he wanted to me to know Brazil as a potential. Cuz it was, I was just like, Brazil, you wanna move to Brazil?
[00:31:44] Georgia: Oh, okay, let’s check it out. So I just went there for 10 days and while we were there, he’d been looking at the website of intentional communities and found one up in Bahia. I didn’t know Brazil at all at this point. It could have been anywhere. And also, when you have a two month old and an 18 month old, you’re not really thinking about much else, to be honest.
[00:32:05] Georgia: So we flew up to Salvador, and then a driver drove us eight hours south, which is only a 20 minute flight but, there was no flights. And we went to this eco village on a river in the middle of nowhere in the Mata Atlântica, which is a light jungle, and looked at it for one night and then had to fly back to Johannesburg and make the decision. I said yes because for me, it was something he was willing to do and it was a doorway out of South Africa. So that’s why we went to live there. And it was very isolated and he travels for work, so I was there on my own. I had no Portuguese and I’m not a linguist, so I was pretty isolated. No electricity, no family, no friends, Not often a husband there. And yes, my third baby, my daughter, was born during the evening, one night in the garden pool.
[00:32:59] Louise: My word that, that sounds, the whole thing sounds extreme. Were you practicing your yoga all through this period
[00:33:07] Georgia: Every day. The yoga has been with me all the way through and it’s held me together through every up and down. It’s, it’s my life tool. It’s, I couldn’t have done any of this without my yoga.
Georgia practicing Iyengar Yoga
[00:33:19] Louise: Were you teaching while you were living in the eco village?
[00:33:22] Georgia: When I was in Johannesburg, a lovely senior teacher there called Gudrin, she asked me to teach and I said, I can’t teach. I’ve just had a baby. I just don’t have time. She was much older than me and she pulled me aside and she said, ‘Never stop teaching, because when you stop teaching, you’ll stop practicing.’ Because you can’t teach if you haven’t practiced. You can’t sit before a class and teach yoga if you’ve not been on the mat yourself. It just doesn’t flow. So she said, while you’ve got these young children, it’s so easy to just fall out of your practice. But if you are teaching even once a week, you’ll keep going. So yes, I was probably only teaching once a week and in order to practice I had to get up at four o’clock in the morning between the baby’s feeds, that was my window. So it was really dragging myself outta my bed, onto my mat. But I kept doing that through those years of three children in four years.
[00:34:14] Louise: Well the children are now teenagers and you now live on a farm in the Sintra region, which is about a 30-minute drive outside of Lisbon where you do teach Iyengar yoga. And you continue to travel to teach workshops in a number of, um, locations around the world. So you’ve really built your practice, you’ve built your reputation, you’ve really built a life around your practice as a teacher. When you came to Portugal to teach, did you encounter particular challenges building a reputation as a yoga teacher here in Portugal?
The Sintra eco-farm where Georgia and her family now live
[00:34:54] Georgia: More so in Brazil actually. In Brazil it was a bit trickier. It was new there and also I was challenged by the language, whereas when I came to Portugal, the Iyengar Yoga teaching community here was much smaller and they were more welcoming and they had English more than in Brazil. You know, language just makes or breaks so many situations. And even though I was in Brazil for 10 years, we spoke English in the house, and then the children, when they’re very young, started speaking to each other in Portuguese and we had to ban it because we didn’t know what was going on.
[00:35:26] Georgia: That’s right. What they were saying. And then we just said, no, at home we speak in English outside. In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t the best thing because it meant that we were in our English bubble. In Portugal I felt very welcomed actually. It’s a very nice community of Iyengar teachers. Not to say there isn’t in Brazil, but my life at that time, and I was very isolated, Brazil’s a much bigger country. It was just different and more challenging. Whereas here it’s mainly Lisbon based, a few in Porto and the South, but we all know each other and support each other.
[00:35:55] Louise: That’s very positive. The area in which you live, in the Sintra region, there’s a lot of alternative households where people are practicing yoga and practicing non-traditional ways of living perhaps. So do you find that a lot of your in-person clients and classes are, are, um
[00:36:18] Georgia: Yeah, but I would, I know where, what you mean and I’d say not at all. In fact, it’s almost a disadvantage. When I came to live here four or five years ago. There were five yoga teachers in the local town, which I thought was a lot. Now there’s maybe 30.
[00:36:35] Georgia: Not to be critical, but it takes a lot to become an Iyengar yoga teacher. You have to have done the practice for four or five years. Then the very basic training takes a couple of years. You’re regulated. You have to do training every year to maintain your qualifications. It’s a real profession and dedication because it’s a profession where you’re not paid like if you were a physiotherapist or something like that. It’s really an offering that you try and sustain yourself with. Whereas, I just have to take care here, but with many of the other yoga systems, you get with the Yoga Alliance or the British Wheel of Yoga, within 200 hours of training, you’re a yoga teacher.
[00:37:10] Georgia: So it’s very easy to be a yoga teacher. And the general public, don’t know the difference between the different yoga systems or what it means. In fact, the people that are interested in Iyengar yoga are not necessarily the alternative types. It’s a more grounded system. You spend a long time learning about the body before you go to any kind of meditation or spiritual aspect of the yoga. It takes time to be able to access the deeper layers of yoga that people who are looking for calmness and spiritual quickly, Iyengar yoga’s not for that kind of person.
[00:37:44] Louise: And you, you actually mentioned something that I was trying to allude to but didn’t quite get there, which is that when I first came here, there were very few, uh, yoga teachers, but now there are a lot, and so I imagine
[00:37:57] Georgia: Dime a dozen.
[00:37:58] Louise: Yeah. I imagine for someone who’s looking for a class, it would be hard to make a decision about who to practice with, but I’ve noticed that, um, in your social media posts, that your classes are always very well attended. So I’m guessing that your reputation has built as a result of you being a solid practitioner and someone who has been teaching, as you say, for what, more than 20 years?
[00:38:25] Georgia: Yeah. Yeah. More than 20 years and practicing for more than 30 years. I’m not really very good on social media and people keep saying, I need to do social media. Fortunately my children actually do my social media posts for me, cuz that’s just not something I can find the motivational interest in doing. I totally rely on word-of-mouth and that’s fortunately worked for me. Just two weeks ago when I was in the Algarve teaching, a new student there from Germany, 25 years or something who does social media for a theater in Germany, and she said, ‘I wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have social.’ And I said, It never works for me anyway, I put out these posts, I never get new students through social media. It’s kind of a waste of time. And she said, ‘But if you didn’t do social media, I wouldn’t be here.’ And I said, ‘But you came through the friend of the friend, da, da, da.’ She said, ‘yes, but then I looked on social media and that gave you the credibility.’ So yeah, it’s important.
[00:39:20] Louise: Well now’s your chance to promote yourself again. So if listeners would like to learn more about you and your yoga classes, and retreats, where can they find you online?
[00:39:32] Georgia: Thank you. Well, my website ironically is YogaBahia because of my 10 years in Bahia, even though I’m now in Portugal, I’ve stuck with it cuz I kind of like what it represents. So yeah, YogaBahia.com and it’s all there.
[00:39:46] Louise: I’ll put a link to that in the transcript to this episode. I think I’ve also seen a post on Instagram. Is it the same?
[00:39:54] Georgia: Yes. Oh, I think it’s just my name, georgiaiyengaryoga. But also on my website, there’s a link to my Instagram.
[00:40:01] Georgia: All right, we’ll put those links in the transcript. And I just wanna finish thank up by asking you, Georgia, how your health is these days?
[00:40:09] Georgia: My health is fine as long as I keep practicing. My lower back is always subject to pain. If I don’t practice, my upper body is very stiff. It’s a toolkit. So if you have a headache, you do some kind of sequence. If you’re tired, another kind of, lower back, another kind, hot flashes, another kind. It’s all there so you can use it for what you need.
[00:40:31] Georgia: Well, I’ve only met you once in person, but I never would’ve had any idea that you’d had such a serious accident as a 20-year-old so obviously Iyengar yoga is really working well to keep you supple and fit and looking great.
[00:40:45] Georgia: Thank you. It really is. After that accident, I was told I could never have children. And then I had three natural births. My thanks to yoga for everything. Really.
[00:40:53] Louise: And thank you today for your time. It’s been lovely to chat with you.
[00:40:56] Georgia: Oh, thank you. It was really a pleasure to talk with you and I really enjoyed listening to your other series as well.
[00:41:03] Louise: Thank you for listening today. So you don’t miss future episodes, subscribe on your favorite podcast provider or on my YouTube channel Women Who Walk Podcast. Also, feel free to connect with comments on Instagram @LouiseRossWriter or Writer & Podcaster, Louise Ross on Facebook, or find me on LinkedIn. And finally, if you enjoyed this episode, spread the word and tell your friends.