Hello, I'm Emily Wilkinson
I created Flourishing Space to offer training and development to psychologists and health professionals who want to bring creativity back into their practice and their lives.
Flourishing Space offers professional development, courses and supervision for psychologists and therapists who want to work with creativity, play and connection, both in the therapy room and in how they sustain themselves.
Our training is grounded in psychological science, expressive arts, compassion-focused approaches and decolonial perspectives.
Originally from Naarm/Melbourne, I lived in London and New York before returning home in 2018. Across these places, I noticed that the very qualities that draw many psychologists to this work, our imagination and our belief that things can be different, are often suppressed by a fear of stepping outside clinical norms or the medical model. Flourishing Space exists to help clinicians reclaim those qualities and bring them back into their practice.
If you're reading this, you might know this feeling intimately.
Why I Do What I Do
Why I train psychologists and health professionals
My work combines psychology, poetry, compassion and creativity.
As clinicians, we are rarely taught how to bring evidence-based creative practices into our work. Many of us were trained in ways that sidelined imagination, play and diverse ways of knowing and being. I created Flourishing Space so that therapists can learn to use these skills with confidence, build them into their practice, and experience the benefits for themselves along the way.
What we need is a deeper connection to ourselves, to one another and to what makes life meaningful. This connection helps us challenge the narratives that keep us isolated and depleted, and it reminds us that humans survive and thrive through interdependence.
Through my own experience and years of working alongside psychologists, leaders, educators and health professionals, I’ve learned that self-care practices alone will never be enough, because we need each other and we need to remember who we are beyond our professional roles.
When we reconnect with our creativity and playfulness together, we tap into a well of energy that can’t be restored any other way. This is how we make meaning of our experiences, learn sustainable ways to practice, resist systems that cause harm, prevent burnout, and offer our clients richer and more holistic care.
When our clients reconnect with their creativity and playfulness, they tap into a well of energy that can’t be restored any other way. We also benefit from this connection, we sustain ourselves, resist systems that cause harm, prevent burnout, and are more able to flourish in our work and lives.
My Approach
I combine evidence-based psychology with the depth and wisdom of ancient Buddhist and contemplative traditions. My work weaves together:
Compassion-focused approaches teach us that compassion works in three directions: the compassion we give to ourselves, the compassion we allow ourselves to receive, and the compassion we offer others, according to Professor Paul Gilbert and ancient Buddhist and contemplative traditions.
Mindfulness and contemplative practices: Based on ancient traditions, these practices ground us in present-moment awareness.
Strengths-based work: This helps us recognise and build on our unique gifts and honour what each of us brings.
Creative and poetic processes can reconnect us with experiences of flow and with ourselves. These processes can also connect us with ways of knowing that resist the narrow rationality often privileged by Western thought.
This is about remembering the curious, playful and imaginative self and integrating them into our work and our daily lives in sustainable, nourishing ways.
These are the parts of us that make meaning, that exist in relation to beauty, to language, to culture and country and to other people.
My Mission
I'm here to help you:
Reclaim the creative, playful parts of yourself that energise and inspire you and bring you joy.
Explore ways to break free from the constant cycle of rushing and exhaustion.
Reconnect with your inner wisdom and unique gifts, and the collective care that sustains us all.
Learn evidence-based techniques that help clients to tap into their own creativity in the therapy room and in their lives.
Find sustainable ways to flourish while staying connected to the work you care about. When you are thriving, the people around you feel it too: your clients, your family, your community.
My Poetry Work
Poetry and psychology ask many of the same things of us. They involve deep listening, finding meaning in complexity, and the willingness to sit with what resists easy answers. They’re also about finding ways to express what it means to be human.
Whenever I'm not working with clients or facilitating programs, and sometimes when I am, you'll find me writing, reading, and thinking about poetry.
In 2018 I was co-winner of the Brooklyn Poets Yawp Poem of the Year Award, and in 2019, I received a Pushcart Prize nomination. My work has been featured on Poets Bridge, and I have read at the New York City Poetry Festival. I am currently working on my first full-length collection.
My Qualifications & Experience
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Professional Qualifications
Master of Clinical Psychology
Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Honours)
IECL Organisational Coaching (Level 1)
Fellow of the APS College of Clinical Psychologists
Member of the Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership
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Professional Experience
Clinical Psychologist with experience supporting individuals through complex challenges
Organisational coach working with leaders and teams
Facilitator of numerous programs, including The Flourishing Way, which combines psychology research and skills with creativity
Founder of Flourishing Space
My Positioning
As a white, settler psychologist working on stolen land, I'm learning to recognise how my profession has been shaped by colonial frameworks. I'm committed to ongoing learning about how Western psychology has pathologised, excluded, and harmed those it claimed to help.
My experience has shown me how deeply ableism and the medical model harm people who don't fit narrow definitions of "productive" or "able." This informs my approach and my commitment to challenging the structures that produce that harm.
This work is ongoing, imperfect, and necessary.
Let's Connect
If you’d like to rediscover creative, playful parts of yourself, I'm here to support you.
Whether through The Flourishing Way or Continued Flourishing programs, training in creative practices for clinical work, supervision or mentoring, speaking, or organisational work, I'll work alongside you to help you find your way back to creativity, joy, and connection.
You don’t have to figure it out alone.
