THE SHAMAN STANDS at the counter of Pacific Coffee on Central's Hollywood Road and watches me scan the busy cafe for her. I weave through the tables, looking for a half Indian, half Turkish 34-year-old. Seeing no likely candidate I retrace my steps and order a green tea. And there she is.
She is tiny, only 1.52 metres tall, and dressed casually in a tie-dyed green cotton top. She looks at me and with an amused smile says, 'You must be Clare.' Lara Anuradha Shah landed in Hong Kong last week. She is here for a month as part of a tour of Asia from her base in Florida, offering one-to-one treatments of an ancient form of healing known as transmutation therapy. It is a rare form of energy work that is practised by only a handful of people in the world - all of them in Peru - and is said to have originated thousands of years ago in Ancient Lemuria, the continent that reputedly once existed in the Pacific Ocean. The tradition was passed on to the Incas and then moved through a tight lineage to modern man.
Shah is the first to bring the tradition from the distant mountains of Peru into the world's cities. She moves elegantly with her cappuccino and we settle into a sofa. The story of how she became versed in the strictly guarded tradition is remarkable. The former journalist - who once worked as a freelance writer for the likes of the Financial Times, Business Week and the Washington Post - was living in Mumbai, India, when, a little over four years ago, her life began to change. Teaching yoga, more and more clients became interested in learning about its healing aspects. She began to study various forms of healing, such as Sekhem vibrational healing and cranio-sacral therapy. Then in early 2002, she upped and left for Miami with her Siamese cat.
'I just felt it was time to leave even though I had nothing to go to,' she pauses and, as if reluctant to use such language, adds, 'It's as if it was all divinely guided.'
Continuing to follow her 'intuition' she wasn't in the US long before she took a trip to Peru (leaving the cat with friends). No sooner had Shah arrived in the Andes, at an altitude of 4,000 metres, than she became ill with a virus. Within 48 hours she was close to death - her organs, in particular her kidneys, had begun to fail. 'I was in excruciating pain,' she says. 'I slipped into a coma.'
No medical doctor was called. Instead, a shaman from a nearby area arrived and began to work on the patient using the rare Incan transmutation therapy. During her three hours in the coma, Shah remembers hearing 'beings - angelic beings or whatever you want to call them. They basically reassured me that all this was not as it appeared to be. I had been brought there for a purpose. They actually told me that it was necessary for me to experience the healing that I was going to experience.'
Over the course of a week she received intensive treatments from the shaman and was miraculously cured.