Spotlight-Jess Huon

At the edge – Exploring the new

How Long: 60 Mins

Overview

This theme challenges us to consider contributions that may seem ‘a bit of a stretch’ – this includes broader holistic health and wellbeing experiences and wider outcomes for participants, practitioners and policy-makers.

Jess Huon will take us to new places within our ourselves and our work while provoking deep understanding on concepts of health and wellbeing. Jess has been engaged in meditative and embodiment practices since the age of seventeen. She has trained in traditional Buddhist monastic settings, inter-faith contexts of meditative inquiry and has spent long periods of solitary forest practice in India, Australia, Spain and the USA. In 2009 Jess was awarded a scholarship to study Buddhist texts at Spirit Rock (near San Francisco). She holds a bachelor of Creative Arts (VCA) and a post-graduate degree in Therapeutic Arts practice (RMIT). Jess brings traditional teaching alive in a fresh and transformative manner. She is described as a natural orator whose talks offer ‘street language for the soul’. Deeply informed but not bound by tradition, her style and insights are grounded in contemporary life.

Throughout Australia Jess offers a rich calendar of Public talks, retreats, Yatras, workshops and one to one mentoring sessions. She is also a published author and Associate Director of Rollercoaster Theatre Company, a not-for-profit ensemble of trained actors with disabilities based in Melbourne. ‘For me, meditation isn’t about insulating ourselves in private chambers of peace, rather it’s a method of practice that supports us to find the inner ground needed to look squarely at the ‘grace and grit’ in our personal, and world, situation. Meditation affords us the space to dive deeper than habitual reactivity in order to find fresh responses to meet the howl of the world’.