Gemma In 2017 I was pregnant with our first child. During that time I was intentional about taking care of my body and mind as I prepared for the birth of our baby. Hypnobirthing was part of that preparation and so was pregnancy yoga. Every Thursday evening I would pack my car with my exercise ball, blanket, water and scarf before arriving at a local village hall to sit in communion with other expectant mothers. It was a safe, comfortable and welcoming space where I could connect with my baby and myself.
As we sat in a circle and shared, listened, stretched and breathed we were encouraged to take this time for ourselves, our bodies and our babies. The person holding this space was Sarah Clover, and this article is part of the Family Feed ‘At the table with’ series.
In this conversation Sarah talks about her early career in theatre, living in the USA before returning to the UK to start a family. We talk about the decision to step back as Executive Director during early motherhood, her subsequent business celebrating its tenth anniversary and how running a business has given her family the freedom they desired. We talk about leading from our values, building a community and how balance and rest are becoming more central in Sarah’s personal and professional life.
Who is Sarah?
Sarah has a gentle, positive and easy going nature. She is a Mum of two boys, a wife, a yoga teacher and business owner based in Cheshire, England. In her work Sarah encourages her community to welcome rest, wellbeing and an inner connection. Although her business has an online reach the majority of Sarah’s offerings are in person classes focusing on all stages of life from pregnancy and prenatal, postnatal, adult, menopause and senior yoga.
In 2000 A few years after her degree in Drama and History Sarah became General Manager for Theatre Porto (previously Action Transport Theatre) a national touring company that creates plays and workshops for children and young people. Sarah loved the company and the work so she could have easily stayed in that role. But in 2006 her fiancee John was offered the exciting opportunity to go and work out in California. Sarah went with him and spent the next two years living in LA enjoying a different way of life.
A shift in to family life
Ready to settle down and start a family Sarah and John returned to the UK in 2008. At that time Theatre Porto was looking for a new Executive Director and Sarah found herself back at the theatre company she loved but this time she was steering the ship and leading the company. The work was full on but enjoyable and Sarah cared a lot about the role, team and the organisation.
In 2012 following the birth of her second son Sarah found that the business’ needs couldn’t be balanced alongside her family values and lifestyle. During her second maternity leave she knew that she needed to step away from the company and find a new way to work and liberate herself. “The theatre was in a way another baby to me, I wanted it to continue to flourish and I felt that responsibility needed to be passed to someone else. Because my family was growing and I wanted to enjoy the time with my children. John and I both quit our corporate jobs around the same time to pursue a different lifestyle. And in the ten years since I have been running and growing my own business” that business is Breathing Space Yoga – bringing community based yoga classes with a focus on accessibility, health and wellbeing.
Can you tell me a bit more about the decision to step down as Executive Director when you did?
Once I had the boys, it’s that shift, isn’t it? It’s hard to describe. But I was starting to see that I can’t run a small company to what it needs and be the Mum I wanted to be. There was just no way. So after the birth of my second child I just decided this isn’t going to work. My heart was saying, ‘I have to pass the company on to somebody that can help keep it moving forward’. The decision was 50% about my children and family and 50% about wanting to leave the company in a good place.
Where did yoga fit into your life back then?
I had done yoga since about 2000 as a weekly class and then when I was in the States my practice evolved, because there was a studio around the corner from where we lived. I discovered there was a whole world of yoga when I was in LA. A few people had planted the seed that I should teach and I was interested enough to think, actually that could be something I could do.
So once I started to realise I couldn’t run a company to the level that was needed and spend the time with my children while they’re young, I realised now might be the time to train. In the end, funnily enough it has probably been more work to run my own business but it gave me freedom.
What is that freedom?
The freedom to work it around the kids. I wanted to be able to drop off and pick up from school and be with them during the school holidays. So that was the driver really for starting a yoga business.
So you and John became self-employed around the same time and with two young children. Can you tell me about making that decision?
Yes, we both went self-employed at the same time. John had been working in fraud prevention for banks and he was ready to do something different. We had a bit of a plan, some savings and I remember thinking worst case: if I can run some classes and bring in enough money, great. If not, I’ll find another job that I can do part-time. So that’s where the thinking was. Luckily I’ve managed to make it all the way through without doing anything else.
What did Breathing Space Yoga look like ten years ago?
I started off with mum and baby classes because I’d done them with my own children. I had discovered that you didn’t need to be a fully qualified yoga instructor to start that. That was the most straightforward way to start the business and it fitted really nicely alongside my children too.
Then about a year after that I started my full yoga teacher training. I knew that ultimately my goal was to grow the business beyond the mum and baby classes and I wanted to expand my training. I thought at the time that I would move into teaching regular yoga and away from mum and baby. As it happened the mum and baby classes never went away and I’m glad about that. I think the longevity of the last ten years is thanks to the mix of classes I run.
Tell me about growing your community, what did that look like?
I had a friend who worked at a children’s centre and I started running a class there. Then I started to look at venues for my own classes. I was looking for clean, warm, nice venues with car parks. I ran classes all over. At this point I was probably running a couple of classes a week, in the day. I had to build the community from scratch.
The children’s centre let me leave leaflets which was helpful and I was still in the baby arena myself as my two were still small, so I had some of my own connections.
Once I had completed my full teacher training I decided to start an evening class. I had been working in the daytime because it fit in nicely with the children. But John and I were able to juggle our work and the children so that I could start an evening class. And from there my community started to grow organically really. I experimented with locations and venues, some of them worked better than others. What really worked for me was word of mouth.
Can you tell me a bit more about your approach to postnatal mum and baby classes?
You can do mum and baby yoga to focus on the baby, but I did more training to be able to do more postnatal yoga. So I’ve always added a real focus on Mum. My classes are more about the mums and always have been. They might not see it that way because they are coming along to a class with their baby, but that’s my focus as the teacher.
What about your pregnancy classes? I always remember it being restorative and peaceful.
I think you’d see a change in my classes if you came though now. I’m much more confident about giving more information about pregnancy and birth. I see the classes now as an opportunity to support pregnancy and birth, which I never felt comfortable doing before. All these years on, all my experience and additional training plus collaborating with people like Donna and Kat (through Pregnancy, Baby and You) has given me confidence to create that support in my classes.
It’s still gentle yoga, it’s still relaxed, we still have all the circle time. But I include birth preparation now. That includes talking about how to look after your pelvis, how to get your baby into a good position etc. It is so important because people aren’t being told this information at the moment. It’s really hard not to scare people about the situation of maternity care, it has to be handled carefully. So pregnancy yoga is a great way to seed bits of important information. I think it is as important as yoga practice.
So you encourage your yoga community to think for themselves and about themselves?
Yes, my work is about empowering people. I think that’s the same across my classes. It’s about empowering people just to connect with themselves, know what they want and need and be able to advocate for themselves. That’s pregnancy, postnatal, adult classes, definitely menopause. It’s that thing of using the yoga practice in lots of different ways to help people connect to themselves more.
It sounds like your confidence was growing, your classes were growing, what was influencing that?
Before the pandemic i’d done meditation teacher training, restorative yoga training and two months before lockdown, I did my yoga nidra training. Those three trainings I think were key for me. At that time there was a development in my own yoga journey. I had come to yoga from the physical side (some people come from the meditation side) and I switched from the movement and physicality of yoga toward a deeper level of mindfulness and awareness.
Those three courses really shifted things and I used that across all of my classes to a smaller or larger extent depending on the class.
I think, looking back on it now, in some ways the pandemic was a massive shared experience. I was teaching with a focus on slowing down and everyone was on the same page. I mean, we might have all been dealing with things differently, but there was this common thread. So that’s when I think I realised that commonality of wellbeing. I could find the themes and connections. You could feel the agreement of everyone in the “room”.
So the pandemic created a cultural shift around wellbeing and your new training was positioned nicely to help your community through that?
I think that shared experience, coming together as a community and the wider wellbeing agenda helped People to realise: I do too much.
That speaks to where I was at too. Just before the pandemic, I was probably at the height of the business in terms of capacity. I was teaching 10 – 12 classes a week. I would say a happy number for me is about eight. I was doing too much. The children were a bit older and in school and I was working more in the day but also more evenings too. I got to a point, and I think it’s around that time when I started doing that training I realised it’s too much. I have to step back because I’m doing too much and I don’t need to. I was working more than I needed to.
So you started to realise you were doing too much, what did you learn from that?
I learned that it wasn’t just the 10-12 classes, it was everything that happens around the classes too. The setup and pack down, the admin, the marketing, school pick ups, family life. So it was the combination of those things going on around the actual classes. I’d organically grown the business around the kids and I could teach when I wanted to. I think my work ethic saw me take on too much and maybe subconsciously, sometimes my work ethic is being driven by society. A need to succeed and bring in enough money and have this successful, thriving business.
For a second time in Motherhood I came to that point, like I had done when I was working in the theatre where I had to ask myself, where’s the balance?
So how did you hold that balance?
When we came out of the lock downs it was really hard to rebuild the business. The postnatal classes suffered the most because word of mouth was lost for two years. I really struggled for a year to just get people through the door. Luckily my adult classes came back and I had a corporate client too. But being self-employed it is hard to strike a balance. The driver at that point was bringing some money in and getting back to helping people in the community.
I’m almost back to where I need to be now. I don’t want to do any more than I’m doing. I’ve cut back to one evening and occasionally I run one off events like menopause retreats and positive birth workshops. So after the reset of the pandemic it probably took me about a year trying to figure out how many classes, what’s working, what’s not working, what do people need?
But I was intentional about my needs too. I made a pact with myself to make sure that I was working in a way that was more balanced for me. I wanted to make sure that things were aligned in my work and personal life. I knew I wanted to focus on community in 2022 but in a more intentional way than I had before. That’s where Pregnancy Baby & You Cheshire came into the picture.
Starting the network with Donna, Kat, Rachel, Maryline and Fiona was a way of creating a community around: new and expecting parents and independent practitioners who work in that pre and postnatal space. PBY is a way for us to hold free socials for the community to come together to connect and support one another.
How does the way you approach your business in year ten support you personally
Community is a big driver for me. I am more intentional about how I build that community now. So instead of coming to my business with a reactive approach to building community and customers I am being more intentional about asking myself ‘what can I actually do?’. At this point in my life, I know I can’t do more. If I do an extra evening a week, that impacts me. I can feel it. Even in terms of my ten year planning I have been intentional. I have a freelance person who helps me with admin now and when we were talking about plans for 2023 I was trying to keep it realistic for me. You see other business owners doing all this stuff and it is easy to think that’s what’s expected, but actually it’s not what was expected.
What is that value that’s driving that decision to make things work for you?
My health and wellbeing, trying to practising what I preach a bit more. Sometimes I think I’m helping people because that’s what I need, but I’m not doing it myself. I think what has shifted for me is that I am leading from my values now as opposed to seeing them as the result.
I think that is about rest right? And I am coming to a realisation that it’s about integrating small moments of space in your day, five minutes at a time. I definitely do that more. I am making that space, and I think I’m trying to share that message in class on social media.
Do you think we could all access balance if rest was celebrated more in parenthood?
The way we see our own rest is a hundred percent influenced by the way society tells us we should parent and work. There is a narrative of – we have to just keep doing and achieving, there’s no other way.
I think things are shifting slowly, although maybe it depends what you surround yourself with. We are seeing the fallout of the full-time working mum trying to do everything because it’s still not equal. Even though we’ve made such gains in terms of women in the workplace, society still works around the male.
That shift happens early on… In my pregnancy class I gave some homework recently to do some postnatal prep. I suggested some resources and books so they could think about their postnatal recovery. Almost instantly the conversation and focus went to the baby. I had to remind those soon to be mothers that they can and should think about their own needs too.
How has running your business impacted how you and John do family life?
I think when John and I chose to change careers, and to pursue the work that we wanted to do it created transformation for us both. John’s transformation recently about what he wants to do and how he wants to work now has brought us closer together with our values and connection. And maybe that’s him absorbing some of the transformation I have been on in the last 10 years or me absorbing his – I don’t know but we have reconnected our values on this journey.
I think we share a lot too. John cooks more than me and I carry more of the mental load around where the children are and need to be. We share our diaries and schedules. It helps us to understand one another’s work needs so that we can make it work.
Tell me about dinner time as a family
We like to cook. And by that I mean getting a recipe out to cook something interesting. We try to include the kids in cooking sometimes too. Even run of the mill food we pretty much always cook from fresh. We have always tried to eat together as a family even if that’s occasionally in front of the TV. Dinner time is an important time for us to catch up on the day so we do like to try and eat together. We mostly all eat the same food now the boys are older.
What’s your favourite way to spend time together as a family and why is that important?
As a family we all love spending time outdoors, walking and camping. It’s important to us to be intentional about time away from work, tech and distractions. Connecting with nature is part of our family lifestyle. As a child I holidayed in North East Scotland and we now holiday there as a family. We love to be around the beaches, scenery and fresh air. It’s half term now and we are going off together to have quality family time.
And that’s where this conversation comes to a conclusion. As I write this it’s the Easter holidays and Sarah, John and the boys are off on an adventure. Sarah’s yoga business is on holiday too because that is the business she designed, one that fits her needs, her family and her values.
Taking that step from employment into self employment can be daunting. The unknown, uncertain, unpredictable nature of running a business can be enough to keep us trapped in work that doesn’t work for us. As I think about the journey Sarah took from stepping down as executive director of Theatre Porto, starting a business that gave her freedom, evolving her business alongside her own transformation and coming to her tenth year with a confidence in doing things her way. I see that Sarah has led from her values all along. She is holding balance at the heart of her world – balance for her, for her family, for her business and the community she has created. This is what sets Sarah apart – she is brave enough to ask herself over and over again – is this working for me?
In celebration of 10 years in business Sarah is extending Breathing Space Yoga’s Mini Library of Yoga Nidra Relaxation/Meditations that you can access here for free
This story is part of ‘At the table with’ a series of conversations with different humans who are doing family life, work, food, wellbeing and business differently. We love to share these stories as part of Family Feeds mission. To explore family life through the lens of food, work and well being. If you are interested in being an “At the table with’ guest then we want to hear from you.
