Mother, Heal My Self: An Intergenerational Healing Journey Between Two Worlds
by Joellen Koerner
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Santa Rosa, CA: Crestport 2003. 211pp 3pp Resources $14.95
This is an extraordinary book about a conventional nurse executive who is led by her work, her family and her destiny to explore Native American healing to heal her daughter and her family traditions of women who face health challenges around childbirth.
Joellen Koerner is from a Mennonite family with a history of traumas around birth in five generations. Her great great grandmother died on board a ship bound for America shortly after childbirth. Ten days after Koerner's mother's birth, her mother (Koerner's grandmother) died of blood poisoning. Koerner had two miscarriages prior to birthing twins.
In the course of her work in the Sioux Valley Hospital in South Dakota, she met and befriended Wanigi Waci (Spirit Dancer), a Native American healer of the Lakota Sioux who was ministering to patients served by her hospital. This meeting was significant to Koerner, as it rekindled roots of respectful and helpful cross-cultural exchanges from earlier generations in her Mennonite community.
Wanigi Waci offered classes to the hospital staff in cultural sensitivity, to help the conventional medical personnel appreciate the traditional ways of healing of his people.
Koerner's daughter, Kristi, nearly died in birthing her first child, whose head did not engage in the birth canal, requiring an emergency caesarian section after a forceps delivery failed. Her son nearly died of an infection due to the prolonged labor. He had repeated hospitalizations for respiratory infections during his first six months. Kristi's second pregnancy was marked by diabetes, hypertension, toxemia and preeclampsia. In both childbirths, Wanigi Waci was present, unbidden, and enormously helpful with his Native American healing treatments.
Koerner went on to study and participate in the healing ceremonies of the Sioux. She shares from her many lessons of the heart and spirit, in a book that is hard to put down.
Koerner is clearly gifted as a nurse and as a teacher of the essence of nursing. She shares many insights around conventional and Native American healing.
...the secret gift of nursing: The chance to bear witness to people in crisis sorting through their lives, offering safety and unconditional regard as they bring completion to issues unresolved, or not understood. The person who learned most in the process was always myself. (p. 20)
There is an inner reality which is as surely objective as any outer one. Don't go outside yourself, return into yourself. The dwellings place of truth lies in the inner man. And if you discover your own nature subject to change, then go beyond that nature; it is the reasoning soul which you go beyond. Press on, there fore, toward the source from which the light of reason itself is kindled. (p. 185)
While life and all its vagaries are interesting, it is the growth of the Soul that is the essence of our purpose for gracing the Earth.(p.129)
Koerner's integrity as a healer who walks her talk is evident in the stories she shares about her healing journeys. What she writes of others is also true of herself:
...wisdom is the benediction on a life well lived. (p. 60.)
Hopefully, Koerner's pioneering work with Wanigi Waci will open more nurses and hospitals to healing collaborations and spiritual lessons.
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