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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 1 of Australia 2013: The Autobiographical Narrative
Each year we make a cross-cultural tour to Australia, though one of our Coyote colleagues comes twice a year to make an impact on incorporating culture in health care for aboriginal people. This year we began with a lecture in a writing conference on the topic of the autobiography in which I describe my experience of writing Coyote Medicine. I finish with a description of what has been accomplished in five years of coming. 1  |
 Deena Metzger: Imagining a ReVisioned Medicine in 2012 ReVisioning Medicine brings medical doctors and health practitioners together with healers and medicine people as peers to create a new medicine that does no harm to patients, the community or the earth. ReVisioning Medicine is based in relationships and so is an antidote to our alienated culture always at war. Based on the best of medical knowledge in alliance with the wisdom and healing traditions of indigenous people... |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Day 8 of the Australian Journey 2012
This is Day 8 of the Australian cross cultural adventure. Today we went to the heart of the community where the elders from the Northern Territories demonstrated some of their ceremonies and procedures to the community. That included the burning ceremony for healing pain, the smoking ceremony for purification, and spear throwing. On the way back to the island, I interviewed a patient advocate from Western Australia. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: The Power of Community: Day 12 of the Australian Journey
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. |
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: Still More Similar Than Different -- Day 7 of the Australian Journey
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!" 1 |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Indigenous People are more Similar than Different -- Day 5 of the Australian Journey
Today is Day 5 of our Australian cross-cultural mental health adventure. We traveled from Melbourne to an aboriginal owned island which has ancient sites and is in the Gippsland Lakes. The take home message for the day came from a Gunnai-Kurnai aboriginal man at the end of the day, who said, "Indigenous people are more similar all over the world than they are different." He had the final word for the day, which is so true. 1 |
Judith Acosta: Beyond Biofeedback: How Words Can Help Children Heal
Children learn who they are in the world via an organic form of biofeedback. Everything we say and do communicates and that communication is received by them not only cognitively but, perhaps more importantly, physiologically and genetically. |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Explanatory Plurarlism
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. |
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Lewis Mehl-Madrona: Modern Day Shamanism
Summary: The word "shamanism" has become very popular. But what does it mean and why do traditional North American deplore this word. Traditional healers are accountable to their communities. Others in the anonymous society must face regulation and must prove that they are more beneficial than harmful. The word shaman is no doubt here to stay, but there is an advantage to resisting it in that it brings to attention the di |
Lewis Mehl-Madrona: What is a traditional healer?
I address the question of what is a traditional healer and define a category of hybrid healers -- people who have studied with traditional healers but are also steeped in the modern culture. Those of us who are hydrid healers can "never go home again". We can't go back and claim to be traditional healers because we have been influenced by too many other stories? |
Judith Acosta: PRIMUN NON NOCERE: First Do No Harm Primun non nocere. This is still the sacred promise of every medical school graduate across the country as he or she accepts the diploma, the title and the rank of healer in our culture. It is the core of the Hippocratic Oath. However, in a world of unreasonable speed, in which new discoveries and new pharmaceuticals are being produced in measures of seconds, not years, it may be more than doctors can promise us anymore. |
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