DEB MCBRIDE

"You have to LET GO

and BRING your

FULL expression

EVERY DAY"

sunny and helpful that you remember them. And that’s what

I did – she had redd-ish hair at that time (today she is blonde) and was dressed in russets with some kind of statement necklace but what I came away with was a distinct impression of warmth and genuine care, plus her suggestions furnishing-wise were spot on.

Fast forward ten years or so and I met her again, not instantly recognising her as the woman in the shop but I did feel a strong attraction to this vivacious, stylish and funny woman who had a rich and generous laugh that could be heard across the room and punctuated whatever conversation she was in. She is able to see the funny side of

first met Deb more than twenty years ago, although I didn’t know she was Deb then. I was in an interiors shop and I needed some help choosing some furnishings. I was served by this gorgeous sales assistant – one of those experiences where the person is so warm,

life but at the same time is also someone of deep wisdom, insight and the keen ability to read people, situations and strangely enough dogs – it is always interesting and enlivening to have a conversation with her at whatever level is engaged. Deb is someone you notice, she is quite dramatic to look at with her blonde hair, often a slash of bright lipstick and dressed in something that has a quirkiness which may be mixed with something more conservative – there is usually a sense of humour showcased in what she chooses to wear and you instantly get a joyful, arty vibe, not a serious Melbourne vibe, even though she might be in black, or in something with a distinctly European flavour.

She is now sixty-five years old – but in her instance you really would have to say sixty-five years young – as you would never really feel her age and she looks remarkably youthful.

Here are some of the things she had to say when I caught up with her for an interview on clothing, style, her love of houses and of course, dogs, in her stylish and unusual home set in a quiet surburban street with a view out over a painterly gum forest and distant blue hills.

ON
AGEING

"THE FACT is that
there is NO OLD for the ESSENTIAL
BEING WE ARE. "

I started by asking Deb about how she retains her youthful vivaciousness and as usual she gave me a multilayered answer that unfolded as we kept talking. - JB

‘I have always considered myself younger than everybody else, I was the youngest in the family, friends were often younger than me but I would still feel I was the youngest. I would always see everyone else as more mature. I would always see them as more ‘together’.

‘It’s the feeling that’s generated from the inside out, if I look at myself from the outside in, I go, “ Ohhh I’m old!” But I don’t live from the outside in, I live from the inside out. It’s what I feel in the morning… I just feel I have bountiful energy and therefore I go with that.

‘If there is any part of me that starts to tell me that I am old and therefore being old equals certain behaviours like sitting back, winding down, taking longer holidays, or that I can slacken off in my responsibilities – in fact any of those imposed ideas of society – then I say no to that. If I in any way let those things come in, then I start to feel I don’t have so much energy, I feel more lethargic and I start to think ‘why aren’t I like everybody else?’ I turn in on myself, I suppose. If I let any of that come in, I am actually not living the life I am in now, in full vibrancy, and in the preparation for the life I am going to go into next as well – so in my next incarnation, I would be born into that same energy I had been living in, of already being wound down and withdrawn from life.’

You seem to have an understanding of a far grander life-cycle than just the life you are already in. – JB

‘Yes definitely, I feel re-incarnation is true, even though it may not be exactly as we may picture that in spiritual/new age circles. And there is a certain responsibility that goes with that too, because if I am thinking I can get away with that because I am going to be dead soon, I go ‘No that’s not it,’ because it’s setting myself up for the next expression.’

'The fact is that there is no old for the essential being we are – it is eternal and forever feels the same however our more external selves can easily believe all we are told by family, church, authorities, community and friends. For me I mostly don’t care for what others say but instead listen (as imperfectly as I do) to the internal beat of my connection with God and that in turn is freeing of any confines and limitations I might feel I should or shouldn’t be doing in this life. With that freedom comes a natural vitality that is kept alive and for me personally, a humour for life that most definitely keeps me joyful and ‘young’. It’s the old saying, ‘young at heart’ really isn’t it?'

‘I never feel my age, I seem to have enormous energy.’

ON
CLOTHES ...

DRESSING is an EXTENSION
of the EXPRESSION of
who I AM

Do clothes interest you, you seem to have your own unique style of dressing with some interesting pieces? Is dressing something you pay much attention to? - JB

‘I like to think I am more interested in clothes than I am, because I think it is important. I’ll tell you a story that really epitomises it. I got up one Friday morning, and I don’t go to the office on Fridays – I felt really great, really joyous and full, and I dressed like that: I had red pants and a black jacket that’s quite smart and I may even have been wearing these red boots (see photo). Two women, overweight, typical local ladies and I can never pick their age because they are probably younger than I am but I always feel they’re older. Anyway, these two women walked up to me and said, ‘We love what you’ve got on and it’s so great to see someone who actually dresses well and we find it very inspiring.’ And I thought, ‘that’s why you dress like that, because you are actually a reflection for other women to feel they would like to try that.’ It doesn’t matter that you’re just going to Woolworths, who gives a toss, put your red lipstick on and go to Woolies.

‘So, I like to think I focus more on clothes but actually I am very practical when it comes to clothing. I like to feel really comfortable. I cannot put something on that I feel uncomfortable in and be all of me. I just can’t do that. Dressing is an extension of the expression of who I am, so I have to feel comfortable. And sometimes it’s indicative… you might put something on that you feel isn’t bringing all of you and that is telling you where you are at… I am playing less-than today, and I want to be a bit invisible and I will dress like that to be invisible.

‘But I would like to dress to feel I am visible every day, that’s what I’m saying because it is important.’

Isn’t it like when you find just the right thing to wear for that particular day, you feel something inside you line up. It’s like a little ‘zing’. And you don’t think about it for the rest of the day, but you feel completely harmonious, and you know that what you are expressing is aligned to that zing. – JB

‘Well imagine if you went to Woolworths, and everyone was dressed with that zing. People would probably talk to you and each other. And red is symbolic of the zing.’

Yes, you love red, what is the significance of it? – JB

‘Well red symbolises potential and it’s always spoken to me.

‘I had a wardrobe that was black for a very long time and the only time I introduced colour, was with red. I was always a black person, I painted my bedroom black when I was fourteen.

‘But when I got my first house I painted a wall red, it was the colour of blood and I have never looked back since then.’

A fashion note to throw in here: Diana Vreeland one of the most influential fashion influencers, stylists, Vanity Fair and Vogue Editor of the last century, adored red too – she had red every-where. Her apartments, interiors all were red.

So, what determines what you are attracted to in terms of clothing? Is it arty? – JB

‘I was going to say I like expensive unusual pieces and I often buy secondhand but then that’s not true as I also like Zara, it’s practical but it has a European flavour. I will forage through their stuff. It’s got to be slightly out of the norm, a bit edgy. And you can pull edgy from anything. You can look at some of the things I’ve got and put with something else they might be quite conservative, but it’s how you put it together. That’s what I’ve relied on, how to put it together.

Your clothes are always a bit of a statement… – JB

‘I think you have to be true to your uniqueness but you can’t be attached to this is me and I have to be this, and I am going to defend it at all costs. The thing about expressing –everyone’s responsibility is to express heaven and we’ve all been given a unique expression within that. If we don’t express that, then we are holding back from the whole and we have to have the courage to express the things that we feel. If you feel you want to put orange with pink and everyone tells you, ‘you can’t’, then you have to go with your impulse because it’s your unique expression.

‘In building this house [her home] there’s been lots of things that people have told me, you can’t do that, or that’s too expensive or it’s not necessary, it would be more practical to have X there. And I go, ‘no, no, you’ve got to feel it’. And then you go, 'yes, that’s what it has to be.’

‘I had a house and I painted a wall red, it was the colour of blood and I have never looked back since then.’

ON
HER HOME

I am OBEDIENT
to what NEEDS TO BE DONE for the house
very EASILY

You've always had a very artistic sense of style and your homes bear witness to this. Can you tell me about the house you are now living in that you built and designed yourself? - JB

‘I have more interest in the home than the clothes. My first job was as assistant interior designer on a home magazine – straight out of school, no qualifications. How perfect was that?

‘What I loved about it was going into everybody’s houses and seeing what they put together. My mother had really good taste but it was in that antique kind of style and I hadn’t seen anything else. But it was in the seventies and you would go into people’s places and they’d actually had their telephone chromed or they’d have silver and purple wallpaper and just things I’d never seen and I’d be in these houses going, ‘Wow, Wow, Wow.’

‘I think that job just completely expanded me and I got really interested in changing my environment and that’s when I first started experimenting with colours. I was desperate to own a house, to start experimenting in it but I didn’t have my own home until I was about twenty-eight and I did everything with it, making my own bed linen, covering all the chairs, painting triangles on the walls. I think you go through these phases with expression and they all collectively lead to an expansion in how you can express in form.

‘It was not until three houses later, after I left my husband, that I was able to really let loose with renovating. I hit the wonderful junction of having money and open slather without a partner in that third house and really went to town with my ideas. When you’re with a partner it’s different, because they’ve got to agree and interestingly enough my ex-husband visited me in that house and he loved it so I asked him, if I’d described this to you would you have agreed? And he said no.

through the process of everyone telling you how you should build and who you should build with and all that blah blah and then you get down to it.' ‘Even though the design came from me, I didn’t have any idea about the lay of the land and how the house would sit on it… or anything about putting a roof on. I had help.'

‘I didn’t have any idea about how high the ceilings would end up being… What happened in my bedroom was that I knew I didn’t want a whole stack of windows but I needed air flow, so I got the windows put up high and then that dictated what would happen in the rest of the house. Next thing I know I’ve got four-point-four-metre-high walls in the kitchen, then of course I had to have a window high up in the kitchen too, and then you end up with this beautiful light-filled house. And I am obedient to what needs to be done for the house very easily. It speaks to me. It’s like the house is already formed energetically and it’s talking to me, it’s telling me how to move those steps to get to completion. And I am just obedient to those steps, because I hear it, every day it speaks to me. I knew exactly what I was looking for in door handles, in colours – the only thing I was resistant to was having a black kitchen. But I had to surrender to black because of the tile colours!'

‘I got to see the virtue of tiles with that house. Oh my god that started a love affair. So, when I came to building this, my current house, I had already bought the tiles for the kitchen before it was even designed. The tiles set the pace for the house.

What was your process with this house? – JB

‘Everything about this house was deeply considered and very much an ongoing inner engagement with all that was being asked of me to represent here in this space.'

'Even the way the land came to me was extraordinary, and at the time I wasn’t even looking for land, but you’ve got to go with the impulse of that offering. So you just follow the impulse and then one thing leads to the next. And you go

Do you have a connection with the Japanese culture? – because with the red and the black, it’s quite Japanese this house. – JB

'No, but if you ask me anything else, Mongolian, yes, probably more-so French, Spanish or Morroccan. When I went to Turkey and visited an ancient Ottoman palace ….ah, the tiles… I could have been there all day and that is when my love affair with tiles was ignited. '

'Something gets awakened in you and then you know you have to follow that.'

Well, you’re good at following that… What you describe to me and how you live is quite intuitive. And I think it takes a lot of courage to live from that. – JB

'We get given this unique expression which is our representation of the might of heaven. And I am obedient to one thing with that expression and that is divine order which is the expression of a plan which is already being governed by God and heaven. If I’m obedient to anybody else’s expression of divine order then I’m already out. I have to be obedient to my expression. You have to let go and bring your full expression every day to that.'

'In order to do that when you are building there are some things you have to fight for. You have a relationship with what is not formed but is already complete and your job is to understand that and bring it into the form. I have to be true to that. So, I go,‘I know that this has to be like this even if I have to fight for it, for example the timber slats on the stairs I had to fight for’.

'And there is a hidden symbology within the house which had to be represented formally and I had to find a way to do that. According to the Ageless Wisdom which I study, each compass direction represents something. East represents expansion so there are uninterrupted large floor to ceiling windows capturing the eastern outlook and the rays of the early morning sun. The private courtyard and access to the outside lawn and herb area is on the north symbolising a place of repose, the herb garden represents alchemy and the science of true healing – something I’ve been interested in all my life. The centre, the heart of the home has the large main bedroom specifically painted dark brown – the colour of sacredness – that offers the pulse of sacredness for the whole building and is representative of the inner temple within us all – this room also looks West which is the direction symbolising sacredness. The dark themes for every room represent the richness and connection to our ancient past philosophies.'

'The front door is clear glass and situated on the South aspect which is related to letting all of humanity in. And basically with all its quirkiness and beauty and unusual but beautiful design, it is a home very deliberately built as a place for all people to come, as true students of life to explore and discuss the philosophical, scientific and religious aspect of our multidimensional existence. It is a true temple built for the deeper exploration of life in modern times.'

It does take courage to express what is coming through you and it could seem entirely new and out of the ordinary and everyone is saying, ‘No you can’t do that.’ You can’t have self-doubt. But Deb, don’t you think we tend to give ourselves away to that all the time – what other people feel you have to do? – JB

'Yes, but what you have to ask yourself is why? But then that gets back to age doesn’t it? You get to a certain age and you say, well why am I defaulting to other people? What has ever been great about that? Where has that delivered me? Or has that given me anything in terms of my evolution or personal development or whatever you want to call it. Has that ever helped me? And I go, ‘maybe not’. You do get wake-up calls that come from other people and that is a different thing. But the general thing of people trying to impose something on you, never took me anywhere, just made me smaller, made me think I was ‘less than’. But nothing in this whole building process ever made me feel that.'

Yes, sitting in your home I understand why you say that.

What I love about this house is the height of the ceilings, the light and space, the inner sanctum of your very sacred bedroom and the eastern orientation of the living room, facing the rising sun. There’s a very strong sense of vibrational stillness in this home which marries with what you are saying.

And to finish, can you tell me the story about this huge photo on the wall? – JB

'The image is taken in Goblekli Tepi a very ancient sacred place in South Eastern Turkey. The photo is of the setting sun facing west and it is on the western wall of the living room. The sky comes closer to earth there, you can feel the relationship of heaven and earth very strongly in that place. So that image really works in this space as I do feel this house represents the magnificence of heaven – I mean you also called it a temple. I’ve always seen it as built for the expression of sacredness.'

You get to a certain age and you say,
“ Why am I defaulting to other people?”

ON
DOGS

They DON'T have any COMPLEXITIES
of IDENTIFICATION or THINKING that they think.

One more thing we have to talk about is your work with dogs...That's an intuitive thing, that was something you just discovered, wasn't it? So what is your work with dogs? Are you a dog whisperer? - JB

'No I would never say that, I stay away from that word and the word trainer. Basically, I work with the behavioural aspects of dogs but I actually work with the people (owners) to help them see where the original impulse came from for their dog’s behaviour because it will come from a human first, in the majority of cases. Energetically in terms of quantum physics, the human and the canine are two self-organising fields but one will always organise itself around another. And because the human is the primary species the canine will always organise itself around the human. It’s like a basic science. So, because they will organise themselves around a human and because they are one hundred per cent vibrational and they don’t have anything else to interrupt that – they don’t have any complexities of identification or thinking that they think or anything like that – the dog will just respond to whatever is the vibration of the human, so if the human has got something going on that needs to be drawn out, the dog will reflect that behaviour and it’s then in your face.'

So someone will come to you with a dog whose behaviour they want to change and then you’ll draw their attention to whatever it is in their life that is causing them to behave like that and then help them change that or understand themselves. – JB

DEB McBRIDE

"You have to LET GO

and BRING your

FULL expression