FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION WITH SHARON TURTON

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FOLLOWING YOUR PASSION WITH SHARON TURTON

Written By Natalie O’Connor

From talking to a lot of people about what they do and why, everyone gives a differing response. Some are drawn to their vocations because of sense of purpose, lifestyle, status or they simply “fell into it”. What keeps them in this vocation is either a sense of purpose, habit or necessity.

You’ve heard it all before: ‘follow your passions’, ‘do what you love’. It’s so important to find your passion, as you go to work for eight plus hours each day, five or more days per week, you want to be doing what you love, but how do we do this? How do we make a living from doing what we love, or what we are drawn to?

Someone who exemplifies following their passions is Sharon Turton. She has built a career as a multimodality healer. She is a counsellor, naturopath, masseuse, Journey practitioner and retreat owner and operator amongst her many talents. She is someone who is following her passion for holistic healing and her love for what she does definitely shines through.

Sharon had a traumatic experience as a child and now devotes her life to healing others, especially children and parents. She has even written three books on parenting. Her passion for allowing children’s light to shine through is strong with all she does and the many testimonials show how much her work has helped many families.

Sharon is now focusing her combined skills on offering unique healing experiences at her own retreat “Wind Spirit”, located in Mount Burrell, NSW, just south of the Queensland border. It is a beautiful eco retreat allowing individuals, families and groups both organised and private retreats.

The retreat is all inclusive, with lovely accommodation, healing sessions with Sharon, meditations, healthy and healing food and even a heated magnesium pool. “The private retreats at Wind Spirit are profound as we do deep work over three days in this pristine land and it’s a total reset for people on all levels” Sharon explains.

Along with the retreats, Sharon is conducting her private online Journey sessions. Sharon’s passion for healing is the focus of all that she does, from children to parents, groups or private sessions. Her aim is for all to live their best and harmonious life.

Natalie O'Connor

eYs Magazine Contributor

Welcome Sharon and thank you for being in our eYs Magazine, and taking part in this interview. Could you describe your background and how you became a naturopath, counsellor, author and masseuse? You’re a woman of many talents.

Oh gosh, that’s a big question, I guess I got into the healing area for two reasons I think. One, because my dad was a pharmacist in a small country town, and he was kind of like the doctor, where people would call him late at night and he was on call and I really loved him and respected him. He also talked to me a little bit about his training of herbal medicine and how wonderful that was back in the day, not that he used it then. Secondly, when I was a child, I was a very sick child. When I was four and five, for many, many months, I was in Camperdown Children’s Hospital. I got over that illness, but there was always something in me about wanting to help children, and also knowing that as a child, it’s a very scary thing to be hospitalised and away from the family for a long time.

I realised that that had such a big impact on me, so wanting to help kids, and parents as well, I guess that led me to becoming a naturopath and then a counsellor, and ultimately a Journey practitioner, which is one of the main modalities that I use. So it’s kind of like naturopathy works on the physical, the counselling work that I do works on the psychological, and the Journey work, ties it all together, working on all levels, as well as a more spiritual level as well. So I feel it’s quite holistic.

I think most people would know what a naturopath is and a counsellor is, but could you describe what the Journey work is?

The Journey work is something that goes deeper, in my opinion. It goes to the subconscious realm, and it helps us clear out some of those deeper, unhealthy beliefs, the emotional blocks, the limiting beliefs that hold us back in life and stop us being everything that we can be. That little voice in the background that says you’re not good enough, no I can’t, I’m too scared or whatever it is. It helps bring that stuff up to the surface, the conscious surface. So we can start to clear it out, and it doesn’t hold us back in life the way it does when it’s in that subconscious. It’s very powerful work. It’s very beautiful work. It works so well alongside counselling, naturopathy; it holds it all together in my opinion.

Your experience as a child shaped your healing journey, was there anything that triggered it, when you were older?

Becoming a naturopath was really important for me, at the time I didn’t know anything about the mind, the subconscious. It was just all about nutrition and herbs and exercise and health. That’s what really got me in the beginning, to try and balance all that stuff. Then after about ten or so years as a naturopath, I started to realise that with some of the clients, there was more than just the physical issues. There was stuff going on at a deeper level, the mind, their stresses at home, their problems with their kids, and their arguments with their spouse, just stuff. Work issues, recurring problems that might be happening, patterns in their lives.

I realised that my herbs weren’t going to help that. Even though I was doing homeopathy as well and all sorts of things, I thought I need to start looking at something deeper. That’s when I bumped into Brandon Bays, who is the founder, the pioneer of Journey work in the world. She was coming to Australia for her very first Journey workshop in the year 2000. She just got off the plane, she needed a massage, and for some act of grace, she ended up on my massage table, in Manly, NSW. As I was massaging her, I felt an energy, for want of a better word, that I’d never felt before. Her energy is so amazing. She basically said, would I like to come along to her workshop? Which I did, she gave me her book ‘The Journey’, which I read, I devoured it.

I went along to this workshop, knowing that I have a few issues to work on. I was divorced at that time. I was a single mum. I had a lot of anger from my marriage, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought okay, I’ve got some issues about that. When I did my very first process (Journey work) at that weekend workshop, I was instantly transported back to a memory of 40 years before, when I was a little four year old, in a sterile clinic. Mum was being taken away. I was in there with the doctor, terrified and screaming and being tied down. It was a terrifying memory. I just shut that memory down in my subconscious. In fact, I’d shut down the whole experience of months and months and months in hospital in 1962, which is not like it is these days. I realised that wow, I’m holding this fear in my body, because after I did that process, my world looked quite different, and I felt different.

I went home and I started thinking about my little girl, who was growing up with a very angry mother, a very anxious mother, a single mother. Her dad and I had split when she was two years old. So she’d had three years living with me in a big black hole of my almost depression, or whatever it was. I was not happy. I started to think what’s going on with her. Not only that, she was a very quiet, shy child. She was very held back. She was the last one in the mother’s group to walk or socialise. She was covered with red angry eczema. I started to wonder was the eczema because of my anger, which I hadn’t fully expressed. It was inside me when I was pregnant with her. Where does that energy of anger go when it’s not expressed healthily when you’re carrying a baby inside? The science of epigenetics now tells us it gets through the placental membrane into the baby.

She was born with this terrible eczema. So after that first workshop, I started to do swaps for somebody who was doing it (she would do the process for me, and I would do it for her), as there were no practitioners in Australia at that time. We started doing very basic simple swaps, but I started also working on my little girl. I kid you not, within six weeks of doing it once a week, her eczema started softening. Within six months, it was gone. Before that, being a naturopath, I had her on the best diet, no wheat, no dairy, no this, no that. Her diet was just so perfect. I was doing everything I possibly could, but it was the emotional manifestation of that anger, which was not only creating her eczema, but also her fear, her shut down response, her reticence to life.

As we started to take the lampshade off her light, she started to socialise more. She started to smile more. Now she’s 25, and she is the most outgoing, powerful, confident young woman that I know. I absolutely believe that it’s because of this work, and she does too, that we did when she was a kid. Without that, she would not be the girl she is now, the young beautiful woman. So, seeing those results early on, it made me think wow, this is powerful stuff. I started to incorporate it into my naturopathic practice and I started to get better results. I started to do more and more of the Journey work. Now I run workshops for Brandon Bays, and I support her with workshops in Australia. Children’s workshops as well. I’ve run those for years and years.

You don’t see too many practitioners that focus on the mind, body and spirit. A lot of practitioners focus on the mind, or just focus on the body, or just focus on the spirit. What an amazing gift that you’ve got all three to offer your clients.

It works well. And I feel it allows me to be truly holistic, in the work that I do. That’s important, because we are not just bodies. We are not just minds. We are not just emotional beings, we’re all of it. Every bit affects every other bit. You could have a child who’s really nervous about going to school, because they’re being bullied, and they get a tummy ache. It’s not a make-believe tummy ache. It’s a real tummy ache, because all the muscles are clenched in the tummy. The emotions affect the physical, the physical affect the emotions, which affects the mind, the beliefs, everything is encompassed as this whole amazing, complicated, unique human that we are.

It’s incredible to see how much science is catching up with new age therapies, because, 10 years ago, all of this was just “woo woo”. Now with people like Dr. Bruce Lipton and a lot of others, the epigenetic field is growing, and it’s wonderful to see science starting to come around to it.

It’s fantastic. I totally believed this 20 years ago when I started doing this work, because I experienced the results myself. I had that direct experience. Now that science is showing it, it’s fantastic. It’s not the woo woo, it’s science-based, it’s going on in our body. It can appear quite woo woo, but this particular form of new age therapy, it is science-based.

Today we have so much connectivity with social media. Everything is at our fingertips, but yet we feel like we are losing connection to self, to nature, to spirit. You’re known for bringing people deeper connections to their self and to their loved ones, and to their kids. You have a passion for working with parents/caregivers and children, and bringing a deeper connection. If someone was reading this article and trying to understand how to bring a deeper connection to themselves or to their families, what would you suggest to them?

Yeah, it is a big question, and it’s a very simple answer, but it’s not simple to do, in this world because we’re not programmed that way. The answer basically is to stop. To slow down. To press the pause button. Pressing that pause button and stopping, just as you have right now, and I have right now. What’s here? In this moment, what’s here? It’s just you and I. Here we are. Can you feel it?

I can.

That’s kind of it. Sages and saints and gurus and whoever and whatever have been saying this forever. How do you do it? It requires the willingness to stop. The willingness to slow down, even just for a few moments a day. I don’t mean to do a visualisation and a meditation that takes you somewhere. I mean to just stop, and connect with the earth. Sit by a tree, empty your mind, look into the distance, touch the earth with your hands, your feet, anchor yourself, earth yourself. That sort of simple stuff that we just don’t do. I think with all the technology these days, and the busy-ness of life and all the information, the technology that’s constantly bombarding us, actually stopping is the hardest thing. We get further and further away from this ability to stop. It’s only when we can stop for a few moments, that we can possibly connect with our soul. With that deeper place inside, that is wanting us to stop. It’s wanting us to connect.

So it’s a practice.

Do you think it’s something that over generations we’re losing this connection with ourselves and to others, or how is it just being lost?

I can’t say for sure, because I didn’t live in other generations but I know that in this generation, when I was a child, I was outside a lot. I was on the earth a lot. I was running around, rolling around, getting dirty, playing with friends, rumbling, all that sort of thing. I don’t think kids do that as much these days, especially not in the city. There’s a fear consciousness that we all live under and we can’t let our kids just go roaming, because something might happen. We’re so busy ourselves as parents, we are not connecting with our kids, with our families, with our loved ones, the way that we used to.

If we don’t take it with ourselves, we’re not present. If we’re not present in ourselves, how can we possibly be present with somebody else, with life, with our loved ones. So it all starts here, with ourselves.

I think we forget along the way, especially mums, or anyone for that matter, that we tend to put ourselves last. It’s something that is a good reminder. That love starts at home, with ourselves.

It does. That’s so true. I think it’s not a selfish thing at all. It’s actually something that is so needed.

It’s time out. It’s not necessarily going out and having a beauty treatment, even though that’s very nice, but it’s actually stopping. Just really connecting with self, with the earth, with something greater than ourselves, so we can be present.

I think healers, be it a doctor, surgeon, nurse, naturopath, Journey practitioner, are very special people. They are devoting their lives to being of service to others. From what you’ve mentioned earlier would it be safe to say that that was your drive? Or was there something else that drove you into this field, because you’ve got such a tremendous passion for what you do.

I do have a passion, and I can’t actually answer that. I don’t know, on this level. I just knew, on a deeper level that that’s what I wanted to do. I think most of my life I’ve followed a deeper knowing. If there’s something that felt light deep down, that’s the direction I tried to go, most of my life. It’s kind of taken me on many corners and round lots of bends.

It’s funny because at the moment, it’s brought me up here to Wind Spirit, which is like a culmination of the circle. I grew up in a little country town. When I was a child, all I wanted to do was run into the bush. I spent hours and hours in the bush with my dog. After growing up, leaving that town, I lived overseas for 10 years in Paris and Tokyo and big cities, then back to Sydney, another big city. It’s only recently that I’ve moved back to the bush, to our own beautiful retreat centre, where all of the skills that I have acquired over all these decades, we’re putting together in the embrace of this pristine land up here, which is, in my opinion part of the healing.

What led you to move up to the beautiful northern New South Wales, and to open Wind Spirit?

This is going to sound really odd, but we were led here.

In the sense that we weren’t planning to move here. We were up here just driving around, having a little bit of a holiday, and we stayed at a place, they didn’t have phones reception.

We needed to make a phone call for work, and they said, “Just go up the mountain and there’ll be reception.” So we drove up the mountain, but we got stopped by a herd of goats on the road. We couldn’t get passed, and there was a big for sale sign, right where we got stopped. At that moment my partner’s phone went bing, it sprang into life, without thinking he dialled the number and it was the real estate agent. They said, “Do you want to see the property?” We said, “Yes. Why not?” We had a couple of days.

So we saw this property. We fell in love with it. It’s kind of beyond words and beyond logic, but we just bought it. We had no plan of moving, no plan of leaving Sydney. We didn’t look at anything else, which is ridiculous, but I mean we were led here. It’s the most crazy story, but it has been the most wonderful experience. We didn’t realize we were going to be running retreats up here. We just loved the land, fell in love with it, and it felt right. But as it turned out, we have a place which is big enough to have intimate retreats, to bring people up here who need several days away from the city, or who need healing, or need a reset of their life, because they’re not happy, or they’re not on the right track, or whatever it is.

Then they can come up here and we do some deep, good, powerful work. Clear out that unconscious realm of what might be blocking what they really need, what they’re really wanting, so that they can go back to their life with a different mindset and anchored in what they really want. So, it’s amazing and it’s just happening. So we’re in the process of building a yoga studio up here, in the old shed that we lived in for three years while we were getting this place built. The land is what’s so beautiful. We’re very close to Mount Warning, we’ve got this magnificent view over Mount Warning, which is the first spot on the Australian mainland that gets the sun each morning. It’s a spiritual area.

You’re totally off the grid I understand, a real pristine ecoretreat.

It is. It’s pure solar, rainwater and we recycle everything. It’s very beautiful. It’s a huge learning for both of us. It just feels absolutely right.

In the short period of time that you’ve set up Wind Spirit and holding retreats, the reviews I’ve read, have been an overwhelming success, it seems like such a beautiful emersion into the spirit, relaxation and connection.

Yeah. That’s absolutely true. Some of the testimonials we’ve had are absolutely profound. I think what’s really important is that yes, they relax and yes, they eat well, and yes, the body gets better and heals in many ways, but something internal shifts. There’s an energy shift, after time at Wind Spirit, something shifts and they get more realigned to the soul, to what their soul truly wants. I’m certainly finding that myself, I know that I’m on the path that my soul wants, and when I’m out there on the land weeding and I weed a lot, I feel it. It’s very interesting because weeding is something I do with clients on the emotional subconscious level anyway. My work is a lot about weeding the things don’t serve people out of their lives, so I think its part of my life path is to weed.

As I’m out here on the land and I can almost feel it breathing, and I feel my soul singing. I know that, that’s something that this area helps people to do, helps them re-align with what is important to them. It actually opens up doors for them to start walking in the direction they want to walk.

You have got so many things under your belt. The Journey work, parent and child work, private mentoring, naturopath, mind, body, spirit cleanse and many, many others. What would people most know you for?

Probably Journey work, I would say.

I’ve been doing it for such a long time, and I am Brandon Bays support in Australia for the workshops that she runs. I’ve been a senior Journey practitioner for many years now. I am still loving and carrying out a lot of this work online. So that’s probably what I’m most known for.

Based on all your wealth of knowledge and your healing capabilities and everything that you teach, would you be able to provide some advice to our readers who might be having some issues right now, or wanting to make some changes in their life right now.

As I said before, the word ‘stop’ comes to mind. I know it’s a very simple word. What happens when we say the word stop? It’s like the mind comes in, “Well, I can’t stop. I’ve got to do this. I got to do that. And how can I stop?”. It’s stopping that back voice, that critical voice, and just allowing it to fall away. It’s not an easy thing to do. Obviously, there’s a lot of powerful technique to help that voice to integrate healthfully, like Journey work is a beautiful for this. I’d recommend that you come up to Wind Spirit and do some deep work up here, of course. Just, start to slow down, press the pause button. One of my books called ‘The Art of Peaceful Parenting’ actually has seven steps how to do this. The first step is simply to pause, to breathe of course, pause and breathe.

The second step is to watch your emotions, what’s happening? To start looking at the emotional reactions that you might have. Start to be the observer of what’s going on inside of you, that’s creating the havoc or the chaos. We can all step back a little bit, and have an overview of what’s going on, but it’s so easy to get caught in the ego, in the reactivity of the moment.

So, instead of that, to step back and respond healthily, and it’s a practice and it’s a learning process as well. It’s taken me many years to start to find this place of peace, that’s here now, but it’s within us all. We all have that peace deep inside. It’s calling us all the time, waiting for us to come back.

Often our stuff gets in our way and it’s our stuff, and our fear and our old programming that live our lives. But if we can get out of our way, put that aside and just come from a deeper place. It’s only when we stop, that we can access that, that then we can start to live this passion.

That’s very sound advice. Just stop. I have to take that on board myself.

Beautiful. It’s not just stopping everything. Like right now, we are talking, there’s nothing much else happening. You’re just there. I’m just here. We are connecting.

So you can be as busy as anything, but this moment is quiet, and then you connect it. That’s the yummy bit. It’s just being present with whatever you are doing. Even if it’s the washing up. Just do it with presence. Not thinking about everything else you need to do. Simply wash up. You’re just there and then it’s not a struggle.

Such sound advice, Thank you. How can people find you?

My website... Sharonturton.com, or if people are interested in the retreats, we have lovely retreats, such as the elemental retreat, based on the earth, air, fire water, and how we do those within ourselves within our bodies. That’s probably my favourite retreat. So, if anybody’s interested in diving in deeply and divinely, that’s there. Also for private retreats, you can just contact me at sharonturton.com.

And is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thank you so much for holding this space that I can share this work that I am so passionate about and love so much. You’re a gift to the world.

Thank you very much for your time and your generosity.

47 | eYs Magazine, Autumn 2021