Counselling

Maggie (Masters Relationship Therapy, BSW, MA) is a Relationship therapist and Mental Health Social Worker. She has a private counselling practice and also teaches at Swinburne University & Relationships Australia in Melbourne (RAV).  

Maggie works with individuals and couples. New referrals are limited to people who have completed any of her training programs or retreats. Relationship Renew is a 6-week live online training and prerequisite for all relationship counselling.

Retreats

A retreat veteran, Maggie’s vision is to create the sort of retreats she herself loves to go to - smaller groups, warm, spacious, fun, with opportunities for in-depth learning, silence, yoga and hiking, and in beautiful natural settings with delicious food.

Upcoming retreats include: Bali Relationship Renew six-day retreat, Sunday 20th - Friday 25th July 2025 (TBC); & the Brené Brown inspired Gifts of Imperfection, also six-days in Bali, Sunday 3rd - Friday 8th August 2025 (TBC).

Mindfulness Groups

Maggie specialises in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and taught this 8-week program in Hawthorn for Openground, Australia's leading mindfulness body, from 2010-2017. She continues to teach MBSR and other mindfulness-based programs, online - including Mindful Self Compassion (next course starts 31/7/24), and her 6-week Relationship Renew training. Maggie also trained with Brené Brown & team to become a certified Daring Way and Rising Strong facilitator and offers this work in retreat format.  

Maggie O'Shea

Maggie specialises in providing unique retreats for small-groups in beautiful natural settings in Australia and Bali. She particularly loves to combine her understandings and skills from many years of mindfulness and compassion practice and group-work, to bring to life and make practical the theory and training programs that have been transformative for her. Based in Castlemaine, approximately 1.5 hours drive from Melbourne, she teaches Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Mindful Self Compassion and her own Relationship Renew programs, as well as providing relationship and individual therapy in her part-time Private Practice. She also lectures at Swinburne University in the Masters of Counselling and Relationships Australia in Melbourne (RAV).

 Maggie’s background includes a Masters degree in Relationship & Couples Therapy and thirty years working in Mental Health Social Work.  She was based in Oncology and Palliative Care in 2006 when she discovered the life-changing mindfulness work of Jon Kabat-Zinn.  Having participated in her first ten-day silent retreat in 1994 she already knew the power of meditation, but the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program provided a way of more fully integrating mindfulness into her personal and professional life.  After training with Kabat-Zinn and others, she was invited in 2010 to teach MBSR for Openground, Australia’s leading Mindfulness Training body, and has led one or more mindfulness groups almost each school term ever since. She is also registered to teach Kristin Neff & Chris Germer’s Mindful Self Compassion Program, Rick Hanson’s Positive Neuro-plasticity Training, and is an accredited Brené Brown Daring Way and Rising Strong facilitator. A long-term yoga practitioner, she has also completed a 350-hour Yoga Teacher training and is registered with Yoga Australia.

 Maggie is passionate about mindfulness and the related neuro-science that suggests that – because our tricky mammal brains and nervous systems are hardwired for survival, not ease – we need to both understand and actually “practice” what it is that helps us live and love fully and well.