Discovering Real Meaning In The Dismantling: Nadya Hutagalung Wants You To Find Contentment

This week’s guest is a huge one - the one and only Nadya Hutagalung. Activist, conservationist, film maker, model, mother and attuned citizen on Planet Earth. Nadya’s experiences, her work and her own efforts to heal herself from all she has seen, encountered and felt is extraordinary, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be sharing this episode with you.

Nadya’s trajectory to stratospheric stardom in the mid 90s didn’t come from a normal or predictive route - an Indonesian Australian child growing up in regional NSW, she was catapulted into modelling in Japan at the age of 12, and less than a decade later she was part of launching MTV in Asia as one of their first VJs. An innate connection to the natural world existed though, and before long she was sharing the stage with world leaders, heads of state and other public figures in bringing attention and awareness to issues such as wildlife trafficking and poaching, plastic pollution and the ills of fast fashion. Nadya’s trajectory took a turn in 2018, when a series of stressful and life changing experiences and opportunities - from launching UN Environment Program reports, to reading an Uninhabitable Earth and a private session with His Holiness the Dalai Lama created a new set of conditions by which to continue to both pursue urgent and widespread change in reversing no shortage of problems, while also seeking to practice stillness and undertake deeper inner inquiry. In 2021 a serious and acute health condition put just about everything on hold, and before long she returned home to Australia for the first time in decades, and today, she’s on the show to share in much more detail about all of this.

Nadya is a fantastic guest to have on this show, and someone who represents and aligns with so much of my own thinking and the reasoning behind why I started Finding Nature in the first place. Her explanation that our society’s out of control relationship to planetary boundaries is a matter of simple calculus is straight forward and clear, but what lies underneath all of the statistics and facts and rationale as to why action on any number of serious environmental problems is a broken relationship to self, to each other and to our planet. Unless we address our values, our worldviews, our beliefs, our relationships, it’s hard to appreciate how this is going to end up any differently than the trajectory we’re on at the moment. The other thing I wanted to chat about with Nadya was how to help people go from apathy to care, and what are the tools of inner resolve that are necessary when people do care. Because to care is to feel pain, to despair, to experience fear. They are difficult emotions and feelings to encounter and deal with, and as an attempting change maker, this has become increasingly important to focus on as the apocalypse continues to encroach with just the latest calamitous, unprecedented disaster.

This time with Nadya was special. I hope from this you realise that you aren’t alone in your own struggles, and that there are modalities, practices and people out there who care about who you are, how you’re going as a person attempting to and making change, and that help is always available as you traverse the ups and downs of what life offers up on a daily basis.

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