S1 Ep5: Sandy Leathem

Octogenarian, Founder of 'Movement Matters’, Feldenkrais Practitioner, Physiotherapist, Embodied Aging Consultant, Grandmother and the inspiration behind this project.

Growing up as a kid in a Tasmanian National Park on the Freycinet Peninsular, informed within her a healthy childlike curiosity, playful creativity, and quirky ‘outta-the-box’ common-sense thinking.

The osmotic ripples from this nature-based upbringing have permeated throughout her life, yet it’s only now that Sandy feels able to find the language that best describes the experience and its ongoing effects.

Her own professional career began in 1964 when she founded as a sole trader her online business 'Movement Matters’ and since then she has worked continuously both internationally and nationally in many diverse settings, cultures and countries.

Sandy brings a rich synthesis of evidence-based science and lived experiences into the programs she teaches, bringing to her work a wealth of over 50yrs experience in the field of intervention prevention healthy aging and longevity. She is passionate about engaging the body’s innate ability to heal and restore optimal functioning regardless of age.

In her late 70’s Sandy was given a clinical diagnosis that in Sandy’s words was 'a profound relief’. We’ll hear more about neural diversity and the effect it’s had on Sandy and those closest to her as this interview unfolds.

Traditional storytelling at its best with wisdom and knowledge shared through the age-old art of conversation.

This is a CBF grant funded project in collaboration with BayFM Byron and Plantation Studios.

Executive producer Rasela Torise. 

Music www.purple-planet.com

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:00

First of all, it was racism, and then it was sexism, and now it's ageism. So I've got to fight three battlefronts. Wisdom's not something you can buy a book and learn. It's not something you can grab off Instagram. It's not something you can you can buy in a course. I needed that courage when I was being threatened, kidnapped, raped, almost murdered.

SPEAKER_04 0:28

As I'm speaking now, the tears just rolling down my cheeks. Tears of utility. Stuff you can't change. So important.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

And the work is so much knowledge supporting your knowledge. Your wisdom.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

The most important activism right now is information for yourself and others. And that's why I'm so happy to be on a community radio initiative to raise the status of older women. Because older women in almost every community carry knowledge and gifts and experiences that are of real value in the real world, in the economy, in the culture that we all care about.

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Welcome to a new series, Wow, Wise Older Women, a CBF grant-funded project created to raise the profile and status of women aged 55 to 85. Across six episodes, we celebrate the profound value of older women and their essential role in society as wisdom keepers, culture carriers, and the voices of lived experience. Through intimate, thoughtful conversations, this series honors the knowledge that only time can teach. In this episode, we meet Sandy Leetham, octogenarian, Feldenkrais practitioner, physiotherapist, embodied aging consultant, grandmother, and the original inspiration behind this entire project. Sandy spent more than 50 years working nationally and internationally across diverse cultures, communities, and clinical settings, bringing a rare synthesis of evidence-based science and deeply lived experience to everything she teaches. Sandy's story begins in a Tasmanian National Park on the Frasernay Peninsula, where a childhood immersed in wild nature shaped her curiosity, creativity, and wonderfully unconventional way of seeing the world. Those early years continue to ripple through her life, and only now, decades later, does she feel that she has the language to describe their profound and ongoing influence. This series brings you traditional storytelling at its finest. Wisdom shared through the age-old art of conversation. Join us as we listen, learn, and celebrate the voices of women whose insight enriches us all.

SPEAKER_04 2:56

My name's Sandy, Sandy Lisa. It feels like an incredible privilege to be invited to be part of the wise older women's project. Incredible privilege. And it's gotten me thinking about well, who am I as a wise older woman? And it kind of makes me smile because I don't think of myself as such. But the reality is I'm 83, and I guess I kind of fall into that category. And yeah, I'm looking forward to sharing my wisdom as it unfolds. I think becoming an oxygenarian has probably been one of the most exciting events of my life. I kind of gave it a lot of consideration, knowing that that time stepping out of my 70s into my 80s was coming, and I I knew that it was incredibly important for me to create a compelling future for myself. Even though it wasn't at the forefront of my thinking, it was occasionally, and it was brought more to the forefront with my own mum, who lived to be very vital and curious about her life until she was 99. She certainly contributed to what this final stage of my life was, you know, I was stepping into. The background of that was realizing that our Western culture doesn't do aging, particularly the top end of aging, very well. That was my perception and still is. It's that awareness that kind of drives me to be doing what I'm doing today. Back in uh what was called the global financial crisis in uh 2008, I got caught up in that and I lost all my economic security, the lot. I was privileged enough to have built up a little bit of a portfolio in property, but it was all negatively geared back to our home, and I lost the lot. So that threw me back into the rental market, and since then I've been literally tossed and turned in that market to the point where, as I was coming into my 80s, I just wasn't able to keep up with the increasing rents. And I was very much one of the cohort of older women just being forced out of the rental market, so there was a lot of fear. My kids took me aside in my late 70s, I suppose I was about 78, and they took me aside and said, Look, we don't have a backup plan, because I'd been asked to move from many rental properties for whatever reasons it was for the owners of the property, and each time I did the rent would go up again. So that's when I was forced through their concern for me to look to other ways of finding accommodation. And it really meant if I was going to keep up with rents, I would have to move quite some considerable distance from where my kids lived. And at that time we were all living within a circumference of about 15 kilometers from each other. But this kind of looked like I'd need to move a much greater distance to be able to find rents I could sustain. So I put myself on a number of lists and it was quite horrifying to me the sort of options that were available in the so-called system of community housing. And I think I became really very scared. You know, I couldn't live in many of the places that I went to look at. I didn't think I could. They kind of felt like they were really out of character with me. And so it felt like a you know, a very black hole I was looking into as I was aging, if I was going to be financially dependent on on that system, which I clearly was. Coming into my 80s from that perspective, there was a lot of fear and anxiety. I just didn't have the financial freedom that I'd had earlier in my life to really make any choices. Family's very, very important to me. My priority was to stay, because I have five grandchildren aging between 20 and three. So it was important for me to geographically stay within an easy distance of my grandchildren. So that really was a challenging constraint, and that opened up for me looking at various uh lifestyle kind of communities, affordable housing communities or government subsidized housing arrangements. And I just would drive through the gate and burst into tears very much from my own internal perspective and without very much respect for the beautiful human beings that lived there. I would make a lot of judgments, you know, from the outside in. They looked very clinical and very manicured and old and tired, regimented and conservative and uniform. I thought I would die. I put myself through an enormous amount of stress. And then looking at more the lifestyle kind of communities, most people who moved into those had a home to sell to be able to buy into. So I wasn't in that bracket. I fell into the bracket where I was relying on Centerlink for support, despite my 50-55 plus years as a professional healthcare worker, as a physiotherapist, and as a Feldenkrais practitioner, which I just loved being and still am. However, one of my boogie boarding friends noticed a tiny little paragraph in the local newspaper from an organization called Cyrovilla asking for anyone who was interested in an affordable housing model, which came available at a little village within 15 minutes of my kids. I didn't know it existed. Most people didn't know it existed, and I immediately phoned up and put my name on the list and then completely forgot about it. However, fast forward, about three months later, I had a phone call to say I had a position, a little one bedroom cottage available to me, and jumped in the car and uh drove down to have a little look, and it was desolate, absolutely desolate. Sixteen little cottages that had been empty for nine years. The garden was like a desert. The redeeming features were that it was near a little village within walking distance in a very pretty area, and it was less than fifty meters from the ocean. I don't know what the acreage would be, maybe two acres, all quite squashed in, awful. However, there was something about the barrenness of it that appealed to me because there's the beginnings of growth. You can sort of create something. And the other thing that was interesting to me about that offer was that the manager, very young woman, very passionate about what she was doing. She was the manager of actually choosing people to come and live in these, and her mandate was we needed to be over 65, lived in the area, and broke, financially broke. So I certainly fell into that category. But I had so much hesitation, I was so resistant. Everyone around me were thrilled, and it's much clearer to me now what my internal resistances were in terms of just my own internal psychology. But the long and the short of it is I downsized dramatically. That in itself was a very painful journey, giving away so much. My son, bless him, was able to give me some storage for those uh belongings that I just I just could not let go of. And the mandate that my kids encouraged me to work with was look, this is just the first step. Let's give it a try. Just take what you will need, you know, two or three cups and plates, just sheets for you, you know, really trim down, and everything that I needed to keep my little business running. It's extraordinary, you know. Within the first year it was like, oh, I can live so comfortably with so little. I've been here literally two full years. Really, I'm enormously grateful. I would like to have a car park for my car next to the little cottage. It's not, it's about 50, 60 metres away. And I would like a second bedroom, but I'm managing without. Really, it's very much within my big philosophy of being minimalistic and just having what's important to me. In saying that, but I still have some things in storage that I need to find home for.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Nobody really shares too many stories about what's happened to them. Older people in these situations don't usually speak up. I remember you saying, you know, I'm I'm not gonna be one of those people, this is not the end of me. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_04 13:02

I do. I do. And as it so happens, the other 15 little cottages, beautiful, beautiful people, but we're on a very different wavelength. I guess that's life. But on the positive side, if I was offered a uh house in the so-called suburbs now as distinct from this little village, I would choose to be here because we've got very, very different interests and different ways of looking at the world. But they're my mates. If there was anything that I needed, they'd be there. And I feel very safe. Given the changes that are happening in the world today and the speed of change, I think, certainly for me, that question of feeling safe is becoming more and more important. And it's not about being coddled, it's more about being able to manage an environment that is moving incredibly quickly, and I'm very aware that physically I'm not as able or as fast on my feet as I used to be, or even as fast in my thinking as I used to be. And that's okay. I'm okay with that. I do have significant challenges with my shoulders. I've asked a lot of them over the decades, and they're taking a time of rest now, not functioning for me as well as I'd like. Lifting and heaving this, that, and the other, even heavy kettles can be very challenging for me. So I'm in myself at peace with that way of being in my body and how I'm needing to manage my body in a way that I've just taken for granted over the years.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

So aside from your physical body, you've also done so much work emotionally, spiritually, cognitively, and I'm just really interested in your current ability to access what you describe as a real richness or a driver of gut language that also represents present clarity. What changed? I think it's becoming an oxygen here.

SPEAKER_04 15:20

I would like to think that would happen for people a lot younger than me. But I have a clarity now, but more than that, I have a confidence now about what it is to be a human being. That's something that's really been, I I was going to say, of interest, but it's much more than that. It's deeper, it's more a drive. What is it that needs to be in place to fulfill my human potential? The theme that's run all through my life has been the extraordinary opportunity, although there was no way I appreciated it as fully as I do now when I was a little kid. But I grew up in the Fraysenae National Park on the east coast of Tasmania in the 1940s, during the war, actually, the latter parts of the Second World War. It was very wild, it was very isolated, no electricity, no telephones, we had mail once every couple of weeks if we were lucky. It was a national park. My parents they had a vision for their lives as a little tiny kid. I think I was less than one when I was introduced to that part of the world. So I grew up as a bush baby, really, a barefooted rock-hopping bush baby. I was very much exposed to nature, and that exposure to nature and the natural world, I kind of learnt about it in an osmotic way. The ebb and flow of the natural seasons and when the fish were running, what sort of fish were running, when the birds were migrating, the changes in the weather, and a huge emphasis on nature and the natural world, not so much in communication, in talking, but in my felt experience. As a little kid, I was left a lot on my own. I didn't have other kids to play with until subsequently my sisters came along, the three younger sisters. But I think that deep somatic experience, I have to use that word experience, that embodied experience with the earth and the water and the land and the sea and the smells and the tastes has followed me through all of my life. And it's really coming out to blossom now at this end of my life, because I've discovered language now that is helping me to better understand what's missing for my grandchildren, and that missingness is not personal. Our culture has changed so much since the Second World War that culturally what was taken for granted in previous generations, much greater family cohesion, for better or for worse, nonetheless, it was there. More of an extended family thinking there were symbols and rituals that were just built into our culture that have been and are being eroded at phenomenal speed. My oldest daughter now's mid-50s, and my son is in his very late 40s, and you know, my kids who were born in the 70s, they didn't get to experience what I experienced. And as a parent, I largely parented out of my experience of being parented, but in my gut, I was parenting from the influence of my very early years in this extraordinary natural environment. But I didn't have a language for it, and I didn't trust it. I trusted what the books were saying, and I can now see with much greater clarity how led astray I was as a parent listening and taking heed of the so-called experts in the books and overriding my gut instincts as a mother because the conversation around me was to follow what the books were saying, and even to follow what the educational system was saying and what the medical system was saying, and now I'm discovering that we've got the whole thing upside down and back the front. I'm witnessing my grandchildren being exposed to experiences that are more about appealing to their intellect than their felt experience, the um kinesthetic feelingness of life, sensorial, living in the everyday. What is now being proven, without any shadow of a doubt, it's unequivocal, is that our Western culture, there has been no value in our humanness around our emotions and our feelings. That's very much been excised. So the influences of the Western culture now, and have been very strongly since the 60s, that's when it's been spoken of as a shift in civilization. You know, this cognitive, more intellectual perspective around life. You know, it's so important to teach our kids to be independent, to fit in with society, and we've got to teach our kids how to be human. Well, the reality is that's just so not true. It's so not true. In fact, the less we teach them from the outside in, the more human they will become through their own innate spontaneous development, which used to be there in years gone by and used to be understood. Freud spoke about this, he alluded to it way, way, way back, but now it's it's been lost, completely excised, and it's more a cognitive behavioral approach that underpins a lot of what's happening now. Because of technology and the extraordinary advances in technology, they're now able to read very intimately what's happening in the emotions and the feelings of us as human beings. It's a different lens, looking through a different paradigm. And when we come back to that developmental perspective, that is very much through validating the emotions that we feel as human beings and the feelings, that it's gotten very clear to me that it's so important. Important to help and support and to provide a context and environment for our little people to feel their way through life. But as a parent myself, I did not give my kids the privilege of doing that. And certainly for the beginnings years of me being a grandparent, I did not appreciate. In my deep gut I did, but I didn't know how to do it. But now I know through the wonderful teachings of various thinkers out there who have joined up the dots and been able to bring the science in to validate our human emotions and our human feelings. And I think it's helped me to have a deeper understanding of my own work as a Gilden Christ practitioner and my little business called Movement Matters has been about addressing the need for us as human beings to value our feelings and sensations and emotions and trusting that part of ourselves as our Geiger counter, as our North Star, as distinct from a more cognitive societal perspective.

SPEAKER_01 23:30

You had a diagnosis recently that seemed to create quite a large shift in the way that you see and saw yourself, and perhaps has given you a better understanding of the life that you've led within your mind.

SPEAKER_04 23:45

I certainly have grown up as one of those different kids. I can see in myself I have had a lens to look through the world that's been very different to my peer group and certainly my parents. In fact, I think I was of great consternation, particularly to my mother and my sisters, and to myself. I would just interpret the world very differently. And I felt very ashamed and embarrassed by my perspective, but that's all I had. I guess I acted accordingly, and on many, many accounts I tried to cover it up and duck and dive. And I now know one of the terms that's often used for that is I learned to mask, cover up, and copy other people because my need to belong was so strong. So I was diagnosed in my late 70s as being autistic and ADHD. But I quite consciously took myself off to be clinically assessed because I wanted to get to the root of my own stress levels. My anxiety levels were huge. And that was really knocking my health around. And when I was given labels, it was a profound relief. I no longer thought of myself as being stupid, which was a pretty common comment internal, and yet deep down I knew I wasn't. The stress levels in the last 10 years have led to cancer and surgery, and I'm now living with a stoma which needs to be managed. And of course, the stress levels I know have contributed profoundly to my shoulder limitations, which have been and are really quite significant. But it's interesting because now I've stepped into another world of better understanding through the science of the brain and particularly the limbic system, which is all about emotions and feelings and sensations, the role that plays in us as human beings fulfilling on our human potential. And that excites me to have that knowledge now. It's still yet to find its way into mainstream. But my urgency comes from the fact I've got grandchildren, you know. And it's like, how can I help to fast track their development? But of course, as a grandmother and as a parent, and I can see it in my own life, you know, I didn't want my mum to share her wisdom with me very much. I wasn't very tolerant to her wisdom. I can appreciate it now, and I kind of did then, but I was reactive and I wasn't as open as I wished I could have been.

SPEAKER_01 26:35

How did that diagnosis affect your relationships with your three siblings, three younger siblings, with other members of the family? How have things changed now that you seem to have more compassion for yourself? Does that also then spread to other people, the closest people to you?

SPEAKER_04 26:55

Oh, absolutely, certainly in the biological family. I can certainly understand my relationship with my mum so much more, and certainly with my siblings and just all around me. And a sadness, you know, a real sadness in there in terms of like I as I'm speaking now, the tears just run rolling down my cheeks. And in the past I'd have thought, what are you crying about, Sandy? But now I understand that tears of futility, and it is, it's like stuff you can't change. Tears of futility are so important, and now I can allow myself to have these tears because I understand that to understand my own humanity, allowing myself to be moved to the degree of feeling futile about circumstances and situations over which I have no control is my key to my own freedom. And I've frozen those tears most of my life. I've just frozen them. I they have been unaccessible to me. Like I lost my playfulness as a very little kid when I was sent to boarding school. I just lost it. You know, one of hundreds of millions of kids this is happening to. We lose our ability to play in that organic, natural way, which is not competitive, it's not results driven, it's not outcome-driven, it's just that playfulness, you know, where you lose yourself in play, and you see little kids doing that with sand on the beach, like you go into another world, into another zone. It happens with older kids, and it can happen with that. This is what creativity is all about. Deep creativity, where you just lose yourself in what you're doing, and your body expresses it's not thinking so much.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

I'm trying to imagine young Sandy growing up in this national park full of feeling and intuition and running free and bare feet, and then being taken to boarding school. Can you just explain what that feeling was like to be taken from what it was that you know and obviously loved into a completely different world and and why that happened?

SPEAKER_04 29:42

The event in my life of going off to boarding school is very clear. It's like a point in time and a point in history, and I think I was about ten. But you know, there were kids going to boarding school much younger than that as well. It really was the fashion. Anyone in rural Australia, largely if the if the finances were there, went to boarding school. However, in my particular case, the reason why I went to boarding school was that my parents had rebuilt what became known as a holiday resort in the Fraysonay National Park on the east coast of Tasmania. It's now called the Lodge. It was called the Chateau in the old days. It's a very, very beautiful part of the world, a very beautiful place to stay now, and lots and lots of families during the holidays would come. And uh my father was an interesting man, a great visionary, uh very hard worker and very connected to the natural world. He built this just a selection of lots of little cabins and then a central area for um big kitchens and dining area.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

And his vision was to escape the rat race, wasn't it, back in the world? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 30:51

Absolutely. So ahead of his time. So ahead of his time, such a visionary, so trusting. At the same time, he died without a will, you know. He just trusted. But he came back from the war, a different human being, and you know, he'd experienced situations during the Second World War in the Air Force. There was no help for, and he was driven to support his family, four daughters, and his wife, and um his stress levels became very, very, very high. Anyway, there was an electrical storm in the early 50s, and it just so happened that a lightning bolt hit the uh main area of the chateau, and the big huge gas cylinders went off, and the whole place went up in flames. There was about a hundred guests staying there at the time, and all through the night they were bucketing water out of Oyster Bay and passing it along the chain and throwing it on the fires. There was no human loss of life, but a couple of people were burned, but massive devastation to their business. And over the years, you know, my father just worked so hard to, I can feel the tears coming again, huh? To pull together his dream and um ended up going bankrupt. And my grandparents, who lived in Launceston and they had a very successful business in Launceston, and they offered to pay for me to go to boarding school. My father really didn't want me to go, but again, the pressure of the day and the challenges that he saw in front of him agreed. And my mum, of course, you know, I think she was really struggling to cope. So it probably on some level felt like a relief. And my grandparents were very insistent. So that's what happened. We eventually all ended up at boarding school, one after the other. But prior to that, we'd had homeschooling, which my mum, bless her, she it was not her vocation. And in her 90s, she shared with me that she did all my homework before it was sent off. And I can only imagine we didn't laugh about it when she told me. It's like, oh cracky, if only I'd known that. I had a false sense of a false sense of my own intelligence, which probably worked for me in many ways. And I went through school, but I had a total breakdown going to boarding school. I just disappeared into a cupboard. I couldn't cope, you know, wearing uniforms and shoes and stockings and suspender belts, and I shut down. The school had no idea how to handle me. I just shut down. And my parents took me away back to the peninsula, and then I've spent most of my life trying to find my way out of that.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

But how did you finish your schooling then?

SPEAKER_04 33:50

My mum prepared me to be taken back to boarding school just before the swimming sports. To prepare me for that, what she did, bless her, was we'd go out in the little dinghy, I would row out, she'd have the craypot on the front of the boat, she'd be sitting in the middle of the boat, and I would dive off the end and swim like the clappers. She'd say, ready, set, go, turn on the bob watch and time me as I swam across the bay at the fisheries, a beautiful little bay, under the red granite mountains in the Bracenay National Park, and I'd swim like the clappers to the boy that was on the craypot. And I would do this every day, and I got to be quite a fast swimmer. Now I didn't really know the impact of all of this or where they were heading or even how conscious she was of it. But then they took me back to boarding school at the beginning of the next year, just before the swimming sports. So what happened was I won all the races. Then I started to notice over the subsequent months that all the kids wanted to play with me and wanted me to be on their team. And I learned that I had to keep performing. And that's how I would make friends, because I didn't know to make friends. I didn't know how to communicate very well. Like the kids didn't speak my language of the bush. So I just performed and won all the races, and I was captain of this, that, and the other in the sports and swimming and tennis and basketball. I became a prefect, but my schooling was non-existent. And I think the teachers just had no idea how to how to support me. They just kept moving me up in grades, and I was seemingly popular, but inside myself I was very empty. I recall it very clearly, very frightened, very lonely. I didn't feel I belonged. So when we'd had Matrick, that was year 12, I didn't get any grades at all. I sat for it, but I didn't get any grades. I remember sitting in this huge hall in Launceston where hundreds of kids were doing their Matrick, and I was doodling on the pages. I just didn't know how to do it. I was very, very practical. Common sense to me was my way through life. And he heard that there was an opportunity to work at Fairfield Hospital, which was an infectious diseases hospital in Melbourne, over the school holidays as a physiotherapy assistant. I think it was probably about two months' work. I'd never left Tasmania before. They found a Gorgos hostel at the top of Spring Street in Melbourne, which was the scariest place I think I've ever, ever lived. I would get public transport out to Fairfield Hospital each day and work in the physio department. Fairfield at the time happened to be Australia's major hospital for amputees and also for polio victims. And I landed up there as a physio assistant with a head of the department who gave me the opportunity to really express my practical skills. I loved it. I was so damn good at making casts or amputees out of plaster, and they were so crude in those days. This is in 1959, probably 58, really crude prosthetics with big clumsy nuts and bolts and screws and hammers and lumps of wood and plaster bandages. And I loved this stuff, and I excelled. As for the polio victims, in these great big boxes where they had to frog breathe when the respirator wasn't working, of course, I was a swimmer. So, you know, I had such fun frog breathing with these people who were in these boxes with just their head out. Sorry, what is frog breathing? You swallow air, you gulp air into your lungs because your diaphragm's paralyzed, you can't breathe yourself. All your respiratory muscles are paralyzed as a polio victim. That's why they have to be in these boxes. Inside the box, you've got a respirator which creates a vacuum and it sucks the air in. So these beautiful people, their bodies needed to be massaged. We would do stretches, and every day, well, then the respirator would be turned off, and during that time they would be frog breathing, which was a limited time, but nonetheless, that's how they breathe.

SPEAKER_01 38:46

And how long can somebody survive frog breathing?

SPEAKER_04 38:49

I can't answer that now.

unknown 38:51

I don't know.

SPEAKER_04 38:53

I can't remember. Minutes, but hours. It's tiring. You know, you have to work hard to frog breathe, because it's all voluntary. So you couldn't sleep. And the thing is, it's not to fatigue. So I mean, I'm making it up now, but I don't know. Maybe 15 minutes, maybe half an hour. Probably less than half an hour, I would imagine, but I I really can't remember.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

You stayed there for quite some time because you're still involved in health. You also ended up marrying somebody that was the minister for health. Can you describe the meeting in Broome with the man that was to become your husband?

SPEAKER_04 39:52

Oh gosh, this takes me back into another part of my life. Okay, just to join up some documents very quickly. During my training as a physio in Melbourne, my father died part way through. And a friend of his in Tasmania was the Minister for Health. And I was offered a scholarship to be able to continue my training, which I did, and I was scholarshipped back to the Royal Hobart Hospital. I had never seen so much money as I did when I was paid every fortnight in pounds, and I took myself off to get my pilot's license, as you do. And then at some point I met someone who was interested in building up their hours because they wanted to go on and become a commercial pilot. I had no dreams of doing that. I just wanted to learn to fly and be free up there as a bird. And the two of us hired a Cessna, a little Cessna 182. You could only do it in those days. We hired it for six months. And we flew across from Cambridge up to northern Tasmania and island hopped through Flinders Island and came in over the top of Wilson's Prom to Melbourne, and then we set up all around Australia. Well, we ended up in Western Australia. We landed at Rotnest, it was one of the many places we landed. I didn't want to go back to Tasmania. Instead, I applied, I noticed that there was a vacancy at a big rehabilitation hospital in Perth, and I got a job there. And then from there I met another physio who had connections up in the Kimberleys. This is such a part of my life I don't talk about very much. She had gone to boarding school and had met up with all these Kimberley families who had sent their kids to school in Perth at boarding schools. So her mates were in that broom, Port Headland, Kimberley region. This is back in the 60s, very different time in history. That was when there was the White Australia policy. There was no mining, and the Kimberleys seemed to be in another world. Anyway, my physio friend at this rehab hospital, her father became very, very sick. He was a surgeon at Roar Perth Hospital, and she didn't want to leave town. So she arranged for me to drive one of the station owners of a huge station between Port Headland and Broome to do his swan song right up through the Kimberleys. He was an old colonel. He was on a huge acreage behind 90 Mile Beach between Broome and Port Headland. He and his wife and family all lived there. Anyway, he wanted to do his swan song because he was developing cataracts at quite a speed, and they didn't have surgery for cataracts in those days. So he was going blind and he wanted to do his last trip. My friend Gilly arranged for me to take her place. So I was put onto an old DC6 plane and flown up there, and I sat in a huge net that they had with all the cargo. McRobinson Miller's were the airline. They dropped off mail and all sorts of engine parts and food and everything that needed to be dropped off at various stations right up through the Northwest. And they dropped me off on a very dusty little airports trip at Mandora Station. And I worked there as a Gillaroo for quite a number of months. I drove Tom DePledge right up through the Kimberlees and Broom, and I met all these wonderful, wonderful, wonderful people, station owners and pearling masters, Mary Jurack and Fossil Downs and the males at Broome. Just extraordinary pioneering families. I had the incredible privilege of meeting. Anyway, the short and the long of it is that I ended up in Broome. Working at the Purlingmaster's fill and Sam Mails business. They had a general store, like a true, genuine general store in Broome. And I was working in the haberdashery department there, living with them in their magnificent old Queenslander in the middle of Broome. And that was Broome in the good old days, where purling boats were in action, Japanese divers wearing great big metal suits with hoses up to these purling luggers. The pearling industry was at its peak. This was before there was a meat industry. This was before the indigenous folk had a vote. Anyway, I was living with the purling master and his wife and his son, and Phil Mail said, Well, why don't you go over and introduce yourself to the hospital doctors and see if you can get a job over there? So off I went and knocked on the door and introduced myself and asked if there was any work around and the New Zealander doctor there and said, Well, what's a physio do? You know, there's a funny sort of culture in these art back areas. It's like right from the get-go, there's a sort of like a way of kind of, I was going to say, taking the Mickey out of you or playing with you in some way, or joking with you. And I was so slow. I didn't get it. I didn't realize they were playing games right from the get-go. They didn't even know me. And here he was asking me what a physio did. And of course I was telling him. And then he said, Well, what do you need to set up a department? And I rattled off a few things. And he said, Oh, okay, well, let's think about it. I'll have to speak to the Minister for Health here. So he reached over and picked up the phone and called after Minister for Health, who was John Rowe in Perth. I mean, this would only happen in the 60s, and said, Look, we need this, this, and this. Can you send it up? We're going to employ a physio. And they've never done that before at the hospital. Anyway, a few weeks later, there I was on the veranda with the physio department. And maybe a year later we were married. It was just wild. I mean, there's so many stories I could tell, just wonderful, wonderful stories. One particular man, indigenous, who was brought in with a broken arm. He would sleep under the French Pani tree in the hospital gardens. The doctor ordered physio for him. Here's me. As green as grass. You know, I grew up in Tasmania. I didn't know there were real Aboriginals. This is just so shapeful. And here I was with this magnificent human being in front of me, six foot plus, long and skinny, with white plaster over his black, black arm. And here's me. I mean, what could I teach this guy? I was sort of thinking, I'd need to give him some shoulder exercises and you know, maybe some little bit of work with his elbow. Of course, there was a language barrier. All I could do was sit on the grass and do this little sort of opening and closing of your forearm, you know. And that's about as much as I could do. I had no idea. Like, how ridiculous. He disappeared off, went to walkabout at some point. And then I don't know what the time difference was, but we were invited to a mission station just down the track. And at that time in history, corrobies were very real, and indigenous folk would walk in or drive in their trucks or cars from hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away over weeks and weeks and weeks, and they came into this mission station before this corrobbery. The local doctor was invited to be there. It was he who I subsequently married. Anyway, the two of us drove down, and right from the very get-go, the Aboriginal men were in one area and the women were dancing in another area, and I was very, very white and not quite knowing how to be respectful. So I was keeping a little bit of a distance, and there was lots of dust, and it was incredibly hot, and flies just everywhere, and there was clapsticks and dancing and stamping and all this preparation of this whole ceremony that would take days. And I recall very vividly standing quietly and hopefully respectfully, and through the crowd, I saw this very long black man coming in my direction with two or three spears in his hand holding them high above his head. He was just loping in a way in my direction, and he stopped several meters away from me, and I could feel my anxiety levels going up, and I was wondering what the people around me were doing. And his eyes were sparkling and his teeth white and were shining, and he was sort of moving these spears forwards and backwards, and I was just totally transfixed. And all of a sudden I realized this was the guy who was underneath the branch of any tree, and he was showing me how he could open and close his arm. And you know, it was just like, oh, I just something happened inside me where tears and laughter and joy and confusion and not knowing how to behave, and I was totally overcome. And he realized that I'd recognized him, and I realized I'd recognized who he was, and and then the dust started rising and he's disappeared and off he went again. And I don't think that experience has ever left me, you know, it was like profound.

SPEAKER_01 50:37

And one of the reasons I imagine that you're still involved in the health system and Falken Christ, what are you doing presently with both of these incredible skills?

SPEAKER_04 50:49

After I was married, we left to go overseas, and we ended up living and working in interesting places around the world for nine years. We spent some time in Hong Kong and I was in Kowloon, which it was then the boat people, and I was working at the Queen Elizabeth Hollis Hospital, and I started to realize my Western training as a physiotherapist certainly did not give me the skills to work cross-culturally. And on one of the visits back to Australia, I was invited to a psychologist and a Feldenkrais practitioner three-day workshop, and I became incredibly fascinated with it. In the 80s, I had the opportunity to do the four-year training, which took me deeply into the world of brain science. I continue to be very engaged with that work, and it is universal across all mammals, all human beings, no matter what their culture background is, all age groups, universal principles that meet and have a recognition of supporting us as humans to fulfill on our human potential as distinct from how we are conditioned to be in our Western culture. That's the two different worlds. So I had to learn to bridge the physio-medical world, educational world, with the so-called Filden Christ world, which I've come to also understand is the natural world, the world that some cultures still, although less so, adhere to, and our dance is how can we be true to our innate nature and learn to navigate the Western world in a way that empowers us and enables us to sustain our authenticity as human beings, as distinct from human do-ings. But it is a choice, I believe, that we need to make as grandparents to create a context and an environment for all children where young adults have the greatest opportunity to tap into or to recognize or to feel safe enough to re-embody their feeling senses, their sensations, their emotional world.

SPEAKER_01 53:16

Tell us a little bit about movement matters and what you offer online as workshops for people.

SPEAKER_04 53:22

I have taken my professional career, you might say, online, and I'm offering classes which I'm loving through movement and through awareness, inviting people to rediscover how to move as they're designed to move, as they used to move as little tiny kids. But of course, we've been conditioned out of that by virtue of our culture, and also the cultural thinking of reductionism and thinking of the body as being in separate parts. The other area that's I've only recently in the last uh two or three years, and that the area that I'm doing trainings in for my own personal use is the Newfeld group. Newfeld is the name of a developmental psychologist from Canada who's developed the Newfeld Institute and is helping me to find language to better understand my emotional development and my own emotional world and the unfolding of human potential, which is all about intuition and developing intuition around how we parent, how we grandparent. The Felden Kreis work, which is what I do do and am a practitioner of, is like the embodiment of what Gordon Newfield is communicating.

SPEAKER_01 54:51

What are your hopes for humanity? If you had one wish today, what would that be? What I would say to those who are still listening to me rant is there is a pathway.

SPEAKER_04 55:06

It is possible. I won't say it's easy and I won't say it's comfortable, but the relief is profound. And I wish that for all my fellow human beings.

SPEAKER_01 55:20

Thank you to Sandy for her depth, her clarity, and her lifetime of embodied knowledge. In our CBF grant-funded series, Wow, Wise Older Women, her story shows us that aging is not a decline, it's refinement. Join us for the next episode as we continue honouring the voices, insights, and life journeys of extraordinary women. This is a Plantation Studios production, executive producer Rasella Torres, and music from Purple Planet Music.