Dumping nerd pressure to find happiness in yoga

Net Results: It all sounds suspiciously like a Hollywood chick-flick script - dump the high-flying, high-paying technology industry job and run off to a tropical island to find happiness doing yoga, writes Karlin Lillington

But that's exactly what Lisa Wilkinson did just as the technology boom was gearing up into high speed. The have-it-all, work hard, play hard lifestyle and the dream jobs came with pressure cooker environments.

"I got to where I couldn't take it anymore. So I packed it all in - the job, my boyfriend - and ran off to the Bahamas to an ashram."

The petite Englishwoman smiles serenely from her cross-legged position on her yoga studio floor, looking more like a mischievous teenager than a 30-something maths and marketing whiz. She laughs at the memory.

"I wanted to change my life, and to change it really quickly."

So in a matter of days, she went from a career in technology and challenging, well-paid management jobs in companies such as Oracle and Baltimore Technologies in Dublin, to being summoned by gong to breakfast at 5:30 a.m. She had flown straight to the Bahamas and ended up at an ashram she knew almost nothing about.

For two months, her life revolved around chants, lectures, hours of yoga facing towards the tropical sea, a few meals and a few hours sleep, then up to start the daily routine all over again. Only much later would she find that, despite its idyllic setting, she had stumbled into one of the tougher yoga teaching schools in the world, and one which focused on an austere spiritually that she found hard to adopt.

"But the yoga was beautiful and the teachers were really good," she says.

None of that severity shows up in the good-humoured yoga classes she teaches from her studio, The Elbow Room, tucked away in an old stone warehouse in Dublin's Stoneybatter neighbourhood, near Smithfield. This is yoga "for normal people", as her brochure and (of course) website state.

Normal people might mean a class full of new mothers and wriggling babies.

The "Mums and Babies" group is definitely her noisiest class, she says with another laugh. And yes, "the babies fully partake", with mums massaging and gently working their babies' limbs.

Arrive another time, and the room could be full of children, or of pregnant women using beanbags and giant exercise balls for a gentle prenatal yoga class, or charity workers at her free Monday class for them. And of course, there are also straight-forward, gentle hatha or vigorously aerobic ashtanga yoga classes, done to music - classical guitar or trancy chill-out songs for hatha; something more bouncy for ashtanga.

"The best yoga classes I've ever done," says one female student in Ms Wilkinson's hatha class.

"It's the first class where I haven't felt like everyone was in competition."

Far from it - while demanding, the classes aren't bossy or strict.

"I like to bring humour and an understanding of anatomy into the classes," says Ms Wilkinson. So she tells students which sets of muscles each position, or asana, is working, and how each affects the skeleton.

Ms Wilkinson fell in love with yoga in 1998 when she was working under the hyper schedules of the booming technology industry - well before Madonna made a thin yoga floor mat the trendiest of accessories.

"Everything was so stressful by that point. A friend said, 'you have to do something; you're cracking up'." So she got on her bike and cycled off to her friend's yoga class in Dublin.

"I think it was the first time my brain had had the chance just to shut down. It was such a massive relief," she says.

A natural at maths in school, she'd always pushed herself hard and had started a degree in engineering, highly unusual for a woman at the time. But she found the coursework tedious and instead went to work with computers, "fixing PCs down to the component level. It was pretty nerdy stuff."

She quickly taught herself to program as well as fix the hardware.

She came to Ireland after "meeting an Irish guy on a plane", eventually started working for Oracle, and grabbed the chance to become a product manager rather than a programmer. And that's when the really hectic work lifestyle began.

"I think I would have become ill if I'd carried on," she says now. Still, she's had to adjust to a significant cut in income in order to follow her new dream job in a studio that was previously a sheet metal operation. And she has a new baby to mind. "I was on silly money. Now, I have to watch every penny. It's changed my ideas of what I need, and what's important."

Are those tech industry entrepreneurial instincts beginning to kick in? "My mum is saying, 'franchise, franchise, franchise'!" she laughs.

"But I'm not into building an empire. I want something I can sustain."

The Elbow Room, 32 North Brunswick Street, Stoneybatter, Dublin 7. Tel: 01 677 9859 www.the-elbowroom.com