Australian Yoga Journal - May June 2017

THE IDEA FOR THE BULWALWANGA RAN

FESTIVALon the New South Wales south

coast of Australia started with the throw

of a spear. Ayurvedic doctor Shaun

Matthews has been interested in the

connections between yoga’s sister

science, Ayurveda, and Australia’s

Indigenous healing methodologies for

many years. It is a topic he and

Aboriginal elder ‘Uncle’ Noel Butler

have discussed many times. When Uncle

Noel Butler taught Shaun’s son to throw

a spear while spending time in the bush

together on one such occasion, Shaun

realised the importance of honouring

and sharing Aboriginal practices with

all Australians so “we can learn form

each other and find the best ways to

support personal as well as planetary

wellbeing”.

Shaun feels that by celebrating our

Indigenous culture, and other traditions

that honour the Earth, we can take

some small steps to redress some of the

wrongs of the past when Europeans

first encountered the First Nations of

Australia. With this intention in mind,

the first Bulwalwanga Ran Festival took

place in January this year, and was a

bringing together of folk from many PHOTO: KATIE MANITSAS;BUENAVENTURAMARIANO/ISTOCKPH

OTO.COM

lineages, mobs and clans with one

common interest — healing and

learning together.

Shaun is not alone in his vision. Yoga

teacher David Life, co-founder of the

Jivamukti Yoga method, reflects on this

topic stating at a recent yoga workshop,

“We should ask ourselves why there are

not more people of colour here with us

in this room today.” With the rise of

yoga in the West, we can all focus on

where yoga can reach out to diverse

communities and learn from the

Indigenous cultures local to us. This

focus on collaboration can herald very

practical and results-based outcomes;

spiritual activism in action was

abundant in the recent Standing Rock

peaceful protests over Indigenous land

in the USA, with positive results for the

communities involved.

Yoga, Ayurveda and Aboriginal

spiritual teachings all honour the

intuitive realm and suggest that if we

become quiet enough in ourselves,

through meditation or through

spending time living close to the earth,

healing will take place. The word

Bulwalwanga — after which the festival

is named — means ‘we are strong’ and

points to the ideas that our nature and

our birthright is to heal. Even the

seemingly insurmountable problems

faced by contemporary Aboriginal

communities and by the environment of

this great land can be healed, beginning

with taking small steps; the

Bulwalwanga Festival is a small attempt

at taking one of those steps forward.

“The ancient yogis and the

Aboriginal elders of Australia both knew

the same thing ... that our essential

nature is peace. This gets obscured by

the conscious and unconscious mind but

the peace is there, part of who you are,

from conception until the day you shed

your physical body,” says Shaun. “The

wisdom traditions of India and Australia

both know this.”

The rishis in India had an acute

observational sense and learned from

the land and animals around them. We

need only look at the names of the yoga

poses to see this — we learn from the

form of the tree and the mountain and

the snake and the lion. The Aboriginal

people had this same ability to learn

from the natural world around them, a

practice they call ‘the listening’.

In New York City’s Bronx, the Wise

Yoga devotee Katie Manitsas celebrates the

connections between yoga, Ayurveda and

Indigenous wisdom at the Bulwalwanga

Ran Festival in southern New South Wales.

WISDOM and

Traditional

58

may/june 2017

yogajournal.com.au