(1 comments) SHARE        Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Thoughts after Sundance 2011 (2970 views) I reflect upon Sundance 2011 and what I have learned. I realize that Sundance is about love and compassion and following this red road that leads to these directions. Sundance gives us an opportunity to rise to become spiritual warriors, to find all the benefits and none of the detriments of battle, to create a community of fellow warriors within which we can feel strong, and to transcend our natural limits to become more.

SHARE        Monday, January 9, 2012
Reflections after a Hypnosis Workshop (2951 views) I describe some reflections after co-teaching a hypnosis workshop. Particularly, we look at a person whose story is too large, as big even as the whole United States. How do we work with someone whose story is that large. I describe ways to extract smaller stories, short stories from the large novel, stories that can work within an hour time frame, the usual length of time for mental health or hypnosis encounters.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Reflections upon transitioning to private practice (2905 views) Just over 2 months ago I left the public mental health sector in New York to transition into private practice in Vermont. This article reflects upon those two months of changes and wonders what we can learn from the type of care available in Vermont compared to New York and from New York's apparent discrimination against paying private practitioners in favor of community mental health centers.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, March 21, 2011
Beyond Narrative Therapy: Day 11 of the Australian Journey (2874 views) On Day 11, we engaged in dialogue about the narrative therapy of Michael White, which is what most people in Australia and the United States index, when we say narrative practices, and the narrative practices of indigenous people. While we deeply respect Michael White's contributions to psychology and humanity, we present him as one branch on a tree of narrative in which indigenous people live in the trunk and the roots.

(1 comments) SHARE        Saturday, March 12, 2011
Imaging and doing are not as different as they sound (2855 views) Contemporary neuroscience has shown us that imagining an act and performing an act are virtually the same. We can strength our muscles almost as much by imagining exercising as by exercising. If mind is so powerful, why aren't we harnessing it for the good. I fear that mostly we allow it to run for the bad, imagining ourselves in any number of dire straights and illnesses, instead of imagining ourselves hale as we should.

SHARE        Friday, January 6, 2012
Mind, body, and unexplained symptoms (2822 views) I describe a woman with a "mystery illness" who has defied the efforts of conventional physicians to diagnose her. She has also been unsuccessful at gaining help from alternative medical practitioners. I show how inflammation is an integrative process which can affect a variety of organs and can be provoked by stress, including the stress of worrying too much. We we can change the underlying process, we can reduce it.

SHARE        Sunday, February 26, 2012
Day 3 of the Australian Journey 2012 (2638 views) This is Day 3 of the Australian Journey. It's also the second day of the Hearing Voices International Conference in Melbourne in which aboriginal elders and their wisdom for managing voices (and giving the voices full ontological status as potential beings) were showcased. I write about some of the techniques I demonstrated in my workshop for managing voices including guided imagery, dialogue, and theatre.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, August 9, 2010
NICABM and MInd-Body Medicine (2618 views) I reflect upon the contributions of the National Institute for the Clinical Advancement of Mind-Body Medicine toward furthering the field. At their upcoming conference this December, prominent are newer ideas of neuroplasticity and chronic pain. Through the understanding that pain circuitry in the brain are remodeled by the experience of pain so as to make people feel more pain, we can refute old ideas of pain.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, March 17, 2011
Narrativizing is the first step at becoming indigenous friendly -- Day 8 (2504 views) On Day 8, we asked how do we transform health care to become more indigenous friendly, whether it's mental health care of general medical care. The answer that jumped out was to implement narrative practice. Indigenous cultures are virtually uniformly cultures of story in which stories matter greatly. Being heard means having the opportunity to tell one's stories. "Treatment" begins by hearing and acknowledging stories.

SHARE        Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Narrative and Science: Day 13 of the Australian Journey (2470 views) Today was our last full day in Australia and the occasion for a lecture and series of discussions at the University of Melbourne's Center for International Mental Health and School of Population Health. We explored the bridges between science and the indigenous world view of narrative. Particularly we were impressed with how neuroscience is completely supporting indigenous knowledge about narrative and its importance!

(1 comments) SHARE        Sunday, September 4, 2011
Sundance No. 2, 2011 (2431 views) Barbara and I write this following our second sundance of the season. In this article we contemplate the idea of the sundance as an embodied metaphorical struggle in which the suffering and deprivation encountered are physical metaphors for the suffering of life. The mindset we use to embrace uncertainty matters in everyday life. We do best when we abandon the idea that we can know what is going to happen next.

(1 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Still More Similar Than Different -- Day 7 of the Australian Journey (2409 views) Today finds us in Day 7 of our Australian Cross-Cultural Mental Health Journey. They lessons of these week have been very consistent -- indigenous from anywhere in the world is more similar than different. An elder proposed an answer for this. He said, "When you listen to the spirits and to nature and show respect, you get the same guidance 'cause spirits talk to each other. They know how the world should go!"

SHARE        Thursday, February 11, 2010
The Miracle of Peacefulness (2381 views) Unfortunately, miracles cannot be guaranteed or produced on demand. What is more certain is our ability to cultivate a sense of peacefulness and meaning even in the face of illness. This is miraculous in itself given today's world and medical culture. So many people sit namelessly, faceless and alone on nursing home floors, passing the time before death.

SHARE        Sunday, September 19, 2010
Explanatory Plurarlism (2348 views) I ask the question, what if all knowledge existed in the form of stories and all stories were true? If we practiced in this manner, as advocated by Uncle Albert, an aboriginal elder, how would we act? The notion of explanatory pleuralism argues that explanatory stories on any particular level do not have to relate to any other level of explanation; rather they must correspond to the level of which they are explaining.

(4 comments) SHARE        Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Cancer and Coyote Magic in Woodstock (2308 views) I reflect upon the stories people create to explain their cancer and how some of these stories can be used to make them suffer even further. I wrote about Sarah, a woman with lung cancer who attended a workshop I co-led with my friend, Peter Blum. Sarah suffered enormously from believing that if she did everything "right", she would get well and her cancer would go away. It wasn't. Therefore, she was bad. What do we do?

SHARE        Saturday, March 19, 2011
Approaches to Trauma in the Indigenous Community -- Day 10 of the Australian Journey (2282 views) Today is Day 10 of the Australian Cross-Cultural Mental Health Journey. Today we talked about trauma in aboriginal communities and how to address that trauma. We collaboratively arrived at some ideas to propose. We agreed that narrativizing is necessary. We need to hear the stories of woundedness that people have to tell and to celebrate their resistance to abuse and to focus more on the resistance than on being a victim.

(1 comments) SHARE        Monday, July 26, 2010
Why can't the sundance feeling last all year long? (2281 views) I reflect on my experience of coming out of sundance, which is always a powerful, personally transformative experience for me and those others with whom I dance. Because of its deep embodiedness, sundance is simultaneously mental, physical, spiritual and communal. This and the prayers brought to sundance and the examples provided by the dancers of transcending our physical limits, explains in part the amazing healings seen.

(1 comments) SHARE        Thursday, April 22, 2010
Learning from Native North America for Health Care (2274 views) The traditional healing of North America is slowly findings its way into conventional clinical settings. Not everyone (Native and non-Native) agree with its entry there. Some people believe that traditional healing should be restricted to Native people and kept away from Non-Natives. Others believe it should be openly shared with all. Even knowing what is a traditional healer is a debated question. Some people call themse

SHARE        Tuesday, March 22, 2011
The Power of Community: Day 12 of the Australian Journey (2237 views) Day 12 of our Australian Journey for cross-cultural exchange in mental health was a low-key day of exchanges about healing in community. We explored the concept that healing cannot occur so easily without involvement of the entire community. Those people to whom we are accountable must agree to allow us to change, or we will not change. We must be invited by the important others in our life to perform a different story.

SHARE        Friday, March 18, 2011
Implementing Narrative Practices: Day 9 in Australia (2202 views) The highlight of Day 9 in our Australian cross-cultural mental health journey was a workshop for indigenous mental health and human service providers on how to make their services more indigenous friendly. This involves, of course, conscious decolonization of our clinical practices. We talked about the need to become more narrative, to listen longer and more deeply to the stories people tell us and to hear stories of others.