Some info about the teachers

Olivia Seck

Olivia is your course guide. She is a mother, holistic childbirth educator, birth companion, trainer, hypnotherapist and HypnoBirthing teacher. She has been teaching and supporting birthing women and couples for over 18 years now. She has 4 children including a wonderful 8 years old who, like his siblings, is her mischievous teacher on the path of Motherhood.

On her quest for a holistic lifestyle and profession at the beginning of the 80’s, Olivia studied various aspects of holistic health : humanistic psychology and education, counselling, voice dialogue, movement and dance, healing and infant massage. After training with the Holistic Birth Foundation, she founded the Kin & Kin Pregnancy practice in Devon and created The Demestia Birth companion/doula training, a distillation of her two decades of studies, her professional experience supporting women through life transitions and her 24 years as a mother and partner.

After training with Marie Mongan, the founder of HypnoBirthing in the USA, Olivia added another dimension to her holistic approach and she created BirthCreation, a holistic childbirth education programme, which includes valuable hypnobirthing techniques. This hypnobirthing approach has been integrated in the Birthing Wisdom curriculum.

Olivia lives with her family in Devon where she has a pregnancy practice and runs pregnancy retreats

Lina Clerke:

Lina works both in Australia and England, and she has over 25 years experience as a childbirth educator, birth attendant (doula), registered midwife and massage therapist.

Lina has attended hundreds of wonderful births and she see childbirth as a profound and potentially empowering experience in a woman's life.

She feels passionate about helping women to grow within themselves during pregnancy and to become relaxed and confident as women during childbirth and motherhood. She has spent most of her adult life helping women birth with dignity and respect and helping babies to be born gently into a loving and compassionate environment.

Her training and experience is extensive, from active birth teacher trained with Janet balaskas, to therapeutic, remedial, shiatsu, prenatal and deep tissue massage practitioner. .

Lina is a member of the Australian College of Midwives, the Australian College of Doulas, an advanced educator member of the National Association of Childbirth Educators (Australia), Associate member of YogaBirth Association, (UK) and she contribute regularly to the Childbirth Education Teacher Training program for midwives and health workers at Melbournes Royal Womens Hospital. 

For more details of Lina's training and qualification please visit her website http://www.wonderfulbirth.com/Default.asp

She is now spending more time in UK, based near Brighton, (with short stays in London) where she is available for consultations, classes, massage for women, Bowen Therapy and birth support.

Josephine Ash

Josephine has been supporting mothers as a breastfeeding councillor for 2 years. She was trained by La Leche League.
From her training, personal and professional experience, she knows how vital support is, in the early weeks of a baby's life, to establish and maintain a good breastfeeding relationship.
Antenatal breastfeeding information and encouragement is also extremely beneficial.

On the Birthing Wisdom training, she will teach how to support mothers in getting feeding off to a good start, as well as ways to deal with common breastfeeding problems. Making a difference as to whether a baby will be breast-fed or not is very rewarding, and she looks forward to teach others how they too can make that difference.

There may be other guest teachers passing on their expertise at various times in the course.