About Marion Miller

My Story 

The Roots of Connection and Creativity

I was born in Tasmania and spent my earliest years on a farm, raised by my immigrant mother from Hamburg, Germany, and my father, a cattle farmer from King Island. My parents and grandparents, worked hard on the land, and in family businesses. The move to Melbourne brought turbulence, my parents' divorce and my mother struggle with generational trauma from a devastated post-war Germany her family left behind.

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​​On Being a Seeker, Finding Presence and Purpose

I've always experienced a spiritual connection to the earth but after being educated in an Anglican school and developing a close relationship with Mrs Penman, the wife of Archbishop Penman, my interest in the spiritual path was sparked. My mother was involved in psychology and neuroscience research at Swinburne University and introduced me to contemplative practice in my early twenties. I reconnected with the professors whom she had published research with many years later to discuss awakening and spiritual experience.

I formed a relationship with the late Dr. SImonne Jameson, who survived WW2 in Paris and went to train as a psychotherapist with Carl Jung in Zurich and worked all over the world in both the arts and psychological sciences. She mentored me in painting and encouraged me to paint big and introduced me to the philosophies of Jung and Buddhism. My dear friend Arian Young, a former Tibetan Buddhist nun, traditional Chinese medicine healer and psychotherapist also guided me through our long lasting friendship. Following in my mum's footsteps I taught mindfulness in an evidence-based secular tradition having trained in the international gold-standard, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), founded by Doctor John Kabat-Zinn.

Personally, I had been exploring the Eastern philosophy of my children's paternal lineage but a retreat with former monk and MBSR teacher, Bob Stahl titled "How the Dharma informs Mindfulness based interventions" developed a deeper interest in the Dharma. I've been attending silent retreats for decades and I’m currently participating in a four-year Dharma teacher training in the Western Insight Meditation tradition. I am focussed on Eco-Dharma and how we can support the social and environmental justice through spiritual and creative practice, ancestry and land-based living.

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I am very interested in rekindling forgotten ancestral lineage and early western wisdom traditions like Celtic mythology, European folklore and goddess traditions, as a form of nature spirituality and eco-feminism. I believe spiritual practice is needed to address the many complex issues in modern western culture. I like to explore these themes and try to marry them with Dharma in my art making, contemplation and circles, always curious about the intersection of east and western wisdom, culture and community making. 

I support a small community with regular online meditation sits and offer a Mindfulness for practitioners course for Allied Health Leaders. I have been fortunate to teach mindfulness in leadership, education, private practice EAP and the community through local council. I have facilitated the wise women's circle for over a decade. I volunteer and sit on the committee of the Insight Meditation Institute of Australia and I'm now establishing a land-based community with The Eco Retreat on the Surf Coast.

Both my grandmothers were creative practitioners; I continue to paint on the easel of my paternal grandmother and treasure the folksy textiles I've inherited from my maternal great grandmother I met in Hamburg. My own creative arts practice at the studio, I explore painting, textile, print making and sculpture and support my daughters in also taking up creative practices. I have recently formed a group for creative practice called Creative Ground.​

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In my early twenties, I traveled west along the coastline of Australia for 6 months, making it as far as Darwin. Spending time with remote First Nations communities in Fitzroy Crossing, Katherine, and Shady Camp N.T., I fell in love with the spirit of Country and I witnessed the initiation ceremony. I was gifted a wild turkey wing by a local elder named Cedric Fortimer at Shady Camp. 

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Wholeness in Complexity

I founded several businesses in creative production, coaching, and mindfulness (including Melbourne Coach, The Coaching Hub and Artists on Location). I formalised this expertise with a Coaching and Counselling degree (ACAP) and ICF certification, integrating coaching with mindfulness to create a framework to take people on transformative journeys and thresholds, developing conscious and creative leaders. 

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I have facilitated hundreds of events in corporate workplaces, education, allied health and the community as well as offering private practice coaching and counselling. I was a co-facilitator of an organisational coaching psychology pilot program using mindfulness and leadership principles to reduce psychosocial hazards and injuries in twelve educational workplaces across Victoria, funded by WorkSafe. After working at all levels of organisation—from coaching executive leaders of large corporations to providing well-being counselling in the public and private sector—I observed a pattern of chronic stress, anxiety and burn out from grind culture spurred on my endless capitalism and the industrial growth complex. Ironically what is happening with humans is also happening to our environment at a much larger and often unseen scale. 

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​Life-Sustaining Systems, Culture and Global Hope

By bringing an embodied mindfulness, systems thinking, compassion and nature-insight to my work, I hope to empower leaders, creatives, and entrepreneurs to embrace their eco-centric ways of working in harmony with the wider web of life. I support l global awareness and local action, creating "islands of sanity," small and healthy ecologies of culture in organisation and community. I love working with thought leaders, visionaries, artists and servant leaders working to build a more integrative approach to work and life, that actively supports us to rise to the complex challenges of our time with clarity, strength, moral imagination, creativity, and a culture of collective purpose and belonging.

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Growing Closer to Nature

Our family is based in Glen Iris, where the studio is located and we move between the city and regional Victoria in Boonah where we are establishing a nature retreat. I am a graduate of the Eco Leadership Program with Port Phillip Eco Centre, a certified Ecotherapist and volunteered with Rewilding Stonnington where I learned more about indigenous planting for local habitat and rewilded my urban backyard. Three years on we have our first coastal banksia flower and everyday new birds, insects and sprouts emerge.

The Eco Retreat, is a long held dream and project I created when I graduated from the Eco Leadership Program and I have hosted several Ecotherapy and Mindfulness retreats. I'm passionate about gardening and connecting with the more than human world and now focussed on phase one and two of The Eco Retreat, establishing an indigenous and native garden, an organic farm, creative studio and Nature Retreat on 70 acres in Boonah.

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Life as an Adventure, Lived Joyfully

Life is an incredible adventure for which I am truly grateful. In my personal life, I've naturally birthed four daughters which taught invaluable lessons about the power of the mind, rites of passage and midwifing human nature. I'm a bi-racial mother and proud parent and value biodiversity and ethnodiversity. My husband's contribution to raising the girls has been a gift to us all. Supporting my husband's executive leadership journey as a co-founder of a successful global technology company taking the built environment on a decarbonisation journey—has profoundly shaped my perspective on ethical leadership, high performing teams and social purpose. His company was one of the organisations I taught mindfulness in and still to this day they have a daily meditation practice session and small sangha. I value self-care and have a regular meditation practice and a founding member of the Insight Circle Sangha. I love to spend time in nature, dance, write, create art and gardening as a way to resource myself. From teaching English in a Buddhist temple in Japan, hiking, travelling the world and sailing the Whitsundays and crewing on a tall ship voyage provided rich and memorable experiences. I still wake up feeling incredibly grateful and energised for the opportunity to serve both people and the planet.

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Thanks for reading to the end : )

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