ABOUT ARIAN
Made in China. Born in Melbourne, Australia. I’ve had an eclectic life, one in which the Gods have bestowed much presence and initiatory input. I am an adopted daughter of a Polish-German refugee father, a kind man, who frequently gifted my own school lunches with rye bread, Polish sausage, Swiss cheese and a Polish pickle.
In 1982 I explored for several years urban communal-village life in Melbourne. It involved conscious co-habitation of over ten adults, co-parenting and sharing wages and property. There were visits by overseas revolutionaries sharing the same intentions, so life was rarely ever dull.
Time passed and much unfolded. Two separate stints with near death awakened a near ending that eventually spared me. I realised that life is often mistakenly taken for granted. We often see it as an entitlement, but it is a mere water bubble in our midst - fragile untouched and barely there.
For a time, I was a Tibetan Buddhist nun living in monasteries and women’s hermitages in Asia, Europe and the USA. Over time I slowly fused a history as a practitioner in Traditional Chinese Medicine, body work, counseling, mindfulness, and meditation and coaching.
Further good fortune arrived in the bounty of nourishment fed by Jungian dreamwork and analysis which later revealed a love for scriptwriting and actor training. This helped enormously to animate my introversion and manage public speaking.
These days I no longer strike out to stride ahead. Call me a fool. Gone is the imposing arc of competition, climbing the ladder and to succeed at any cost. Instead, I am claimed by seeking and wondering with the mysteries of what it means to live deeply and die well. Within the last three years, I’ve wrestled with attempts to be a faithful witness to five dying members of my family. Their deaths are not lost on me and I am astonished at their lives, and at how they came this far.
I contemplate their gifts and how it will be when it is my time. All the while gathering them in. Remembering. Setting a place for them at the table. Feasting of their days. Carrying close such kin. A call to safeguard those who helped me arrive, no less.
What does dying ask of us?
And what of the appreciation for the kin that showed the way, for the life in us?
How can our indebtedness reflect our deepest capacity to be human?
In a forgotten time where being human is both an unspoken and an invisible grief - a whisper and maybe even a rumour. Being human is a fading memory buried in the spiraling out-of-control reverie that is pumped out in the name of growth, development, and advancement. Dying to be human is a call and an obligation. A mercy dash. A claim to remember. A debt owed to a life entrusted. It matters. Today my own broken-heartedness is an activism. A courtship I can no longer refuse.
Come with your compassion, your empathy, the peace you foster in your heart. Continue to breathe effectively for strength and resilience. But how about cultivating a practised and purposeful obligation that’s tethered to the world and grieve for what we are rapidly losing? Our capacity to be human. Our refusal to love what we already have or do not wish to see, is disappearing. We can no longer play small and pretend what's happening will go away.
Truly joined at the hip is grief and falling in love with life.
Our isolationist culture worships self-reliance and independence - the “I can be and do anything” ethos. The individual at the centre of the universe is dangerous. The consequence of a highly prized individuation means that growth away and from community is an absence dubbed, “but hasn’t it always been this way?“ Village making is a claim for dependence on others; so that others need you just as much as you need them, that which cannot be divided. Our ancestors carried this close. To them it was an achievement.
What becomes of a culture embedded in a self absorbed self-help psychology that centre's so much attention on the child and the eternal presence of the all prevailing self? It's a paradigm largely driven by what our parents did or did not do for us. The proclivity of offering and attending retreats, workshops and assemblies in the name of self-improvement eventually lose any real and earnest healing and transformation because we return, once more, to an unhealed and unwell culture. Changes and fluctuations to the natural world are coming in so fast now from too many angles, that its very disturbance fails to alarm people. Being awake, aware and mindful requires courageous maturity, grief and the ability to fall in love with life. Consumerist culture sees to it that we shop more, rather than feel more.
Can we set the tone differently and weave the riches of what once was into our imaginative tapestry? And in so doing, court a purposeful legacy to bequeath to others and beyond. A tapestry that entails community driven ventures flowing with wonder and reverence for living deeply - imbued with ritual, mystery and ancestry, mythology, storytelling and dying well. Creating a space for heartbreak for what we are rapidly losing. The absence of this approach keeps many therapists and coaches busy, and many would be trainees in a career.
“’The principle content of psychology is what happened to you earlier. We don’t even separate history as a story from history as cause. No other culture does that. If you’re out of your mind in another culture or quite disturbed or impotent or anorexic, you look at what you’re eating, who’s been casting spells on you, what taboo you’ve crossed, what you haven’t done right, when you last missed reverence to the gods or didn’t take part in the dance, broke some tribal custom...It would never, never be, what happened to you with your parents forty years ago. Only our culture uses that model, that myth.”
Wedded to a partner who is an English-Maori-Jewish smiling devotion, I commune with nature while learning to be intimate once more in the home of the wild. I spend my days now devoted to serving my huge growing family and community, willingly, in ways that help to feed the larger life for future generations to come. Piece by piece, I gather stories and history of my ancestors which help trace a remembering of ritual, time, knowing and place. A remembering of what it means to be human.
“For the Indigenous soul of all people who can still remember how to be real cultures, life is a race to be elegantly run, not a race to be competitively won. It is an obligation to engender that elegance of motion in our daily lives, in service of maintaining life by moving and living as beautifully as we can.
Living and running were holy things you were supposed to get good at, not things to use to conquer, win, and get attention for. Running was not meant for taking but for giving gifts to the holy in nature. Running was an offering a feeding of life.
By trying to feed the holy in nature the fruit of beauty from the tree of memory of our Indigenous souls, grown in the composted failures of our past need to conquer, watered by the tears of cultural grief, we might become ancestors worth descending from and possibly grow a place of hope for a time beyond our own.
The rental rate for this gift of being allowed to flourish and reside in this continuum with the rest of the world, is that we do everything possible to be indigenously beautiful, promising that we make ourselves spiritually full and delicious so as to feed the next ones to appear in the ongoing river on the occasion of our passing.”
Orphan Wisdom School Scholar (CAN & UK)
Dip. Acu (USA)
Cert IV Training & Assessment
Grad Dip TCM
Grad Cert Soul Centred Counselling
Grad Cert Thought Field Therapy.
Workplace Programs: Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence & Attention Training www.arianyoung.com.au
BOOK A SESSION info.dtbh@icloud.com
