Calm on Canning Street
Katy worked in corporate marketing in the banking industry for years both in London and in Sydney. She realised while living in Sydney that the hamster wheel of the corporate world wasn’t for her anymore. She felt fed up and dissatisfied at work.
So, she bought a camper van with an ex-partner and they decided to go “off grid”.
They went to live in a community in Portugal where she spent eight months in rural Portugal, living off the land, with limited phone and wifi access, practising daily yoga and meditation and generally escaping from modern society. During this time she went to India for a couple of months to train to become a yoga teacher. Afterwards, she returned to Portugal and realised that although she had loved her time living as part of the community, it had been an incredible experience and she had learnt so much, she knew it wasn’t her long term dream and decided to leave. Katy returned home to her family in West Sussex. She was 32, single with no job and didn’t want to go back to corporate marketing. She started her first yoga business Katy and the Calm and started teaching yoga classes and running retreats. She also worked in freelance marketing on the side. She used the year at home as a time for deep self reflection and introspection. She then moved to Brighton as she had found a job working for the Fostering Service doing their marketing and offering her much deeper job satisfaction as she was using her skills to do something good and make a positive contribution.
It was at this time she started seeing her now husband Ross, whom she had known for years. Ross lived in Edinburgh and they did “the commute” for six months until Katy made the decision to move up to Scotland in September 2017. She loved Edinburgh and took up yoga around the corner from where they lived, on Canning Street, which is now her studio!