A Place For Embodiment & Creativity

 
 

Small Beyond is a relationships-led organisation. We facilitate practices, spaces and stories that encourage people to build embodied and creative relationships with themselves, their community and their environment.

We host retreats, courses, workshops and conversations that offer creative and embodied resources such as meditation, mindfulness, art therapy, poetry, yin yoga, dance and restorative movement. Each of our core members is mental health aware, trauma informed and guided by lived experience. 

 
 
 

Founder and co-director of Small Beyond, Shannon (pronouns: she/they), is a published author, artist and embodiment practitioner of Irish and French settler descent who currently lives and works on sovereign Kulin nation lands (Melbourne, Australia). They believe embodiment is a human right and their practice is person-centred and grounded in creativity, care and liberation. 

Shannon has trained in dance, creative writing, yoga, massage and somatic therapy and has been teaching for the past 8 years. Alongside their art practice, Shannon also works for a non-profit, trauma informed organisation called Collective Being whose aim is to provide free wellbeing practices to communities who don’t have access to mainstream resources and services. 

Shannon is interested in how creative and embodied practices can support our values and actions becoming aligned, building our ability to live from a place of empathy, purpose, joy and resilience.

 

Josh (he/him) is a proud Ngāti Te Wehi man. He is a poet, dancer, performance artist and facilitator at Small Beyond and is interested in where and through what means our inner and outer worlds meet and, ultimately, influence one another.

This interest has led him on a long and windy path where he started and sustained a meditation practice, co-founded and ran Australia’s first multi-disciplinary meditation studio, has been invited to artist residencies 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, dance and embodiment with understanding of land and place and the sacred relationship that connects them.

 
 

Shannon and Josh have hosted embodied writing, meditation and dance workshops at The National Gallery of Victoria as well as international hotels and creative villages, such as Desa Potato Head in Bali, Indonesia.

They have been artists in residence at the VARDA houseboat residency in California, the Poccopocco residency in Oaxaca, Mexico and more recently at Desa Potato Head where they will return to host a retreat in 2023.

Combining their shared passion for poetry, dance and visual art with an interest in how embodied practices such as meditation and mindfulness can support and bolster the creative spirit, they hope to inspire a sense of wonder and possibility in everyone who engages with their work.