Indigenous wisdom for modern times with Paul Callaghan

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host Castunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, a mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Paul Callaghan is an Aboriginal man belonging to the land of the war Amie people on the coast of New South Wales, just north of Newcastle. At the age of thirty five, Paul had all the outward markers of success, a happy marriage, three young children, amazing job, house, two cars. As he said to me himself, he was the Aboriginal man the government wanted to put on all the posters as the example of a success story. At that age, he also had a breakdown and he found Western medicine and psychology was not able to help him. By fate or destiny, Paul found a path to his Aboriginal heritage and this is where he found hope and healing. And as he said to me himself, he didn't just get back to his old self, he discovered his true self. He's gone on to have a successful career, held senior executive positions in Aboriginal and non Aboriginal related areas, and now, together with Aboriginal elder uncle Paul Gordon, he has written a book called The Dreaming Path as a way for all Australians,

1:34 Aboriginal and non Aboriginal to learn how Indigenous wisdom and spirituality can help us all to navigate modern life with more peace, contentment and well being. Here is my conversation with Paul Callaghan. Paul Callaghan, Welcome to the Crappy to Happy Podcast. It is an honor to have you joined me this morning. Thank you. I don't know about an honor that I certainly look forward to sharing with what seems to be a kindred spirit over things we're both passionate about, and I'm looking forward to seeing where we might come from different places, but in the kind of way we talk. Same, same, Yeah, definitely what. We're trying to do to help.

2:15 People exactly, And we were having a little conversation off air about that. We've both worked in tafe organizations in the past, and you know, we've both written books in this space of health and mental health particularly, so we do have a lot in common. Paul, you were telling me that you were the first Aboriginal manager in Tafe, New South Wales. Can you tell me more about that part of your journey. I can. I started in Tafe in ninety ninety seven, which is a long time ago, but young time goes really really quick, just saying so that was nineteen ninety seven.

2:56 That was just a couple of years after I'd had a nervous breakdown and major depress and suicidal thoughts, and I thought that I would struggle, and I was told by the system that I would never recover and never work again. But we had a couple of years. I had recovered enough to have faith in applying for a job, and I applied for a job in Tafe and I got it, and I started off in Tafe as a manager of an Aboriginal unit, which was just a wonderful role where I was responsible for providing trading and support to Aboriginal students and we built We built up our student base one thousand percent in three years, and just students coming in from everywhere doing amazing things. And I learned the power of not just education, because we all know that, but I learned the power of TAFE and I have to say TAFE for me back then. I think it's changed a bit now, but back then was one of the greatest secrets and resources in Australia ever.

3:57 And it saddens me to hear of the changes in training. And I don't know why, but I kept on getting promoted. So I went from an aboriginal manager to the head of Access and Equity, which was all about supporting people from marginalized communities, people, students with disabilities, students from multicultural backgrounds, students incarceration, and that was just an amazing role as well. And then I was promoted to be the equipment of the Dean of Business and Computing because I have an accounting degree and I thought that would be a challenge, but I enjoyed being in mainstream and I found that all of my all of my staff and I had quite a few hundred, were just as committed to social inclusion and diversity as the specialized stuff. And then I got tapped on the shoulder and asked to apply to be an institute director or a CEO or the equivalent of the university is a vice chancellor with TAPE, and I became the boss of New England TAPE, where I had from memory twelve hundred staff. I had twenty three thousand students, a budget of about seventy million dollars and in our third year we were rewarded best large training provider in New South Wales and top three in Australia.

5:12 And I guess, connecting all that, the reason I was so successful is I don't think people assessed me very well maybe hahah. But I used all of the things I learned from my orders by going Bush and Culture. I integrated that into the Western environment, including my leadership style, and it proved very successful for me. Well, congratulations, because that is that's a huge role to have and a very big job. Now I want to backpedal because you said that you came to TAFE after you had gone through a period of being depressed in suicidal and you were told that you would never recover and you would never work again, and obviously that was not the case. Can you share with me what the factors were that led to that breakdown?

6:01 Yeah, I can share the factors, and a lot of the factors didn't become obvious until after. But I was cognizant enough at the time, because I've always been a person in embraced wellness. I was cognizant leading into my breakdown that something wasn't right, so it didn't come as a surprise, which might surprise some people. So from when I was younger, I was always a very positive person and always a high achiever. And so in my mid thirties I was in a really good place. I was married to a wonderful woman who still puts up with me. We had three children under five, We had two cars, we had a house. We lived near the water. So sometimes I say that I was the kind of the averageal person that the government would want us all to aspire to be in terms of success, and all those things were great. I had a degree in accounting, I had a diploma in surveying, had to play more in drafting, and I was at the time a manager in marketing for a university, and I was also a lecturer in economics.

7:11 And what happened was I was pretty much a workaholic, and I demanded perfection of myself, and so I was driving myself pretty hard. And we had a new brother, a new baby, but just before our baby was born, the youngest Liam. My wife Allison went through a very difficult time and she was in hospital and the doctor said to me, one morning, you'll have to be here this morning. We think your wife has a brain chairman because she'd lost a vision and her blood pressure was up and she had massive headaches, and they said, we think she might have a brain tumor. So you'll need to be here because you might need to decide whether the baby lives or the mother lives. And so I said, okay, we don't have mobile phone. We didn't have mobile phone.

8:00 So I said, I just need to go to work and tell them that I can't host this big, major promotional event that I was to do. And so I went up and told my manager that I couldn't do the event. It was three or four hundred VIPs from all over the state. It was a major thing. And she said to me, no, I need you to do this and then you can go down and see your wife after that. And so, being a person that's always been loyal to anybody and everybody, because that's the way I grew up, I said yes. And so I conducted that three hour session and I was the EMC and I was laughing and joking, but inside I was being torn apart because I didn't know what was happening with my wife, and so that kind of fractured me. And as I recovered from my breakdown and talked to a counselor, he said that was probably one of the breaking points.

9:01 And he actually said to me, he said, why did you do that? He said, no normal person would do that. I said, well, that was my loyalty to the organization. And as I reached out to the system, I found counseling gave me lots of ideas, but I wasn't able to really shift what was going on within me. I found that I needed Dandy depressants for probably twelve months to lift me from that dark place, and I was very thankful for that. But during that time I read a lot of self help books, and some of the books on depression I would warn people, make you more depressed because you start looking for labels. I read a lot of other inspirational books, more on just cognitive ways of cognition thinking. I read inspirational books and I found all of those didn't give me a particular answer, but they gave me little nuggets of gold that I could harvest and start to stitch together in terms of what I needed for me. And so that enabled me then to be well enough to start thinking about going back to work. But before that I did hit a Christis point where because I've always been a very loyal person, I truly believed what the experts said, and they were saying to me quite consistently that this is manageable at best, that there's no cure, and that you probably won't recover enough to be able to work again. And so having

10:33 a wife who was only thirty at the time and three young children, I thought, I really can't be a burden to these beautiful people. I can't be an invalid, I can't hold them back from their life. So I walked down the road to kill myself in a particular day. And it wasn't because of my own personal suffering. I was doing it because I knew they'd be ridiculed by the community, because they already had been guys that I played football and cricket whipple laughing at me. And there was only a matter of time, I knew, until the kids got bullied about their dad not being with it. So I was going to kill myself to free them up. But as I went to do it, a thought came to me, and the thought said, maybe you don't have to listen to what you've been told. Maybe you can prove everyone wrong, and that you can, you can find a way to heal yourself and then help others. And I went, Okay, I'll do that. And it wasn't a magical thing at all. It took me quite a few years, but over the years I started to rebuild my confidence and then I was taking Bush and given access to my culture. And that's when not only did I truly heal and go to the place that I'd aimed to be, which was back to my old self, I actually went past my old self and I realized then that I'd never really been me, and I found the real meat, and that was the Catharsis. That opened up a whole new wealth for me, where I reshaped everything I did and every way I behaved and became the real me.

12:05 And that's provided me with a life of absolute contentment where I've achieved more things than I would have possibly dreamed of. Wow, Paul, when you say I was taken out Bush, what does that mean like who came and took a hold of you and took you out bush And what did that involve? I guess it was interesting because, particularly being on an abitional person on the East Coast, you hear stories all the time that culture is there, there's no traditional knowledge. You get told that that's a waste of time. So that's coming from kind of within your own networks in terms of family and friends. In terms of culture, I mean there's culture, there's contemporary culture. I grew up my mum's from Crual Mission, and I grew up living with mum in the mission or visiting the mission every day.

12:56 So I grew up knowing that, but I didn't know any of the traditional things such as language, such as the old stories, such as old practices and value systems. And you get told that that's not there, even though I yearned for it. I kind of hadn't thought it was, but it was. It was just that it was somewhat hidden for many, many reasons, and so I was. You can I would call it serendipity. I would say it was a lot of luck, but you could also argue possibly destiny. But as I was doing my work, a person asked me one day and just said would you like to come Bush and learn some things about traditional culture?

13:40 And I went, wow, I didn't know that it exists, and they said, yeah, it does. So I thought, okay, I'd like that. And when I told other people I was going to do it, people warned me. They said, no, no, it doesn't exist. There'll be Charlatan's, there'll be liars. Be careful, they're about to rip you off to make it up. They just do it to make themselves feel good. It's all lies. And then other people said to me, don't do that. That's any Christian. You'll get sek you'll get cancer, you'll diet. So there are lots of pressures for me not to do it, but I thought, no, I'll go with your due diligence and I'll see what this is all about. And so the first night I went out Bush was quite open minded, at the same time a little bit a little bit careful to make sure I was not walking into something that wasn't quite right. And I just found this amazing door was open to me in terms of care, nurture, love, knowledge, connection, all these things.

14:45 And I was taken to a site that I talk about in my book and they've given the story behind it. And to connect with something that's over ten thousand years old and hear the story, it's not so much the logic of what you hear through years, it's the feeling inside. And it's not just because I was an Aboriginal person. It was because I was connected to that spot by someone who was there with me. And I've had the privilege of doing on Abiginal people since. And that is the power of connecting with the footsteps of our old ones. And sometimes I like to talk about hearing the whispers of the ancient wisdom that surrounds us that is still there. So going Bush was about connecting with people that had been given stories and knowledge from the old ways. And so it's part of a connection of something that's over sixty thousand years old. And that's the really beautiful thing.

15:40 This knowledge has been there for a very long time, and it was almost wiped out after seventeen eighty eight, quite deliberately by government policy and also assimilationist ways of being. But it isn't gone. And I was just very fortunate that I was given a snippet of that and able to that over many decades and in more recent times. When I was talking to one of the elders, I said to one of the elders, you know, I've learned so much, and it's not something that's backward looking. I've used all the things you've taught me in this contemporary world, and it's given me an ability to cope with all the different pressures of holding down a job and paying off a mortgage and being a leader and having staff and being able to still be me. And they said, yeah, that's right. It's there for the contemporte world. And I said, I think all of this stuff would be really useful for non Aboriginal people as well. Can we share it?

16:42 And they said, yeah, we can, because the knowledge that we have belongs to the land, and the people on this land need to hear it so they can learn from it as well. And then we all can be one. And the way I like to think about it, and the way some of the old people describe it, is we can all sit around that fire together in a circle where we don't judge each other, where the circle is unbroken, where everyone is equal, where we see each other in safety, where we know we can speak, but also we know we can listen and that's I guess something really important about what I've learned When I wrote The Dreaming Path. Initially it was a book where I was trying to share my insights from my personal journey and how I've used Aboriginal values and philosophy to create a life that's beyond my dreams in terms of contentment.

17:39 But now I've been thinking about it, it's also of equal for reconciliation, where non average Australia can feel comfortable about being on this beautiful land and we can join hands and walk together into the future as one, so that we can really all celebrate not only the present but also what our old people have done for sixty thousand years. And Lady is care for this place and love this place, and give us knowledge to care not only for place, but for each other. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you epps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and reviews.

18:37 Aul. So basically, what you just described, is that you had achieved all of the western definition of success outwardly, all the things that the world tells you are going to make you happy, but fundamentally there was a disconnect inside you. You had were separated from your culture and your authenticity I guess, and in real connecting in that way that you were then able to, as you told us earlier, bring all of that wisdom back almost reset, and then apply that to your life and continue to achieve astonishing success, but without necessarily having to make that to cut yourself off from all of that other very important part of your life and your history and ancestry. Have I summed that up.

19:28 That's a beautiful summary. That's a beautiful summary. And counseling was certainly helpful, but it wasn't the total answer. And something that the counselor told me. And end up becoming a really good friend, and I end up taking him bush and sharing culture with him, which was twenty years after, which was a wonderful way to repay what had given me. But he said to me one day in one of our sessions, he said to me, Paul, I can't give you the answers, but I can tell you going through this. There's a message to you from you about you. And he said, if you can find a place quiet and try and find that message, he said, I think you'll find that this is happening for a reason, and you'll be able to turn it around. And so I didn't just sit there and look for an answer, because I've learned that sometimes the more you search for an answer, it might't come. But if you're trying to relax, it will come. But looking back, I can see what it was was I'd spent my entire life, well maybe from say ten years old upwards. I'd spent from ten years to my thirty fifth birthday trying to be all things to all people at all times. So I was answering to everybody's expectations. I was trying to be the perfect son.

20:42 I was trying to be the perfect person. I was trying to be the funniest guy. I was trying to be the perfect friend. I was trying to be a bit of a sports hero. I was trying to be the perfect husband. I was trying to be the perfect father. I was trying to be the perfect work colleague. And I realized in hindsight that I was just exhausting myself, and in none of that was I trying to be me. I was just spending my entire existence trying to be everybody else's whatever they wanted me to be. And so as I recovered and looked around and started to learn my cultural things, I realized, Wow, this isn't just me that's getting sucked into this vacuum. It's just about everybody.

21:24 And what I realized was the old people have a beautiful saying. They say, when we leave this world behind or we leave behind, is our story, so make it the best story possible. And so that's a really beautiful, beautiful thing to anchor your thoughts on regularly if you want to do a bit of a reflection about your life, and that is, when I leave this world, will I be able to say I'm leaving my best story possible. And my observation for most people, we think we're living a good story, but we're not. What we're living is a busy story. I see everyone being busy, and I was the same, and there are times now where I'm still busy. But the important thing is I choose to be busy because an observation I've made is when you look at traditional culture, and I'll use a little bit of a kind of Aboriginal way of thinking and talking.

22:18 In Aboriginal culture, the boss was mother Nature. She was our boss. Ultimately, everything we did was to the heartbeat of Mother Earth. So we moved. We moved in accordance with where food and water was, and we moved so we didn't kill any particular place. But that was how we lived our life and it gave us everything we needed. So if you can imagine a world where there was no war, no hunger, no poverty. If you can imagine a world where there are no jails, no police, where everyone lived to be old age pretty much and the place of wellness mind, body and spirit. That was traditional Aboriginal Australian. But now we get consumed with all this busyness.

23:06 And so the boss now is the clock. So you think about any one of us. We wake up, what time is it, we get through the day, what time is it we get home, What time is it we get to a traffic light. The red light gets us really angry because it's stopping us, it's stopping our time. And so we're trying to beat the clock. Whereas in the Abriginal way, there is no such thing as time. It's actually I've just finished my PhD. And there's a quote from a psychiatry workshop that it provides an evidence based to the average way of thinking, and that is Aboriginal time is cyclical. Past, present in future is the same thing, and so it cycles. And when the colonizers first observed Aboriginal people, they thought we were just The phrase lazy black was used all the time. They also walk about they're about time. We weren't lazy at all.

24:05 For Abiginal people. We serviced all of our essential safety and physiological needs. If you look at Maslet's hierarchy, we service that anywhere between half an hour and two hours of a day maximum. On the coast, it was probably half an hour a day. Inland, probably two hours a day because we knew country and we knew what we needed to do, and so the rest of the time was nurturing relationships and sharing knowledge. So we were sitting down and sharing things. But others observe that as wasting time, because there's this whole thing of time. But time is a precious resource, we know, and it can't be bottled and it can't be saved, and we need to use it well. But if you go back to what I said earlier that for optional people, all we leave behind is our story. That's kind of an anchorage point about I need to reflect on this precious time I have on this earth. Do I want my story to read?

25:02 What is my story? When we're younger, my observation is we dream and go, yeah, I want my story to be A B, C and D. And then we hit our fifties and sixties and we go, I'm unhappy. And then maybe we reflect on and say, yeah, I'm not doing what I would have liked to have done. And I've got friends that have told me they have lives of regret, and that's really sad. Because we're here now. People say we're conceived in love, we're born in love, we live in love when we go back to love, and so it's about us embracing our story and our purpose and why we're here. But I don't think we're born to just be busy. I think we I mean the dreaming path in terms of the phraseology. What it's about is in our written way of thinking, we're all born to follow the dreaming path. And the dreaming path is I care for my place and author is in my place. We all have that purpose if you like, but how we do that is different, but we all align with that. And so if you imagine the world, would I guess the question you ask because some people might look at me and go, oh, that's new age poppy coop, But just have a think about it from an objective, reflective perspective. If everyone in the world, or let's say eighty five percent of people in the world, could live a life focused on caring for our place and all things in our place, so that's each other, that's the animals, that's the environment, would the world be

26:35 a better or a worse place? And that's not saying we don't embrace technology and that we need to do things that generate power and to get food production to the scar we need for a seven point seven billion population. But the question is if we all were able to live our best story, which means we're all part of this beautiful mosaic in different ways that cares for country and cares for each other, would that be a better world? And my argument is that sure would be one. Yeah, definitely, And I think you know we're more and more we're waking up to this we're realizing. And the thing that struck me about your book, Paul, is that you know, I teach meditation, and I last year I did my yoga teacher training, and all of these people are realizing the wisdom of these simple philosophies and getting back to a more simple existence. And we tend to look to everybody wants to go on to India and meet a guru, or go over to South America and have some Ayahuascar or and there is just so much of that wisdom and culture right here, literally in our backyard.

27:47 We don't have to travel to these foreign places to connect with these ancient this ancient wisdom and these ancient principles that are so relevant and necessary in our life right now. We can connect with that right here. I agree entirely. I mean, as I healed myself, I read a lot of those books and they were beautiful and they helped me a lot. So I read books in terms of North American wisdom. I read books in terms of Buddhist philosophy. I read books in terms of Hindu philosophy, and I read all sorts of books and they all helped me. And when I talked to the elders. What we agreed was and as part of the Aboriginal way of thinking, it's not about having the one answer. It's not about saying we're the right way. It's about saying, here's another thing to add to that beautiful universal wisdom that people can look at and see what works for them.

28:36 So the book I've written isn't meant to place itself above any other book. It's to say here it is. But I was interviewed by someone who was somewhat cynical and had me on the defensive, which I didn't expect around the book, and it was not a bad thing because it forced me to think about what is the answer to the question? And the kind of question was We've heard all these things in terms of Asian philosophy, so what makes this so different? And now I've thought about it, it's not about being different. In some ways, it's reinforcing those universal truths. At the same time, it gives people a different way of viewing the world, and that's always hawthy. But it also comes from the world's oldest living culture. So all those other things are beautiful, but this is sixty thousand years of culture that belongs to this land that our people have lived by for a long, long long time. I mean, the Pyramids are only five thousand years old. We've got rockfish traps out of Brilarrena that are fifty thousand years old, and these things have given us a good life. So part of this, and I did it, I kind of addressed it in my PhD, was that there are still people. And Tony Ebbott was one that said when he was Prime Minister in Minister Average Affairs, he said that that colonization was on the whole a good thing for optional people because it brought us to the technological world. Our world gave

30:10 us everything we needed for a very long time because we didn't need the phone, we didn't need the wheel, because we didn't need to carry last thing. So it's all in context. Now in this contemporary world we need those things, but we can still use the learning from our old ways in this contemporary world. And I agree with what you said ks the simpler we make our life, the easier it is to find contentment. And research shows that you know, we earn too much money. We get to material things and we get really stressed out about holding onto them. But something that's simple doesn't mean us not profound. And this is really important for me in how I share my views on Aboriginal governance and education.

30:56 Our educational systems were really, really complex, and I've actually mapped it. I've mapped best practice education against Aboriginal pedagogy and epistemology and ontology, all the different ways of learning and thinking, and our stuff is there. It's just hidden because the way we do it is we say, let's share a story, Let's have you on and share a story. And yet through story we learn so much. And so dream time stories aren't fairy tales. But they sound simple, but underneath are all these profound messages about I need to be a good person, I need to not be greedy, I need to be loving, I need to be humble, I need to always share, I need to be respectful.

31:41 They're beautiful ways to live life. So they're simple, but they're profound, and they're sophisticated in terms of how do I enact that. So certainly my tip to people they don't have to read the book, of course, but is to try and declutter their world so that they can find that profound in the busyness. Because our business clutteres up everything, and I know that in terms of my breakdown. But once I started to define myself and say I'm going to walk my footsteps, but I'll do it in a way that's respectful to others, I became a CEO. And I would never have expected that because I didn't want to be a leader. I never wanted to be, but I realized at a point in time that I was meant to. So I thought, if I'm meant to be a leader, I'd better learn how to be a good one. And so that was about me embracing my responsibilities on where destiny was taking me. But in doing that, I've always made sure that I bround myself and going back to reading all sorts of things. And our teachers, our old people, say that when they sit you down in the circle, I say, I can share some things with you and you'll learn, but there'll be a point where I can't teach you anymore. And where your greatest learning will come from is going somewhere in nature that connects with you and sitting there being still for a day or two, and then the nature, the trees and the animals will come to you and they'll teach you things and that sounds a bit airy fairy too, but

33:11 I've done it. And if you have that place of stillness and it taps into what you were saying kas about meditation, you have these profound insights into your own life and others. And so it's really funny how these days mindfulness is such a big thing. But going back to the term I talked about earlier, walk about, walk about isn't walk about. Walk about is walking country and seeing every single thing there, the dust, the trees, the sky, the animals, the leaves, the flowers, and connecting with it and being in that moment with every step you take. So it's a walking mindfulness that is very, very free. So what I suggest to people as a starting point in trying to push back on business is make a point every day of taking your shoes and socks off and going out the back yard or frontyard and just rubbing your feet into to the sand or dirt or grass and pretend you're a battery, trying to connect to a source and let that current of mother nature come through you and just feel how good it is to be alive.

34:13 Pail the book is co written with Uncle Paul Gordon. Can you tell me who Uncle Paul Gordon is and what your connection is with him, and how he came to co write this. Book with you. Uncle Paul Gordon, he is an amazing man who I didn't meet until a little while into my cultural path. So when I was taking bullshit was by other people and they kept on talking about Uncle Paul to the point being a cynic and indocrinated it with a similationist ways of thinking. I thought, who is this Uncle Paul? Everyone's putting on this bloody pedestal. I can't see anyone being that great. I'm a bit skeptical of this guy. Sounds like he's a bit of a big notor. And so I didn't meet him for quite a while, like well a year, and then I finally met him and spent a little bit of time with him, a lot, but a bit. And when I met him, I realized how wrong I was number one, to judge someone I hadn't met, and number two, how cynical I was when all people said we are nice things, and straight away I wanted to tea bup those things. And number three, I needed to get to know him. And now people talk about that, they say, you can't really you shouldn't judge anyone anyway, But you really can't make an opinion on anything until you know its story or a person story. And once I listened to him, I found all this profound wisdom that he was willing to share, and it was unbelievable, and I became When I first met him, I was guilty about how I judged him.

35:47 And then I realized how much knowledge he had, And in our way of thinking, when you have knowledge, you become quite to coin a Western phraise magical and say overturned clever man, and the ability to do psychic things. So then I became a bit frightened. I thought he might read my mind and smite me. So I became a bit frightened of him and a bit timid. But as I got to know him, I realized none of that was true, None of that dark stuff was true about him. He was just the person that wanted to share, and he shares in a very caring and loving and laughing mate. But now I've known him for well over two decades, I realized every seed he plans is for a purpose. He plants seeds in all sorts of people so that there's a garden rather than one person. And so then he became a teacher that I admired dearly, and then over time we became friends. And then we became best friends where I can share all sorts of things additional to the cultural knowledge. And now we're a team where we share with others. So in a way, he's brought me through. I'm just laughing to myself. I don't know why, but I'm suddenly seeing Master Yoda and Luke Skywalker coming up through the ranks. But therefully, we're not killing any Darth Vaders. Maybe Darth Vader is the Western system that kind of takes us to the dark side of the force. But Paul shared and now works with me, and he never ceases to amaze me with

37:17 the knowledge he has. I was within last weekend because he had sorry business. He lost someone to you and his family, so a lot of us went to support him, and he still amazed me with knowledge that he has from it feels like he's been alive for about two hundred years. But he has traveled country and been with a lot of old, clever people and wise people throughout this continent and has an incredible memory in terms of traditional knowledge, but also contemporary knowledge and how to how to integrate the two. And he's almost kind of bilingual in terms of different cultures. And he's certainly been able to share things with me that have not only changed into my life, but he supported me to use what he's given me to change lives. So if we were if we look at each other, I guess we're like two circles that overlap. So he has a knowledge base, I have a different experiences. I have a slightly different one, but then we overlap where we do share. And so in the book, I've quoted him directly because he has a very unique way of thinking and speaking, and I didn't want to sanitize that or take away the resonance and the beauty of how he speaks. And so in the book, I quoted him directly because I think people just need to hear his voice in their mind because and I guess the way I've written it is I'm kind of the connected between the different parts of the book where he speaks where I put in my two

38:48 cents worth. But he is a phenomenal man, a giving person, and there is much to learn from. Him throughout the book too. You have included stories Aboriginal dream time stories, and you've also included exercises or reflections. I guess that people can take and apply to bring this to their own lives, and so it is very relevant and very applicable. And I just wanted to make the comment too when you talked about story that even in Western psychology, you know, the power of metaphor is proven, the fact that we learn and we retain and we get these insights not through being told things directly, but through the power of metaphor. And I think that that's essentially what these stories are, isn't it.

39:35 They are And while you were speaking, I was thinking about you. They are metaphorms. But also I guess if you think about it, would you sit down, would you prefer to be given a story or given a lecture exactly? And a lot of the Western world staff are lectures like I'm going to tell you, whereas a story is let's share, which says I expect you and I'm going to share this with you, and then you're welcome to listen, and then let's have a yan about it and you can give your thoughts. And the beauty of when we share with a story. And I've written a children's book that will be coming out later in the year for nine year olds that has a lot of news stories that I've written, and it's got this vehicle where there's an old man sharing with these two kids that listen to the stories. And as I wrote that book, I realized that with this sharing, I might write a dream time story. For instance, in chapter eight of The Dreaming Path, I wrote a story about leadership based on a full necklizard, and it's done quite deliberately. I've put all sorts of things in there for discussion, but when people read that story, they'll also come up with other things that they've seen that I had no intentions of depicting, because they'll have their own context insights. And that's the beauty of sharing story.

40:52 If we sit down and share with mutual respect and equality of power and a willingness to listen to each other or a group of us, we're all great because we'll have new insights, and that's the beauty of knowledge. If we do sit down and share, we all grow, and as we grow, we all have a greater ability to create a better place. And that's the power of unity. And we don't have a lot of unity at the moment. Having said that, when you look at a lot of these crisis I mean, and I have been praying and sending my love to what's happening in Ukraine and also to those facing such horrible daily trauma in terms of the floods up your way, and I was having to think about that in terms of how does that fit in with our cultural stuff, And when I thought about it straight away, I thought, well, you know, in terms of Maslow, it's okay that we try and seek self actualization and all a path of contentment, which is what the book I've written is all about. But there are times when then stuff happens that's just horrible, and so we go back to what our basic needs, and that's our physiological needs. We need food, we need shelter, we need safety, we need water, and we need to know our loved ones are safe. And so for those that are flood stricken at the moment, they're not getting those things, so of course they're not going to be in a

42:23 place where they're thinking about the longer term contentment of themselves. And certainly we know over in the Ukraine that's happening. So I was thinking about that, and yet in that crisis. What we see is the rest of humanity staying to let go of their business and share their love. We're seeing that there's fundraisers happening in Australia on the weekend for the floods. We see people on television. Yes, there's been criticism of the lack of government response, but people are wandering the streets helping each other. There are people getting around on boats saving lives. I saw the same with COVID. With COVID, there were amazing things happening where you kind of thought, well, I don't want COVID to ever come again, and I wouldn't like to see floods on anybody. But wow, I wouldn't it be great if we could be this caring for each other when there's no crisis. And that's the sad thing. I mean. I talked in the book about going through storms, and I've been through lots of storms in my life. I don't know if I've been through any his major it's what's happening up the North Coast. But I've had my breakdown.

43:30 My career has ended in the public sector when I started to challenge the system. My brother passed away a couple of years ago with me by side, and I kissed him goodbye, and that's something that will forever scar me. I was there when my son served his hand almost servet, his hand on a band saw it was just heading off my skin. So all those things are horrible, and I wouldn't wish those storms. But in storms, once the storm starts to shift and we start to repair, there are good opportunities for learning from storms, and so I wouldn't wish any storms on any body. But I've also learned when these things are happening at a point in time, when we work through the grief and the anger and the depression and we start to accept what's happening, there are opportunities to look and learn and go what's something I can take out of this? So it wasn't all the waste. And I mean I was talking to elders about the floods up the North Coast on the weekend and they were saying, well, you need to know the story of the land and those big mountains up the back of Brisbane and tweed Heads and list more. They're just a big catchment of water and so traditionally the old people would have been down on the flats, but they would have known the floods were coming because they would have read the land and they would have disappeared a couple of weeks before the rain came, and they would have been up into the high country and it wouldn't have been a big deal. They would have gone, oh, well, there's a good flush. And so it's about listening and understanding the story of the land. And that doesn't take away the pain and suffering that people are feeling. But

45:01 we need to be thinking about all these things, including I mean, the old people are saying a lot of the traumatic events that are happening, whether it's because mother it's not happy and she's not going to stop until we start with and so that might sound rubbish to some people, but our old people truly believe that, and I do too, and we across the world need to start taking seriously the warming of the planet, which is a novel I've just written as part of my PhD, and it's a really inspiring thing, but it's also a sad thing. But it seems to be young people who are protesting about global warming and leading the charge. And while that's older people, some are on board, some aren't in all of that. The question I have in terms of leadership, I guess is where does the truth lie with all that? And that goes then back to story.

45:59 What is truth? What is the true story on only of these things we're facing. But having said all that, there are times when trauma surrounds us and grief is real and the pain is real, And I guess what what I talk about in the book is sometimes it's okay just not to be okay, as long as it doesn't stop us in the longer term from kind of trying to find that blue sky and getting back into life again. Paul, one last question. You mentioned earlier that you became friends with your counselor and you took him out Bush. Is this something that's available to people to be taken out Bush? How does one get on board with that kind of idea? I mean, I love the book. The book is a great way to engage with Indigenous culture and to bring that into our lives. But if somebody wanted to go and have a more direct experience, is that something that's available?

46:47 It is? It is, And certainly start of the book, I'm very careful to explain that the book's only a capture of myself and Uncle Paul's views of the world. They're not meant to reflect anybody else's. They're meant to inspire people to want to search for that local knowledge, because it is important to understand there is local knowledge what Paul and I are sharing the big picture if you like, the common stories across all the different tribal groups across Australia that were there. But within the unity, there's also the diversity of thoughts. So the way the old people explained it is across all of Australia. Traditionally we cared for our place and all things in our place, but the way we did that locally was different through dance, through song, through story, through artwork, and that's really important.

47:34 The old people are saying, we want to share this. And there's a beautiful quote from an old an elder from Central Desert that I used in my PhD. That he said, he said, our culture is a gift that we want to give to all of you. Why do you not want to take our gift? It's there to help you all And then he talks about it at more length, but it got me thinking, Yeah, this is a beautiful gift that country gives us all, and so it's there for all people. And certainly Uncle Paul has copped a bit of flat at times, saying why are you sharing this with non Aboriginal people, And he said, I'll share it with anybody that wants to learn, because knowledge, if not shared, is of no use to anybody. And there are a lot of non Abiginal people that can benefit from this knowledge. And if they benefit, then country benefits.

48:20 And that goes back to the Aboriginal definition of well being. The Aboriginal definition of well being says that we can only be well when everything is well. That's all people in all country. And so that means for people in Australia to be well, Aboriginal people need to be well, but also non Aboriginal people need to be well. In some ways. Aboriginal people, even though we're in a negative space in terms of the socioeconomic indicators, in some ways, because of our cultural connection and our connection to spirit, many of us in a far bit of place than non Aboriginal Australia. So although non Ariginal people may be higher in a lot of those nomic indicators, spiritually there might be a bit of a gap there. So if we share, we all carry each other and we all become well. And certainly that's something Uncle Paul and I are happy to share. And there are lots of other resources and books, but they're also One of the beautiful things I'm seeing around Australia in the last twenty years is cultural reclamation. I'm seeing more tools with Aboriginal people, taking non original people and sharing them country and sharing story locally. I'm also seeing beautiful things on television where we're seeing more Averaginal faces in different screens. But also I'm seeing welcome the country and acknowledgments of country that are not tokenistic anymore, that they're quite genuine. And something that Uncle Paul shared with me that challenged me and made me think only a year ago, was he said

49:52 back in the referendum, he said we needed a majority of Australians to support that, and he said the Abriginal population was only through percent of that time. So he said there are a lot of non original people voted for us to be citizens and to be in the constitution. He said there are a lot of good people that are willing to hold hands with us. We can't ever forget that, and we need to share this with them, and so this is all about again coming together. Original traditional knowledge isn't meant to say let's all go back to the Stone Age. It's saying here it is in this contemporary rule we all evolve and let's all come together, and you can be my friend and you don't have to feel like an outsider. You can actually sit at the fire with me as part of my family. And now people they say that they'll bring you in. This concept of extended family isn't just for original bloodlines. Throughout Australia.

50:49 Traditionally too, when the macasms used to come down well before cook, they'd be taken into family, and it still happens. Someone can say you're now my grandson, you're now my granddaughter. You can come bush with me and you're now and my family, and that is kind of yes, symbolic, and it might be metaphoric, but it's also real that we are family and we're all together in this one place. So let's care for each other here here. Paul, thank you so much for your time today, and thank you for the book. It is a gift, and good luck with everything else that you're doing in the world. Thank you wonderful to share space, as I said, with a kindred spirit, and I'd just love to see the work that we're both doing. I'd love to see that take route and enable people to reflect in a safe way and to find their path and to live a life where they can say that they're very happy with their story.

51:45 Thanks. The Dreaming Path is available right now in all bookstores, and if you're interested in finding out more about Paul and his coaching and consulting and facilitation services, you can contact him via his website, which is Cultural Consultancy dot com dot a you. Thank you so much for listening today and as always, I look forward to catching you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy Listener