Lynne Oliver trails tanned toes in the swimming pool after a dawn yoga session. In bikini and scarlet sarong, framed by the blue Lanzarote sky, she cuts a striking figure. At 56 her back is as straight as a teenagers and her body supple as Plasticine.  Years of yoga have been far more rejuvenating than any number of Botox jabs. 

We are in the garden of Villa Isis, the house/cum/retreat that’s home to yoga teacher, her partner Stuart Forster, with whom she runs Holistic Holidays, and usually about 10 guests, who arrive as tight as closed fists and depart a week later floppy and grinning. It’s a sun slowed easy set up, but the result of vision and hard work.

Three years ago Lynne was teaching yoga at London’s  Hogarth and Hurlingham clubs to the ladies who lunch and stretch set. Craving peace and sunshine, the class headed by Lynne went on a life changing holiday to the Canaries. It was amazing doing yoga in the open air says Lynne. In London I hated the commuting, the fumes….The holiday inspired the couple to sell up in Britain and embark on a radically different way of life, with their new company, Holistic Holidays at the hub. We started looking for properties, says Lynne, and this place just beckoned. Today Villa Isis is more than a holistic holiday camp. It really is symbolic of a life rebuilt. At 45, I found myself alone, depressed, with a child to support and little money says Lynne.  Freshly divorced from Bruce Welch , a member of guitar band The Shadows, Lynne was used to a lush lifestyle. She was previously married to Formula 1 racing driver Jackie Oliver but found herself downgrading from three Porsches to a Mini and losing £100,000 through negative equity, this was 1989, on her house “my pension”

Her mother died. After along battle with endometriosis, Lynne had a hysterectomy.  There was a breast cancer scare and the joint aches and pains that had dogged her intermittently for years kicked in.  The lessons really began then.

Central to Lynne teaching is that ones health and emotions are intrinsically linked. “ It is all connected to tension which causes the kidneys to be inefficient so you get lactic acid accumulating in the system. This causes stomach acid, migraines, headaches and joint pain.  And stress itself is not just immediate stress. It’s a cumulative thing. Its like a library in your head that goes way back. Any reminder of a particular stressful situation will go to that area in the body and make it tight”. This is why quick fixes or anti depressants are not the answers. In Lynne’s case, yoga was the saviour. 

She first noticed the connection between the emotional and physical when she was a child. ”being very sick when my mother went away. better when she came back”. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music, before leaving to model and landing the banal but exciting job of the Formula 1 Gold Leaf team’s personality girl, travelling around the racing circuits and incongruously, in hindsight, handing out cigarettes!

MORE