Kenneth S. Cohen                

   Native American Healing like other forms of shamanistic or aboriginal healing does not emphasize physiological change as a criterion of cure, though change in the physical condition (and thus cure from the allopathic perspective) may indeed be a side-effect of healing.  One is considered cured if one is restored to a balanced, harmonious relationship with one's natural and social environment and if one feels better.  Anticipated improvements include greater self-esteem, dis-identification with the disease and improved quality of life.  Thus we are faced with the curious fact of an individual who enters and leaves the healing ceremony with no measurable change in his/her cancer, yet both healer and healee agree that there has been a healing.
 
     Misunderstandings between conventional and complementary practitioners arise from culturally defined (normally unconscious) allopathic definitions of health and disease.

     We live in a field of relations.  Indeed, we grow out of that field in the same way that a plant grows in a garden.  We require the nurturance of all of the natural elements: sunlight, water, air, earth.  Disease is viewed as a lack of harmony with one's environment, with what the Lakota (Sioux) Indians call 'All My Relations', including the mountain, plant, animal, human and spiritual family.

     Sometimes the Native healer will ask the patient to take a walk in nature and look for a stone.  The stone will be interpreted by both the healer and patient, looking for symbols of the disease or cure.  This is a Native Rorschach, with one important difference.  There are no 'correct' and 'healthy' answers.  Instead, one looks at both the personal and transpersonal meaning of the symbols.  For instance, one might see a wolf-like shape on the stone.  If the patient fears the wolf, then this might imply that the root of the disease is the patient's fear of the 'wilderness' aspects of the mind that are beneath conscious knowledge and therefore beyond control.  Or the wolf might mean that the disease can be ameliorated if one pays more attention to the family, because wolves hunt in packs and are symbols of family devotion.

     A good part of the cure is the search for the stone, the long walk in nature.  This helps the patient to see himself from a new, fresher perspective, breaks neurotic patterns of behavior by placing him in a natural environment which is less likely to reinforce that behavior, and, most importantly, exposes the patient to Nature's Healing Power.

     Many of our diseases are subtle forms of malnutrition.  We suffer from 'malillumination', living and working in dark, closed habitats.  Ancient people learned from the light of the sun and moon how to be renewed everyday, how to shed the concerns of the past and be reborn in the present.  Modern man literally lives in the shadow.  Our feet tread on concrete rather than on the earth.  The earth's vital forces no longer feed and inspire the body.  How many of us can simply stand on the earth and feel the quality of contact?  Can we feel the connection with the earth through the whole body?  Or are there chronic tensions which inhibit this flow of feeling?  Perhaps when Moses was told "Take off thy shoes for thou art on holy ground." he was being asked to face life directly, without the mediation of shoes.  Then the ground is holy, or as the Lakota say, 'wakan' (sacred) everywhere.

     The Native elders say that our first teachers are the Four Winds.  From the wind of the East we learn creativity, from the South innocence, from the West transformation and from the North fortitude.  We are reminded of these qualities by spending time outdoors and feeling the winds on our bodies, in our minds.  The wind is the life breath; it is the essence of our soul.  In Lakota, the word for soul, woniya, is from the root ni, the breath of life.  It is also this ni which is purified in the sacred sweat lodge (inipi), a principle healing rite of most Native Americans.  It is life breath which is transferred to the patient in the healing practiced by so many Native Americans.  Pueblo tribes say that running is healing because it is an expression of gratitude.  We return to Creator a portion of the gifts of life: breath and sweat.  By polluting the ni, modern society has shown disrespect towards our Source and so cut ourselves off from the healing energies.

     Similarly as our ears are exposed to noise pollution, receptivity and openness are severely impaired.  Instead of listening to 'the harmony of the spheres', our environment insults us and so we turn obsessively inwards, withdrawn and alienated.  The Innu of northern Quebec say that listening is our most important sensual link with the Great Mystery.  Sound teaches us about the vibratory energy which is at the heart of Creation.  We have become so habituated to our modern sound environment that few of us realize the tragedy is being unable to hear the wind in the pines, the gurgling of a stream, the silence.  The sound of running water is especially important.  Our bodies are made mostly of water.  The sound of water cultivates self-awareness, attunes one to nature and is an example of flow and flexibility.  Water teaches us not to take the personae too seriously.

    Western religion resonates with this view.  Focusing on visual vibratory frequencies, "God said 'Let there be light' and then there was light."

     Our civilized, technological world has interfered with the level and quality of contact with natural forces.  Artificial electromagnetic fields mimic both the electrical impulses which flow through the nervous system and the electromagnetic fields of the earth.  It is possible that the species homo sapiens is itself being mutated by these fields.  And as Jerry Mander has pointed out in his brilliant work In The Absence of the Sacred, (1) whereas evolution was once a process of interaction between human beings and natural environments, modern humankind has created an incestuous situation wherein we interact largely with objects of our own creation.

     To get in touch with our natural selves and the world we live in, we must periodically get as far away from civilization as possible.  We must learn to become 'savages' (from the Latin silva, 'a person of the woods').  Progress is not merely movement towards a goal, but movement from a base.  If the word 'progress' is to have any meaning at all we must understand the primitive (primal) root from which we all grow.  Only by integrating this primitive, natural wisdom can there be any chance for improvement.

     So how, in fact, do Native healers help one to find this natural self?  We must spend more time in nature, not merely reading about it, not merely imagining (vizualizing) it in our imaginations or through the entertainment media, but going there!

     By communing with nature and paying attention to our dreams, we discover our 'totems'.  This is an anthropological term borrowed from the Native American Algonquin language.  Totem derives from ototema, 'spiritual friend or ally'.  Totems are aspects of nature, commonly animals, with whom we feel a deep spiritual affinity.  Each individual has at least two totems.  Examples might be the spirit of the Bear, Eagle, Mountain,  Star, Pine Tree.  The totems are sources of wisdom, guidance and healing power (power to heal oneself or others); they also ensure good fortune and protection from misfortune.  According to some tribes, individuals also have spiritual guardians in human form.

     We learn to dialogue with these totems through meditation and dreams.  In Native American ceremonial healing, the totems are seen and heard in an altered state of consciousness induced by drumming, singing and dancing.  They may be sensed by the healer, the healee or both.  Interestingly, EEG studies cited by Jilek (2) and others show that Native American drumming causes auditory driving, brain wave synchronization and a predominance of alpha and theta.  The latter suggests states in which images and information from the unconscious may be more readily accessed by the conscious mind. Thus, even if one does not accept the presence of a transpersonal source of healing power, there is evidence that both healer and healee access information from their own conscious regarding the disease and proper course of treatment.

     The precise methods of contacting the totem vary from tribe to tribe, from healer to healer.  Often the Native healer learns his art during vision quests, fasting and praying on a mountain top.  Each healer's method is unique.  To imitate it is considered insulting and shows a lack of recognition that in nature nothing repeats itself.

    Involvement of the community is one aspect of Native American healing that seems to cross all tribal boundaries.  Members of the tribe are generally invited to support healing by their presence, by focusing their healing intent and prayers, by singing and/or dancing.  The healer is often an orchestra leader, guiding and focusing the healing power.

     If the patient is seriously ill, it is presumed that the patient's connection with the totem is tenuous or that the totem has been lost, trapped in non-ordinary reality.  Then the healer may need to 'spirit travel' into these other realms to find the missing totem.  He/she may physically place it back in the patient's body by laying on of hands or by blowing it into the fontanel or chest of the patient.  Sandra Ingerman, in her important work Soul Retrieval (3) shows a great deal of psychological insight when she relates the missing totem to fragmented parts of the personality, aspects of oneself that have become inaccessible due to emotional trauma.  Whereas the western psychological model conceptualizes these fragments in the personal unconscious, the shamanic model sees the traumatized 'soul parts' as lost in other realities.  The Native healer must mentally/spiritually go to these realities and retrieve them.  Again, health is seen as wholeness and integration.

Honoring the Medicine:   Each person is born with a unique spiritual gift and talent.  Native Americans often refer to this gift as one's 'medicine'.  Medicine also includes the concepts of spiritual power, wisdom and totem.  We become ill when we do not honor that medicine.  As one of my elders expressed it, "No evil sorcerer can do as much harm to you as you can do to yourself."  In the Judaic tradition, God announces his name to Moses as 'I AM'.  God is the unqualified sense of being.  If we follow the words 'I AM' by qualities like 'stupid, unworthy, ashamed', then we are 'taking the name of the Lord in vain.'  This corresponds well to Native understanding.  We invite disease through what the elders like to simply call 'negative thinking'.

     As a corollary, we can say that disease is also caused by 'false positive thinking', masking our sorrows and frustrations with a smile.  On the SiSiWiss altar (a Native American healing tradition from the Northwest) are two candles.  A Nootka shaman explained to me that one candle symbolizes the positive, the light-seeking.  One candle symbolizes one's problems and dark places.  A spiritual individual looks at both.  In fact, there is a serious danger in practicing spiritual healing without both 'candles'.  If healers and other therapists are unwilling to face the shadow - a problem I see in some Native healers as well as many New Age practitioners - then we may create unhealing situations.  We may point the finger at others, blaming them for our own faults.  We may shut off patients' expression of feelings which make the healer/therapist uncomfortable.  We try to attract devotees who affirm an inflated self-image for the healer/therapist.  We dishonor the medicine by following a path that is false to our nature, by bending to the will of educational and religious institutions and conventions, by trying to fulfill the expectations of others.  Thus, turning a deaf ear to our 'original instructions', the unique message of the heart, we let our authentic gifts rot inside.  It is a paradox of western civilization that although we expound 'individualism', we fear to differ from the crowd or express our gifts in our own unique way.

     Native American healers present no dogma, no beliefs to follow.  The healer begins his/her session with counselling, finding out about the client's feelings, hopes, dreams, disappointments.  And as with all spiritual healers, much of this information is sensed nonverbally, through body langugage, tone of voice and energetic field (aura).  The Native American healer is concerned with how the client perceives himself, his family, his place in the world.  He/she helps the client to become aware of unconscious assumptions, makes suggestions for changes in life style, is gentle and compassionate when necessary but equally capable of scolding a client for indulging in fantasy or compulsive behavior.

     Counselling is often necessary to learn the psychosomatic causes of disease.  But the Native American healer also recognizes that for some individuals talking about the disease may be more a part of the problem than the cure.  Sometimes the problem is not that we haven't thought about things enough, but that we have thought too much and thus reinforced a fixed way of perceiving the understanding ourselves.  A Cherokee elder warns not to get too wrapped up in thinking, especially about the past.  He says, "If you think of the past, you are like a squirrel with a very long tail, always getting caught in the bushes."

    A sensitive healer already knows much about the client's 'medicine'.  The goal is to help the client discover that medicine for himself and learn to honor and express it.  Often, all that's needed is a reminder to pay attention, to listen to the guidance that Nature is always providing.  The Healer may show the way up the mountain path.  He/she has already been there.  The Healer may provide direction, encouragement and support so the individual can make that journey for himself.  Through 'vision quest', the seeker can commune with spirit and receive healing directly from Nature.  The gifts that are revealed are a medicine not only for the individual, but for the community, for All Relations.

1 Mander, Jerry.  In The Absence of the Sacred.  San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991

2 Jilek, Wolfgang G. Indian Healing.  Blaine, WA: Hancock House Publishers, 1982

3 Ingerman, Sandra.  Soul Retrieval. San Francisco: Harper, 1991\

Ken Cohen, M.A. also known as 'Bear Hawk' has been following the Native path for 20 years and has worked as an educator, traditional healer and counsellor in hospitals, prisons, universities and both native and non-native communities throughout the U.S. and Canada.  He was one of the 'exceptional healers' studies in the Copper Wall experiments at the Menninger Institute.  Ken is a member of the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge of the Senecas, an inititate of the Red Cedar Circle (SiSiWiss tradition) and a former apprentice to Rolling Thunder and several other elders.
 

You may quote from or reproduce these editorial clips if you include the following credits and email contact:
Copyright © Daniel J. Benor, M.D. 1992 Reprinted with permission of the author P.O. Box 76 Bellmawr, NJ 08099
www.WholisticHealingResearch.com   DB@WholisticHealingResearch.com 

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