Maria Spathis is a registered Transpersonal Psychotherapist and Business Consultant who bridges corporate precision with human depth. With over 20 years’ experience in human resources, payroll, and organisational operations, and formal qualifications in Psychology, Business (HR Management), and Transpersonal Therapy, she brings structural expertise together with therapeutic insight to support people through loss, transition, and change. Her knowledge of enterprise agreements, Fair Work obligations, compliance frameworks, HRIS systems, and psychosocial hazards in the workplace enables her to translate complexity into clear, sustainable, and people-focused pathways—where clarity and compliance align with emotional intelligence.

Alongside her corporate career, Maria has devoted years to working one-to-one with clients in the raw terrain of personal transformation—supporting those navigating bereavement, identity shifts, career crossroads, relationship changes, and profound uncertainty. Her own journey—including the passing of her father, a life-changing six-month expedition across Australia, and the collective upheaval of the pandemic—deepened her understanding of how loss reshapes both individuals and systems of life and work.

From this integration of lived experience and professional expertise, she developed the Via Method: a grief-aware framework that equips workplaces to meet psychosocial risks such as burnout, transition fatigue, and diminished role control, while guiding individuals to reclaim resilience, meaning, and clarity. Known for translating complexity into frameworks where compliance and compassion are held together, Maria helps turn transition from something to endure into a profound passage of sustainable growth, healing, and renewed possibilities.

In Orphic and Platonic tradition, death was sacred—an initiation into deeper realms of understanding. Loss, transition, and change hold the same liminal quality: a metaxy, the threshold between what was and what is yet to be. These passages are not merely disruptions to be endured, but living catalysts—poiesis, a creative and regenerative force. Through symbolic descent, we retrieve what was essential, reweave our fractured narratives, and emerge in new forms of strength. What once unmoored us becomes the very passage into transformation. The discomfort is not bypassed but honoured—as philosopher’s stone, as alchemical agent, as the soul’s work. This model invites a radical reframing: grief as a portal, not a prison.

Spathis comes from the Greek word spathē—a blade/sword that does not harm but reveals. It carries the ethos of aletheia: truth emerging from the shadows. In ancient philosophy, the sword is not a weapon but a symbol of discernment—cutting through illusion to reach the heart of what matters. Spathis invites us into that same clarity: healing not as mere repair, but as a purposeful unfolding. When we meet loss or change with presence and intention, we step into a space where what was broken can be metabolised into meaning—where endings become thresholds, and loss is transformed into a rite of becoming.

Our society has forgotten the practices that once held loss, transition, and change with reverence. Spathis seeks to restore these—not by returning to the past, but by reviving its wisdom in a form that speaks to the modern world. Drawing from ancient tragedy, where communal catharsis transformed collective upheaval, Spathis envisions these life passages as shared rites rather than private burdens. It invites us to re-author the role of loss and change in our lives—not as experiences to conceal or rush through, but as thresholds to witness, honour, and integrate. In this way, transition becomes not only personal renewal, but a catalyst for cultural evolution.