Teisha Lowry’s life has taken her from Kalgoorlie to Melbourne via London, Dubai and Bali. Her childhood was shaped by a loving family, a mother with a passion for gardening and a tragic death. As a passion for dance transformed into a successful modelling career, she found herself travelling the world, but personal heartbreak led to a transformative experience in a foreign land. Now she is an advocate for healthy and sustainable living and her story is an inspiring one.

Girl of the West

Lowry grew up in the Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie (now known as Kalgoorlie-Boulder). She has a clear fondness for the town and of her early days spent with her family. “We had massive vegie patches everywhere,” she recalls. “My mum was into organic gardening way back then. She is the biggest green thumb that I know. Her garden was a huge part of my childhood.

"I love Mother Nature and I love being outside. I love going back home to Western Australia where my parents live on an acre. They pretty much grow most of their vegies and they have a massive chook pen. It’s all organic. It’s pretty amazing.”

“She would try to teach me. I had to follow her around; and she would have the hose in one hand and I had to recite her theories back to her. I didn’t think it was very normal because none of my other friends’ mums did that kind of thing. But now I look back and I so appreciate it because I have such a huge fascination and respect for flowers and plants.”

In retrospect, this early learning in the Garden was planting seeds for what was to come. Lowry observes, “Today, all of my textbooks are on aromatherapy and plants and horticulture. I love it. I love Mother Nature and I love being outside. I love going back home to Western Australia where my parents live on an acre. They pretty much grow most of their vegies and they have a massive chook pen. It’s all organic. It’s pretty amazing.”

An early transformation

Lowry speaks lovingly of her entire family: mother, father, sister and brother. There is also sadness though in her family story that brings tears as she thinks of it. Lowry lost a baby sister who died when older sister Teisha was just 12 years old.

She remembers with sad clarity the moment when her father told her what had happened. “That was a transformative moment for me,” she remembers. “It made me realise the importance of family and made me take life a little bit more seriously.”

What this devastating moment did was begin a pursuit of personal growth that remains with Lowry to this day. She says, “I just really explored myself and what I was going to do with my life. That’s huge for a 12-year-old to go through and to discover herself. Out of that I just knew I didn’t want to stay in Kalgoorlie. As much as I love it there, and I love Western Australia, I had this sense that there was so much more out there.”

Dance fever

After the loss of her sister, Lowry became focused on dancing and took to it a lot more professionally. “It was my creative outlet,” she remembers fondly. Young Lowry would come home from school, go straight to dance class, go home for dinner and then go back for more dance lessons.

When I ask her what dance represented to her at the time, instantly the answer comes: “Freedom. It was something that I could express myself with. I just needed to express my emotions, my frustration, my anger, my sorrow, my grief, my happiness, everything. Dance was my whole world back then.”

After Lowry graduated high school, the family moved to Mandurah, a coastal town 72 kilometres south of Perth. In the same year that she graduated high school, Lowry had become a qualified dance teacher and in Mandurah she opened up her own dance school. She had around 120 students all doing expressive dance, contemporary, modern, hip-hop and tap.

“Self-belief is transformative; I know because for a long time I didn’t have any. When I was modelling I had nothing.”

Dance had been a huge part of Lowry’s life up to this point but things were about to change. “What literally happened was that I woke up one morning and said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’ At the time I had an agent who was representing me for dance and a little bit for modelling. I contacted them and they said that I should go to Melbourne. I packed my bags and left within a week.”

At that point Lowry’s work through the agency had mainly been dance-related with just a couple of minor modelling gigs for catwalk shows and the like. This was a big leap of faith in her life but, as Lowry observes, “No one was holding me back. My mum believed that it was my life and I should do what I want. Although with Mum there was always the assumed ‘Don’t come home with your tail between your legs’ at the end of it.”

Strike a pose

Without really knowing what she was looking for, at age 21 Lowry got herself on a train and crossed the Nullarbor. Her break came when she was signed by the modelling agency Cameron’s. As success and work came her way she found herself living in London, working in Dubai, then coming back to Australia and moving to Sydney. For most of her 20s Lowry was modelling and doing well at it, on one level.

In a very successful modelling career, Lowry has been the face of a variety of advertising campaigns including brands like Finelines, Kayser, Holden, VW, Triumph and Tourism Victoria. She also made a foray into television, presenting on the lifestyle program The Boat Show and making a guest appearance on Postcards.

For Lowry, however, the modelling world had good and bad elements. A few minutes with her and you realise you will only get openness and honesty and her assessment of modelling is typical.

“What I like about modelling is the people,” she smiles. “You have a bunch of creative people coming from all over the world.” Quickly, though, she switches to the part of her modelling career that troubled her. Lowry observes, “Most of the time I found modelling very challenging, both mentally and physically. I became self-consumed and really competitive and I didn’t look after my body. I would starve myself before a photo shoot just so I wouldn’t have a bloated stomach and would look really skinny. Looking back, I didn’t know what it was at the time but, technically, I think I had bulimia.”

Lowry talks freely about the negative nature of her thinking and relationship with food at the time: “Self-belief is transformative; I know because for a long time I didn’t have any. When I was modelling I had nothing.” So how do you carry on a successful modelling career without self-belief? Lowry says, “When I am on stage or in front a camera I can put it on. It’s like a meditation — you just forget about everything and you just focus. When the cameras went off, though, I lapsed into monkey brain with psychotic thoughts.”

Lowry believes her negative psychological state was expressed in a negative relationship with her long-term boyfriend of the time. Ironically, though, it was the very negativity of this relationship that provided the most significant turning point of Lowry’s life.

Awakening

The boyfriend at the time was a photographer and, Lowry says, “He was a reflection of my own lack of self-belief. He would remind me every day, tell me I was no good, and I believed him. He would call me fat and tell me that I wasn’t good enough to be a model and that I wasn’t good enough for him to shoot me for campaigns. Looking back, it was a psychologically toxic relationship but I had no idea that anything was wrong.”

The couple had been together for four years when Lowry went for a holiday in Bali while her boyfriend was in New York working with supermodels. She remembers, “I was in Bali when he sent me an email saying that the relationship was over. I was having breakfast in a cafe and I read the email and I just cried. I tried calling but that was the end, just like that, even though at the time I thought that relationship was my future.”

Although devastated, Lowry recalls this as a turning point in her life that precipitated some remarkable events. “I remember thinking, ‘This is not right; I can’t keep living like this.’ I don’t know what it was exactly but I believe it was a kind awakening, a spiritual ‘kick up the bum’.”

Looking for direction, Lowry set out on a desperate search. She had been reading the book Eat, Pray, Love and decided to find the medicine man from Bali who was portrayed in the book.

Lowry recalls, “I had a driver helping me look for this medicine man. I was on the back of a motorbike and we were having no luck. He dropped me off eventually and said, ‘Here it is.’ The medicine man wasn’t there but there was this beautiful Balinese lady. She took me in her arms and she just said to me, ‘Everything’s going to be OK.’ She somehow knew, in a way, what I was going through.”

This lady then took Lowry through her craft, which turned out to be aromatherapy. It sounds like a scene from the book, or perhaps a movie, but she showed Lowry how she would extract ginger oil and lemongrass oil.

“I remember going back to my little villa looking over rice fields in the back of Ubud and thinking, ‘This is my life. This is where I want to be. Things happen for a reason.’”

“It was just incredible,” Lowry recalls. “I thought, ‘I want to learn more,’ and she taught me so much. At that first moment, when she was showing me what she did, something dropped in the pit of my stomach and I knew this is what I am going to be doing for the rest of my life. I knew I would be playing with plants.

“I knew as well that it had to be in its purest form. To be playing with nature and to screw around with it and then put it out on the market, that’s not being true. I just wanted to make the purest product that I could using organic materials. It wasn’t a massive dream, either. I wasn’t envisaging making millions — I was thinking of making enough for family and friends, having an online store perhaps and getting enough in each month from Bali for that. It grew though and got bigger.”

At this time Lowry was already studying business at RMIT. She told the lady that she wanted to work with her. Lowry says, “I remember going back to my little villa looking over rice fields in the back of Ubud and thinking, ‘This is my life. This is where I want to be. Things happen for a reason.’”

This all happened in March 2008 and the first product from Indah, Lowry’s aromatherapy-based beauty brand, was on the market. The range originally used organic ingredients sourced in Bali, although today all of the Indah beauty products are made in Australia and are certified organic under the ACO (Australian Certified Organic) banner. Only the coconut oil is still sourced from Bali, and Lowry is seeking organic certification for that, too.

The journey within

At the same time as starting her business, Lowry began devoting time to her health and her spirituality. Lowry says, “When I got back from Bali I started buying textbooks on Buddhism and Hinduism. It was hard to practise Hinduism here but I adapted well to Buddhism.

“I probably wouldn’t say I’m a Buddhist but I believe in it and I practise it. I meditate daily but I can do it anywhere; I don’t have to be in front of my statues and incense. People say if you can meditate 20 minutes a day, that’s a great start, but I want to be in a place where I’m ‘aware’ and living meditatively all of the time.”

Despite some challenges — as all businesses face — Indah is still going and it is all Lowry. As she says, “Indah started with me and my thoughts. It started with just me. I have my beautiful fiancé helping now but it started with just me doing everything: wrapping and packing, selling, marketing, PR, raising capital — everything. Indah is my soul. It was the beginning of my spiritual journey and it is my life.”

As well as working with her fiancé on Indah, the two have collaborated on the development of a website called Queen Coco that she describes as her alter ego. It’s an online health destination offering a blog, healthy teas, exercise programs and serious cleanses for people wanting to detox.

At the same time as maintaining these two projects and still doing some modelling work, Lowry is also passionate about a very different cause.

The orangutans of Borneo

Lowry becomes impassioned as she talks about the plight of the orangutans of Borneo. She explains, “I became aware of the issues around the orangutans when I really began researching beauty products and also food. I discovered that so many Beauty brands and food products use palm oil.”

The Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) is endangered largely because of deforestation and the establishment of palm oil plantations in its native habitat. The United Nations Environment Program has warned that if things continue as they are then this species of orangutans could become extinct. Harvard researchers say this could happen in the next 10–20 years.

As far as Lowry is concerned, palm oil is a big part of the problem. “In cosmetics it is so cheap to use palm oil in soaps, shampoos and conditioners and so on. It’s the most traded oil in the world and to get the oil they are destroying the orangutans’ habitat. In America and Australia it doesn’t need to be labelled on the packaging as palm oil. It can be labelled as vegetable oil, which is frustrating because the consumer doesn’t know what they are buying.”

Although she has been campaigning on the issue for some years now, it was in early 2013 that Lowry officially became an ambassador for BOS (Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation). According to Lowry, “They have about 880 orangutans in their care and only about 20 or so get released every so often. They keep me updated on what is happening with the babies and rehabilitation. It is such an honour to work on their behalf because their work is so important.”

Simply Teisha

As far as the future goes, things are relatively simple for Lowry. She says, “I really want to let people know about issues that matter and that they can do something about. I want to get the word out there about palm oil and also about the absolute need to use organic products.

“Organic is important because everything starts with the soil and if that is organic soil then the food we eat is much more nutritious and less toxic. Organic eating equals a better quality life and a longer life. We are living longer but there is a lot more degenerative disease and it has to come back to our food.”

As much as she has grand ambitions to help make a better world, Lowry also has simpler ambitions closer to home. “My motto,” she says, “is to live with simplicity. I’ve cleared out so much crap and clutter from life. If I can just make everything really simple, starting with my food, then I will be living the life I want to live. I’ve thrown out most of my wardrobe, which was huge for me. If you come into my house I’ve got simple things. I’ve just got the clothes I need and I eat really clean food.”

Lowry sums it up, appropriately enough, simply saying, “If I can do my bit and make a difference then that is what it is all about.”

For more details, visit indah.com.au.