EMMA WARMINGTON (E-RYT500) YACEP

Founder, Director

Emma is a Yoga Teacher Trainer, Transformational Voice Work Guide, Mindful Communication Coach and Women’s Healing Arts Facilitator.

If there is such a thing as a typical yoga teacher, Emma is not it. A fiery Celtic spirit with deep passion for authentic living, an infectious laugh and a hardy aversion to spiritual platitudes, Emma is a long term traveller, world adventurer and life-long student who has been channeling her passion into international retreats and residential Yoga Teacher Training programs for more than 10 years. 

A colourful past with a plethora of physical and emotional traumas has fed Emma’s greatest fascination for this life’s odyssey; the human animal’s seemingly boundless capacity for healing and transformation.

For Emma, a life of travel including more than 10 years spent living in yoga communities in Asia led her to assist, support and co-teach immersive teacher training programs for 7 years before creating her own school, Jivani Yoga. Through her life affirming, experiential & transformative program, Emma has now certified over 200 teachers from more than 20 countries. A passionate teacher’s teacher, she has developed a steadily progressive and highly effective method for training teachers and is currently offering both 200hr & 500hr Yoga Alliance registered courses in Thailand, Costa Rica and Northern Ireland.

Designed to build confidence, personal integrity and reveal raw authenticity, these programs and the dedicated team who teach them, encourage and support trainees in sharing their personal experience of Yoga whilst standing confidently in the power of their own unique voice.

As a student and practitioner, Emma continues to seek out the greatest teachers she can find and to date has accumulated over 2500 hours of accredited training with some of the world’s best and upwards of 4000 teaching hours with students all over the world. A Senior Heart of Yoga teacher, Emma also holds certifications in Science of Chakra Yoga, Anusara-Inspired Yoga, Hatha Yoga (RYT500 from Anusara), Forrest Yoga (Advanced TT), Nada Yoga, Ancient Healing & Transformational Voice Work (Voices of Eden), Tao Tantric Arts (Mantak Chia’s Universal Healing Tao), and has taken hundreds of additional hours of training with many notable teachers including extensive study of Body Mind Centering and Yoga Anatomy with Amy Matthews, Kirtan & Mantra with Dave Stringer and Sheela Bringi, and The Naked Voice facilitation with Chloe Goodchild. 

Additionally, Emma is a Team Up Mindfulness Facilitator providing coaching and mentoring for individuals and groups in person and via Skype, and certifying as a TRE (Tension/Trauma Release Exercises) Provider.  

In teaching Yoga, Emma guides her students with Krishnamacharya’s Principles of Practice as taught by her most beloved and influential teacher, Mark Whitwell. These breath focused principles provide the foundation for all practices and are complimented by sound alignment cues, mantra, spacious support, self love, and the development of felt sense awareness as students come into a place of intimacy between their body and their breath. Deeply committed to passing along the gifts of this lineage, Emma’s classes are essentially a seamless blend of Breath, Movement, Sound and Stillness.

A fearless and spirited voice work facilitator, enthusiastic kirtan wallah and crazy in love with sacred sexuality, Emma facilitates workshops, retreats and immersions programs with guest teachers amid the schedule of Teacher Trainings. She has a long history of practicing Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), conscious communication, massage, tantra, meditation, qi gong, voice work, and silent retreats. This multidisciplinary approach has created a richly varied practice and a teaching tool kit that adapts to serve the individual and the ever changing nature of life. She is passionately dedicated to sharing these healing arts as a path to deeper intimacy in relationship, liberation in the body & mind, self-confidence, freedom from struggle in daily life and limitless personal growth.

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LAURENCE GILLIOT (E-RYT200)

Laurence has been teaching and practicing Yoga and Meditation for the past 9 years, organizing retreats in Europe and Asia and facilitating Yoga Teacher Trainings for the past 5 years with Jivani Yoga and Pranaya Yoga. 

Laurence is a natural teacher and facilitator. With a dedicated practice to yoga with a wide variety of styles and gifted teachers, Laurence sees yoga as a journey home, reconnecting us to the deepest parts of ourselves, with our breath, humour and self-love as travel companions. 

Her classes embrace a variety of traditions: Anusara, Vinyasa, Restorative yoga, Ayurveda and Yoga Philosophy. Her alignment cues and intelligent sequencing help her students to safely deepen their practice. She has been co-teaching for 3 years with Emma Warmington, Director of Jivani Yoga, and is so grateful for everything she learned from Emma in terms of facilitating Yoga Teacher Trainings. 

Laurence is passionate about the physical and emotional therapeutic aspects of Yoga using Ayurveda and mindfulness techniques to work with the mind. Her embodied knowledge of Yoga Philosophy connects her students to the roots of Yoga and invites inner inquiry. She is appreciated by many students for her gentle and compassionate presence. 

When Laurence started to practice Yoga, it had a profound impact on her life.  At that time, she was working in an international non-profit organisation, facilitating community conversations, from remote villages in DR-Congo to slums in the Philippines to violent neighborhoods in Papua New Guinea. She saw that she could greatly contribute to this world not only by helping “poor” communities but also by transforming her own emotional luggage and by sharing her practice with others.

Meditation in motion has been a common denominator in Laurence's life. She completed a 5-month walking meditation in the Himalayas. She also facilitates Conscious Communication workshops and is a certified facilitator of Dance Mandala, an ecstatic dance expression, where participants listen and follow the body's intuitive wisdom.  Since 2006, Laurence has practiced Buddhist mindfulness meditation with Zen-master Thich Nhat Hanh and she co-facilitates a weekly meditation group in Chiang Mai. 

Laurence coaches individuals and groups based on an intuitive approach called TeamUp Coaching Programme developed by 3C Consulting that combines mindfulness and Buddhist psychology. During the training, she will share the insights and tools of the TeamUp Coaching Programme, offering students powerful personal development tools, transforming from the inside out.

TARA EDEN

Tara has been exploring movement as medicine for as long as she can remember. 

For her, movement has always been the key to a feeling of personal freedom, empowerment, creativity and peace of mind. 

For over 20 years she has studied various components of movement: Using the Body as a Tool of Expression and Communication (BFA in Theater), Movement for Self-Empowerment & Breath-led Movement (Ashtanga Practioner) Movement as Therapy (Certificate in Dance/Movement Therapy), for Physical Fitness and Wellbeing (Yoga Teacher, RYT 500) and Awareness Through Movement (Feldenkrais Method).

While based in New York City, Tara taught vinyasa and hatha yoga in boutique (Kula Yoga Project) and local studios (Shambhala Yoga & Dance) and brought it to the Hasidic Jewish community, inner city middle school, private high school and all kinds of private homes.

After re-locating to Thailand, Tara produced her company, The Somatic Movement Project (www.somatic-movement-project.com) as a resource for movement and bodywork modalities that deepen awareness, provoke curiosity and promote presence of being. 

In 2010, her fascination with the body prompted Tara to delve into Thai Massage and extensive anatomy studies. Frustrated by anatomy classes that were boring, disjointed or based on a 2-dimensional, non-moving image of the body, she designed her own Embodied Anatomy course. Using one's own embodiment/body awareness as a guide, students learn to understand the complexities of the body in a way that is relevant, fun and memorable. Tara presents her course to various groups including YTT 200 & Advanced Yoga Teacher Training Programs

Tara now practices Integrated Bodywork which helps the receiver illuminate their "blind spots" that create chronic tension (body & mind), facilitating deep relaxation, body awareness and more comfortable and efficient movement and/or breathing patterns. 

She is currently based in Chiang Mai, Thailand where her company, Somatic Movement Project, constantly evolves. 

Tara continues to teach Integrated Movement, Awareness Through Movement™ and Somatic Yoga (a practice of building asana from sensory awareness and functional architecture rather than picture-perfect asana and universal alignment). She created and leads an immersion program, "Learning to Listen" which is an intensive introduction and exploration of Somatic Movement, broken into modules, held twice annually.

She travels internationally teaching, hosting retreats, offering integrated bodywork and leading yoga teacher mentorship programs. 

SOPHIE JOHNSON (E-RYT500)

From a young age Sophie has pursued her interest in the body and physical exercise, with a childhood of competitive sports leading her to studying Sports Psychology and Sociology at university. After struggling with anxiety throughout her teenage years, Sophie was introduced to Mindfulness which steered her onto the wellness path and completely changed her life. 

In 2014 Sophie headed off to India to complete her first 200hr TTC studying Ashtanga inspired yoga but left feeling as though she wasn’t was ready to teach. This is when she found Jivani Yoga and took part in their first 300hr course. Since undertaking this training in late 2014 Sophie has been working closely with Emma and the team, seeing her assist and teach on each of the  200hr courses in Costa Rica. 

In 2017 Sophie took the leap and quit her part time job to go full time with her own yoga business, Tula Yoga, and has since held numerous events, classes, day and weekend retreats in throughout the UK. This year she completed her Meditation teacher training and loves to incorporate these practices into her yoga classes. 

Whilst Sophie occasionally enjoys a stronger practice, for her, yoga is and always will be so much more than back-bending and headstands. It is about deep, honest listening and truth-telling. She believes that the way you breathe is the way you live. The simple act of reconnection to the self through awareness of the breath allows us to reclaim the power of oneness and intimacy. Sophie encourages her students to drop in and draw awareness from the roots up, grounding them in a strong foundation. A lover of travel, experiencing nature and new cultures, delicious food and books, Sophie is constantly learning and evolving and trying to absorb all the beauty that this world has to offer.

Hannah Armstrong (RYT500)

tamar zick (E-RYT200, RYT500)

When she was 10 years old, Tamar went to summer camp for the first time.  Thus began a life long love of the immersion experience.  The yoga of community learning, practice, laughter and tears is now amongst Tamar’s greatest joys. 

Training yoga teachers along side her primary teacher, Mark Whitwell, for the past 3 years in California and Fiji, has prepared Tamar to provide her students with an experience of the principles of yoga in a clear and direct manner.  She loves talking yogic philosophy and sharing her understanding with her students.  Tamar sees yoga as a direct experience of the nurturing flow of life.  Her teaching is based in simple yet profound principles of coordinating breath and movement.  The intention of the practice of yoga is to cultivate intimacy with your own mind and body.  This intimacy with self then spreads to the ability to connect with others.

Tamar has had her own personal yoga practice since 2006. She teaches, studies and practices in accordance with teachings from Sri Krishnamacharya as brought forth by his son, TKV Desikachar.  She has a great respect for this lineage and has gone to great lengths to seek out her teachers.  She has accumulated over 1000 hours of learning with various teachers who were direct students of TKV Desikachar.

Having worked as a psychotherapist for many years, Tamar sees each person’s capacity to be at home in their own body as essential to an authentic life which is each person’s birthright.  The practice of yoga as the direct participation in life as it has already been given is what Tamar hopes to transmit to her students.  

There are many different paths that Tamar has traveled, most all of which center on exploring life alongside a group of fellow human beings.  She has worked as a wilderness expeditionary teacher with the Outward Bound Schools, led wilderness trips for adult survivors of sexual abuse, and guided wilderness based adventure travel.  She is a 7, the enthusiast, in the enneagram system, enthusiastic about the whole mess of life. 

The world is in quite a state.   Yoga teachers have the means within their own lives and within their teaching to be of service to a world in need.  Tamar takes this mission to heart and very seriously…  but not without a strong dose of humor.   

Tamar earned her 500 hour credential from Gary Kraftsow and Mirka Kraftsow of the American Viniyoga Institute.