My Transition Story
Re-settlement transitions...
I had several significant transitions as a child. At the age of three my mother took me by ship back to her home country of Germany to visit her relatives while my father stayed in Australia building our house. After nine months we returned to Sydney and I had to relearn to speak English with my friends. Then when I was 12 the government resumed a large area of land in our town including our house and forced us to sell and move out. That was my first experience of writing a letter of protest to the newspaper, but our house was demolished to make way eventually to a Coles carpark! I left behind all my multicultural friends and started a new life in a Church of England girls' school as a "scholarship girl" or "brain". No doubt this transition led to my tendency to question the business-as-usual system and its underlying paradigm.
Transition from artist to scientist...
I grew up with Bodenwieser modern dance classes, violin and piano lessons, a love of composing my little tunes and dancing to music. In primary school I loved folk dancing and the singing broadcasts and we even had our own percussion band. But in high school I realised that if I wanted to make a career in the arts I would have to practise until I was better than the rest, and as I had always shied away from performing, I gave up my dance and music to follow my scientific curiosity.
Transitioning my diet...
When my curiosity to understand consciousness and behaviour led me to a career in biology, my naturally "soft heart", nurtured by my mother and my childhood pets, came into direct conflict with the necessity of "sacrificing" animals for research and teaching. I found myself blending possum livers and obtaining brain tissue from pink baby rats. This was the time when I stopped wanting to cook and eat meat. (Married at 21, I had transferred dietary habits from my mother to my own kitchen without much thought.) I found support for my caring for animals and food choices in books by Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lappe and later John Robbins.
My first career transition...
So soul-destroying was this conflict between my head and heart that, once finished my PhD in the late 80's, I immediately left biology altogether. Even while doing my lab research, I had already begun to live a "double life": I had returned to my original quest to understand consciousness through more integrative approaches like meditation, psychotherapy, bodywork and eventually expressive arts therapies. Having also been recently divorced, another major transition, I was now free to "follow my bliss" to train in the US for a while. In somatic-movement work: Body-mind Centering and Alexander Technique, I experienced my "nature within": my breath, my inbuilt animal reflexes and movement patterns, and amazingly, my self - a female primate.
Inner meets outer transition...
My relationship with "outdoor" nature had begun with a love of beachwalking and swimming in our favourite saltwater lagoon by the sea, where, as a child in the sixties, we spent our holidays. Even during my science period, I found respite from PhD writing along these same beaches. In the 90's I found an integration of "outer" and "inner" nature in deep ecology workshops and ecology-centred community arts, and training with rainforest and anti-nuclear activists Seed and Macy. I became part of an Earth Support group that met monthly for many years.
I vividly recall one moment during an evening community arts performance by the ocean. I was one of a group of dancers, covered in clay, lying and crawling on a rock like a lizard, gradually evolving into my human form. I looked up at the vast night sky, heard the ocean, felt my embodiment and my oneness with all of this. Our performance was a community expression of our concern for the earth. My concerns also manifested in songs that would write themselves through me now and then, with lyrics like "Hold on Gaia, we're coming home!"
In my academic role training Music Therapists for 14 years, I incorporated concepts and experiences of ecological self, and wrote about the potential role of therapists in social change. I designed workshops in which we could express through the arts what issues we most care about. As citizens of Australia my partner and I would participate in protests about forests and wars and reconciliation with our Aboriginal first peoples. We would hand out "how to vote Green" leaflets in electorates that spawned two conservative prime ministers.
My current transition...
Lately, feeling ever more hopeless, disempowered and cynical in a world seemingly devoid of ecological consciousness, or even empathy for other human beings, and lost in "unemployment" after my course itself was phased out by the university, I have gravitated again to deep ecology, climate action summits and social ecology symposia. Through these I have found kindred spirits. We are forming a Climate Wellbeing Network, to provide psychological support for engaging with climate change. My partner Alex and I enrolled in free MOOCs on climate change, which led us to Citizens' Climate Lobby and renewed hope of citizen-centred democracy.
Instead of battling against this transition as the loss of my former career, I'm coming to accept it. I am taking the opportunity of having more time to revisit the many gifts I've received on my life journey so that they may contribute to the vital climate change movement in this make-or-break moment in human history.
What is your transition story?
Re-settlement transitions...
I had several significant transitions as a child. At the age of three my mother took me by ship back to her home country of Germany to visit her relatives while my father stayed in Australia building our house. After nine months we returned to Sydney and I had to relearn to speak English with my friends. Then when I was 12 the government resumed a large area of land in our town including our house and forced us to sell and move out. That was my first experience of writing a letter of protest to the newspaper, but our house was demolished to make way eventually to a Coles carpark! I left behind all my multicultural friends and started a new life in a Church of England girls' school as a "scholarship girl" or "brain". No doubt this transition led to my tendency to question the business-as-usual system and its underlying paradigm.
Transition from artist to scientist...
I grew up with Bodenwieser modern dance classes, violin and piano lessons, a love of composing my little tunes and dancing to music. In primary school I loved folk dancing and the singing broadcasts and we even had our own percussion band. But in high school I realised that if I wanted to make a career in the arts I would have to practise until I was better than the rest, and as I had always shied away from performing, I gave up my dance and music to follow my scientific curiosity.
Transitioning my diet...
When my curiosity to understand consciousness and behaviour led me to a career in biology, my naturally "soft heart", nurtured by my mother and my childhood pets, came into direct conflict with the necessity of "sacrificing" animals for research and teaching. I found myself blending possum livers and obtaining brain tissue from pink baby rats. This was the time when I stopped wanting to cook and eat meat. (Married at 21, I had transferred dietary habits from my mother to my own kitchen without much thought.) I found support for my caring for animals and food choices in books by Rachel Carson, Frances Moore Lappe and later John Robbins.
My first career transition...
So soul-destroying was this conflict between my head and heart that, once finished my PhD in the late 80's, I immediately left biology altogether. Even while doing my lab research, I had already begun to live a "double life": I had returned to my original quest to understand consciousness through more integrative approaches like meditation, psychotherapy, bodywork and eventually expressive arts therapies. Having also been recently divorced, another major transition, I was now free to "follow my bliss" to train in the US for a while. In somatic-movement work: Body-mind Centering and Alexander Technique, I experienced my "nature within": my breath, my inbuilt animal reflexes and movement patterns, and amazingly, my self - a female primate.
Inner meets outer transition...
My relationship with "outdoor" nature had begun with a love of beachwalking and swimming in our favourite saltwater lagoon by the sea, where, as a child in the sixties, we spent our holidays. Even during my science period, I found respite from PhD writing along these same beaches. In the 90's I found an integration of "outer" and "inner" nature in deep ecology workshops and ecology-centred community arts, and training with rainforest and anti-nuclear activists Seed and Macy. I became part of an Earth Support group that met monthly for many years.
I vividly recall one moment during an evening community arts performance by the ocean. I was one of a group of dancers, covered in clay, lying and crawling on a rock like a lizard, gradually evolving into my human form. I looked up at the vast night sky, heard the ocean, felt my embodiment and my oneness with all of this. Our performance was a community expression of our concern for the earth. My concerns also manifested in songs that would write themselves through me now and then, with lyrics like "Hold on Gaia, we're coming home!"
In my academic role training Music Therapists for 14 years, I incorporated concepts and experiences of ecological self, and wrote about the potential role of therapists in social change. I designed workshops in which we could express through the arts what issues we most care about. As citizens of Australia my partner and I would participate in protests about forests and wars and reconciliation with our Aboriginal first peoples. We would hand out "how to vote Green" leaflets in electorates that spawned two conservative prime ministers.
My current transition...
Lately, feeling ever more hopeless, disempowered and cynical in a world seemingly devoid of ecological consciousness, or even empathy for other human beings, and lost in "unemployment" after my course itself was phased out by the university, I have gravitated again to deep ecology, climate action summits and social ecology symposia. Through these I have found kindred spirits. We are forming a Climate Wellbeing Network, to provide psychological support for engaging with climate change. My partner Alex and I enrolled in free MOOCs on climate change, which led us to Citizens' Climate Lobby and renewed hope of citizen-centred democracy.
Instead of battling against this transition as the loss of my former career, I'm coming to accept it. I am taking the opportunity of having more time to revisit the many gifts I've received on my life journey so that they may contribute to the vital climate change movement in this make-or-break moment in human history.
What is your transition story?