Facilitator, Cameron Tukapua is a visionary, entrepreneur and community leader. She is the original founder and was Principal of the New Zealand College of Chinese Medicine. Cameron has over 2 decades of teaching and clinical experience in Chinese Medicine. She has worked with thousands of people including government,medical,professional and lay people. She offers clear, guided reflection on our thinking, feeling and behavioural states. This helps us to understand and honour ourselves as individuals and create more harmonious relationships.
Kia Ora, Welcome to you,
My name is Cameron Tukapua. Cameron is my original family name. When my father passed away, I took this as my first name to honor the land based legacy of my family heritage. Tukapua is my married name. My husband is Maori. Tu means "to stand". Kapua means "the clouds/ heaven". I am proud to have married into Maori culture. Like all other indigenous cultures, Maori people honor our relationship with nature. When I first started studying acupuncture, we were taught to see ourselves as standing on earth with our head in the heavens. This image clearly shows that we are the link between spirit and form. I aim to live to celebrate that relationship.
My observation and experience of working closely with people as individuals and in groups is that ultimately everyone is looking for the same thing. We all want peace of mind, happiness and a sense of ease in our lives. At this stage of my career working directly with people to find this level of living feels like the most natural thing in the world. A group of people learning together is one of the fastest ways we as individuals can make changes in our lives and I have been witness to hundreds of people transform through the collective experience. For 6 years I have been leading these retreats and find that people readily and easily relate to the practical wisdom of Chinese medicine which is ageless wisdom based on nature. It offers a simple model of self- seeing that helps us understand ourselves and others and how to meet and manage our deepest needs.
In our modern Western world we are encouraged to believe that happiness comes from outside. In contrast, the Eastern traditions say that everything you need to be happy and fulfilled lives right inside you. To touch this awareness we turn within. To keep it alive we learn to listen to our inside knowing and create a life aligned with that which we truly yearn for. The retreat is designed to give you an experience of your inside Self and then take away some tools for deepening this relationship with your goddess within.
Aprils offer to join her and host the retreats in Bali came at the right time for me. Villa Waru has been designed as a special sanctuary for people to come to, to take rest and be soothed. Most people I see in my work are constantly over stimulated in one way or other, this leads to deep level exhaustion and a disconnection from the true Self. The intention of the retreat is to reconnect to the primal influences which govern all of our lives and find a natural way of being that can support us on all levels.
Arohanui, With love and respect,
Cameron Tukapua. October 2009
Since 1989, April Swando Hu has been involved in executive development, education management, coaching and training in Asia. Her quest is to facilitate self-actualization of individuals and organizations. She is excited to be able to facilitate the nurturing of Working Goddesses at Villa Waru, Bali, (www.villawaru.com), a private luxury residence offering well-being executive retreats. Educated at Yale University and Stanford Business School, April is fluent in English and Mandarin Chinese and lives with her husband and four children in Hong Kong.
I came and stayed this time in Bali having arrived five years ago after a long spell of travelling to teachers in the west and India. I I have been teaching yoga and practicing cranio sacral here since. I'd been raised in Hong Kong by Dutch/Indonesian parents who brought me here many times on their trips back to spend time with their families. I had studied in London at the College of Cranio Sacral Studies while I was teaching yoga privately and at centres such as Triyoga and the Life Centre and leading yoga and meditation retreats in Greece, Spain, and Italy. The connection of these two practices of the healing arts brought me to Ubud where a yoga friend encouraged me to practice cranio sacral here.
Having finished working as a PA to a brilliant hotellier and her financier husband in London, I spent my earnings studying a MA in Chinese Art from SOAS and Christies. I was on a buying trip in New York when in 1996 I first met yoga at a class in E11th street. I followed my practice over the next seven years through some outstanding teachers. First in Astanga yoga with Pattabhi Jois and Richard Freeman, then in Iyengar yoga with Faeq Biria in Paris, followed by Scaravelli yoga in London with John Stirk and in Rome with Diane Long. Teaching privately in London in the summers allowed me to spend six months of every year travelling on pilgrimages and to study with my teacher Clive Sheridan in India.
The longest I've been anywhere must be Hong Kong during my school years but I've travelled since then working as a journalist for radio and television and lived in some wildly contrasting places: Vietnam and Cambodia in 1989, on to London and then the west coast of Scotland, where my ex-husband and I bought a boat in 1992. For the next seven years, we lived and sailed around the world. Though so far I have yet to experience anywhere as spellbinding and as transformative as India. My last long trip before my daughters were born was to Mongolia where I spent a dream summer practicing yoga with my teacher and riding horses for the rest of the day. Raising my three year old twins on my own is my saddhana now.
