Karenza is a local Filmmaker, Digital Storyteller and Yoga teacher who has led a very interesting life, some would say 'out of the norm'. Karenza spoke to Denise Alison (Humans of Lismore) about the many different chapters that her journey has taken her on, from the hills of Perth to the Ananda Margis in Stanthorpe and finally to Lismore.

“My life has lot’s of chapters. The first chapter began in 1973 in Perth where I was born in Subiaco Hospital. I was the youngest of 5 kids. All the other kids were 2 years apart and then I came along 6 years later.

I spent the first 10 years of my life in Perth where my mum was like 3rd generation. She came from a “ nice", middle-class home and she told me her parents had hoped she would marry a sensible Perth boy who was an accountant or a businessman [like her Dad]. Instead, she fell in love with an artist from London through her theatre group, who became my Dad.

Mum and Dad split up when I was 2 after 13 years of marriage. I think things were kind of on the rocks with them before I was born. It was a traumatic time for the family. Dad was an alcoholic at that time and loved to socialise, he was always the life of the party. Mum was getting into Yoga and living a clean and healthy life. All the other kids were born in England and Mum had studied Yoga with Iyengar in London. She was really inspired by him. When they came back to live in Australia and had me, she was looking for a Yoga community to support her.

Dad was in the film industry. He was a Bohemian, a theatre actor and a filmmaker. He worked with the BBC in England and made a lot of documentaries over there. Dad was a workaholic. Mum’s outlet was to find her Yoga practice. Mum joined an organisation that was focused on Indian practices and they had a Guru. Mum, in an attempt to leave my Dad actually moved to this community in the hills of Perth. They were called Ananda Marga. She changed all our names without telling Dad. My birth name is Karenza so I’ve gone back to that. I became Kiran from age 2 to 30, which is a Sanskrit name [meaning “ray of light”] and all my brothers and sisters were given these spiritual names.

My sister told me the story of when I was only 2 we came home one day from the community and my sister was bathing me as she was 10 years older. She said - "Come on Kiran, let’s get out of the bath". Dad said - "What are you calling her?" She said - "That’s her name now. Mum said - We all have new names." Dad lost it. That was probably the last straw. They had quite an ugly break-up.

Mum took all of us and retreated to the community. We lived with lot’s of family in this hippy community for about a year and then Mum met a younger man there who she fell in love with. She was raised Catholic so didn’t want to have sex with him until she was married so they kind of had to get married because they wanted to have sex I guess (laughs). He agreed to marry her. He was 6 years younger and she had 5 kids. He was my Stepdad for 20 years and he did his best. He took us all on.

A year after they got together the most traumatic thing in my family history happened. My oldest brother Caedie who was 15 was distraught that he wasn’t with our Dad. He could not cope with our new stepdad. They didn’t get along. He was getting into drugs and alcohol and he stole a car with his mates. They crashed the car and he died. That was on my Mum's birthday.

Mum just wasn’t coping. She still had 4 kids to look after. I was only 3 at that time. She bottled up her grief and became very focused on the spiritual group she was in. She would meditate 3 times a day and it was a way of switching off and she just wasn’t really present after that. My older sister was like my second mum. She became the one that was emotionally there for me. Her birth name was Zazie but she changed her name to Satya. We just went on as a family but Satya and my brother were only 2 years apart so they were very close, and the trauma of this plus dad leaving and needing to care for us younger kids affected her deeply.

We were sort of taken from one rental to another with Mum and my stepdad. Dad didn’t cope with the death of Caedie and he moved back to England so he separated from us altogether. He had another son and daughter in England.

My 3 brothers and sisters who were left embraced the Ananda Marga but I didn’t so I was kind of the black sheep of the family. I’ve got a bit of my Mum and Dad in me. I’m a filmmaker and a yoga teacher as well. I grew up with yoga and meditation as part of our daily practice so I know that’s a part of my truth but I’m very mistrustful of groups and organisations that try and separate you from the rest of the community with their dogma. My alarm bells go off.

The hub of this organisation, the Margi’s, was happening in Sydney in the ’70s and 80’s so they decided we would move to Sydney to be closer to the action. The Margi's believed they were going to revolutionise the world with their ideology but it was pretty culty and sexist from my perspective. They packed me off to live in a community in Stanthorpe by myself [with an American Margi family] when I was 10 years old. I’m resentful of my Mum for doing this but she thought that was the best thing to do while they sorted their new life in Sydney.

There was a Margi school in Stanthorpe that needed numbers to get started so lots of the Margi kids were sent there. I lived in this remote community near Stanthorpe with a lot of Margi families, Monks and Nuns. I was very traumatised by being removed from my family and circle of friends in Perth. But we were told that “we were all one Universal family” constantly. While I was there my eldest sister decided to become a Nun in the organisation so she trained in Nepal and India before being sent overseas to work. She was only 19 and then my second sister followed in the same footsteps. They effectively cut me off, saying that everyone was their sister and brother now, not just me. After that, Margi’s kept asking me - "Are you going to become a Nun like your sisters?” No way, not me!

After a year in Stanthorpe, I moved to Sydney to join Mum and my Step-Dad. That was a good time because I went to a great Public School in Woollahra with teachers who really saw me. They were my best schooling years, I discovered there that I loved to write and was good at it.

They decided to join another community on the Sunshine Coast so just when I was about to go to a good high school we moved again to the country to start this community. We lived in a caravan and a shed for a few years. No running water or toilet while they were building. Everything was about building the organisation, nothing about the family unit being important.

As soon as I finished Year 12 I took off and moved to Melbourne to do a Bachelor of Arts and start my own life. That move was a huge turning point.

Going to uni, I enjoyed independence and in true postmodern 90’s style, totally deconstructed my upbringing and found my own tribe of people. I also got to connect with my Dad on my own terms, not through my Mum’s lens. He inspired me to pursue film. We would watch a lot of interesting, obscure films together on his couch and I absorbed his artistic sensibility for film as a medium of poetic expression. He was giving up drinking so we had a bonding time there and we had a good 25 years of Dad sober before we lost him.

Of course, doing an Arts degree you don’t always come out with a job. You have to create your own work. I always felt like I was a writer and thought I’d become a journalist, but after uni, my mind was open to other forms of creative expression.

After studying, I travelled through Europe and based myself in London, squatting with some friends from Melbourne in a punk, traveller, rave scene partying pretty hard. I reclaimed my birth name Karenza and connected with my Dad’s English / Welsh heritage. Travelling solo, hitching around Europe and then exploring India I found a resilient, strong person inside myself and realised I could face any obstacle that came my way (especially wearing my favourite red, doc martin boots!). I took heaps of photos and wrote everything I was doing in my journal. When I returned to Australia I got right into photography and that led to film and through that, I did a Post Grad in Film and TV back in Brisbane.

Coming back from overseas, in that space, I got really, really sick. I was in my late 20’s and the trip to India led to a nasty virus that attacked my immune system. That led to getting Diabetes Type 1.

I nearly died in hospital. I made a choice to get super healthy and look after myself properly. It was a big transition learning how to live with that.

I thought, this city life’s not doing it for me and I knew I had to get out of Melbourne. I left my girlfriend and moved back to live with Mum for a little while in the community. I must have been really sick (laughs). Then I moved to Brisbane to study Chinese Medicine and massage and got right into making my body and mind strong.

Then in 2003, I met the person I knew I wanted to make a life with. I knew very early on that he was the one I was looking for, a trust in someone I’d never experienced before. I’d been working in Brisbane for 5 years in the film and tv industry, but was finding the stress of city life was building up again and I wasn’t enjoying the work there anymore. He had 3 children already who lived in Maleny so I left Brisbane to move back to the Sunshine Coast and start a life and a family with him.

We had our daughter there and raised her in a rainforest treehouse that we built, looking out over a little creek for her first 4 years. She’s 13 now. The three of us do everything together. We are a team. It’s been a really healing time, this family time. We’ve been together for 17 years now.

Having a baby also connected me to my mum in a new way and brought us closer together, healing our fraught relationship a lot. Becoming a mum has been a major highlight of my life. My daughter inspires me and brings me so much joy. Her childhood has been so different to mine. She gets everything she needs and gets to follow her interests. As a result, she is a balanced, self-contained and loving human. She makes parenting easy.

We would always come down here to the Byron area for holidays and knew this was somewhere we’d love to live one day. So we moved to Lismore 9 years ago and as my daughter started school, I was ready to go back to my creative life.

I always thought Tafe was someplace I could work one day because it has a film department. I went and did a refresher course to get my skills up again and got my mojo back. I got funding with Screenworks the next year to make my first short documentary, Tilly’s Symphony. The next year I did another short doc, Making Waves. Screenworks have been the best thing for me in this regional area. They’ve supported me so much in getting the confidence to call myself a filmmaker. I’m currently attempting to write a feature, drama screenplay based on some of my own story. Along with filmmaking projects, I also work as an educator, teaching film skills within the local community.

I also teach Yoga at a few places in town, yoga keeps me centred and content. I taught Pre-Natal yoga classes for many years too which I love as I think that bonding time between mother and baby in the womb is so important. I guess it reminds me of how connected we are to our mothers, forever.

I would like to mention that my mum was a founding member of the Margi community in Maleny where the River school began. Both my sisters also helped start schools in their roles as nuns. One here in Lismore “Vistara” primary, nearly 30 years ago, which is where my daughter started school.

Dad died 5 years ago and Mum 3 years ago, both only in their 70’s. Neither of them liked going to doctors and they wouldn’t go to hospital when they were unwell. They lived their lives to the full and then found out they were really sick. Mum died from a second stroke while she was travelling in South Africa. It happened after staying up all night chanting and meditating at a yoga retreat with her Margi family there. It was quite a spiritual end to a life that she had devoted to that practice.

I love Lismore. I always remember the first Yoga class I taught here in Lismore after coming from QLD. There was an older guy with blue nail polished toes and I loved it. It just felt like everybody is accepted here and there are so many fascinating stories. I love the diversity and the land itself.

We moved for the coastal region mostly. We all love the beach and Byron and we’ve just discovered Yamba now. Having Lismore as our town centre with so much culture happening, Norpa and the gallery…is great. I feel like Lismore has been good to me. It’s supported me and I’m doing exactly what I want to be doing.”

Making Waves - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rToDb0dRc