\u201cI was born in White Plains, New York, about an hour\u2019s drive north of New York City. My mother\u2019s grandparents came from Italy, but her parents met in NYC. Both my father\u2019s parents came from Dublin, and emigrated separately to the States. My grandmother was one of ten children; four stayed in Ireland, two came to Dorset, and four went to New York. My father is an amazing man, a really loving being. His parents worked really hard; grandfather was a ship welder in the war, grandmother ran a restaurant, and they later had a dry cleaning business before moving on to other larger companies. My Dad wanted to go in to the Air Force but his eyesight wasn\u2019t good enough, which pleased my gran, who wanted him to go to university. He went to Fordham and specialised in education, and then ran a non-profit school for mentally and emotionally handicapped children. My Mom was a school teacher; she also worked in a psychiatric unit in a hospital with children who\u2019d been badly abused, and were separated from their parents.<\/p>\n
As my two sisters and I grew up, our parents were constantly encouraging us to reflect upon our feelings\u2014why we were upset, what was really bothering us\u2014so we were all very emotionally fluent, supported to look within and uncover what was underneath. With our parents discussing their work at the dinner table, the framework of emotions and psychology was natural. I was passionate about books, read voraciously and was often the top of my class. I went to private Catholic girls\u2019 school, but I asked to switch to the local high school because there were many more resources and opportunities to be intellectually challenged and stimulated. Being a keen student my parents encouraged me to become a doctor or lawyer, but to my mind lawyers seemed to build arguments and then spend the day fighting, and I definitely wanted no part of that. I was more interested in healing and what made people happy, so I worked as a nurse\u2019s aide in a large hospital during weekends and summers, to see if I wanted to commit and submit myself to the challenges of medical school, with a view to becoming a doctor. I loved being with the patients and learned a lot, but it seemed that 90% of the work was done by the nurses on very low pay; doctors would breeze in, use patient consult meetings to discuss their golf games and weekend plans, then refer to the nurses\u2019 notes to decide on treatment\u2014and at no time touching the patients. So med school didn\u2019t feel right for me. I considered Georgetown for Foreign Service and doing something international, where I could still be of service to bridge and heal the larger community. My quest was: what really makes people happy? How can suffering and pain end? Growing up around a lot of wealthy people, I could see that despite everything they had, they seemed to be quite miserable, and I didn\u2019t want to end up like that.<\/p>\n
When I was 13, my grandmother died. She was exceptionally intuitive; she had what they call \u201cthe sight\u201d. She could see and sense things, when she wasn\u2019t with us. She\u2019d phone my Dad and say,\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong, what\u2019s happening?\u201d, when my sisters or I were upset, such as the time our dog died, which he had forgotten to tell her about. When she died suddenly in the hospital, I began to hear her talk to me. I was grieving but I heard her quite distinctly saying, \u201cDon\u2019t worry about me, I\u2019m fine, I\u2019m not in any pain, and I\u2019m praying for you\u201d, as if she were on the phone speaking to me. Then I started to hear other people in spirit\u2014parents of close school friends who wanted me to relay messages for them, such as \u201cTell her to stop taking drugs.\u201d I felt they were loving messages and I was never afraid. But it was a bit odd, and I didn\u2019t know what to do about it. I told my Dad; he said not to worry, because your grandmother was like that, and you know, you should probably get trained in that. Meanwhile, my mother encouraged me to get to university and get qualified, because her priority was that I should always be independent.<\/p>\n
I decided to go to Cornell University and study Industrial and Labour Relations, because the coursework covered similar material as the degree for Foreign Service and an MBA. I thought I could help people, maybe even go into union organising for nurses. However, despite it being a \u201clabour\u201d school, the majority of the faculty was extremely right wing, and was teaching union-busting. They even removed the course on ethics from the curriculum. In human resource management they spoke as if people were objects, from which they needed to extract utility, and that I found repugnant. But I felt it was important to complete what I had started, so I learned how to disagree with them in their own rhetoric. I wasn\u2019t very popular there as a result, either with my classmates or the faculty, inviting left-of-centre speakers to visit and give alternative opinions. But mainly I was still concerned with finding a prescription for human happiness, what \u201cism\u201d might work best.<\/p>\n
In the summers I earned money by working in the fisheries in Alaska, helping with the salmon harvest in the Kenai Peninsula, where later the Exxon-Valdez oil spill disaster took place. It was so pristine and so beautiful; I felt passionately about nature, and it made me realise that I didn\u2019t want to live in New York, and I didn\u2019t really like big cities in general. Alaska was paradise for me; nature was so vibrant and I felt the spirits of the place connecting with me.<\/p>\n
After I graduated, I bought a round-the-world ticket, and came to the UK to visit my grandmother\u2019s sisters in Dorset and Dublin, and then went to the Findhorn Community, before travelling onward. I was pulled to Asia; I wanted to learn meditation to hone my intuitive gifts, which didn\u2019t seem to have a clear form, but I knew I needed to discover them. I went to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Burma visiting all kinds of temples, and meditating there, looking for my teacher. I went to every Kuan Yin temple I could find. In Japan this deity is known as Kannon, and in India she\u2019s called Avalokiteshvera, a bodhisattva of compassion, and a major teacher for me. Eventually I ended up in Japan, learning meditation, and teaching English because I needed to start repaying my student loans. In Tokyo, I heard about a group in Lyme Regis, so I actually came to Lyme, from Japan, to do a personal development workshop, led by a therapist from London. I became his apprentice, quit my job in Japan, and came back to Lyme to work with him. Eventually we got married and worked together; since then we\u2019ve parted, although we remain good friends and still work together.<\/p>\n
Nowadays, the one-to-one work that I do with my clients involves helping them to access their inner wisdom and latent talents. I also work with family constellations, helping people to break repeating patterns of trauma trapped in their family lines. My greatest joy is in giving sessions and training practitioners.<\/p>\n
I experience my ability to \u2018see\u2019 as part of basic instinctual sensory knowing, available to everyone. It is the part of ourselves that knows when someone behind us is looking at the back of our head when we are walking down the street; we can feel it, and these skills perhaps evolved from the days when predator\/prey situations were more common\u2014those who could sense, lived. Rupert Sheldrake, the scientist, calls it the morphogenetic field, and that is the energy field in which I work.<\/p>\n
If I hadn\u2019t gone down this particular path I think I\u2019d have liked to work with the land; I love being in the green and with nature because it speaks to me. I keep bees in an orchard in Uplyme, and I love growing and working with herbs. Living in Lyme I feel I\u2019m in tune with the elements; it\u2019s perfect for me. I feel I can be true to my heart here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Robin Mills went to Lyme Regis to meet Chetna Lawless. This is her story. \u201cI was born in White Plains, New York, about an hour\u2019s drive north of New York City. My mother\u2019s grandparents came from Italy, but her parents met in NYC. Both my father\u2019s parents came from Dublin, and emigrated separately to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1462,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-1461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-people","tag-robin-mills"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.marshwoodlife.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}