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Meet The Facilitator
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Melaina Faranda

Soul Flame – Learn How to Ignite Others with Your Storytelling

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Melaina Faranda, a storyteller, facilitator of women's and girls' circles, teacher, and author of 67 books, has shared stories for decades. Passionate about personal and mythopoetic storytelling, she trained at Emerson College’s Storytelling Beyond Words and with luminaries like Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Dr. Martin Shaw. She believes stories foster a deeper collective homecoming, whether personal or imagined, and has refined her craft through extensive training in the UK and USA.

Want to be someone who can ignite the wildfire of others' hearts and imaginations with a good story well told? You already tell stories in the form of anecdotes to family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. And… there are specific ways you can make those and other stories more fully luminous and alive. You don’t have to be a ‘natural’ or have an acting background to be a storyteller. It's a learnable art form with practical tools and techniques that can help you: expand, persuade, inspire, move, encourage, educate, entertain, and open the wonder door. It's every person's birth right to be able to offer a story to the collective. A story that can spark change, light the soul candle of inspiration, and summon phoenixes from ashes - in a way that information, ideology, and statistics never can. In this workshop you'll learn techniques for remembering, crafting, and discovering personal treasure within the stories you're moved to tell, and how to tell those stories well!

Image by Maxim Tajer

Kai

Embodied Connection: The Dance of Wildfire

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A passionate advocate for kindness, acceptance, and interconnection, he brings these principles to his workshops. With 18 months of experience facilitating a Men's Circle for Complete Men, he creates supportive spaces for emotional well-being. His offerings include meditation, breathwork, and a Thursday wellness group combining surfing, meditation, and yoga. He has trained in sound healing, assisted elders at Bedrock, and serves on the Manhood 2025 committee, fostering connection, self-discovery, and positive transformation.

Join us for "Embodied Connection: The Dance of Wildfire," an experiential workshop designed to explore the creative forces within through movement and connection. Participants will engage in silent partner movements and joyful expressive dance, fostering a deeper sense of interconnection and embracing the vibrancy of life. With a focus on kindness, acceptance, and interconnection, this workshop encourages spontaneous movement and non-verbal communication in a safe and inclusive environment. Activities include guided warm-ups, laying connection exercises, and a guided ecstatic dance session, all aimed at celebrating individuality while cultivating community. Participants will leave feeling empowered, connected, and inspired to embrace their unique journeys. Come ignite your inner wildfire and dance your way to deeper connections!

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Robin Clayfield

Cultivating Depth and the Fire of Truth for Healthy Relationships

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Robin is an international facilitator, trainer, and bestselling author passionate about creative group work, personal empowerment, Permaculture, Deep Ecology, Ritual, and Ceremony. She presents Creative Facilitation and Teacher Training courses, along with workshops on Earth Connection, Visioning, and Heart and Soul experiences. Robin also offers consultancy for trainers, facilitators, and organizations, supporting impactful and engaging learning experiences.

What if Relationship were a picnic? A nourishing feast of exquisite and transformative energy shared with your partner or friend. Imagine sitting down to a smorgasbord of opportunities and processes to connect, bare open intimate truths, burn away debris and energise life together with shared clarity, love and compassion.
Robin’s workshop introduces and gives an experience of ‘The Love Feast’ Relationship Process, a dynamic, creative and profoundly honest practice to deepen, honour and enhance any loving relationship. 'The Love Feast' supports heart sharing, honesty, trust building, clarity, honouring of self and other, and cultivating shared synergies or intentions. Acts of love and surrender, release, rejuvenation, practical tools, inspiration, joy and delight are possible gifts that participants will experience, gifts that can last a lifetime. You’ll also take home a ‘picnic blanket’ map to use to expand the process to its fullest potential.

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Amanda Askew

Language of Touch

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Mandy, as a Massage therapist, is very interested in people's embodied awareness, and facilitating the reconnection to experience through the senses, as we did as children. Mandy loves creating opportunities for fun, exploration with a playful sense of curiosity, deepening self-awareness and presence.

Language of touch is an individual and partner inquiry into our curiosity, to play with our sense of touch. I welcome you to a play-space to explore your senses. It's an invitation to be with yourself and others in simple, exploratory, fun ways that are grounding and connective. A space to slow time down, to feel, to be with, to breathe deeply, giving the mind a rest. A beautiful way to meet with the five elements of touch, giving the gift of self awareness, connection and playful authenticity.

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Penelope and Ross Duncan

Gender Conversations

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Penelope and Ross own and operate ‘Journey Home to Soul’ offering a wide variety of specialised programs and modalities to support your path back to your authentic self. A process of uncovering your gifts and releasing patterns that no longer serve you. It is a cleansing mind, body and soul.
 

Join Penelope and Ross for Gender Conversations - a mixed circle where together we explore what it means to be our gender and the challenges we face, the conditioning and beliefs we carry, and our experiences with the opposite gender.

When men and women come together in the safety of the sacred circle and its protocols, deep wisdom is offered and received, and healing is possible.

We are here to guide you as you reconnect with your true purpose and weave a new way of being. Whether through our workshops, spiritual ceremonies, or channelled artworks, our offerings are designed to meet you exactly where you are in your personal Journey.

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Leo Blanke

The Fire Within: Transforming Conflict into Connection

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Leo Blanke is a Relationship & Intimacy Coach dedicated to helping singles and couples build deep, lasting connections. His journey began with a personal longing to feel seen, loved, and accepted, leading him to explore the science of relationships and the art of connection. Through years of growth and experience, he now empowers others to break free from fear and disconnection, offering practical tools and daily practices to cultivate trust, safety, and intimacy in relationships.

In this transformative workshop, we will explore the tools to navigate challenging conversations with ease and clarity. You'll walk away with the Conscious Conversation Framework, which will support you to resolve conflicts in ways that create safety, deepen understanding, and strengthen your relationships. Discover how to move beyond blame and reactivity, and into vulnerability and connection. Together, we’ll explore practices that allow you to feel seen, heard, valued and validated—building unbreakable bonds and creating a foundation of trust. Join us to turn the fire of conflict into a catalyst for deeper connection and relational resilience.

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Fiona D-Speedie

Exploring our masculine/feminine traits with partner dancing

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A passionate dance teacher, shaman, leadership consultant, equine-assisted learning facilitator, and mounted archer, she moves fluidly between these diverse yet interconnected roles. The surrender required in dance mirrors the openness of shamanic practice, while her leadership and facilitation draw on decisive, protective action. She creates safe, goal-oriented spaces where people gain clarity, direction, and a sense of achievement, blending intuition with structure to guide others on transformative journeys.

Dive into the dynamics of masculine and feminine energies and discuss how to dance between the two. To follow in partner dance is to embrace our empathic, intuitive, and sensual qualities (feminine) with our leader showcasing strong, decisive, and protective aspects of the masculine. We will experience this using somatic dance and body language. Together, we'll examine how to embrace and celebrate both masculine and feminine traits without being perceived as dominant/aggressive or weak/submissive. We'll also identify the toxic masculine/feminine traits, learning strategies to avoid them. Above all, we'll focus on the importance of healing and accepting ourselves fully.

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Manda G Jennings

Consciously Ignite Your Dating Journey

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Manda G Jennings, Founder of the TruSelf Collective, is an Embodiment Psychotherapy Coach, Master Practitioner in NLP, Time Line Therapy™, and hypnotherapist. She helps people reconnect with their True Self, breaking free from past programming and limiting beliefs. Believing that healing comes from within, she guides clients to rediscover their wholeness, confidence, and personal power. Through her transformative approach, Manda empowers individuals to live authentically and attract the love and success they truly deserve.

Step into the transformative energy of Wildfire to ignite clarity, confidence, and connection in your dating journey. Whether you're struggling in the dating scene or hesitant to begin, this workshop will help you align with your true self to attract the love you desire.

Gain clarity on your relationship goals, learn about attachment styles and love languages and how to create an authentic dating profile. Through guided exercises and support, you'll begin to shine the light on your patterns and unresolved hurt, build confidence and shift your energy to consciously relate and create loving connections you truly deserve and are actually here for!

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Isy Gabriel

Embody your full force of nature

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Isy Gabriel, a renowned facilitator, trainer, and practitioner, brings over 40 years of experience in personal growth. With a Psychology BSc and PhD research background, her journey weaves together bodywork, shamanism, tantra, shadow work, and family constellations—culminating in Obsidian. Known for boldly addressing taboo topics like Eros and sexuality, she now trains facilitators, expanding this life-changing work. Her mission: to clear limiting paradigms and cultivate greater aliveness, healthy power, and inner freedom in the collective.

Do you desire to clear what's in the way of you being at your full force of nature?

Obsidian Quantum Constellations is an embodied process that works best with a room of curious humans, that desire change personally and collectively, and wish to become the force of nature they were born to be.

We move through the interconnected and resonant shamanic field, tracking back to the ancient ancestral traumas that are at the seed of the dysfunctional paradigms that run our lives and world today.

As the Obsidian process unfolds before us, quantum shifts are made through time and space, ancestral traumas are released and integrated, and life-affirming new codes are rewired, embodied in present time personally and collectively.

This work serves the evolution of human consciousness.
Together we can contribute to a more harmonious, diverse and creative world.

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Kara Ockendon

Conscious Uncoupling: A Transformative Relational Lifestyle

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Kara Ockendon, founder of Soul Healing, is a Relationship Breakdown & Divorce Coach specializing in conscious uncoupling and the Family Law system. With degrees in Law and Psychological Science, she combines legal expertise with a trauma-informed approach. Having personally navigated high-conflict disputes and marriage breakdowns, she empowers clients to break unhealthy patterns, navigate transitions, and foster lasting transformation. A single mother with a thriving co-parenting dynamic, Kara offers 1:1 and group coaching for conscious, holistic healing.

Conscious Uncoupling goes beyond break-ups, offering tools to consciously navigate all relationship breakdowns with minimised negative toll, growth and compassion.

We are regularly faced with relationship breakdowns in life. These moments often trigger subconscious wounds and expression of unhealthy cycles of relating that deepen conflict, mistrust, and resentment. While these wounds and unhealthy cycles are heightened during separations, such patterns impact breakdowns in all relationship dynamics.

This workshop introduces foundational practices to help you break these cycles, own your wounds, and foster authentic communication. By transforming breakdowns into opportunities for growth, connection, and healing, you can reduce the emotional toll of relationship breakdowns, separation, and the Family Law system— and thrive through the process.

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Emmajane Love

Playful Intimacy Games

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Emmajane sparks joy, creativity, and connection through play workshops and events, helping thousands drop their masks, discover their play personalities, and embrace deeper expression. Blending games and storytelling, she creates spaces for fun, depth, and authentic human connection. Passionate about bringing people together in unexpected ways, she invites you to be seen and fully alive. When not crafting connection magic, she’s exploring new adventures or planning her next game or performance.

Are you ready to give yourself full permission to play? Where Connection, Freedom, and Joy Come Alive!

In this playshop, you’ll be guided into a series of connection and expression games and fun challenges designed to help you take off your masks, experience deeper connection and intimacy and experience true joy and aliveness!

This is a space where you can let yourself be truly seen and embrace the freedom of self-expression. Reconnect with your inner child and give yourself the permission to be wonderfully, beautifully human.

Imagine bringing more silliness, spontaneity, and adventure into your intimacy and relationships, letting go of the constant need to achieve or succeed. Here, you’ll rediscover what it feels like to be fully alive, immersed in the present moment, and filled with deep, authentic joy. Oh, and prepare to laugh until your stomach aches and your eyes fill with tears of happiness!

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Richmond Heath & Emiline Duncan

Gender In Motion – Tremoring Into Connection & Flow

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Richmond Heath & Emiline Duncan are deep friends & world-leading TRE trainers. With more than 20 years combined experience in the somatic healing of trauma they have a special skill in guiding people to specifically heal through their relational wounding.

In this experiential workshop we will use the somatic self-care practice TRE to connect with the internal fires that move & animate us all - long before & well beyond the arising of our conscious mind or gender identity.

After establishing a sense of safety & self-regulation we will divide into groups that reflect participants chosen ways of identifying in relation to gender. Taking turns, each group will tremor while the others observe, creating an opportunity for the somatic movements of our body to spontaneously express our deepest patterning in relation to seeing & being seen through the lens of gender.

Following time for reflections & sharing we will reunite as a collective & tremor as a group, allowing the spontaneous movements of our pulsating human organisms to connect, dance & weave us together both through & transcending our varied experiences of gender. 
 

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Annie Mitchell

Playful Self-Expression: An All-Inclusive Journey to Confidence

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Annie is a client-centered therapist dedicated to helping individuals overcome challenges, heal, and strengthen connections. She fosters a safe, supportive space where clients feel heard and empowered. With a background in education and the corporate sector, her eclectic approach integrates creative passions like writing, artwork, theatre, and burlesque as tools for self-expression. A writer, illustrator, and director, she explores themes of sexuality, feminism, and spirituality, using creativity to inspire personal and societal transformation.

This body-positive burlesque workshop invites you to embrace your authentic self through sensual, playful movement. You’ll learn the art of glove removal, the graceful use of feather boas, and how to embody your essence with confidence. This empowering session encourages you to shed metaphorical layers, revealing the true, unapologetic self. As you explore through movement, you’ll tap into the transformative power of dance, embracing authenticity, sensuality, and joy. Through each gesture, you’ll release negative baggage, connecting with your body in a loving, empowering way. Whether you’re a beginner or experienced, this workshop is about celebrating the beauty of being you. Join us in this immersive journey of self-expression and confidence!

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Simeon Ayres and Kate Long

Gender In Motion – Tremoring Into Connection & Flow

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Simeon Ayres and Kate Long are long time partners, together they have raised a family in the Strathbogie ranges in NE Victoria. Kate is a counsellor with a generous and seeing heart. She is a storyteller and horsewoman. In her home community she works to reinstate connection with Country and Ceremony into the everyday. Simeon is a mapmaker and storyteller, He has been involved in men’s work for many years. Both are trained in the School of Lost Borders tradition as Rites of Passage guides and offer programs in Victoria and beyond.

We bring an ancient myth from Northern Siberia… The story of Red Bead Woman and the Crow Prince. We see stories like this as living entities carried down through the ages. They contain the magic of healing and the possibility to break life long enchantments. We tell this tale over 40 minutes around the fire, and then create a council to 'feed the story' by feeling into, and exploring its imagery and implications. What is it within you that this ancient tale stirs and calls forth? Where do you find yourself in the story?

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Victoria Basdeo

Cultivating Your Creative Potency with Kundalini Yoga

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Vicky Basdeo has been practicing yoga for most of her life (nearly 50 years!) and she has been teaching kundalini yoga for the past 18 years. Vicky loves sharing these empowering yogic teachings, tools and techniques and inspiring others to deepen and explore their own embodied creative expression. She lives with her husband Murray & teenage daughter Grace in an off-grid community next to a beautiful national park in the border ranges, growing food and living a hand-crafted life.

Kundalini Yoga is a potent, transformative yoga practice and the intention of this session is to learn some simple techniques and practices to harness and channel creative energy more powerfully & consciously.

The workshop includes: spinal warm-ups, elemental massage techniques, foundational kundalini yoga postures, pranayama breathwork, meditation and a lying down relaxation. You do not need a partner for this session and all are welcome to be a part of this joyful exploratory journey. BYO yoga mat.

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Chris Hudson

What Do I Want?

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Throughout his life, he has embraced a variety of experiences, each shaping his journey. From working as a commercial fisherman, kitchen hand, and builder’s laborer, to studying Spanish in Mexico and working in an organic garden at the Krishnamurti School in Hampshire, England, he has always sought new learning opportunities. Returning to Australia, he found his passion in carpentry and building, drawn to the outdoors and independence. Along the way, he raised two children with his partner, all while exploring life's existential questions. He has come to realize that the answers lie within, waiting to be discovered.

What is our deepest longing? Are there things we crave, desire and yearn for? What do we dream of for ourselves? We spend much of our lives in service to others, to ideals, to beliefs, to children, partners and parents. That's part of being human. We have a creative capacity. When we are learning about something, when we know how it feels and we want to be immersed in that feeling, we become motivated. We see the goal and in a sort of creative freedom, we call in and arrange the parts that support our desire. We enter the flow of things. We know where we are going and things become simple, effortless and mysteriously supported. The workshop that we will co-create will touch on clarity, worthiness, motivation, our creative capacity, what is half hidden and the making of space.

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Murray Goodchild

Free Your Voice

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Murray is a singer/songwriter whose specialty is in creating song for special events and celebrations such as weddings, births and gatherings. Over the past 10 or so years he has written the theme song each year for the Victorian Men’s Gathering, Menergy. Murray sees group singing as a powerful way to bring people together inside of a unified intention and songs that are shared together become potent reminders of the meaningful experiences shared at gatherings such as this.

We’ll be freeing our voices, firstly with the help of some warm-ups and then by learning and singing a bunch of songs that have literally been created to be sung in groups. They’re easy to learn, they’re catchy as anything and their message is life affirming. When we sing together, we breathe together, we harmonize with each other and we generate and share good vibrations with each other. You may even unlock your inner bard and the songs and stories within you awaiting to be given voice.

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Craig Wyld

Yes/No, Yes/No Consent Using Hugs

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Craig has dedicated most of his life to being of service and helping others. Through his business, The NAKED Soul, Craig's life purpose is “Inspiring Humanity to Love”. Craig is an active contributor to men’s community, President of Mens Wellbeing Inc, Common Ground Lead Facilitator, Accredited Mental Health First Aider, mentor and Dad.

This Workshop calls you to live a more full-bodied expression of who you really are. Practice saying NO! Learning to set healthy boundaries for your personal well-being and ask clearly for what you want - without apology! Speak up and say YES to life and live it on your terms with Craig's guidance in this safe space, you will experience consent through hugs (but only IF you feel you are comfortable). Important Note: You do NOT have to hug anyone in the HUG Space – ever, but you will discover a clearer sense of what is a yes and where the no is for you.

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Tim Easton

Creative Dance

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I have danced the 5Rythms for fifteen years and always found this creative movement to be healing, good exercise and fun. I've experienced depression at various times of my life and this creative outlet has often helped to dig deeper to uplift the causes of my low mood. The process of creative healing has certainly been of great benefit to me.
I'm a father of three healthy adult children, carpenter by profession; although these days I work in public health and have been a member of Men's Wellbeing since 1999.

Based on the 5Rythms this creative expression of dance is intended to wash away the boundaries we carry and open our hearts to fun and joy. It also can assist in healing the wounds we carry by letting go of the old patterns.

Image by Maxim Tajer

Melaina Faranda

Soul Flame – Learn How to Ignite Others with Your Storytelling

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Melaina Faranda, a storyteller, facilitator of women's and girls' circles, teacher, and author of 67 books, has shared stories for decades. Passionate about personal and mythopoetic storytelling, she trained at Emerson College’s Storytelling Beyond Words and with luminaries like Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Dr. Martin Shaw. She believes stories foster a deeper collective homecoming, whether personal or imagined, and has refined her craft through extensive training in the UK and USA.

Want to be someone who can ignite the wildfire of others' hearts and imaginations with a good story well told? You already tell stories in the form of anecdotes to family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. And… there are specific ways you can make those and other stories more fully luminous and alive. You don’t have to be a ‘natural’ or have an acting background to be a storyteller. It's a learnable art form with practical tools and techniques that can help you: expand, persuade, inspire, move, encourage, educate, entertain, and open the wonder door. It's every person's birth right to be able to offer a story to the collective. A story that can spark change, light the soul candle of inspiration, and summon phoenixes from ashes - in a way that information, ideology, and statistics never can. In this workshop you'll learn techniques for remembering, crafting, and discovering personal treasure within the stories you're moved to tell, and how to tell those stories well!

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Women embracing difference, making a difference
to the enrichment of our lives, our families and our communities

Image by Maxim Tajer

We acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture. We especially recognise the roles of Women and the deep wisdom they impart for the future generations of women to stand tall in their knowledge, wisdom and culture.

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