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 20 years now. She has 4
children including a wonderful 10 year 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 27 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
Katinka
Soetens
Katinka
is a mother of 3 and a Natural Active Birth teacher
and Doula with over 12 years active experience. She
is also an Adult Educator, moonlodge facilitator
and Priestess of Avalon serving the feminine Divine
through ceremonies, workshops, talks, retreats and
individual sessions. Katinka has worked as an ante-
natal teacher at Penrice maternity unit, within the
NHS midwife-led birth preparation sessions and
independently for many years. She was taught
Optimal Foetus Positioning by pioneer Jean Sutton,
and holds the advanced OFP teaching certificate.
Having enjoyed home and water births herself, she
is passionate about the freedom of real choices
available to women around their pregnancies,
birthing, bodies and sexuality.
Kate Brennan
Kate is a mother, grandmother, doula, writer,
forest school leader, natural builder, actress,
shiatsu practitioner among other things!
She attended her first birth 26 years ago while
pregnant with her first child, the experience had a
massive impact on her life after that. Her own
journeys through pregnancy and birth were varied,
all with huge learning and growing. She specialised
in pregnancy and birth in her shiatsu training and
attended births using shiatsu as pain relief and
support. In 2008 Kate became a grandmother and was
her daughters birth partner at a beautiful home
birth and it was after this that she decided to
look for training that would enable her to support
other women in the same way. As a student on the
Birthing Wisdom course she found what she was
looking for!
She is passionate about supporting women in all
areas of life, especially young women,
disadvantaged physically or socially, women with
emotional traumas....and sees pregnancy and birth
as a unique opportunity to grow into a different
perspective on life, the universe and
everything!!!!
Josephine Ash
Josephine has been supporting mothers as a
breastfeeding councillor for 4 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.