When the pandemic put travel to a halt, Becky feared for her future as a flight attendant. But reconnecting with herself led her back to her roots and revealed how she could carry on grounded.
Becky Lawson lived a few different lives before she started her healing practice with The Grounded Rebel. She was a snowboard instructor living abroad, a safety officer’s assistant in the mines and most recently a flight attendant. What ties these lives together is care, and when she lost her job because of the pandemic, it was self-care that gave her new direction.
“My heart absolutely sank when I was stood down. We didn’t know what the future held for our family, if I would ever fly again or how I would support our family. My whole world felt like it had fallen apart,” says Becky.
In an instant, Becky’s world went from a glamorous life in the air to life in lockdown. She lost her job, her lifestyle and her sense of self. “I identified as a flight attendant for a decade and my life revolved around my job. I loved my job so, so much. Staying at home during the lockdown, home-schooling and trying to rediscover who I was after flying was just such a weird time,” she says.
Becky felt lost but used lockdown as a time to find herself. “I started to really go deep into self-healing, meditation, embodied dance, and somewhere in all of that I reconnected to the raw unedited version of myself,” she says. What she found was something that had been part of her since her early teens – alternative medicine.
Of the many books on the subject that her mum had around the home, she was drawn to a crystal encyclopedia. “I remember reading that book front to back many times and memorising the crystal names, identifying characteristics and healing properties. I would share this with my friends and started to buy crystals from that moment,” she says. A few years later she was introduced to Reiki through a weekend course that she begged her parents to attend and has since continued to practice reiki in some form every day.
The idea to turn her passions into a business came after winning an Indigenous scholarship to Mia Freedman’s Lady Startup Course. “The course has you list all the skills and experience that you have and then asks you to come up with any business ideas that you could start using that experience and skills. I made candles as a teenager and I had always done Reiki and people always asked me about crystals so I came up with two business ideas: crystal and reiki infused candles and being a Reiki Practitioner,” says Becky.
For six weeks, she worked on course material, built her website and sourced crystal infused candles. By the end of it, The Grounded Rebel was born. ‘Grounded’ pays homage to the literal grounding of flights that led her to this shift and grounding through connection and ‘rebel’ is an ode to her approach.
She thinks of The Grounded Rebel as her alter-ego. The complete opposite of the polished flight attendant that she’d been for so many years. “The Grounded Rebel lets me be this free wild woman who has always been within me. A goddess who doesn’t give a f**k and can say and do anything she likes without being stifled into a box, or by the expectations of others,” says Becky.
Attitude aside, Becky’s work is rooted in deep care. “[With The Grounded Rebel] my caring goes much deeper. Now I care about the clients’ healing in all aspects: mental, physical and emotional,” Becky says. She uses ‘Rebellious Reiki’ to help clients heal from stress, emotional and mental fatigue, living in a state of high functioning anxiety, addiction, or recovering from psychological trauma. Her work reminds her of just how many people are struggling and urges us to ‘remember to always be kind to every person we come across.’
Her story is a study of the power of connecting with yourself and all the good it can do. That connection is how Becky describes being grounded: “to me [being] grounded is being centred and connected. Connected to earth but also to yourself. It’s knowing your true self beyond any doubt and being completely comfortable in your own skin. It’s not responding or reacting as if events in your life are negative or positive, just that they are neutral and your response is what makes it positive or negative. A grounded person can create their own storyline.”
What she has created for herself is a sense of fulfilment from watching her clients thrive, a livelihood that supports her family and more free time to spend with her husband and two girls. “My eldest said to me the other night how happy it makes her that I’m home all the time instead of off flying. That warmed my rebel heart more than words can describe,” she says. And all of this was created out of ‘a low place and during a pandemic’.
She may be in the business of healing others, but it all started from healing herself. Proof that she is living her chosen Powerpants affirmation: ‘I am resilient’.
"I reconnected to the raw unedited version of myself"
Becky Lawson, The Grounded Rebel
About the Author
Alegria Alano is a roaming writer and a bottomless pit of curiosity. Most of her time is spent exploring new places, interesting ideas and fascinating people. She writes about what she discovers in a diary, on alegria-alano.com, and more regularly on the gram at @alegriaalano.