Withyin Creative Wellness is a holistic health and creative arts company built on a simple belief: feeling well is not a luxury or a destination. It is a practice. One that belongs to every person, every family, and every community.
Who We Are
We bring experiential workshops, restorative private sessions, and the Wellness Oracle into the spaces that need them most. First Nations communities across Turtle Island (Canada). NGOs and organizations navigating burnout. Individuals ready to come back to themselves.
We believe wellness should not be saved for once a week or once a month. It lives in the micro moments, the small daily practices, the ten seconds of breath before a hard conversation, the question that shifts a whole afternoon. We make those moments accessible, alive, and genuinely fun.
We believe everyone deserves to know there are always more tools, practices, and support available to them. We help you find what can work for your life.
Our Mission
To make holistic health and creative practice a living, breathing part of everyday life. To inspire individuals, teams, and communities to take their power back, one micro practice at a time. To make self discovery and healthy habits so practical, so joyful, and so woven into the fabric of daily life that waiting to feel better simply stops being an option.
Our Values
Experiential over passive
Real change happens through practice, not presentations. Everything we offer is designed to be felt in the body, not just understood in the mind.
Art as a way of being.
Our facilitators are professional artists and performers first. We bring creativity, play, and genuine fun into every room we enter because we believe those qualities are not extras. They are essential to human health.
Trauma-informed and culturally humble.
We strive to create spaces where every person feels safe enough to be real. We show up as allies, not experts. We honour the wisdom already present in every community we enter.
From self care to community care.
Wellness is not just a personal journey. When individuals heal, communities shift. Everything we offer is designed to ripple outward.
Inspiration with roots.
Without hope we have nothing. Without practice, hope fades. We bring both. Every tool and experience we offer works today, not someday.
Inclusive by design.
Queer-affirming, anti-racist, and led by facilitators of colour. Withyin was built to belong to everyone and we mean that.
How We Show Up
There is a reason people leave our sessions talking about the energy in the room.
We do not arrive with a script and leave two days later. We come with practices, presence, and a genuine curiosity about the people in front of us. We make things fun. We create environments where dialogue is encouraged, where community wisdom is centred, and where nobody feels talked at. Our sessions are interactive, embodied, and full of micro moments that participants carry into their everyday lives long after we are gone.
We introduce practices people can use in ten seconds or ten minutes. At the kitchen table. Before a hard meeting. In the middle of a difficult day. Self discovery does not have to be heavy or complicated. In our hands it is often surprising, playful, and deeply human.
No pressure. No performance. Just practices that help you feel a little better than you did before.
Our facilitators are professional artists, performers, healers, and educators who have spent decades learning how to hold space across wildly different contexts. From global stages to remote First Nations communities across Turtle Island. From marginalized Black communities in America during outreach tours to conference centres and community halls across Canada. That range is not incidental. It is exactly why the work lands the way it does.
We speak with people, not at them. We learn from every room we enter. And we never leave without making sure something real was built, a skill, a feeling, a conversation that continues long after we are gone.
Apollo Halley
Founder and Lead Facilitator
Apollo Halley is the founder of Withyin Creative Wellness and the creator of the Wellness Oracle. He is a performing artist, creative wellness facilitator, and experiential educator whose life's work sits at the intersection of art, holistic health, and human connection. With over 25 years of experience across dance, theatre, film, and facilitation in more than 35 countries, everything Apollo has lived, learned, and survived has been poured into building something he once needed himself.
As a multiracial person of Guyanese heritage, Black, Caucasian, and Portuguese descent, and the child of immigrant parents, Apollo grew up navigating what it means to exist between worlds, never quite fitting the categories others needed him to fit. That experience of otherness became the foundation of his empathy, his artistry, and ultimately his life's work. He knows what it costs to hold on through the hard years. He also knows what becomes possible on the other side of them.
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Withyin Creative Wellness was not born in a boardroom. It was born in community. In sweat lodges and Elders lodges. In university classrooms and remote First Nations communities. In the quiet aftermath of grief and the loud joy of a room full of people remembering how to play. Apollo does not teach wellness from the outside looking in. He walks the talk, imperfectly and consistently, and believes that the most powerful thing a facilitator can offer is not expertise but genuine presence.
His performance credits include The Lion King on London's West End, Wicked at Universal Studios Japan, Star Trek: Discovery, IT: Chapter Two, and the FIFA World Cup Opening Ceremonies. He toured with Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater doing community outreach in some of the most underserved Black communities across America. For four years he toured globally with Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, Santee Smith's celebrated company rooted in Mohawk storytelling and culture, performing across Turtle Island, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Mexico.
For nearly seven and a half years he was in relationship with someone from Saddle Lake Cree Nation, folded into community life, teaching chair yoga at the Elders lodge, leading family fitness and yoga at the Boys and Girls Club, sitting in sweat lodges, learning what it means to show up not as a helper but as someone who belongs to people. He has taught wellness workshops at Blue Quills First Nations College, facilitated at the Cree Cultural Camp, and presented breakout wellness sessions at Knowing Our Spirits, an annual conference in Edmonton welcoming all people to explore holistic health through an Indigenous perspective. For the past three years he has traveled Canada exclusively, leading five-day experiential workshops inside First Nations communities.
Those years did not make him an expert. They made him humble, careful, and genuinely devoted to this work.
Apollo holds a 400-hour yoga teacher certification in Kundalini, Yin, and Restorative yoga, certification with the Thai Healing Alliance, and Life and Health Coach credentials through the Health Coach Institute. He is the creator of the Withyin Method, a nine-phase experiential learning cycle at the heart of every Withyin program, and the Wellness Oracle, a nine-year labour of love and his most personal offering to the world.
He is not here to be the expert in the room. He is here because service is the only honest response to everything he has been given. And because he genuinely believes that when people are given the right conditions, the right practices, and the right space, they remember what they are capable of. Every time.
Our Facilitators
Every facilitator in the Withyin community is a professional artist, performer, or creative practitioner first. That is not a coincidence. It is the whole point.
We believe the most powerful wellness experiences are led by people who have spent their lives learning how to be fully present, how to read a room, how to hold space for the unexpected, and how to make something come alive. That is what artists do. And that is what we bring into every workshop, session, and gathering we lead.
Salinee
Vanichanan-Meek
Salinee Vanichanan-Meek is a movement artist and educator who believes that wellness is an active, creative practice woven into the fabric of daily life. Her foundation as a professional dancer includes touring with The Alabama Ballet and performing with the Ballethnic Dance Company, highlighted by a featured solo for the late Maya Angelou in Still I Rise. Holding a B.A. in Dance from Birmingham-Southern College and a UCLA Teaching Credential with an emphasis on Social Justice, she has spent her career bridging the gap between high-level artistry and community advocacy.
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From her years as an educator for the Los Angeles Unified School District to her current role as an Adjunct Professor at Flathead Valley Community College, Salinee treats every classroom as a space for students to land, breathe, and rediscover their power through the art of feeling alive.
As an E-RYT 1000 and Registered Children's Yoga Teacher, Salinee brings over twenty years of mastery to her work, rooted in her 2003 Integrative Yoga Therapy training. She serves as a veteran co-creator and facilitator with Withyin Creative Wellness, leading programs across Alberta, Montana, New York City, and Connecticut. Beyond the studio, she contributes to the field as a creative advisor, editor, and analyst for the research-backed, evidence-based practices found in the Wellness Oracle. This unique blend of academic insight and artistic intuition allows her to lead with inspiration with roots, ensuring that the tools she shares are as practical as they are soulful.
Whether she is leading Yoga, Art, and Climb camps at the local climbing gym or facilitating her Connection and Grounded Clarity workshops, Salinee's presence is grounded, warm, and deeply relational. Recognized as a Montana Teacher Leader in the Arts in 2016 and a Presenter of Dance Curriculum in 2018, she focuses on the micro moments, the small daily practices and shifts in movement that allow a person to realign with their inner truth. She honours the wisdom already present in every community she enters, inviting participants to come as they are and providing the grounded direction needed to navigate life's uncertainties with clarity and depth.
Eric
Vilayhong-Bolivong
Eric Vilayhong-Bolivong is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, DJ, and creative facilitator based in Tkaronto (Toronto), living and working on Indigenous land while honouring their family's immigrant roots. Their work spans photography, videography, visual arts, graphic design, tattooing, music, and storytelling, with creativity serving as a central tool for connection, healing, and self-expression. Eric is a graduate of the Art Foundations and Interactive Design programs at George Brown College.
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As a queer and neurodivergent artist living with ADHD, and as the child of immigrant parents who brought their roots from Laos to build a new life in Canada, Eric's lived experiences deeply inform how they hold space. Growing up navigating unstable environments and moving between worlds taught them independence, adaptability, and a profound understanding of what it means to need a space where you feel truly seen. That understanding shapes everything about how they show up in a room.
Eric is the original co-creator of Creative Arts for Wellbeing, the flagship arts-based workshop at Withyin Creative Wellness, developed alongside Apollo Halley. Where Apollo brings the somatic, holistic, and facilitation framework, Eric brings an extraordinary breadth of artistic skill and a meticulous creative eye that elevates every detail of the experience. Together their modalities are genuinely complementary, covering the full spectrum from embodied wellness practice to visual art, photography, videography, music, and collaborative community creation. The result is a five-day experience unlike anything else available to First Nations communities across Turtle Island.
Eric is also the lead designer of the Wellness Oracle, Withyin's signature 111-card reflective photography deck. His visual sensibility, attention to detail, and deep understanding of how art creates emotional safety are woven into every card in the deck. Through Withyin, Eric channels over 15 years of community-focused experience into work that uses creativity as a genuine pathway to emotional wellbeing, resilience, and belonging.
Deidrea James
Deidrea James is a dance and theatre professional, educator, and wellness facilitator with over twenty years of experience across stage, film, and multiple dance styles. As a Guyanese Canadian born and raised in Toronto with mixed cultural roots, her life has been shaped by a commitment to creating spaces where people are invited to discover their own potential, trust their bodies, and access their innate wisdom.
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Deidrea James is a Guyanese Canadian dance and theatre professional, educator, and wellness facilitator with over twenty years of experience across stage, film, and multiple disciplines. Born and raised in Toronto with mixed cultural roots, her life has been shaped by a commitment to creating spaces where people are invited to trust their bodies and access their own innate capacity.
Her performance career is anchored by a defining tenure with The Lion King, one of the most celebrated musicals in theatre history. She made her professional debut in Toronto at eighteen, went on to perform on London's West End, and continued across North America, including Broadway and Las Vegas. During this time she held leadership roles as swing, dance captain, and fight captain. Her theatre work also includes the Stratford Festival, Mirvish Productions, and performances alongside recording artists Katy Perry and Deborah Cox.
Through Withyin, Deidrea channels her performance background, her training as a birth and postpartum doula, and her deep commitment to early childhood education into facilitation work grounded in compassion and body-based practice. She understands that wellness, art, and self-discovery are not equally accessible to all, and she shows up to close that gap.
Shereese Caspersz Halley
Bio coming soon.