About Shannon
Hello friend, and welcome. How sweet and terrifying it is to know people land here to read about me. I hope it doesn’t disappoint you to learn there isn’t a neat, marketable story here. There was no single moment that changed everything or set me on this path. No grand epiphany. Just a life, lived through this body. An experience of the cosmos that happens to be unfolding as me.
That experience has included things I didn’t choose and wouldn’t wish for anyone: a childhood home where violence lived in the walls; family ruptures that reshaped my life; loss of loved ones; a grief that feels like broken ribs.
I know now how the things we move through shape our physiology, but what I knew growing up was just sensitivity and divergence: inflammatory pain that flares and migrates; nerves that fizz, and a mind that races. There were years where anxiety and low mood felt like forever-friends. I’ve sat in rooms with kind therapists who asked good questions, and I tried a bunch of different cognitive approaches. I gathered language, tendencies, insight and perspective, and it helped, in the ways it could.
I found somatics the way most people find the things that matter: sideways, via goat tracks and back alleys. A friend invited me to a yoga class. I went because she asked. I went back because it felt good. Then I trained to teach.
Yoga gave me a toolkit of breath and asana, but I could also see how easily bodies became shapes, how often we were guided to achieve a posture rather than to move towards a particular sensory experience of our own, unique and miraculous form. So I followed my curiosity further, towards teachers and practices living at the edges and intersections: somatics woven with art-making, with grief work, with nervous systems shaped by inequality, illness, caregiving and survival. Places where bodies weren’t expected to be calm, compliant or impressive, just real.
We live, learn, move and heal inside systems that don’t always see or serve tender bodies. I’ve had to find my own ways through. I know what it’s like to hold diagnoses that are both clarifying and reductive, to exist in the gap between what the notes say and what it actually feels like to get through your days. I hold a non-pathologising view of the body and mind because I know first-hand how limited labels can be. Useful, sometimes, but never the whole story.
What is universal is this: our lives are complex and contradictory. Grief sits right beside joy. Ugly crying exists next to howling laughter. We hold entire universes within us, and we are never reducible to a history or a checklist.
These days, I walk alongside people who care deeply and give so much. Changemakers, campaigners, carers, creatives, community-shapers. People whose hearts are big, whose contributions and roles in the world matter, and whose pace hasn’t always been kind to their bodies.
If you're here, I'm guessing you've been looking for something that feels less clinical, less rushed or performative, and way more human. Something that meets you where you are and trusts that you already hold what you need.
You're in the right place.
Foundations
For two decades I’ve gathered practices, modalities, frameworks and experiences that allow me to walk alongside people with genuine understanding and care.
Mind-Body Coaching – The Embody Lab
A gentle, body-attuned approach to decision-making, helping you align your actions with what feels true and sustainable for your nervous system.
Somatic Stress Release™ – The Embody Lab
A trauma-informed practice that works with your body’s natural rhythm to release stress, restore balance, and expand your capacity to respond to life with steadiness.
Integrative Somatic Parts Work – The Embody Lab
An embodied approach to understanding the many aspects of self, blending somatic awareness with Internal Family Systems principles to bring safety, insight, and integration to the parts of you shaped by life.
Functional Flow Yoga & Meditation – Spanda School
A way of moving and meditating that values curiosity and presence over performance, helping you reconnect to your body and its intelligence.
Facilitation Skills & Program Design – Mike Dyson
Training in creating spaces where learning is responsive, inclusive, and participant-led, cultivating connection and presence in groups.
Brene Brown Dare to Lead™
Exploring courage, vulnerability, and values-aligned leadership as tools for authenticity and integrity in action.
Mental Health First Aid
Equipping me to notice and respond to signs of mental health challenges, ensuring that safety and care are always present in the work I offer.
Philosophy
For years, I’ve been paying attention to how humans carry their histories, their joys, their griefs, and their stresses through posture, breath, and presence. Every life experience – trauma, loss, medical conditions, creativity, career, relationships – shapes how we move, respond, and inhabit the world.
I am one human in one body, guiding, witnessing, and holding space for others as an equal. My approach blends the science of the nervous system, polyvagal theory, and embodied neuroscience with somatic movement, Hakomi techniques, functional awareness, and body-led enquiry. I draw on the teachings of those who explore the edges and intersections of movement, relationality, and somatic practice – Staci K Haines, Kai Cheng Thom, Nkem Ndefo, Dr Scott Lyons, Dr Richard Strozzi, Dr Rae Johnson, Licia Sky, Frances Booth, and Manuela Mishke-Reeds – while always listening first to what the body in front of me knows.
In practice, this means we explore the body’s intelligence, tune into its rhythms, and follow where it needs to go. We work with tension and release, contraction and expansion, insight and curiosity. The invitation is always the same: to meet yourself with compassion, to experiment, to learn, and to carry these discoveries forwards in ways that last decades, not just moments.
Here, you are not performing, you are being. You are learning, sensing, expanding and practising with the body you have right now, so that you may become the person you wish to be.
Lineage
This work did not begin with me, nor does it belong to any single modality, culture, or individual. Somatic practice lives inside a much longer human story and has been shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems, land-based ways of knowing, and ancestral practices of listening, sensing, orienting, and responding through the body. Long before neuroscience named the nervous system, bodies already knew how to regulate, to grieve together, to move with seasons, to attune to place and to one another.
I hold this work with deep respect for those living lineages. For the Indigenous cultures whose wisdom has been extracted, translated, renamed, and too often erased within contemporary somatic and therapeutic spaces. For the teachers and elders – named and unnamed – whose knowledge continues through bodies rather than texts.
I practise on unceded land, and I understand my work as being in relationship with that land, not separate from it. This means staying curious, accountable, humble, and resisting the idea that somatic work is something to be mastered or owned. Instead, treating it as something to be remembered, tended and passed on with care.
I write more about this important context, and my ongoing relationship to it, in this journal article.
Inclusion
Creating spaces that feel truly accessible and inclusive has always been my north star. That care shows up in the way I use language, in how I structure my offerings, and in how I think about pricing. But I also know that life looks different for everyone, and what counts as accessible isn’t only about convenience but about budgets, energy and circumstances.
If the cost of participation is the only barrier for you accessing this work, I offer a limited number of reduced-rate sessions each month. Simply email me at hello@shannonpalmer.au and we'll find a way to work together.
If your situation changes while you’re receiving support – if you’re able to return to the stated pricing – please let me know. As a one-woman small business, I sincerely appreciate your consideration, as it helps me continue holding this space for everyone who wants to be here.