How To Shift From Feelings Of Abandonment To Being Stoked on Self-Love with Clay MacDonald

How does a small child recover from losing their Mum? Not just survive, full of self-destruction and fear, but learn great joy, even gratitude for the darkness that once was your universe?

How do you come back from the shame of things you once did as a result of that sense of abandonment, to truly love yourself as an equally precious part of the same 'one big organism'?

 I first met Clay Macdonald 22 years ago when The Beautiful Girls released their debut album Learn Yourself. Clay was one half of the band’s rhythm section, along with drummer Mitch Connoly and I was presenter of Triple J Drive at the time with Charlie Pickering. There was definitely a certain, let’s say, free spiritedness, that struck a chord with my punk anarchy. 

Over the years we’ve popped up in each other’s lives at the most seemingly random but of course, serendipitous times – charity surf comps, in the forest in the Northern Rivers and more recently on a relatively remote beach, several weeks in a row. I became fascinated by the man that Clay had become, living very simply was one part of it, the other was this effervescent, contagious joy that glimmers out of his entire being . 

How do you find that in a world that’s geared toward fear, toward self-doubt? How do you take that corrosive poison out of your heart and turn it into self-love? Meditating for two hours every morning, and stopping for 3 consious breaths every 3 hours is part of Clay’s secret, but there was so much more to Clay’s inspiring metamorphosis than I saw coming.