Dear Anyone whose Reading,

I'm restarting my blog after several months hiatus.

What's new!

We've started Coyote Institute (for Studies of Change and Transformation) in earnest!. How exciting. We're a Mississippi Corporation and are applying for non-profit status. You can learn more about what we're doing on the google discussion groups for coyotemedicine and coyotewisdom. We're planning a non-hierarchical organization with a governing council of seven people. In a very real sense, we're trying to build a tribe and are fostering the growth of dens all over the place. Before we achieve non-profit status, we can still accept your help through another non-profit who's nursing us along from pup-hood to adulthood.

Also, my website has changed to www.mehl-madrona.com and, as well, there is a developing website for Coyote Institute at www.coyoteinstitute.org.

Coyote Institute has two initial projects (and more as the various dens dream and plan and vision and sing and dance):

1) Hocokah Project. We want to encourage everyone everywhere to be part of a healing circle. We will have information on the Coyote Institute web site about how to start a hocokah, how to manage a healing circle, how to have leaderless leadership, and more. We will have a discussion group for working out difficulties and reporting successes, a place for collecting stories of results and outcomes (also known as research), and a directory of circles that people can join.

2) Traditional Healing Network. We are seeking to create a cyber-community for healers from all around the world, so that healers can communicate with each other, can network, can be found by people anywhere who are drawn to their healing system. We envision healers "studying" themselves, a break from the usual way they are studied by anthropologists. By that we mean healers reflecting upon their approaches, what they do, how it works, why it works. I am especially interested in diabetes and in so-called "mental illnesses", but others may have other interests. We are considering a software platform called Second Life for managing these connections.

I'm personally really interested in re-visioning research so that people themselves ask questions of relevance in collaboration with each other, as opposed to our current academic framework.

Of other relevance is my move to Argosy University in Honolulu, Hawai'i, where I'll be the Director of their Psychopharmacology Program and also an Associate Professor. This January I'll be teaching Neuropsychology, Quantitative Inquiry, and Stats Lab. In the summer, I'll be teaching Narrative Psychology. More later.... I'm getting winter tires and they just got placed onto the truck and it's ready to roll.

Lewis