There’s a golden thread running through Dr Freya Dawson’s life. A unifying theme. It’s nature, or rather a connection with nature, a sense of being-ness, a blissful feeling of belonging. But there’s also another thread that intertwines with the first, moving not only in and around her life but with that of those around her – it’s her lifelong love of learning and then unlearning.
I first met Freya through one of her events where we snorkelled Bushranger’s Bay and with her encouragement I spent time with the beautiful grey nurse sharks that call the bay their (part time) home. She runs her Rewild your Soul events in some of the Illawarra’s most beautiful natural places.
And for good reason. "I lead people into the bush and into the sea because for me that’s the shortcut to coming into presence,” Freya explained. “Because the sea’s not thinking, the trees are not thinking. Because when you’re with them, for me at least, I can let the thinking go and I can just be.”
Now this is the Freya I know, the one who guides people to learn more about themselves by unlearning the thought patterns that might hold us back; a spiritual, supportive mentor. It’s hard for me to see Freya as she once was: a practising lawyer and an academic teaching constitutional and administrative law.
She said, “I practised for year as a lawyer and I absolutely hated it. Law is all about conflict, and being adversarial and arguing and all that sort of stuff…. I can do that, right. But it didn’t mean I enjoyed it.”
But working firstly as a lawyer in Darwin and then as an academic at the then Northern Territory University gave her the opportunity to explore Kakadu and Lichfield National Parks.
“I’d only just become interested in matters that could be called spiritual at the time,” she said. “I would go on these bush walks right into the wilderness and the energy of those places just blew me away. It was palpable. There was no denying that there was Spirit alive.”
However, it wasn’t until the birth of her first child, Jeremy, a very spirited child, whose mantra was “I will do what I want, in my own way, in my own time” that Freya began to question what she knew about parenting and teaching and education.
“That’s where the unlearning started. Basically I had just finished my PhD and then Jeremy refused to go to preschool,” she said. “It meant I had to unlearn everything I knew about education and learning, and that was quite a lot by that stage since I had been a university academic for 15 years by then.”
This wasn't an easy process and there was a lot of chaos and unravelling. "My sons were my biggest teachers by challenging me in every way imaginable," Freya says, laughing.
Freya collected the skills and processes that helped her to consciously parent her children and wrote the Joyful Parenting book and several related online courses. But the universe wasn’t done with her yet and during a bush walk last year, she received a message that it was time to show others a way to unlearn their negative self beliefs and find peace, joy and freedom, outside of the parenting space.
“Right up the top of Mt Kembla all of a sudden this download arrived, literally something just dropped in my head which was: ‘You’re going to lead people out to places like this and you’re going to teach all of this stuff that you know and it's going to be called Rewild your Soul and you’re going to do start doing that here in Wollongong.'
“Rewild your Soul is the process of coming into that inner focus and engaging with this unlearning process, which literally does bring you more peace, joy and freedom. It’s coming into your essence rather than all the stuff you’ve learnt,” she says.
“It is part of that golden thread. Learning is still really important to me as well as unlearning. I’m learning all the time. But I’m learning in a different way now than I used to.”
Dr Freya Dawson has two upcoming workshops: a FREE Rewild your Soul workshop while your kids are attending Bush Magic on October 2 and a bush walk up Bong Bong Pass on October 9. For more details, head to her website You can follow Freya on Facebook and Instagram