Australian Government to enforce alcohol bans in Aboriginal Communities

A report into child sexual abuse in Aboriginal Communities has resulted in the Australian Government introducing enforced alcohol bans and medical examinations for all children under 6 in the Northern Territory communities.
Responses are polarised….in the eyes of some, these Aborignal-only laws will only add to the racism and separatism that started the cycle of anger and despair that has lead to many of the issues of abuse and violence in the first place. Others are asking what laws and enforced medical procedures will be put on the white miners who make up some of the numbers of the perpetrators of abuse….

The following is a letter to our state newspaper that I wrote on a day when the news of the bans were released across the country….with headlines that further places Aboriginal Australians in the pathologised, ‘troubled /wounded’ place of the collective Australian psyche, once again ignoring the depth and knowledge of traditional Aborginal culture in its pre-invasion state.

Some leaders are in agreeance with the decision as you can see here and others are concerned for the well being of families who will have to comply with the enforced medical examinations as you can read about here…..

Letter to the Adelaide Advertiser 22nd June 2007

There is a saying that goes, “What is impressed upon a person will be
expressed by the person”.
For thousands of years Aboriginal society was a strong culture
defined by co-operation not competition, sustainable land management
and spiritual and cultural practices that enriched and enhanced
community life. Mental well being, a sense of meaning and purpose,
mutual obligation and belonging defined cultural identity.
A comparatively short time ago land theft, internment into opressive
camps, punishment for speaking ones own language, legalised child
removal, alcohol in exchange for compliance, sexual abuse, work
without wages, lack of legal status until 1967, maginalisation and
poverty was impressed upon the heart and soul of a once strong and
flourishing society.

As a nation we are in the very early days of recovery from the impact
of abducting children from loving family arms and the consequences of
a materialistic, competitive culture inflicting its values and fraught
land management practices upon the traditional land owners.To enforce more laws, rules and restrictions in an attempt to protect
the children is a long way from the deep healing, development of
meaningful relationships between Aborignal and non-Aborginal people
and the strengthening of the heart and soul needed for Aboriginal
Australia to recover from the violence and multiple traumas
inflicted.

What we are seeing now is simply the mirrored- expression of what has
been impressed in very recent times and as Einstein wisely
counselled….”The significant problems we face cannot be solved at
the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”.
We need to think from the heart and link hands as a nation over the
coming years to recover the strength, dignity and courage that
defined Aboriginal society for so long… until us white fellas came
stomping across the country, trampling peoples lives and seeding the
current crisis across Aboriginal society today.
Let’s at least hear you say “Sorry” John Howard before you begin
issuing more of the autocratic rules and dominant culture control
that started the problem in the first place.

The Sha’manic… The Manic… and the Mists of Madness in between…

*This piece is shared here for my friend on the Lonsdale Street Tram who has asked many questions over the years about my view on “Energy Management” and why I think that energetic and Emotional Mastery of the often chaotic forces within is such an important part of our journey to reaching our fullest potential.

For a number of years I had several highly creative, highly emotional, charismatic people in my close inner circle. Some have remained and others have taken a different path.
During one particularly chaotic year three of my friends were diagnosed as having bi-polar (manic depression)..a state that highly creative, often emotionally unresolved people experience as the sharp side of the brilliant Sword of creativity and a highly imaginative Mind.
I have never experienced that place myself, though the mirrors of my relationships reflected back the choas that often accompanies the highly creative state and I sometimes had a “there but for the grace of god go I” perspective….

These days, unswayed, uncharmed and unconvinced by the hyper-energetic excitations of another’s “wow”, I am ever mindful that once sleeplessness begins, it is often followed by a gloriously seductive technicolour dream that is merely a nightmare awaiting to enter centre stage…….

I read and researched widely during that chaotic time and have no doubt that much of the entertainment, paintings, movies, stories and ideas we enjoy collectively were birthed within and as a result of the hyper-manic realms….and from the depressed and darkened place that most often follows….

Those books I bought are now boxed away and happily removed from my everyday life…but I remember what I have learnt and am Thankful for the lessons….though I have no need to return to that place of learning ever again….
Through those many journeys that I walked with friends and family and in my work in the areas of homelessness and welfare, I came to realise that there is a “Mist” of ‘madness in this realm of “mania” / hyper-mania….bi-polarities and chaos.
One of my friends ( we were Thelma and Louise in our teens) finally realised how seasonal her manic-eruptions were, that was the beginning to transcending the chaos that visited her every winter for several years.

It is not a ‘line’ that one crosses from ’sane’ to ‘crazy’…it can begin with a little thought here or an odd reaction there…droplet by droplet like when we begin to enter a fog that we can see in the distance and suddenly realise the fog has consumed us and we can no longer see a single foot in front of us….

What is ‘crazy’ anyway?
The Shaman and time travellers of Indigenous ways of old…and not so old…required the altered state to access their gifts and the Other Realm.
Our mental health system is one based on pathology and sickness not the Mythological state and individual giftedness….which is often defined by those ‘manic’ currents and imPulses…
Our visionaries, shaman, mystics and time travellers are most often sedated, mislablled, interned and squashed by medical practitioners and therapsits who are themselves uninitiated into those higher, precarious realms.

There was a time in my life when the seemingly Shamanic erupted into the Manic so brilliantly and outrageously that I barely had time to grab my floaties and goggles before the tsunami of a thousand volts of creative and chaotic currents crashed down upon my world and swept me to the outer realms of the human Mind…

At the time I referred to the “Demon” who entered our home and whilst I may not use that term today …I am not so sure I would not still refer to the Demonstration of such chaos with anything less than dislike and take great care in its unpredictable presence.

The Mists of Madness…
……a semi-fictional Story remembering all of those who I walked with upon that crazy path over 10 years ago…

Remember how much I used to hate your snoring? Well I’ve never told you this but sometimes I welcomed the raucous rumbling with delight! I would prop myself up on one arm and smile as I watched you sleep. I’d stroke your hair and pull the sheets over your shoulders, serenity in the beauty of our Love.

It was at those times that I welcomed your snoring like a reliable old friend.
You see I had come to understand that you never snored when the demon was nearby.
Your snoring told me that you were resting deeply and your mind was not stinging with the relentless attack of whirlwind thoughts, paranoia and tormented thinking.
The raucous racket of your snoring told me that we were in for a peaceful night.

We laughed that time I video taped your snores as they went from a quiet hum to a hullabaloo. After that you didn’t doubt me when I said I had to leave the room in order to sleep. You even looked a little embarrassed that such an undignified racket was beyond your control.
We were both convinced that you had gifts from God and we were in agreement that much was expected from one to whom much had been given!
Snoring was outside of this dignified realm.

I knew that when the demon was nearby you would not sleep. You would be pacing the floor, bouncing up and down on a crazy see sore of euphoria and tragedy.
You might wake me up with that crazy secretive look that alluded to mysterious knowledge of far away things…no time for sleeping, no time for eating and no time…absolutely no time… for me..
In fact unbeknownst to me I may have turned into the enemy whilst I was sleeping. That took some adjusting to!

When the demon was in our house you would watch me sideways, seeking out the signs that would confirm to you I was now foe and not friend.. . I was a cryptic enemy to be decoded
When the demon was in our house even our animals were plotting against your Divine purpose and none of us were to be trusted.
Except our beautiful dog who walked tirelessly by your side.
When she panted with thirst you no longer saw the need in her eyes…all you saw were the things you thought were true.
Even when they weren’t.

When the demon wasn’t in our house I tread carefully lest it be merely slumbering and ready to pounce at us from behind the madness veil.

Although the demon spoke to you, spoke with you and saw through you …it was not you who stood before me…you had disappeared in the mists of time.
Where did my snoring, contented mate go when the monster was here?
The moments of brilliance and knowledge twisted in a frenzy of certainty and not.
When did they merge to become one big knot until your thinking confused you and your thoughts were like rattle snakes stinging wild monkeys in the prison of your mind?

Sometimes I found myself drawn into your swirling, twirling mists of madness.
It was easier to pretend the bizarre to be true, than to plunge into my heart break alone.
Then I would cry and beg you to come back, rest, sleep, slow down.
Return to me and the world we will never again share.
You looked at me with brash confidence.
Your new world was far superior to mine.
You said my tears were cleverly plotted to draw you in…you weren’t to be fooled by the hysterics of one such as me!
I lay there sobbing and watched the tears turn deep velvet red.
My heart had split open, broken on the bed.

You were euphoric in your mania, swinging recklessly through unexplored terrain.
You invited me to join you, oblivious to my pain.
When the demon was in our house there were messages in unseen things.
Sometimes we had to go to the bathroom to speak lest the enemies were listening through wires thread through neighborhood yards.

Your look suggested I was your co-conspirator but I misread you, I was so pathetically happy to be on your side again that I joined you in whispered secrets made safe by a running hot, noisy shower.
Whatever it takes!
And it took my peace of mind.
Puffed up with bravado and conviction you were ready to confront those spies who were cleverly hidden in a neighbor’s disguise.
You had begun to burn things and you abandoned objects in the street.
The mists of madness now consumed you in a swirling, fog in your head.
Not even the incense could rid our sacred scarred home from the acrid odor of fear and dread.

I called you and I called you ….“Please come back, don’t leave me here. .. don’t let them take you away”.
……and when I realised you were no longer with me I yelled at that demon to return you to me.
I thought it was too late, you had gone but then I saw a glimmer of you in your eyes.

Teary, weary, fearful eyes, I grabbed your hand and brought you home. You only stayed for a minute or two.

Your body quivered and shook from the tremendous bolts of energy that charged forth from the darkness and wrapped you in tentacle embrace.

There was fear and euphoria, confusion upon your face.
Electrical currents surged through the once peaceful, reflective place.

The demon barged into our scared home and wouldn’t leave
…so I had to call the police and have them take you both away.
I no longer had a choice.

And you looked at me with a little smile that said… “See, I knew I was right…you were plotting against me”.

And I stood there and I shattered before my own eyes and bled into tomorrow.
Much was lost and too little was gained when our home was invaded by the demon from the unrequited past.

Grandiose certainty lay shattered and smashed in the debris of our life.
The demon mocked all that we once believed in.
We were once so confident about tomorrow…but were left with shattered yesterdays.

Forever in my heart you will remain
and I close the door on that place knowing that
we all learnt was needed
for where we were
at that Time….

*******************

Finding our Sacred, Peaceful Pathway….spending time in Nature enables us to Breathe once again…

When things just simply do not fit anymore…

Purrl is a beautiful little Black cat who, like ALL black cats is a very good manifester.
She is able to stare at the back of my head and make me turn around and read her Thoughts of “Feed me…Now!”
She can awaken people in the night when the Moon is full and she just has to go out and do Cat Things at 3 a.m.

Purrl is such a good manifester that she turned up at my home out of the blue in the arms of a long-ago partner who insisted she strayed into his workplace to be with me!

Purrl, for all of her skilled ways with both Mind Mastery and the Law of Psychic-Control has not learnt one of the fundamental lessons of Mastering the Law of Attraction….

You can clearly see this area-needing-development by the following photo:

You see the Law of Attraction requires us to release that which no longer fits in our life in order to allow for the LARGER things to appear!

Non-negotiable…letting go of the old to clear the space for the new is Metaphysical Mathematics 101!

Whilst Purrl remains her little-kitten Self in her mind, she will forever be squashing growth and sleeping with one foot out the door…..

Cats are really not so different from humans after all!

You can learn a bit more about how very similar we are here: “She is not ugly…she’s scared….”

Law of Attraction for Gardening Soil and Soul

In 1998 my world came tumbling down…as in CRASH!Over the few month prior to the Crash! I had completed the “The Artists Way”, Julia Cameron’s outstanding 12 week-study-at-home Creative Recovery course.
Julia Cameron was recently featured in the Science of Mind magazine and has been teaching the principles of the Law of Attraction and the power of Creative Imagery long before The Secret took the world by storm.

The Artists Way is based on the principles of the Universal Laws, the Law of Attraction and Creativity as being core essence of all things that ever were or that will ever be…and that all of us are born into and learn patterns that disconnect us from the memory of who we truly are…Co-creative beings born of the Creator….and thus here to create!

In February of that year I very reluctantly left the home I loved so dearly, walked away from a relationship I once treasured and no longer had trust or peace of mind…..and in that upheaval lost my big garden with the wonderful big Cedar tree….It all came to this bare and barren place……..

I was running personal development groups for homeless women at the time and knew that life was calling me to ‘walk my talk’ like never before and to move to a new level of ….everything…….

Seeing the Garden of my dreams clearly in my mind, I began seed by seed and pulling weed by weed to plant my new Garden…I planted a Forgiveness tree, 4 gum trees to honour the Elements, the 4 directions and the Mind , Body, Spirit and Emotions which make up the wholeness of who we are.Lavendar bushes for my Grandmother’s memory….

My mother planted a Rose bush for her Mother, with a message of Forgiveness and letting go in a Mandala she created and buried in the baby rose bushes soil.Co-incidentally my Mother entered her own “deep dark day” the very weekend I moved to the new barren home and we both moved to a new level of relationship and life as she connected the fragmented dots of her past which also gave me access to some of my own stories I did not know before.

That first winter I did little other than weep and sleep and work and dig ….it was the ‘deep dark day of the Soul’ like I had never known before as I shed the layers of old patterns and life styles and beliefs…beLIEfs and expectations that had taken me to the barren garden and home without love…..I knew, in spite of the turmoil and sadness and loss, that I was in the midst of what Joseph Campbell refers to as “The Heroes Journey” and my call to ‘adventure’ meant that I had the choice to create a new garden seeded with the Intent for a rich, loving, abundant life….and that the s*it from yesterday was indeed the fertiliser for the New Day and New Garden….

Within four years my garden now looked like this:

I connected with the Earth, Water, Fire and Air spirits….I created a restful place of reflection and renewal where I could sit under the stars and take instruction from the cosmos at night…..

In 2001 I met the partner of my dreams….a peaceful, kind, strong, loving, trustworthy and honest man….who arrived in my life with his own set of cook books and a background in herbal medicine, Steiner education, Aboriginal education and film….all things dear to my heart….and some!What this big lesson in Soul School taught me is that if we affirm “I create the life of my dreams” and“I deserve the best”….then life will automatically release the things which are not in keeping with this Decree…and that might mean a period of enormous turmoil and loss and upheaval….and it can be pretty uncertain as we move to certainty….

But if we, one seed at a time, clear the soil, extract the weeds and waterand love and cherish our Ideal….

And we no longer seek to mix oil with water by living in circumstances of chaos or drama or unhappiness whilst affirming that we deserve the best and blessings of the Universes infinite gifts….we allow that which no longer serves our highest good to leave our life in order for the Vision to unfold….

And sometimes the transition from the old to the New can be a time filled with chaos and uncertainty, just like we see when the wild winds and heavy rains precipitate the gorgeous-glorious gardens of the Spring time….

*****************

PS
Re leaving the magnificent Cedar tree that I loved so much….a year after moving to the now-not-so-barren-house I noticed that a pot plant I had brought from my old home has sprouted a small cedar tree from a seed dropped from the original no doubt.
Over the next few years it out grew the pot, splitting the sides and sending its roots down into the soil…….eventually becoming a fully sized (15 feet) Daughter-Tree of the one I had to leave behind….

Not only that but a fig tree magically appeared along side, no doubt seeded by a bird in flight dropping magic-fetiliser on my garden.The Cedar tree taught me that once we learn to let go and release….it will return to us….not in the exact same way or even looking as we thought it would /could/ should…….but it will return when our Intent is in aligment with the Highest…..

She is not Ugly…..She is just Scared

A large part of my work is in the homeless, health and housing sectors and I work with some wonderful, creative, interesting, often very wounded and not-yet-recovered teenage Mothers….young Women who are very early in the journey of self actualisation and in many cases living a life style of “children having children’…passing on generational, toxic patterns that often result in their own children entering the homeless-teenage-parenting realm just a few years down the track…..
We had a graduation day in our “Art of Change” personal development group the other day…It is a group that met monthly throughout 2006 and covered topics such as the power of the Mind, the law of attraction, using creativity and art for creating change.

One of the girls, a 19 year Mother of a 3 year old girl was sharing how she sees the world differently than she did a year ago and how her insight had made her more aware of others and “even animals”….

The young Women in the group are generally uneducated in the formal sense, often having left school as a young teenager…. but very much school-of-life young graduates, most having experienced sexual assault, violence, crime and abandonment in their childhood….
Therefore their use of language and metaphor is usually straight from the hip and a rich alternative to the ‘well spoken’ social interactions of other young Women who have had a more stable beginning in non abusive homes ……and were able to stay in the one school long enough to receive an education.

This particular participant was explaining how there are two abandoned /homeless kittens living in the bottom of her garden and how she has been making a decision as to whether or not to adopt them, having fed them for a month now and feeling confident that she is staying put in her state housing home.

She made a statement that spoke so much more than the thing she was immediately referring to.

She said that when she first saw the kittens they looked like they were “really f***ing ugly” (“f****g being an adjective, verb, joining word, pause and noun all in one sentence much of the time for these young Persephones)….

She then said “Now I realise they were not ugly…they were just ******g scared all the time and it made them look wierd”….

I thought about how so many of the people who came to the shelter over the years often had a very unappealing and unattractive vibration….pain and anger and loss and rage and grief and hopelessness…as staff we came to identify a particular smell that is connected to poverty and despair…it is like an aura of miasma mixed in with the poor hygeine and bad-breath sighs…it is a smell that can permeate a whole house and very unpleasant to be around.

She concluded her story saying “The kittens look beautiful now…they are happy and they know they are getting fed and someone cares for them…it’s amazing how they went from so ******ing ugly to ***** gorgeous!”

The human animal is not so different from the furry-animal kingdom in many ways and I was reminded about how a group of at-risk youths my partner was teaching in a high-need school transformed in an instant when they hired black tie suits and had a visit to the barbers to receive an award for a film project they had produced.

“The robes madeth the man” and it set up a whole new FEELING of pride, deservability and new-view of “Who I am”…
We just got the news this week that one of the boys has been accepted in to film school and this happened only because he had access to new opportunities that created a new FEELING of the world of film, cameras and stories instead of anger, rebellion, more anger and more rebellion. Disconection from love and Soul purpose can be a very ‘ugly’ thing…it creates wars, makes people hurt one another and at it’s most deepest felt….compels a person to take their own life….

I am very grateful that the young personal development graduate shared her story in the language she did because the words “She is not ugly she is scared” have inspired me to contemplate those words “Begin Within” and how feeling undeserving /fearful /unattractive /inferior on the inside will mirror back to us a distorted reality on the outside….the ultimate flaw in the Mirrorcle of Life….and send out a loud and clear message of self loathing and disconnection to the world around us.

A strange look in her eye remembering life on the streets as a homeless kitty…

Feeling sooo much more at peace and no longer scared….

And of course Loveand acceptance and Friendship takes away that ugly, scared feeling….. heals every time….