About Marion Miller

My Founding 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 Germany and my cattle-farmer father. Spending the first five years on the land nurtured my connection to nature. Later, moving to Melbourne brought the turbulence of my parents' divorce and my mother's struggle with post-war generational trauma. Throughout my life, creative arts, spiritual practice and emotional awareness has been my constant, to process experience and explore the deepest aspects of the soul. I carry on a rich lineage of creative women; I still paint on my paternal grandmother’s easel and treasure the textiles of my maternal great-grandmother, this creative practice I now share with my own daughters and other creatives in the Glen Iris studio.​

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Wholeness, Nature, and Leadership

As a coach and counsellor with a degree from ACAP, I have founded projects in coaching, creative production, and nature-based mindfulness. Having facilitated hundreds of private practice sessions, corporate and community events; including a WorkSafe-funded organisational well-being pilot in Education. In a corporate EAP role I have witnessed firsthand the chronic burnout caused by modern workplace culture and the way our system pathologises the human condition and measures normal functioning as the ability to participate in an economic system that is degrading it's own environment. What is happening to human health is happening at a much larger scale to our earth but it doesn't have to be this way. As a holistic coach and counsellor I support leaders to find healthier ways of working through systems thinking, coaching, embodied mindfulness, creativity and nature-insight, I love helping leaders and creatives create work that honours their true calling and wider web of life and to move their lives to more sustainable models. I have witnessed first hand how leadership can flourish while being authentic, purpose driven, compassionate, culturally and environmentally aware and still be on an entrepreneurial journey of success, and growth. I believe the worlds needs this kind of leadership and through cooperation, ethics and wise action, we can rediscover how to weave social and environmental balance into local culture, community and workplace.

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On Being a Seeker, Finding Purpose

My spiritual connection to the earth was sparked early, but deepened when my mother, a psychology researcher, introduced me to contemplative practice. I was profoundly shaped as an artist and practitioner by my early mentor, the late Dr. Simonne Jameson, a psychotherapist and art dealer who trained with Carl Jung and my dear friend Arian Young, a former Tibetan Buddhist nun. My reverence for the spirit of country deepened during a six-month journey to Darwin in my youth, spending time with remote First Nations communities and experiencing ceremony and ritual in Northern W.A and N.T. Decades of silent retreats have led me to a four-year Dharma teacher training in the Western Insight tradition. Today, I weave together Eco-Dharma, eco-feminism, and Celtic ancestral traditions and folklore to support community back into connection with nature and discovering their authentic calling. I host women's circles, leadership coaching and well-being retreats, teach mindfulness, and serve on the committee of the Insight Meditation Institute.

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Our family splits time between Melbourne and Boonah, where we are establishing The Eco Retreat on 70 acres—a long-held dream cultivating an organic farm, indigenous gardens, land stewardship and a creative studio to share in with community. Birthing and raising four daughters taught me to trust the body and natural rites of passage, and supporting my husband’s journey as a climate-tech co-founder has been a wild adventure. I love gardening, travelling with my family, developing projects, making art and being creative and I'm a bit of kitchen witch! Now at 51 I am entering a new era both inwardly and with establishing an off-grid life at Boonah farm. I remain deeply grateful for the privilege and opportunity to serve both community and the earth.