Facilitators with lived experience

Euphemia

Euphemia, (gender pronouns: they/them) is a somatic and pleasure coach, facilitator, and author. They offer somatic and embodiment practices to resource their clients’ pleasure practices and habits through deep and disarmingly dorky ways. Meanwhile, they are always imperfectly in-process with their own pleasure, embodiment, and collective liberation practices.

They feel most aligned to purpose when they support people in experiences of attunement to the body’s subtleties, slow pleasure rituals, people-pleasing and appeasing social conditioning, broadening embodied choices, realising and articulating desires, embodying power and autonomy, and chronic pain.

They are of Scottish descent, born a settler on unceded Kulin Nation lands (AKA Melbourne, Australia), and a recent migrant to Lisjan Ohlone land on Turtle Island (AKA Oakland, California). They hold the identities and experiences of being white, queer non-binary, able-bodied, and born middle-class, and a trauma survivor.

Euphemia is trained and certified in sex-positive education, sexual violence counselling, somatic coaching, trauma-informed facilitation, and has a background in Community Cultural Development.

Warren Roberts

YARN Australia was Founded by Warren Roberts (pronouns: he/him) in 2007 in Sydney NSW and has engaged many Australians to build intentional relationships with Australia’s First Peoples through Storytelling, Arts & Culture Events, and Training Programs. Warren is a proud Thunghutti and Bundjalung man and he has extensive experience working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities having worked for NGO's and universities, as well as local, state and federal government. Warren has been fortunate enough to work alongside esteemed elders from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, which has encouraged him to reflect on the importance of respecting cultural protocols.

jo buick

jo (pronouns: she/her) is an educator with an interest in the alchemising intersections between social justice, embodiment and healing. She is a meditator, yoga teacher and the co-founder and director of the non-profit organisation collective being. Of celtic (Scottish Highlands) heritage, jo currently works and lives on unceded kulin nation lands in Australia.With a background in education and social justice strategy, and over 20 years of embodied experience in movement, yoga and meditation practices, jo brings to her work an awareness of the ways in which bodies, spaces, stories and systems collide and intertwine. She is especially interested in the potential for individual and collective healing and integration through group work, body-focused practice, rest and ritual. jo holds Masters degrees in both Teaching and Education and is trained in trauma-informed practices as a Trauma Centre Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) Facilitator and a trauma-informed educator.

Lauren Gower

Lauren Gower (pronouns: she/her) belongs to the trawlwoolway people of tebrakunna country / Cape Portland in northeast lutriwita / Tasmania, and currently lives, works and learns in unceded Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung country in Melbourne. She is a writer, artist and plantsperson who engages in place based restorative practices for country, community and self that centre First Nations ways of being, doing and knowing.

Shannon May Powell

Shannon (she/they) is a writer, arts worker and embodiment practitioner of Irish and French settler descent who currently lives and works on unceded Kulin nation lands. They believe embodiment is a human right and their practice is person-centred and grounded in care and liberation.

Shannon has trained in dance, Hatha, Vinyasa and Yin yoga, Zenthai massage and somatic movement for trauma. They were initially inspired by the intersections between somatics and social justice to build a relationship with the non-profit community organisation collective being where they currently work.

With lived experience of healing trauma through embodied practices, Shannon is interested in how embodiment can support our values and actions becoming aligned, building our ability to live from a place of empathy. As a person who holds privilege as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, queer, middle-class, settler they recognise the life long work that they have in dismantling systems of oppression.

Joshua Lynch

Josh (pronouns: he/him) is a proud Ngāti Te Wehi man. He is a poet, applied philosopher and Director at Small Beyond, based on unneeded Kulin nation lands. Josh started and sustained a meditation practice, co-founded and ran Australia’s first multi-disciplinary meditation studio and now co-directs and hosts Small Beyond experiences with Shannon. Josh has a professional background in systems thinking and is currently applying this knowledge to his new found passion for permaculture design. He hopes to weave together and integrate practices of meditation and embodiment with understanding of land and place and the sacred relationship that connects them.