Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Excerpt from Coyote Wisdom Chapter 10 This excerpt tells the story of my work with Tiffany, a young woman with cancer who was from the Christian faith and how we used Meister Eckhart as a way to bridge my Native American philosophies with Christianity to create a healing dialogue throughout the course of her cancer. this seems like an important story to me because it shows how we can create healing (meaning and purpose) even when the patient dies.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Reflections upon transitioning to private practice 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 

Dr. Kathleen Albertson, L. Ac., PhD: "Sport Injuries: Effectively Treated with Acupuncture" Acupuncture is clinically proven to accelerate the healing of sports injuries. Integrating Western and Eastern treatment makes the most sense and can fully restore chronic and acute injuries in many cases. You often heal quickly, fully, and with improved performance. Acupuncture is commonly used for a wide variety of injuries. Read how it works and what it treats.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Thoughts after Sundance 2011 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. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Sweat Lodge, Prayer, and Community Prayer and community have been stripped away from contemporary health care. Both are sorely needed. I talk about the sweat lodge ceremony as being a laboratory for exposing mainstream healthcare practitioners to the perspective on health and the world of Native American people and show how it produces the kind of connectedness and sense of belonging that we desperately need and which is associated with greater health.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Adolescent Addictions and Las Vegas This weekend I attended an addictions and mental health conference focused upon adolescents in Las Vegas, Nevada. What an appropriate venue! I spoke about narrative practices in relation to addictions -- how we have to counter the dominant stories about magical potions and find other heroic stories that work equally well.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Approaches to Trauma in the Indigenous Community -- Day 10 of the Australian Journey 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.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Implementing Narrative Practices: Day 9 in Australia 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.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Narrativizing is the first step at becoming indigenous friendly -- Day 8 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. 1 

Judith Acosta: Brains, Babies, and Verbal First Aid When we have rapport and learn the basics of Verbal First Aid, we can take our children from crisis to calm, from pain to comfort. Our relationship with them and the words we use can lead them to a healing response not only in the moment but in the fullness of their entire lives.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Imaging and doing are not as different as they sound 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. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: The Narrative Interview: Day 3 of the Australian Journey Today finds us on Day 3 of our Australian cross-cultural journey. Our focus today is on the narrative interview. How would we interview people if our focus was to elicit their story instead of making a conventional DSM diagnosis. I interview a woman who has been suffering for 12 years and who has finally been offered an antidepressant medication. I show how her suffering can be rendered intelligible through narrative. 1 

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Clinic Restructuring I work part-time in a community mental health center in New York. Recently New York's Office of Mental Health has restructured clinical services. I write about what that has meant for quality of care, which inevitably goes down. I argue that this is inevitable in a "fee-for-service" system. I argue that the alternative is to pay physicians to care for panels of people and to do the best job as they see fit for these people.

Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Hearing Voices and Seeing Visions: What to do? Once upon a time, in most of the world's societies, hearing voices and seeing visions was honored and desired. In contemporary, modern culture it has become the one symptom that allows an immediate diagnosis of a psychotic disorder. In this essay, I write about the downside of pathologizing voices, while still acknowledging that many people suffer enormously from voices and negative visions. I describe how to be healing. 1 

Dr. Cheryl Pappas: Celiac Blues and Greens Celiac disease,invisible, undiagnosed, could be playing havoc with your physical and mental well-being. Learn to listen to your body and you can heal it.