I live in Perth, Western Australia, with my architect husband Wayne and our teen sons, Luc and Remy, along with Sergeant the Border Collie and Adam the Siamese Oriental cat. I'm an astrologer, taroist, author of I Am Lilith, and a writer and editor.
Melanie Dufty
"I’ve worked intensively on my path of self-realisation for 17 years through meditation, energy medicine and extensive spiritual studies. I’m a qualified Western tropical astrologer (Federation of Australian Astrologers), with my own consultancy for the last 10 years offering readings and personalised self-realisation programs.
My novel I Am Lilith brings together my spiritual and astrological understandings in a rollicking story.
In my broader professional experience, I have a Bachelor of Social Science from Curtin University in Western Australia, and spent the first 12 years of my career as a public relations professional and media spokesperson in the banking and retail industries in London and Sydney. I've also been editor and head writer for a business publication for seven years.
My life purpose is to achieve unity with my soul and help others do the same. This path is assisted greatly by my practice of Mahat Meditation and through receiving Integrated Therapeutic Alignment energy medicine alignments for many years."
THE PATH THAT LED ME TO TODAY
In September 2017 I started something I’d wanted to do since a kid… write a novel. For years I’d asked the universe, ‘what have I got to say?’ and a plot finally emerged that let me share the big-scale and hopeful understandings I believe to be true about human evolution in a wild story. I Am Lilith was born.
It was a long while before I got to that point. I started out as an achiever and partier, with a firm eye on material acquisition and a set of life success goals.
I began my career in public relations (PR) and communications, after graduating as the top grading PR student of my year from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, with a Bachelor of Social Science.
During nine years in London and Sydney working for the banking and retail industry bodies, I was a media spokesperson in dozens of TV and hundreds of radio and press interviews, and very keen on growing my career. I was entirely skeptical about all things spiritual and didn’t believe in things like energy medicine. During this phase I met Wayne in London, and we married in 2001.
After moving to Sydney, I left my intense job to have our first son Luc in 2004, and that is when my spiritual journey began.
Although uninterested in spirituality, I was into natural health and chose to have a homebirth. Some 30 hours into labour and at my absolute end, I screamed silently ‘If there’s anybody out there, HELP ME!’ The response was a surge of power that allowed my exhausted and agonised body to birth Luc. This befuddled my mind and opened a crack in the doorway to my soul.
I muddled through Luc’s first year in something of a depression, and was getting desperate to find something more fulfilling. I had a huge resistance to going back to corporate work. I didn’t know what to do with myself - my perfect-looking life wasn’t ticking the box of my longing, which was the yearning for my soul.
At the end of my tether, I began studying Master Choa Kok Sui’s pranic healing and arhatic yoga in 2005, becoming passionately interested in the soul’s journey and energy medicine. I went on to study traditional astrology, becoming qualified through the Federation of Australian Astrologers. Since 2007, Wayne and I have been big on Mahat Meditation and Integrated Therapeutic Alignment (ITA) energy medicine, offered by the Melaney Ryan Institute of Applied Consciousness, and highly recommend these paths.
In 2011, Wayne’s architectural business was hit up by the ‘global financial crisis’ and we had to sell our house, his Porsche, pull the boys out of their private school. We struggled financially for a decade. I went back to PR work and got a job with our state water utility as a writer and editor.
In August 2013 I was struck by a nervous system syndrome, which saw me suddenly hospitalised in agony. The nerves in my shoulders were severely inflamed and damaged so I could barely move my arms for months.
Even worse than the physical pain was the primal terror it cracked open, and resultant severe insomnia, which put me on pharmaceutical sleeping tablets for 18 months. I nearly lost my mind. Within two years I was healed and off the pills, with a lot of help from ITA energy medicine. It was deeply humbling to showdown with serious shadow and come out the other side, and I understand what it is to be in a very dark and seemingly inescapable place.
After reading Paulo Coelho’s The Pilgrimage and watching Emilio Estevez’s The Way, both about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage through northern Spain, in 2015 I took off alone and walked 500km of the traditional route. I have always been very unphysical so it was all the more bizarre that I’d want to do it. As is widely believed, I found there is a magic along the Camino trail that will present whoever and whatever you need to reveal something important in yourself. It changed me, and I know exactly how.
Reconciling light'n'dark has been a big theme in my life. One way to consider this duality is in the Lilith and Eve archetypes we all carry, especially women. Balancing them is the trick, or we get too naughty or too nice. At our wedding, Wayne said I was the 'whole woman' and I know now he was calling me forth. On it.
