From pain ridden to art of healing

Lifestyle –  Judy Murphy meets Ronah Corcoran, the woman behind a new yoga and wellbeing hub

Watching Ronah Corcoran nimbly bound up and down on yoga mats and cushions on the floor of her new wellness centre in the City’s Westside Enterprise Park, it’s difficult to believe that she once suffered from back pain so badly that she had to be taken by ambulance from her home because she couldn’t move.

A ten-year back problem was the reason that Ronah turned to complementary medicine after conventional methods, including muscle-relaxing drugs and physiotherapy failed to solve the underlying cause of a condition that had left her debilitated for a decade.

Reiki was the specific treatment that worked for her when it uncovered an emotional issue that needed to be addressed, she says.

Other factors in her life at the time were causing stress, and stress is a major factor in back problems but in Ronah’s case, there were more deep-rooted causes.

“It sounds corny but it worked,” is her claim for the Reiki.

Now, this woman, who has made Galway her home for more than 10 years after a lifetime spent abroad, is eager to share her knowledge via a new centre, the Amara Yoga and Wellbeing Hub, which opened just over a month ago in the Fiontarlann at Westside, just behind Dunnes Stores.

One of her aims is to help improve people’s mental health by offering a variety of therapies and workshops at affordable prices as she comes from a social services background, working with children and adults in crisis.

Ronah had always wanted to work in social care, she recalls; an early memory is of wanting to go to Africa to help the poor.

That desire may have stemmed from her own past, which sounds fascinating and also difficult.

Born outside of marriage, she was adopted as a child and lived in Dublin for her early years until the family moved abroad in 1978, to her mother’s homeland of Germany so that her father, the well-known composer Frank Corcoran, could take up a position in Hamburg – work for modern composers wasn’t exactly plentiful in Ireland at the time.

After some years there, they moved to America and then to Italy, where, as a young adult, Ronah based herself for almost a decade.

Constant travelling might sound exotic, but it made difficult for her to put down roots. In addition, her mother suffered from mental illness. And Ronah’s twin brother died when she was 15, although she says the loss was tempered by the fact that she was away at boarding school at the time.

All in all, it was an event-filled youth and when she eventually decided to attend UCD in her 20s after spending time working in restaurants and bars in Italy, she opted to study Psychology and Sociology. After graduating in 2000 she was employed by the HSE in Dublin, working with children in care, a job she loved but which was incredibly challenging, she says.

In her 20s, Ronah had begun to suffer back problems, which began with a slipped disc and became progressively worse.

She was on a lot of painkillers, she says, but not very successfully and so she began exploring other therapies.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.