A New Life: Katie Donovan tells Sylvia Thompson about her life-long awareness the link between body and mind.
Katie Donovan decided at the age of four that she wanted to be a writer. Then living with her parents and younger brother on the family farm near Camolin, Co Wexford, her choice of career may have seemed unusual yet it was nonetheless encouraged.
When she was nine, her parents broke up and Katie moved to south Dublin with her mother and brother to continue her primary school education, later attending secondary school at Newpark Comprehensive in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and taking an honours degree in English at Trinity College Dublin.
Throughout all these formative years, her passion for writing grew (she wrote her first serious poem at the age of 15) but so also did her compassion for others and her awareness of the mind/body connections that would ultimately lead her - after several years working as a journalist with The Irish Times - towards the work she now does alongside her poetry writing and her shared responsibilities with her partner, Stephen Sensbach for their young children, Phoebe (3) and Felix (11 months).
Looking back over the years, it's easy now to see what drew Katie towards training to be an Amatsu practitioner (often described as Japanese osteopathy, Amatsu involves gentle manipulation of joints and ligaments to correct imbalances caused by strain, injury or prolonged poor posture).
While still at school, she taught herself yoga - a practice she continues to this day.
"At the moment, I attend a one-to-one class every six to eight weeks and we work out a routine that I can then do myself at home. All Amatsu practitioners are encouraged to do bodywork themselves, usually yoga or Tai Chi," she explains.
When at Trinity College, she fundraised and did home visiting with the St Vincent de Paul and also worked with the Samaritans.
"I was very aware of how privileged I was being in one of the most lively, enjoyable parts of the city while just outside the campus, there was homelessness, domestic violence, sexual deviance, loneliness and poverty." She also did some short courses in massage in between her lectures, involvement in the Literary Society and her poetry-writing.
As a graduate in the 1980s, she was told like many others "don't expect to get a job here, you'll have to emigrate". So, off she went to do a Masters in English at the University of Berkeley in California.
"This was very taxing intellectually and I was broke all the time so I had to work part-time but it was a wonderful experience to be somewhere so ethnically and culturally diverse," she says.
Due to her love of travel, the idea of studying for a PhD to enable her to become a college lecturer lost its appeal and on her return to Ireland she was not tempted to settle. "I found Ireland then cold, grey and poor and there were still no jobs. I worked briefly for an art magazine in Paris, did some amateur counselling training - flirted with the idea of getting more involved in psychotherapy and then went to London to do an intensive course in teaching English as a foreign language,"
This led her to Hungary, where she got a job in a boarding school in a small town in the north east.
"I didn't know anybody there. I wrote a lot of poems and got to the point that I could see a book [in sight] which was very exciting. I came home, deciding I didn't want to travel anymore, wrote some articles about my time in Hungary and sent them to The Irish Times where they were published."
So began Katie Donovan's 13 year association with The Irish Times, first as a freelance writer and later as assistant features editor. "I really enjoyed meeting people and writing their stories. And journalism and writing poetry was my life for quite a long time." During this time, Katie published three books of poetry, Watermelon Man (Bloodaxe, 1993), Entering the Mare (Bloodaxe, 1997) and Day of the Dead (Bloodaxe, 2002).
She says: "I started getting back pain and repetitive strain injury and I began to look at how I could treat these problems. I went to a physiotherapist, later a chiropractor and started taking yoga more seriously, reading complementary health books and became more interested in how diet affected one's health."
On a three-month sabbatical, she came into contact with an Amatsu practitioner and really liked her work.
"I thought I'd like to do this myself and had a sense that I could find work as an Amatsu practitioner rather than training in reflexology or massage which were oversubscribed. I found a part-time course I could do while working in The Irish Times and completed it when I was pregnant with our first child," she says.
"The goal of Amatsu is to balance the person and bring harmony between all the body systems. It seemed to be the kind of work, I could manage myself as it required a lot of empathy and working with touch which I liked.
"So, I had my qualification and went on maternity leave. Then, we were told that The Irish Times went into an economic crisis and that all options were off the table so I had a stark choice - fulltime work or take the redundancy package and start all over again with a new qualification. It was a very hard decision to take as I had built up a lot of colleagues and good friendships and I was used to the network. I've always been a self-starter so I decided to take the challenge and develop this new career."
Now three years and another baby later, Katie is building up clients again after a second period of maternity leave. "I built a treatment room in the grounds of my home in Dalkey with some of the redundancy money and I now have autonomy over my working hours. My partner, Stephen is a musician and sometimes, he is practising the cello in the practice room above the treatment room and my clients think what a nice soundtrack that is.
"I also find that motherhood brought me right back into the body again in a very profound way. I found pregnancy very hard but the experience of birth exhilarating. Caring for babies gives you a strong sense of touch and an intuitive understanding of another body which feeds into my Amatsu work.
"I sometimes miss the intellectual stimulus of journalism but at the moment, I'm better equipped for doing bodywork. Meanwhile, I'm working on another book of poetry which continues to give me an outlet for my love of language."
See also www.amatsu-ireland.com