Narelle Carter-Quinlan BAppSc

Narelle Carter-Quinlan has consciously explored the felt sense of the body’s interior, its embodied relationship with spirit in form, and the living presence of the land, all of her life. An Australian, she grew up by the sandstone cliffs and sea of Coogee Beach, her father a surf lifesaver, her mother insisting she learnt to immerse and move in water, before she learnt to dance on land, at age four. The fluid form of Source, the resonance of sandstone-bone, pulsed through the tissues.

She has Songline-walked through the body’s wilderness in the formal academic study and teaching of Anatomy, Histology, Cellular Pathology, Clinical Biochemistry, Embryology, with post graduate research in Spinal Pathology; low back and pelvic pain and the neurophysiology of postural control, particularly in the landscape of Scoliosis. All of this offering her an intimate experiential knowledge of the body’s inhabited geography, topography, and inner terrain.

Her long and dedicated training as an elite level dancer, followed by her formal, rigorous training over near two decades in the Iyengar method of yoga, is these days, surpassed by a more organic approach to movement and the practice of yoga, both within the experience of an Asymmetric Spine, and, in general; the body as felt, known, poetic place in communion with the greater ecology. She is a photographer and writer, seeing and hearing the body as part of the breathing land, inspiring her students and audiences to join in participation with Wholeness itself.

A Transformer, Narelle’s centrality is one of Spirit and the sacred.
She has been initiated into aspects of the Land by an Indigenous Elder from the Far Northern Territory, aspects of which were further anchored decades later at Uluru and Kata Tjuta, and at a sacred site on the Seven Sisters Songline.
Listening deeply, she has made gemstone jewellery and gem essences in conversation with the body of Earth.
She has danced the Dreaming in its relationship to Country and Body for near six decades.

Consciousness. Experiencing itself.

These days, in her sixties Narelle travels as a chosen way of life. Walking, Dancing, Sounding her Songlines of the littoral zones of our planet, listening to Place as it echoes our oneness with all things. She makes Images that speak to the visual language in codes impregnated in sand, rock, sea and sky, impacting and transforming consciousness directly. She currently lives aboard a boat, on the eastern seaboard of Australia. She celebrates fine, strong spiced coffee and the rich velvet that is chocolate. Often from the deck as the light ripples the fluid field of Sea.
Narelle is the Founder and Steward of the Saltwater Songlines Project.