This is an excerpt from my book, Coyote Healing: Miracles from Native America. It's about the medicine wheel.

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Chapter 4 Excerpt

The Healing Journey: Medicine Wheel

Having found our inner healer, it now compels us to take a journey. The archetype of the journey has many forms, including the quest for the Holy Grail, the pilgrimage from the Lord of the Rings, and the annual trek of the faithful to Mecca. The journey becomes more important than the destination, meaning that the work done to transform ourselves and our relationships takes on a life of its own. The process of growth and change takes on an importance in its own right. Being on this path (or spiral, as we consider the medicine wheel) is more important than arriving at a specific destination.

Another Rumi story illustrates this crucial point (which Alistair Cunningham has documented with long-term cancer survivors).

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In this story, a man in Baghdad dreams of a magical house in a distant, mystical town. He is so inspired by his dream that he sets off on a several year journey to find this house. Each night he dreams further details to guide his journey. Finally he has enough details to recognize the city as Cairo. Then, each successive dream reveals more details of the house until finally he recognizes the section of the city. He explores this section of this city until his dreams guide him to the very house.

He reaches the house with great enthusiasm and anticipation, sure that a rare treasure awaits him. A servant opens the door and hears his story. The master is not at home, and has left a minimal staff in place to manage in his absence. Though puzzled by his enthusiastic desire to explore the house, the servant obliges him, showing him every room. When the final room has been examined, and none of the rooms contain any particular marvel, our hero becomes frustrated and depressed. Why did he spend so many years searching for this unremarkable house? He wonders where the master of the house went on his journey, thinking that he hoped that man had more success in finding something of value. The man puzzles at this coincidence as he sets off for home.

Midway, in a desert oasis, our hero meets a man to whom he feels inextricably drawn. They begin to share travel-weary conversation as they rest.

I tell patients this story, saying that the hero learns that the man also had a dream of a mystical house in a mysterious land and has pursued that dream until he found the house. To their amazement, their experiences are virtually identical. They discover that each has dreamed the other's house. But, why? What was so special about each of our houses, the men asked each other, gradually becoming aware as they continue talking of how profoundly each has changed as a result of the journey. In the telling of their tales, they gained entry, each to the other's soul, through the gateway of the eye. They realize that their internal changes were much more important than the destination (outcome) of the journey. Without a destination, they would never have made the journey.

"The healing journey is similar," I say.

"Without a destination (the image of what we want, be it health, justice, or democracy), we wouldn't undertake a perilous journey. The changes happening within us while on the journey become more important than the destination. Hope is the sense that we will reach the destination."

"Without hope, we would give up and go home," I say. "The opposite of hope is not false hope, but despair."

Hope keeps us on the journey, even when the outcome of the journey is contrary to our wishes, or uncertain. I always want to make patients happy, to speak the answer that would comfort the most, but also to always tell the truth.

Life is a journey, and the intensive healing format within which I work provides a structure for that journey. The illness provides an impetus for the journey and a destination.

The story of Moses presents a series of miracles that led to the release of his people from bondage in Egypt, including the spectacular parting of the Red Sea to let the people flee Pharoah's army. Moses found his miracles by following God's instructions to the letter, but can we? And what do we do, if we don't? Can we still find healing?

Being on a healing journey provides us with the resources and awareness to face decisions, including how to reconcile the conflicting prescriptions of oncologists and herbalists, of naturopaths and physicians. Or how do we reconcile the inner message of the body versus the demands of the doctors for one more round of chemotherapy, to decide when enough is enough? No one can help with that decision, which every patient must make, despite the advice of his or her physicians.

How much surgery should you have? How much chemotherapy? How much radiation therapy? How much alternative therapy? How do we know what to do in the face of uncertainty?

The destination of the journey is not always clear, as in the first Rumi story. Would we make the effort if we knew that cure wasn't possible? To be effective, personal transformation must become a goal on its own. The road to the frame of mind necessary for healing necessarily begins with the road to peacefulness. Transformation requires many changes, including alterations of our sense of meaning and purpose, deepening the quality of our interpersonal relationships, and finding joy in a new identity that encompasses the illness as stimulus for transformation.

Beginning the healing journey requires (1) openness to making profound life changes including relationships, (2) willingness to embark on a journey into the inner world, and (3) a community including healers who will both bear witness to the journey and aid in its completion, and (4) an accurate appraisal of the threat we are up against.

What drives people to brave a war-torn country to make the pilgrimage to the Church at Medugory? What takes them to Lourdes, or to seedy clinics in the Dominican Republic? What sent comedian Andy Kaufman to the Philippines to a psychic surgeon to cure his cancer? We have an impulse to make the healing journey, the pilgrimage of the soul. This same impulse toward healing also leads people to the hallowed halls of our major Cancer Institutes, where some will recover and others will suffer tremendous insults to their bodies, for a mere 4% or less improvement in their 5 year survival -- all the benefit that some chemotherapy studies report. This is not to criticize what is often a desperate response of concerned doctors to hopeless patients crying out for cure when there is none; nor to diminish the areas in which oncology has actually made great progress. I merely call attention to the need for health practitioners everywhere to give patients something in which to believe, even when that something poses more risks than benefits. This can happen as often in alternative medicine as in conventional oncology.

Stories best explain the inspiration and beauty arising when we pursue the miraculous even when we are not blessed by its appearance. Suffering diminishes when we embrace the journey and do whatever we can to move toward wellness.

As a side benefit of making the healing journey, our sense of love for our self and for others deepens, giving additional meaning to our lives. Love gives value to being human. Great playwrights and ancient Native American storytellers recognized that love transcends questions of life and death, incorporating this insight into marvelously woven tales.

The practice of being in retreat without distractions, isolated from family and culture, bereft of newspapers, telephones, computers, books, radios, music, and all of our other forms of entertainment, has become a keystone of my approach. Riding on top of this foundation of retreat and isolation, comes the mind-body-spirit therapy that I use to start people on their own healing journey.

Diedrick's story illustrates the beginning of one healing journey. I saw him first in New Mexico, after his father called me. Diedrick was 18 years old and had been hospitalized 20 times in the past three years with bipolar disorder (what we used to call manic-depression). Diedrick knew we were going to meet, "since he was the world's best basketball player." He proceeded to elaborate a pressured stream of loose associations, keeping me from saying anything or asking prying questions. I opened my ceremonial bag and began to sing. At the start of the song, Diedrick became more subdued. He eventually started crying. His body trembled.

"If you felt like me," he said, "you would kill yourself. The pain is too great to bear." That moment marked the beginning of Diedrick's healing journey. Through ceremony, we began our first real communication. Ceremony made Diedrick able to communicate his pain and suffering. When the ceremony ended, Diedrick returned to psychotic communication. But even then, sentences were embedded in his crazy talk that made clear the deep meaning of our communication during ceremony.

One month later, Diedrick and I embarked on a 10-day intensive retreat, resulting in improvement that has continued years later, certainly related to my enthusiasm about the treatment's potential for success, and to Diedrick's believing that the treatment would help him. Since his healing intensive, Diedrick has not returned to the hospital, nor has he been arrested (as he used to be for his bizarre, public behavior). He was able to get a part-time job and to manage his life on his own. We started him on a healing journey, on which he learned how to connect to his inner healer through ceremony and song, learned tools to soothe himself (reiki, guided imagery, relaxation training, journaling), and learned how to establish healing relationships through body work, talk therapy, and biofeedback. He learned that people cared about him and that he could make contact with those people.

For Diedrick, and others, ceremony mobilizes and facilitates healing. Diedrick's faith and hope in what we were doing helped to activate his own self-healing response* or inner healer. Each specific technique paled in comparison to the power of his inner healer. Diedrick's newly discovered idea that he was a spiritual warrior on a journey to find healing gave him a sense of meaning and purpose much more powerful than his old vision of himself as a broken, psychiatric patient. It's so much easier to tolerate the bad days of suffering, when that day and that pain fits into an overall context of a journey that leads somewhere, that has meaning and purpose. We make the healing journey in order to feel meaning in our struggle with suffering, to grasp that our life has a purpose, and to find joy and peacefulness through the effort to fulfill that purpose.

Dr. Andrew Weil has recently emphasized these topics in his talks (Alternative Therapies Conference, New York, March 1999) as he mentions the importance of the art of medicine, the doctor patient relationship and the underused power of the placebo effect.

Against the rainy, gray sky background of his anguish, Diedrick learned that he could hope for his life to change. His desire for a girlfriend motivated him. This hope allowed him to drift backwards through the pain of his life where some of his gaping wounds could be healed. His paranoid talk about crimes his father and mother had committed resolved into talk about the pain of their divorce and his mother's drug addiction. He cried about losing touch with her because of her addiction. As part of our work together, we were able to find her and reunite them, somewhat to his father's dismay.

The opposite of hope for Diedrick was not "false hope." It was the suicidal despair he had learned from skeptical, doubting doctors, who gave him powerful psychiatric medicines with many side effects, but little help. These doctors lacked medicine for his soul. They didn't believe that he could undertake a quest for wellness. Their model rendered him genetically inferior and forever doomed to a life of medication and suffering.

Diedrick's story illustrates how healing the body begins with healing the soul. When the soul is well, death or insanity can be approached with peacefulness and love. Diedrick needed the hope that psychiatric medicine couldn't give him, in order to examine those aspects of his life in which everything had "fallen apart."

Despite the continued fog in his brain, Diedrick came to believe that he had sufficient strength to stay out of the hospital. In time Diedrick even found a girlfriend, ending his sense of total isolation from intimacy with other people.

The medicine wheel concept guides our healing journey.

Our healing journey starts in the east, where we find spiritual connectedness and the power of spirit to sustain our life. The East is where we learn about the connectedness of all things. There we find the inner vision that comes from our awareness of underlying unity. The East represents beginnings and infants and children. It is both the beginning of life and the beginning of journeys. The development of the self as an individual occurs in the East, where we also learn about sharing. We encounter our cultural environment and identity. In the East we bask in the healing power of Spirit, and realizing that we are never alone. Spirit is always with us. Guidance and direction is always available. The East is springtime, the symbol of new birth, of newborn foals in the fields nuzzling their mothers, of baby skunks and bears, of the rising sun, and the majesty of the soaring eagle.

After connecting with Spirit and realizing that we are not alone on the path, we make our way toward the South. There we learn about emotions. We learn to experience our feelings, and to recognize the emotional storms that pass through us. We learn to ground ourselves in contact with the earth and with the present moment, and discover that we are like the Great Oak, whom the storm can never blow down. We learn trust and innocence in the South, as well the excitement in discovery and joy that new knowledge brings. Youth developing toward adulthood thrives in the south, like a plant turning its leaves toward the summer sun. The South holds a strong sense of family, and is also the direction for learning about honesty and trust. We encounter the social environment and relationships in the South. On the healing journey, after we connect with spirit in the East, we discover our feelings in the South. Through our feelings we develop and renew our relationships with family and with other people (including the healer). Summer lives in the South, along with the animals of kindness and compassion the deer, the mouse, and the horse.

Once we have discovered that we have a spirit to guide us, that we are never alone, have asked for guidance, have traveled to the land of our emotions, and have re-established relationships and family, we are ready to go to the West, the land of the physical body. There we learn to nurture the body and the environment in relation to the cycles of life and death. The West is the place of the adult who provides sustenance for his or her family, as do the plants at the harvest. In the West, we learn about respect, kindness, and activities to nurture self, others, and body. We also encounter the economic environment and its foundations and supports. The West contains the things that we put into our body, the ways that we use our body, movement and touch, all of the physical aspects of being alive. Crucial to the wisdom of the medicine wheel is the understanding that without spirit (East), emotional awareness and quality relationships (South), we are not able to adequately nurture and sustain our bodies (West). The Bear lives in the West and represents this intense physicality. Its retreat into physical hibernation (the inner journey as it corresponds to the physical body) is an important aspect of taking care of the body of going into retreat, of resting, or delving into the underworld or the unconscious.

Having encountered the physical body and world, having examined our sources of economic support and resources, we are ready for the North, where we discover insight and community. In the North, we develop our intellect and learn to seek knowledge and wisdom. From our intellect we learn to recognize our beliefs and values. We learn about the perceptual filters modifying how we see the world. The North demands that knowledge be put into action. The healing journey requires a "give-back." It requires our expressing our person healing as action in the world. It is the place where Elders teach and share their experience and wisdom. There we appreciate the importance of the nation and grasp the larger picture or context in which we find ourselves. In the North we learn how to put caring into action. The North is the direction in which we consider the political environment and how to express our voice within that environment. The buffalo lives in the North and represents wisdom and community.

The medicine wheel, circle, or spiral represents never-ending cycles of life even as it represents the healing journey. It is based upon an understanding of the cyclic nature of life and the importance of the universal principles of behavior: sharing, caring, kindness, honesty, respect, trust, and humility. Its circlic nature ensures that the whole is addressed. It informs us that all of its elements are related to each other. It is multidimensional, representing both individual and social levels. We see that no one element can be understood in isolation of the others. We see that action or work on one element leads to potential change in any other element.

Authors Website: www.mehl-madrona.com

Authors Bio:
Lewis Mehl-Madrona graduated from Stanford University School of Medicine and completed residencies in family medicine and in psychiatry at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, Coyote Wisdom, and Narrative Medicine.