In Conversation: Manoj Dias & Tjimarri Sanderon-Milera

Words: Good Sport
Images: Ben Clement

Tjimarri Sanderon-Milera (TJ) is a proud Aboriginal man, born and raised in Adelaide, from the Narangga and Kokatha language groups, located on South Australia’s western coastline. TJ has been a 100m-400m track sprinter since his teens, creating opportunities to compete on the National Circuit and overseas for Australia. Throughout his sprinting career TJs encountered a multitude of pivotal experiences, good and bad, and is now channeling his learnings toward the new wave of young Aboriginal kids. TJ coaches fundamental skills to succeed not only in athletics, but within life itself. As an ambassador for lululemon, TJ continues to empower and build community within this younger generation to help them achieve their dreams. Through the University of Adelaide’s Wirltu Yarlu Aboriginal Education Program, TJ strives to break the inequality of education for First Nation people.

Born and raised in the Theravada Buddhist tradition, Manoj Dias is a speaker, coach and educator. Through mindfulness and meditation, Manoj has helped thousands of people around the world trade mania for pause, so that they may live fearlessly in honour of a happier and more meaningful life. As the founder of A—SPACE, Australia’s first multidisciplinary meditation studio, he walks this truth en masse with a family of one heart, having regularly taught in New York, Los Angeles and throughout Australia. Manoj became Australia’s first lululemon global yoga ambassador, a role he uses to champion more accessible and inclusive wellness experiences for the under privileged and marginalised.

The following conversation was proudly initiated and inspired by lululemon.

Manoj Dias: It’s good to see you, brother. Thank you for coming to my place, visiting Melbourne today.

Tjimarri Sanderon-Milera: Thanks for inviting me here today bro. It’s been a minute.

M: It’s a pleasure. We’ve caught up intermittently at a few events through Lululemon over the last year, so it feels good to keep flowing on from where we’ve left off. There’s a lot of different places in which the work we’re doing intersects. [Over] the last few years a big focus for me, through meditation and mindfulness, has been exploring ways to take this to people and communities that don’t usually have access to them. For a long time, I’ve felt that wellness feels exclusive, right? You need a certain amount of money to go to a particular yoga studio or fitness studio. Even as we see more meditation studios, it feels like it’s available to a certain class, or demographic. There are communities that can really benefit from wellness, and I was really interested to find out from you, because I’ve got such a massive interest in Australia’s Indigenous culture. How would you and your communities really approach wellness?

T: We’ve always done things collectively or as a family when it comes to perspectives on education and health. Traditionally we’ve had our storytelling which is passed down. There is advice from elders, interconnectedness with family and community and even things like healing circles and other ceremonies. It’s complex because we have these traditions but we also live in a society not designed for them. [In] Aboriginal communities, we’ve been orientated towards sport, like AFL or NRL. They’re the main sports that Aboriginal people zone in on because that’s what they see. They think, ‘Oh, that’s all I can be good at, so I’m going to be a football player’. [This] is the reason why I chose not to play football and become a runner, but it’s been tricky. I would love to see Australian Aboriginal communities looking at alternative ways of being active and mindful and having that bit of wellness in their lifestyle that’s not just through football.

M: I think with minority communities, there are so many other priorities, right? Wellness almost falls to the bottom of that. But what I’m seeing, and you’ll probably agree, when it comes to the statistics around mental health… anxiety, depression, and suicide, it almost disproportionately affects minority communities.

T: Massively.

                    

                                    

M: I think it’s really important, man… I just got back from three months in New York and some communities are really struggling to just meet the day-to-day expectations and pressures of life. But it’d be great if at some point in our lifetimes that we can see these practises, which I think is like basic friggin’ skills of how to notice your breath or how to be mindful of your emotions, be brought into our universities and schools because, man, when I was young, if I knew how to deal with my anger I might have been a very different person in the first portion of my life.

T: I feel you on that one.

M: I wasn’t really taught too much about it [Aboriginal culture] in school. But I’m really excited to learn more from you on how the Aboriginal people really value the concept of ‘community’ because. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but for me and people my age group growing up in cities like Melbourne, the desire to be part of something bigger than us is so massive, right? Our parents’ generation, maybe our grandparents’ generation, had things like churches, temples and monasteries. Whether you follow a religion or not, one beautiful thing it offers is this ability to come together with people that have a very shared belief or a shared intention and to feel not as alone as you might. You can be held in this space and you can feel like they’re your brothers and sisters. Does Aboriginal culture bring people together in that same way?

T: Plenty of times throughout my career, [I’ve felt] it to be a lonely world at the centre. You have to open your mind to go out and explore, and be able to find someone or people that aren’t going to make you feel lonely.

Sprinting is a solo sport. You’re training as a part of a squad, but for the most part, you’re training and competing for yourself, regardless if you’re in a national team or whatever. You want to get that 0.1 or a second quicker. The amount of mental space that takes up in your head is crazy and it gets very, very lonely. Even when you are at your peak of performance, you’re still just constantly wired to how lonely you actually are during that sport.

M: Because you’re also competing with the people that you’re in the community with…

T: I was training with three other guys - good mates now - but when I walk up to the start line, we’re not mates, and you think, ‘No, I’m going to beat them. It’s me and the clock here.
I don’t care what he runs, he doesn’t care what I run. I’m just running to win’. It really takes a mental toll after some time.

M: You have this culture of community that you’ve been brought up with, the Aboriginal sense of community, and there’s this sense of community in athletics. How do these two intersect in the work that you’re doing?

It’s like people are too scared to ask for help. They think that everything needs to be done
by themselves to succeed in life.

T: Community, for me, is a sense of hope and leadership as well, there are times where you are receiving from a community or giving. I’m reaching 30, so I’m at the point where I’m wanting to create a space where I’m a leader for younger generations, whether that be in the Aboriginal community or athletics. That’s where I’ve had the opportunity to coach the Aboriginal athletic squad. We’ve got 15 or 20 kids, and 13 of them are rocking up on a regular basis, which is amazing. They’re coming out Mondays and Wednesdays, they’re learning athletics, and they wouldn’t know it, but they’re learning about community. They’re learning about being organised for training, being healthy
and active. They’re just having fun. It’s crazy. Now, I can connect those two together.

M: Awesome.

T: What about you now? How have you managed to connect everything together?

M: Oh man, it’s interesting. When A-SPACE, my meditation studio, opened in 2016, I think we saw that people in Australia were curious about mindfulness and meditation. We started to notice that a lot of people were meditating in Australia, but they were usually doing it through apps.

T: Spotify meditation playlists right?

T: Very true. I was lucky enough to have the support of Port Adelaide Athletics Club, where there’s a strong Aboriginal community. This year, they put an Aboriginal design on all their team uniforms and they’re really making stepping stones in how they want to support their local community. In that aspect, it was easy to put an Aboriginal athletic club together. Because we were the first ones to do it, the Sporting Commission of South Australia has gotten behind it. They were able to fund us; we’re able to pay for coaching, for the kids to compete every weekend, and give them a kit, healthy foods and everything. But It’s not always that easy.

M: Especially without funding, right?

T: Yeah. It was very surprising to get funding for the programme because athletics doesn’t have much funding at all. I didn’t get any funding in my career, unless I was going to be making the big finals on the regular... So, setting up a community can be hard work. You’re going to go through that period where you feel like you’re alone because no one’s getting behind you.

T: With Aboriginal communities specifically it’s... A lot of people don’t see the bigger picture of what happened 250 plus years ago [through colonisation]. They just see it as now. They don’t look at the past. Purely because they just don’t want to because I guess in the back of their head they know how bad it actually was.

M: Right, and people don’t really understand the effects of colonisation. And how have you seen that?

T: It set Aboriginal culture up for failure. We’d never had our eyes on any of the things colonisation brought - disease, alcohol, etc., so we never knew how to handle it. We didn’t know how to process things and it’s just a ripple effect from there.

M: I think these days we can see something and we just make up our own mind as to what has happened.

T: Yes, exactly...

M: Or have expectational questions like ‘why can’t they do this? Why can’t they do that?’ But I see it as intergenerational trauma leading people to behave the way they’re behaving.

T: Exactly. It’s the ‘shame’ factor as well. Through colonisation and slavery, it was put on Aboriginal people and across the globe, that if you’re black, you were essentially a slave and then you’d have that shame factor put over you.

That has just gone through generations and generations. Aboriginal kids are growing up, where they’re told they’re not going to be able to succeed because it’s a white man’s world. In the work that I do with the university, we’re creating a space where they’re getting out of their comfort zone, they’re breaking that shame factor to be able to go into a white university. At our univer-sity, there are 200 Aboriginal students, but there are about 30,000 students at the university.

T: Yeah, that’s happened to me as well. It was after work one day, I thought I’d go for a quick jog. Then I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just keep going again’. I got to 10km and I felt good. I got back to the car and it had been 21 km’s. I was like, “’Oh dang. I’ve never run that far before’. I went from 10km to 21km. I had just gotten lost in running. Literally, just one step after another.

M: Like a flow state, you were just in the zone… Tjimarri, if we could look forward five years in time, what would you love to see happen with the community that you’re creating?

T: I’d love to see it as a stable thing. It’s only two nights a week at the moment. I’d love to see it eventuate into something where I am just coaching the senior squad that’s just dedicated to doing athletics and sprinting. Sprinting and running changed my life, so I want to help kids change their life. They’re sticking to it, and if I can do that in the next five years, that would be insane.

M: That’s beautiful.