A New LifeLainey Ennis has turned a health crisis into a business opportunity. Sylvia Thompson reports
Turning a health crisis into a business venture requires a certain kind of disposition, a disposition that is prepared to look deeply at personal experience and see how other people could learn from this experience.
South African born and Dublin-based complementary health practitioner Lainey Ennis (59) has done just that.
Following her personal burn-out in 1996, Ennis took three years to take things at a slower pace, spending half of each year close to her grown-up sons in Australia and the other half working in Ireland.
Then, following a holiday on the island of Cyprus, she hit on a business idea: to bring Irish people on "inspirational soul journeys" to Cyprus and more recently to the foothills of Sierra Nevada in the South of Spain.
"I've run four trips so far. It's lovely to see the transformation in people as they begin to glow and look healthy by the end of the week.
"I've had people from all walks of life - bank managers, gardeners, teachers, therapists - some of whom who have come on more than one trip," says Ennis.
The idea of bringing people away from their home and work environments to de-stress was similar to what Ennis herself did in the late 1990s.
"In some ways, these health holidays are a distillation of everything I believe in. I've watched people make big changes and become motivated to be more aware of their health issues and lifestyles.
"My burn-out taught me that my personal boundaries in work have to be very good. I had strived very hard towards perfection and tried to learn and learn and learn. I needed to say stop. This is time for myself. I did that and really listened.
"I've also changed my daily routines: Now, I get up at 6 a.m. and am in bed before 10 p.m. I practise yoga every day and go on long walks after yoga. I eat very carefully and I have learned the value of rest," she explains.
One key opportunity arose during Ennis's "time-out" phase in Brisbane, Australia which has enhanced her work practice.
Already trained in aromatherapy and other complementary health practises such as colour therapy and Hakomi body-centred psychotherapy, she came upon a course in Ayuveda, the ancient Indian approach to good health and disease prevention.
"It was a coming-together of everything I had learned so far - vibrational treatments, colour, food, lifestyle and yoga. It was like stepping into Aladdin's cave for me," she explains enthusiastically.
During this time, Lainey Ennis also re-ignited her love for singing (she was in the professional voice choir Oriana for 18 years in South Africa and worked in the Opera School at the the Conservatory of Music in Brisbane before settling in Ireland, following a tour with the Meanjin Dance Theatre here in the late 1980s) by doing a one-year singing course with performing artist and voice teacher Chloe Goodchild.
"The course was about the development of singing without singing songs and choral pieces. It was very spiritually based - we did a lot of chanting. It was lovely to get the performer part of me out again," she says.
However, it was her new knowledge of Ayuveda that formed her complementary healthcare practice and also gave her a framework for her health holidays, which consist of outdoor meditation sessions, yoga, swimming, good food, massage and general attunement to nature.
So back in Dublin full time since 2000, Ennis now teaches yoga in Monkstown, Co Dublin and gives one-to-one complementary health treatments from her home in Dún Laoghaire.
And she works hard at promoting her health holidays which she calls Aphrodite Trails.
"I'd say I've had three major turning points in my life - the first was when my husband died of cancer in 1983, two years after we had moved as a family to live in Australia, the second was when I had my personal burn-out in 1996 and the third has been the development of my Aphrodite Trails.
"My fantasy now is to develop my own retreat centre somewhere in the Mediterranean, to create or buy a place where I can offer these health holidays to Irish people myself," she says.
For more details on Lainey Ennis Aphrodite Trails, contact tel: 01 2803635 or email laineyennis@eircom.net