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Articles    H3'ed 5/31/12

Imagining a ReVisioned Medicine in 2012

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In 1999, I called together a healing community we call Darà © which means Council in the Shona language of Southern Africa.  The community gathers for a day of healing on the first Sunday after the new moon. We have been meeting for more than 13 years.  Whoever comes to Darà © is welcomed as a member of Darà ©.  Much healing occurs as we learn and apply the old, old ways to ease, relieve, cure as best as we can.  It seems that miracles occur every month.  Not everyone is cured.  But then not everyone is cured by western medicine.  But many people are benevolently affected on the physical, emotional, spiritual planes.  Also community itself is healed as we heal. And additionally, as it is increasingly clear that the healing ways of western medicine are enhanced by the medicine we offer, alliances between the best of the two ways of knowing become possible.  Such parallels between western medicine and healing ways are implicit in CAM, Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  But they are still parallel events operating from different perspectives. ReVisioning Medicine that brings all the ways into a unified and dynamic council, is we, believe the future.

The ways of Darà © are carried among us from month to month.  We try to walk in the world as healing presences.  We try to live according to the healing ways that are revealed to us.  Although Darà © only meets officially once a month, it is a 24/7 activity through which our consciousness develops.  

***

As I write this, a colleague and long term Darà © member, is trying to recover from serious auto immune responses to medication.  The physicians do not have other medicines to offer patients even though they increasingly have to deal with side effects that are serious, sometimes more serious than the original condition. If we thought about illness differently, we would seek other interventions.  We would invent other treatments.  We would all be engaged in ReVisioning Medicine.  

This colleague came to see me because she was in increasing discomfort, pain, fear and anxiety.  There were a scattering of potential diagnosis and an increasing negative response to the medications suggested.  Autoimmune responses to steroids is the least of it.  

We did what healers and medicine women have done from the beginning.  We sought Spirit's aid.  We turned to divination.  I suggested, as is my way, a series of questions that she could address over time.  At the heart of our concern, was a piece from her early history.  As a young girl, she had had the desire to be a medical doctor.  It had arisen when she read and reread Microbe Hunters .  Now in her sixties, after a long history of university teaching and activism related to social justice, her thinking has changed.  A Darà © member for many years, she has deeply assimilated the teachings that have emerged based on " all our relations. "   She is committed to a revisioned medical practice that does no harm. She no longer wants to hunt and kill microbes. She wanted to know what peaceful co-existence might be.  

When she addressed the question that affected her most urgently, "What am I called to in order to ease and bring peace to the distress in my body?" the answer from the I Ching, her augury of choice, was direct:

"Shake/rousing (51) describes your situation in terms of a disturbing and inspiring shock. The way to deal with it is to rouse things to new activity. Re-imagine what you are confronting. Let the shock shake up your old beliefs and begin something new. Don't lose your depth and concentration. What at first seems frightening, will soon be a cause to rejoice."  

This advice was followed by: "This is a time when Noble One transforms anxiety and fear through adjusting and inspecting."

Mysterious and ultimately incredible as it seemed, the pain she had been feeling disappeared with "Shock" from the I Ching.  And then, also, the anxiety was gone. Three years ago, when she had been also suffering from diverticulitis, a Music Darà © restored her to health that lasted until these last weeks when she has been highly stressed. Now again, the old, old medicine of Story and right relationship and community of all beings brought her back into alignment and health.

***

Some weeks before the cataract surgery, I had given the ophthalmologist, my novel, Feral , which is grounded in the particulars of the beauty of the natural world.  The Girl in the novel has gone feral in order to ease the pain of her life.  To live within the animation and beauty of nature was to be vitally alive.  Happiness came to her from being companioned by lizards and a wolf.  She had agreed to come down from a tree where she was making her home on condition that the Woman, a therapist, not confine her within the terrors and illogic of civilization. The young woman initiates her therapist into the true ways of healing through challenging psychology's identification with pathology while insisting upon right relationships and alliance with and compassion for the earth and its creatures.   Her agonies and distress derived from knowing that the animals are consistently hunted down, that humans are afflicting and terrorizing all life.  That the violence she suffered as a child, is suffered by the natural world a thousand fold and without end.  

"When you read this," I had told the surgeon, "you will know why the surgery has to go well.  I am a writer, I need to be able to see."  I had put myself in his capable hands so that my somewhat clouded vision might be cleared."  I had also given him texts of keynote addresses I have delivered to various medical associations on the loss of the soul of medicine, on the increasing gulf between the medical world and true ways of healing.

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Deena Metzger  is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) (more...)
 

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