Unravelling Codependency Through Creative Play: Poetry & Movement with Banana Wild

In this session, participants will explore codependency not as a clinical label, but as relational patterns that many of us experience in connection, attachment, and care through creative poetry prompts and embodied movement games.

Using the tools of artistic expression and group play, the workshop will:
• Surface inner narratives around connection and dependency.
• Encourage community reflection on how we relate to ourselves and others.
• Use poetry to translate emotion into language (writing and sharing short pieces).
• Use movement games to explore boundaries, attunement, and autonomy in a supportive group setting.

Participants will leave with a deeper sense of self-awareness, expressive insight, and shared creative experience.

About Banana Wild
I’m Banana, founder of Soul Shine Collective a lived-experience-led community fuelled by creativity, connection, and radical compassion. My work grows out of a childhood shaped by addiction, mental illness, systemic neglect, and social norms like heteronormativity and misogyny, alongside experiences of homelessness, institutional harm, and recovery from an early age. All of this taught me something vital: real healing doesn’t come from systems it comes from people who show up, listen deeply, and don’t disappear when things get messy.

I don’t do clinical, top-down wellbeing. I work from mutuality, honesty, and shared humanity, weaving together storytelling, creative play, and embodied practices that help people reconnect with themselves and each other. After being asked far too often “what’s wrong with you?” instead of “what happened to you?”, I’m passionate about creating spaces where people are met with curiosity, warmth, and genuine care.

Over the years, I’ve supported people in prisons, youth services, drug and alcohol teams, mental health spaces, schools, and community settings — not as someone who swoops in to fix, but as someone who can sit alongside, say “me too,” and really mean it. When people feel truly seen by someone who gets it, trust grows and that’s where real change begins.

Lived experience isn’t a bonus feature in my work it’s the whole engine. Through Soul Shine Collective, I create joyful, honest spaces where stories are celebrated, not hidden, and where queer and marginalised folks are invited to take up space exactly as they are. I believe survival isn’t just a backstory it’s a qualification and my work is about turning that survival into connection, creativity, and collective care.

https://www.instagram.com/soulshinecollective25/