Noeleen blazed a trail for complementary therapies

Noeleen Tyrrell believes we all have the power within ourselves to achieve. A Dublin native, she moved to Sligo in the early 1990s and practiced in various forms of complementary therapies before she eventually open the Ard Nahoo Health Farm in Dromahair, Co Leitrim.

Noeleen is a trailblazer – she did this at a time when yoga and complementary therapies weren’t as mainstream in Ireland as they are now. But her business grew and grew and she hasn’t been afraid to adapt to what she needs in her life at any one time. She now runs her own yoga training and coaching business, where people from all over the country come and train or can avail or transformative coaching.

We met in Sligo to chat more about her journey to where she is now.

Angelina: Noeleen, thanks for talking to me. Tell me a little bit about your background?

Noeleen:  I was born in Dublin. My parents were living near St Stephen's Green on Cuff Street. We moved from the centre of Dublin out to the suburbs, a bit out to Raheny. And then eventually, by the time I was in third or fourth class, we ended up out in Rush. 

"I always had a bit of an entrepreneurial thing going. I was working from an early age and even when I was younger, we used to have little concerts in the back garden and we'd charge people to get in. 

"I left around 1991 and I was living in Jersey and the Channel Islands and then hopping over into Europe and Greece and doing seasonal work in Jersey and then going and living in Puerto Rico and stuff like that for the winter. I went to San Francisco in 1990. I discovered yoga there. I also did my first training as a Swedish massage therapist and met and married my husband. So I did all of that in those two years and then came back to Ireland in 1992.

Angelina: What did you do when you came back to Ireland?

Noeleen:  I worked in Dublin for a period and trained in a number of different areas. And then finally in 1994, I discovered a therapy called Cranial Sacral Therapy, which is branched out or grew out of the major osteopathy training. And that was to be what just took my full attention then. 

"I moved to Sligo in 1994 and set up a clinic here for five years. In the meantime, myself and my husband were looking for a house. We had discovered the old ruins of a house in Dromahair and we did that up as our home. Then when I got pregnant with my first child, it was like, I don't want to keep doing this. I don't want to be in and out to Sligo for work.

Angelina: So what did you decide to do at that point?

Noeleen:  The dream was that I would be able to see people at home and mind my baby at the same time. We decided that we would build a treatment room. While they were building that treatment room, I'm going, 'where will people wait?' That 'what if' led to just more what ifs. I ended up opening Ard Nahoo Health Farm and having a baby in the same time. 

"Of course, the reality of it was that if you build a business in your backyard, your child is going to have to go somewhere to be looked after. So it flipped the whole original idea over. But there was the birth of Ard Nahoo.

Angelina: So what did the journey entail with Ard Nahoo?

Noeleen:  So the yoga bug, I got bitten while in San Francisco and it just kept growing. When it came to opening the retreat centre, I kept thinking, 'Okay, I know I'm going to be really busy here, I've got this young baby and I'm going to design my work around the fact that I will be the one teaching yoga, that I will keep that thread of my passion alive'. 

"I went and did a teacher training to coincide with the opening of Ard Nahoo. I'd already been using yoga, like what I'd know, because at that point, I'd been practicing for eight years or something like that.

Angelina: It must be a huge challenge opening that in the '90s though.

Noeleen: When I was doing my feasibility study, the word wellness industry didn't exist at all. I wanted it to be number one, I wanted to use natural therapies and leave as little mark as I could on the planet. I knew that I wanted to use my business as a showcase of how you can actually live without completely damaging the earth. You can run a business, you can have a livelihood and still totally respect everything. I'd done a lot of research into flotation therapy, and we got a flotation tank. We opened with the float tank and a sauna. It was stressful but I had a great team around me. We had a lot of fun, an awful lot of fun, but we had chill-out breaks.

Angelina: Was it difficult to find a market for what you were doing?

Noeleen:  Because I had my clinical background, that gave me a kudos. I actually had quite a few people from the clinic who came out and would still come out for treatment. I was still running clinical work. I had to phase that out. It got too much. I already had a customer base, if you like. They came with me, but I just wasn't ready for the response. The response was huge. We had a double-page spread in the RTÉ Guide. It was almost like an instant success. It's as if the world needed it.

Angelina: So it continued to evolve over the years?

Noeleen:  Along comes another child, and then we'd moved out of our house to allow guests to stay there. We bought another ruin of a house, did that up, and that's where my second child was born. At this point, I've got a business mortgage, a mortgage on the new house, a brand new baby, and my other little fella just trying to get on in the world. 

"We got some really good advice from the Leitrim County Enterprise Board - they gave us this fabulous mentor. He just cleared it up for us, and told us, 'You're actually in a great position, you have loads of options'. We sold the new house, paid off our business mortgage and moved back into our house. 

"We then developed the eco-cabins. We built three eco-cabins and that was it. And we were lucky - while we didn't skyrocket during the boom, we stayed level. And when the crash came, oddly our business went up. So while all those new layers of busyness were going on, I was losing myself more and more. I was getting more and more stressed. Not stressed as in worry, stressed as in just completely living my life exhausted. I was doing the job of three people. Then there was a constant tug on my heart that I wasn't there with my kids, that I wasn't the mother I thought I was going to be. So it was like I was getting swallowed up in the success of the whole thing because I was an integral part of that success.

Angelina: So what was the solution?

Noeleen:  We had this opportunity for funding through the Greenbox initiative, which promotes eco-tourism. They wanted us to be one of their flagship projects. I sat with a really cool architect, an eco-architect, and he did this whole consultation with me. 

We built eco-cabins so we could take a lot more people and have control over the quality of their experience from start to finish on specific dates. The rest of the time you could come and book a cabin and I may or may not see you. If you want a treatment with me, you book and if I'm available, you get it. But if I'm down visiting my Mum, then you can't get it. Or it's somebody else. 

"So after the second year of teacher training, I decided I have to just back off completely from everything else. Everything became more and more yoga-focused. Until it led me to the point where I'm running 200-hour teacher training, 300-hour teacher training. I'm the principal of Ard Nahoo Yoga School, and yet I'm still on a Friday night waiting to see if people are going to arrive. Logistically, I'm still running another business, which was the retreat. I made the decision to sell. So we sold and left, and I'm ecstatic with myself.

Angelina: Where are you at business-wise now?

Noeleen:  I worked with a coach to bring me to that decision, to that massive decision. It just really made a deep impression on me that this simple process of conversation is all it is, was able to create such a shift in my life that I'm not sure I'd have been made in that time frame. I signed up and did a course, as a transformative coach and absolutely loved it. I have a coaching thread that is now coming through along with my teacher training and retreats. I'm using it with groups, so I'm doing group coaching as part of day-long workshops, as part of my retreats. I'm offering a group coaching session, and then I'm doing private coaching. A lot of my clients are yoga teachers because that's who I speak to.

Angelina: You seem to have a need within you to keep pushing on.

Noeleen:  I believe in the absolute power within each of us to create whatever life we want to create. I absolutely believe that. Obviously, the circumstances are going to present different opportunities for different people. But within that, we've got our choices. If we don't actually focus on what it is that we want to do and keep getting stuck in life and the voices and all the negative stuff that we tell ourselves the whole time, then we are missing the point.