At Cape Horn
John R. Lawrence Jr, Ph.D., CSC
Seattle, WA
John was recently elected Chair Head of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Explorers Club.
I grew up on a farm in rural Missouri. At the end of WWII, at the age of six, I sailed with my uncle to the California Channel Islands awakening a lifelong passion for travel and exploration. After graduating from Whittier College in 1962, I moved to England where I worked full time and also became engrossed in rock climbing an moutaineering, climbing in the British Isles, the European Alps and later in the Pacific NW.
I have a broad and varied background as a teacher, chaplain, workshop trainer, world traveler and father of two terrific adult children both living in Seattle. During the Reagan Era I served as Executive Director of a Seattle area non-profit organization for Southeast Asian refugee assistance, Plymouth Refugee Opportunities (PRO). I have explored many countries and cultures around the world while sailing my small sailboats in the Mediterranean Sea, and after several years of cruising my wife Ann and I sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to Barbados and the Windward Islands where we lived aboard, cruised and I worked as a commercial diver. Years later after working in water resource development, while living in both Thailand and Sri Lanka, I sailed from Sri Lanka, across the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean, then home to Seattle. More recently I sailed ’round Cape Horn on a 35 ft sailboat.
For the past twenty years my close affiliation with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies has involved me in research and documentary film making. Expedition locations include China (NE Manchuria and Inner Mongolia), Estonia, the Rio Negro River in the Brazilian Amazon and Tuva in Siberia.
I still love to travel, sail and explore different lands, seas and cultures. I have studied with indigenous native healers in their home countries and I am informed by their deep abiding spiritual connection with the earth and their varied perspectives toward life, death, healing and health.
Recently, I have become grand father to Henry Thomas Lawrence!