| Living
quietly on a side street in Barrytown is a small woman with a generous
heart and a Russian accent
whose healing gifts are having a big impact on those
privileged to know her. Her name is Lara Chkhetiani, and she is a folk
healer, what
Americans might call a medical intuitive, like Caroline Myss, able
to diagnose with her
hands and also able to cure. Originally from the Republic of Georgia,
she was trained in
Moscow where the attitude toward folk healing is deeply respectful:
over twenty years
ago, the Soviet government gave its official seal of approval to alternative
healers in that
country when Brezhnev was cured of his partial paralysis by folk healer
Guna
Davitashvili. Since then, folk healers have been working
side by side with allopathic doctors and technicians in an alliance
far more common abroad than
in this country
where alternative healing is often viewed with suspicion
by the established medical profession. Lara was "discovered" by
Guna Davitashvili in 1981. Since she emigrated to
our area, stories of the miracles she has worked have been steadily growing.
But then, her
life is a bit miraculous in itself. When
she was not quite twenty, Lara was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Her
devoted father brought
her from their home
in Tbilisi to a Moscow hospital and then, desperate to find help
for his daughter, he sought out Guna, Brezhnev's healer, and brought
her there to meet Lara. What happened next was completely unexpected.
In her soft voice with its charming
Russian accent, Lara remembers: "Guna take one look at me and she can see,
she knew I had the gift. She tell the specialists to hook me up to machines that
measure energy." The experts
were about to receive the shock of their lives: when they took readings
of the electrical charge emitted by Lara's hands, the needles were
off the gauge. "One machine have five little bulbs that light
up. If one light up, it means you have a lot of energy. When
they test me, all five light up." The
doctors immediately went into action, eager to verify, quantify, and
channel
this amazing gift. "First they teach me how to give the energy by
breathing, then letting it
out. They start me with plants. Then they give me patients, to see what
I can do to help
them. Many diagnoses: one woman with cysts in breasts, a man with chronic
insomnia, another with a fibroma of the bladder. " Lara saw them for just three
minutes a day for
five days. At the end of five days, the cysts had shrunk, the insomniac
was sleeping
soundly. ("He send me flowers," Lara says), and the fibroma
was completely gone. Then
repeat radiology showed that Lara's tumor was gone, too. "
I have to heal people, otherwise energy gets stuck in my body," Lara
explains."
And I love it. I love to help people. " When I first met Lara,
I was immediately struck by
her warmth and kindness, all the more striking when you hear what
she has been through
in her life: some of the details are pretty horrific. But she has
remained a truly generous
person with a gift ofopen-heartedness that draws people to her and
makes them love her
unreservedly. And the miracles continue.
I met one man whose painful bone spurs had left him practically
crippled. "He
didn't think Lara would do any good, he didn't believe in any of
it," confided
his wife. " But I made him go. He saw her a few times, and nothing
seemed to be changing. I told
him, 'One more visit, just one more', so he went, grumbling. And
the bone spurs
dissolved, just like that. The doctor showed us the x-rays. It was
amazing." Another
grateful client, whose arteries had been almost completely blocked and
who was facing extensive surgery, wrote an article about Lara for his
local newspaper after her treatments healed him. "The doctors
couldn't believe it," says Lara. "They kept looking
at the test results and shaking their heads." |
I spoke to a number of
Lara's clients, all eager to share their experiences and their
enthusiasm for Lara's healing gift. Richard, an entrepreneur in his
mid-fifties, says, "I
had a team of holistic practitioners working on me for five years.
I had deep-seated stress,
constant headaches, a brick-like neck and back. Lara did more for me
in six months than
that whole team could do in all those years." Jane, a retired
teacher, had suffered for
years from low-grade chronic fatigue. "I'd been to a lot of people
about it and never had much benefit. Then I started seeing
Lara. Now," she says, "I have an amazing amount of
energy, more
than I've ever had in my life."
 Healers
need healing, too, and some of them have found Lara. One therapist
I
know takes his entire family to see her whenever they're not feeling
well. Another told
me, "Lara has helped me move through a lot of old feelings that
I was just cycling
through over and over. I've tried many therapies, many methods, but
Lara has made more
of a difference for me than anything else. It hasn't been
overnight, but I can honestly say
my quality of life has jumped ten points."
While all of this may sound
weird, mysterious, or murky to Americans, it should
be noted that several ancient Asian healing systems map the patterns
of energy flow in
the body; both acupuncture and acupressure, for instance, are grounded
in the knowledge
that healing results when blocked energy is released. Lara works on that energetic
level,
sometimes barely touching her clients, but with noticeable results. As one woman,
a college administrator in her mid-thirties, says, "I'm sensitive, but
when she puts her hand
on me, I can feel it almost like acupuncture in my muscles. I really don't
understand how it works, but I know it does work. I see Lara for
my stress. It's like
seeing
a shrink, only very direct. When she touches me, I calm down." Marilyn,
a musician in her
mid-50s
agrees: "I'd noticed a tremendous change in a friend and she told me she'd
been
seeing Lara. I'd suffered from depression for years and so I thought I'd give
her a
try, sort of as
a last resort. Lara really helped me unstick the energy. It was
the crucial step
in being
able to move on."
"
Lara is the real thing," says one friend. "People can spend thousands
of dollars,
train and study for years and still not be able to do what she does naturally.
She has the
gift. But she isn't puffed up about it. She sees people right in her house, sometimes
her
kids are there. It's very relaxed."
How did we get lucky enough to have "the real thing" living
in our
midst? When
Lara's home was burned to the ground during the civil war that erupted in the
Georgian
Republic in the early 1990s, she fled with her family to Moscow and eventually
found her
way to America, seeking political asylum. She arrived here with only one suitcase
and
$250 in her purse. But everywhere she goes, she helps people, and they have been
eager
to help her in return. "She is a gift," says one devoted client. "Anyone
who knows Lara
loves her. She is an angel."
Until recently, Lara has kept a low
profile. But now, with word spreading and
a biography in the works, this healer may be on the brink of well-deserved fame.
We aren't suggesting that people abandon allopathic medical care if they seek
treatment with Lara; it is important to remember that she comes from a tradition
of partnership
with the medical professionals in her country. She can be reached at
(845) 758-4342.
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