VIEW PROFILE: Chetna Lawless

Spiritual journey ends in Lyme

THIS week View Reporter PAUL CROMPTON meets Shaman CHETNA LAWLESS who talks about following her spiritual path around the world, ending in Lyme Regis

TALES of apocalyptic global warming dominate headlines; multi-national corporations leak thousands of gallons of oil destroying huge swathes of marine life.

At no time in the last 2,000 years have peoples’ awareness of the precarious nature of the planet they inhabit been so pronounced. Even Lyme is not immune with Church Beach and Monmouth Beach named and shamed for their poor water quality in the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Beach Guide 2010.

For many people the burden of guilt is transferred and the enormity of the situation overwhelming, but co-founder of the Lyme Regis based Laughing Rainbow Mystery School, Chetna Lawless is using her gifts as a shamanic practitioner to teach people Medicine For The Earth, the art of healing the planet through transmuting personal and environmental toxins.

Any town is more than the sum of its parts: people, scenery, proximity to nature, architecture and history all conjure up a sense of place, but for Chetna, having lived in the town for over 20 years, Lyme Regis is all these things and more.

“Dorset is just wonderful, there’s an incredibly rich history in this landscape. Walking the cliff paths and fields and surrounding hills, there are just amazing views. If you relax and observe and listen to the sounds, hearing the birds and the sound of leaves and trees, that is nature helping us all the time,” said Chetna.

“I love Lyme, the land here is amazingly healing. There’s a history of it. People used to come here for hundreds of years for healing.”

Having been on a spiritual quest around the world, from Scotland to South East Asia’s Buddhist monasteries, Chetna found herself in Dorset on a week-long workshop led by spiritual therapist and healer Golden Cobb.

Chetna says; “When I travelled to England it was for a course Golden Cobb was leading in Dorset; he asked me to quit my job in Japan and work full time with him. I said, ‘yes’, and we co-founded the Mystery School in Lyme.”

Chetna decided to follow her destiny and travel the path of a mystic and shamanic healer when she was 21-years-old, but had been aware of her calling from a very young age.

“My experiences of the invisible realm began as a child, and continued intensifying. The veils between the realms were very thin for me with regular out of body experiences, and visits from my departed grandmother, who also had the gift,” said Chetna.

“I knew after graduation that I had to find teachers to help me develop and nurture my gifts in a disciplined way, rather than let them impinge and overlay themselves on to my ‘normal’ reality. I booked a round-the-world ticket and went in search of my teachers,” said the American ex-pat who completed a degree in Industrial and Labour Relations at America’s Ivy League Cornell University.

Having worked with and taught mystic and shamanic practices since 1987, shamanism, according to Chetna, is a way of living that requires one to respect, and be in harmony, balance and co-operation with all of creation; it is a way of life that brings healing to ourselves, our friends and families, our communities, and our planet.

Shamanism dates back over 40,000 years and at its core is the understanding that humans are part of a web-of-life that includes all plants, animals, other life forms and nature. The belief all things have a spirit we can interact with, and work with, is fundamental to shamanism.

The modern western resurgence of interest in shamanic practice over the past 40 years is timely, says Chetna, becoming more animated, crumpling the purple throw as she crosses her legs underneath herself. The search for solutions to current environmental challenges finds inspiration and guidance from this ancient tradition.

“We’ve lost connection with a part of ourselves, and people are longing to get back to that internal harmony. The chaos people feel inside is the chaos they see outside in the world,” she said.

“When we find harmony and peace within ourselves, we project that to the outside world. This is at the heart of the planetary healing work.

“Shamanism helps people make their own connection with the divine. Once that connection is made a whole new universe opens up to people. It is a path of direct revelation. People experience a divine love that is greater than any human love. To me, brought up Catholic, I call that divine experience God, and my God is formless.”

The cornerstone of all shamanic practice is the shamanic journey, during which the practitioner alters their state of consciousness in order to access information and healing from spiritual dimensions, and bring it back to this reality. This is achieved through a process akin to meditation.

Classically shamans achieve their meditative state (the shamanic journey state), through tuning into a percussive beat of a drum or rattle being played at between four and seven beats per second. This changes the brainwaves from Beta, the brain’s waking state, or Alpha, the brain’s meditative state, to a Theta wave pattern. Delta, the brain’s dreaming state, is closest to Thea.

“Plants, trees and nature are in the Theta wave pattern, so being in the shamanic state of consciousness is when we most easily fall in tune with nature. Theta is a deep state in between being awake and asleep – and it is a fully altered state of perception,” said Chetna.

Although some people are more pre-disposed to the shamanic way, Chetna says anyone can be taught to journey, “because our brains are hardwired to do so,” adding, “It is also a wonderful alternative to meditation – if you don’t get on with traditional meditation, it is another way to practice relaxation and relieve stress.”

Apart from the planetary healing work, modern day western shamanic healers practice a whole variety of ancient healing methods - one of them is Soul Retrieval. What psychiatrists may refer to as disassociation, which can happen when a person experiences trauma, loss, or shock, shamans refers to as Soul Loss, which can lead people spending the rest of their life feeling a part of them is missing.

In such situations the shamanic practitioner can work with spirit guides to track down the soul parts that have been lost (or disassociated) and exist somewhere in the field of consciousness, and return it to the person. What present day psychology describes as the field of consciousness, shamans call the web-of-life.

“This kind of shamanic healing is another example of the support and co-operation that exists between the spiritual dimensions, and between us humans and the spirits of nature, which is why the respectful and loving treatment of the environment is of utmost importance to a shamanic practitioner,” says Chetna.

“The plants, animals and trees are connected in the web-of-life. We depend on nature for everything, on all the elements to live: the food we eat, the water we drink; everything is connected and interdependent. In science we call it ecology. In shamanism we see it as a spiritual reality. It is vital to our survival for us to respect and honour everything in that web.”

People are waking up to the damage they are creating in the world, through their thoughts as well as their actions, says Chetna, and people are realising they don’t want to be part of the problem anymore; they want to be part of the solution.

“I have witnessed many people reconnecting and developing a greater love and appreciation for the place where they live – and this has led them to taking greater and care of it.”

Chetna added: “The challenges we are facing today demand new and creative ideas. When it comes to healing the planet, there’s not one answer, but many answers that lay in each one of us. We each hold pieces of the jigsaw. The idea is to come together as a community and share our ideas in order to create a new reality – to dream into being a better experience for our planet. That visionary power is within each of us. As a shamanic practitioner, I help people to experience that.”

For more information on Shamanism, call Sui Anukka on 07740 307362 or e-mail admin@vision-voyages.com.

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