Before he shows Kanyini, Mac plays the footage from his most recent TedX talk. This was actually organised by some incredible friends of ours – check out their work here. I appreciated Mac’s candour, as he described his previous experience of panic attacks before public speaking, which started shortly after he acquired Embercombe. He also shared the self-doubt he experienced after stepping off the stage from this Ted X talk. His willingness to present himself as vulnerable is inspiring. He explained that on his journey, he realised over time, that ‘failure isn’t doing something badly; it’s not getting up to do it again’.

Mac went on to talk about the cycle of abuse, similarly experienced in our history, which repeats itself again and again in our behaviour as a people. As children of one mother, the earth, we are all brothers and sisters, and this life is a shared experience – it is this sense of belonging, which carries responsibility.

The inescapable truth is that unless we heal deeply within, these issues will keep bubbling up and contaminating others, much as has happened with the First nation people of Australia. Mac referred to activism – it is not enough simply to do good things in the outside world without healing within first. This union of the ongoing journey of inner healing with what we do in the outer world is the journey of the Twin Trail. Ultimately we reach a point when we are flowing in our gift. He calls on us to be warriors of open heart – ask “where is the core of my beauty?” and keep bringing it forward. The open truth, he says will set us free: “This beautiful world, we can have it back again.”

In the Tedx talk, Mac refers to a friend, Bob Randall, who is the protagonist of this documentary. The film, “Kanyini”  tells the story of the Stolen Generation: A generation of Aboriginal children who were taken from their Indigenous roots, in an attempt to assimilate them into mainstream white Australian Culture; The separation of children from their land, their family and their belief system in order to make them “civilized”.

In the film Bob Randall describes being severed from 5 roots in this civilization process. He describes these roots as connecting him to his sense life, his sense of belonging – this is Kanini:

• Belief
• Land
• Family
• Psyche
• Spirituality

To become civilized, he had to be severed from these primal sources of connection.

The painful, and ugly, uncomfortable reality of the film Kanyini is part of the shadow that we have to both acknowledge a take responsibility for, and to feel and identify with, in order to move more freely through space and time.

Source: Uncivilized