Christmas 2008

Hello Everyone and Mele Kalikimaka (Merry Christmas),

Since my last post, I have been on Thom Hartmann's radio show in Portland, Oregon, which was really fun, since I got to speak for over an hour about Christmas depression. Then, an evening lecture at the New Renaissance Book Store in Portland. I'll be back in Portland, April 9-11, 2009, again on Thom Hartmann's show (April 10th) at the New Renaissance, April 9th, and speaking on Native American Health Disparities, Friday evening and all day Saturday.

Now I'm in Hawai'i. I got to sit at my new desk at Argosy University on Monday, which was fun, and I went surfing today, which was intimidating. I finished my new book, Narrative Psychiatry: healing mind and brain in a social world, and sent it to the publisher. I also got my papers graded for my last class at the University of Saskatchewan.

Today, I'm working on a book chapter about healing intergenerational trauma. I'm reflecting upon how children absorb the impact that events have upon their parents without ever having to experience these events. Residential schools had that impact. Generations of children who never attended residential school got the full impact through their parents. How does that happen? We learn the stories that our parents tell. We learn to perceive the world in this way. We then react to the world in this way and that resets our physiology.

Here's the abstract for the article:

Trauma to indigenous people has been more the exception than the rule during the era of colonization. Entire cultures were virtually decimated by disease (smallpox, hepatitis A, etc.) and forced to accept one sided treaties to avoid starvation. This phenomenon frequently occurs among Aboriginal populations who were forced to endure forced assimilation at the hands of European settlers. Among the British-derived colonies turned nations, the residential school phenomenon forged new waves of abuse that are still reverberating. The introduction of residential schools in the late 1800s emphasized the suppression of Aboriginal culture and institutionalized intergenerational trauma. The residential school experience led to increased feelings of fear, anxiety, helplessness, and increased maladaptive behaviors related to alcoholism, family discord, and high suicide rates (Bryant-Davis, 2007; Duran, 2006).

The concept of inter-generational trauma relates to trauma that is inflicted upon a subsequent generation by the behaviors engendered by the effects of trauma on the older generation. Intergenerational trauma results in the transferring of emotions related to a traumatic experience from one generation to another. This trauma can be direct through parents re-enacting the abuse they received upon their children. It can be indirect through the transmission of an expectation for being traumatized and behavior patterns that result from trauma without directly abusing the child. In this chapter, we will consider how inter-generational trauma arises, persists, and will ask how it has been healed and it can be further healed in aboriginal environments in North America and around the world.

I want to tell the story of being kicked out of Canada, since it's one of the more bizarre experiences of my life, but it's also a message that Creator has a different plan for me. To my complete shock and amazement, on October 15th, I got a response from Canada Immigration in Los Angeles about my application for permanent residency. I had just been declared "criminally inadmissible" to Canada because of a traffic violation in Arizona in 2005 for which I paid a $200 fine. I had a misadventure with a red light late one evening when no one else was around. I didn't realize that the U-turn green arrow (which always followed the red light) was turned off after 9:30 pm and I habitually turned, only there wasn't a green arrow like in the daytime and a cop was sitting there and bingo! Little did I realize this would someday make me a "criminal" in Canada. The ticket dropped from my record after three years and I have a clean driving record now in the U.S. What's even more funny was that the same Immigration people knew about this from the time I entered Canada and it was no big deal for me when I got a work permit in 2005 and in 2007. Apparently policy changed, or this is what I was told by a Saskatchewan provincial judge with whom I became acquainted. The new policy as of July 2008 is to treat all traffic stops in the U.S. as "felonies" in Canada. Strange.

So that's a long way of saying I had to rethink my life plan. Besides focusing more on teaching rather than clinical practice (I'm teaching psychology now at Argosy University and anthropology at Johnson State College), I'm throwing my creative energy into the newly formed Coyote Institute (for Studies of Change and Transformation) which is a way to blend and re-energize indigenous wisdom with the post-modern world. Anyway, our two main current projects are 1) the Hahokah Project, which is to create a healing circle in every living room in the world, and 2) the Traditional Healing Project, which is to create a network through Second Life of traditional healers from around the world who can connect with each other and can also be reached by anyone interested in traditional cultural healing. We're slowly building all this at www.coyoteinstitute.org.

Lewis

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

Bugs

I am sitting in the shadows of Mt. Mansfield, in Stowe, Vermont, waiting for my son to wake up. We're going to a sweat lodge in Weybridge, Vermont, that we built last weekend. This will be the second time this lodge has been used. We'll leave at 0930, so I better wake him up at 0900. It's 0830 now.

I just finished three intensive retreats (one partial week), the other two, a week, and more than a week. I wanted to talk about the power of community for healing, the way that we have so much more power for healing. When we had three people together it was more than twice as powerful as two people. Five people were even more powerful. We forget that in conventional medicine when we try to keep people alone in little rooms with us.

I wondered about the kind of world we would have if medicine were more like intensive retreats than it is. We would need to make a big shift in how we think about illness and practice medicine. Current medical practice is primarily aimed at doing whatever it takes, mostly with drugs and surgery, to create a physiological state in which we can’t see physical evidence of disease and the person stops complaining of symptoms. It’s an “anti;” approach. We use antibiotics, anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, analgesics, anti-anxiety agents, etc. Most of our classes of medications can start with the letter “a”. How would medicine look different if we saw illness as an aspect of life, part of the human stories that we live, and not necessarily an external evil attacking us that needs to be destroyed or attacked back. I suppose our current metaphor is the immune system, in which natural killer cells absorb invading bacteria. What this model fails to take into account are the many healthy relationships we maintain with micro-organisms. The environment is not as unfriendly as contemporary medicine imagines. I suspect that what we do with our antibiotics is to kill our friends and strengthen our enemies, perhaps a parallel to what has happened in the various Gulf Wars.

What amazes me is the current terror people seem to feel about germs. I'd like to stimulate some discussion around this. I know people who claim to have had various infectious that my medical training says is impossible. Some have been cured with homeopathic injections, others with months of intraveous antibiotic therapy, others with ceremony and ritual and no antibiotics at all. I think homeopathics have other effects than just ridding the body of germs, some of those effects being quite profound. I have injected Traumeel for joint problems and have been impressed with it and/or the placebo effect associated with it. I got some old ladies in Tucson off steroid injections (which I know are bad for joints) and onto Traumeel injections. Was it placebo or Traumeel? Only God Knows and she's not telling.

Anyway, does anyone know about this approach to illness of using cotton balls to look for germs and then devising remedies energetically (I assume they use a computer system that puts the desired energy into solution) though I don't know. Dr. Schultz is one of the people involved and then there is a person named David in Colorado who makes remedies also. I probably should have gotten more proper nouns from my friend, but didn't.

So here's my question, to myself and anyone reading this, and I found out, as I mentioned in my last post, that some people do read this, because Mothering Magazine read my blog, which actually really touched me. When are germs good and when are germs bad?

I suspect there are some really bad germs that are probably human created, like HIV or Ebola virus. I suspect we have done something to the environment to facilitate the creation of super bad bugs, because I don't think nature would be so stupid as to create something so lethal.

But what about worms, parasites, spirochetes, etc.? We know that children in Third World countries have virtually no asthma or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. The argument is that their parasites shift their cytokine balance in such a way that they don't get these conditions because the resources are needed to fight bugs and parasites. However, children in New York City, which I suspect is the most germ-fearing city on earth, have tremendous high rates of asthma and JRA. Is it actually healthy to avoid bugs or does it hurt us in other ways? Are bugs our friends?

That's what I meant by the "anti" paragraph above. It seems we're against all life but our own and perhaps our own lives require the lives of our invisible friends to be whole. What if we need germs to be well! My New York friend talked about her doctor seeing spirochetes and staphyloccus in her live blood cell analysis. I had trouble believing that given my training. It seemed that she would be dead if she spirochete or staphylococcal septicemia. Nevertheless, I could believe that immune cells could float around in blood that have encountered these critters at some time and have memory of them. But that's not what the live cell analysis people were claiming.

Leo Omani, who is a healer on Wahpeton Dakota Reserve in Saskatchewan tells his children to tell their children to eat dirt because it will make them healthy. A lot of elders in Saskatchewan believe in the healing power for young children of eating dirt. Could dirt have had protective factors that made it less likely to get TB or smallpox?

I suspect that most of what we do with our medicines is kill the friendlies and encourage the growth of the super-bad-bugs. I know that the death rate from infection began to decline in 1856 with the improvement of plumbing and its implementation and that the slope for the rate of decline didn't change with the introduction of antibiotics on a widespread basis. The argument would be that those we save with antibiotics are balanced out by those we kill with antibiotics (Stevens-Johnson Syndrome, anaphylaxis, overgrowth of Clostridium, etc. etc.). I never cease to be amazed at how physicians hand out antibiotics. I suspect it would be better if they were over the counter like Mexico so that everyone could buy penicillin, ampicillin, etc., and might stop there, because the physicians hand out samples of things like Levaquin or even more powerful new drugs. They do this for conditions that probably won't respond to antibiotics anyway, though all patients expect them now. The name says it all -- "against life."

My friend in New York hesitates to even shake the hand of those who might have bugs. She wants everyone she knows to get checked for bugs and treated. Of course, the treatments might be helpful independent of the bugs, and perhaps homeopathy played a large role in her recovery. I don't know.

I do find my New York friends who are afraid to walk on grass for fear of bugs somewhat amusing. What a state when people are afraid of grass. (It might have deer tics hiding in wait to ambush the unsuspecting humans).

But what about all the bugs who do abound -- hepatitis C is an example of a virus that deserves respect. Those bugs can cause dreadful disease, though I know people who are living well with hepatitis C and have learned to accomodate it to them, and them to it.

Thoughts?

Narrative Medicine and the Audience

I am in Stony Rapids at the top of Saskatchewan. I just took off the article from Mothering on Hypnosis and Birth because I thought they had published it long ago and it turns out they haven't yet published it! They saw it up on the blog and asked it to be taken down. What amazed me was that someone actually read my blog (e.g., the editors at Mothering). There's an illusion I suppose that no one is out there. I'll have to check with them if it's ok to leave up the original paper from the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis 2004, but I suspect that it is. My apologies to mothering. And thanks for giving me the experience that someone actually reads this blog.

That brought my awareness to a message from Renae on Coyote Wisdom discussion group. She was writing about Bakhtin's perspective that all dialogue involves an audience. She wrote about Bakhtin's perspective on our internal, silent dialogue always being for someone. She brought my awareness even further to the importance of the audience in what we do. In our most silent and alone moments, isn't every one of us aware of being watched. Some would say we have created an imaginary audience. Other pre-moderns would say the spirits and the ancestors are always watching us, which is a feeling I have -- of my grandparents and other spirits watching what I do, which, of course, makes me accountable to my perception of what they would think of what I am doing.

So the stories that we perpetually live are being lived for someone. Who is our audience? Who are these "ghosts within" who watch what we are doing and planning. I think what Bakhtin was getting at was the way conversations are memoralized. We don't just store the story. In order to properly store the story, we must store the context in which it occurred and the audience who heard it. Whenever I remember with language, it seems that I am telling a story (silently, of course), but to someone. When I remember without language, then I feel what happened to me, but it seems that there is no way of changing or resolving without language. The non-language parts of the story are immutable without the words themselves which allow us to change the tone. So when I start to tell myself a story, I use words and their associated images and I do imagine an audience. Sometimes it is a friend. Sometimes I have the feeling that my grandfather is listening. Sometimes I imagine some element of the Greatest Mystery being aware of me and my tale. Always there's someone.

So when Renae wondered how changing the audience would change the story, that became central to my meditations today. When a person enters our office, they come not only with multiple stories begging to be heard, but also with multiple audiences who listen as well to these stories and influence their telling. In our interviews and discussions, we need to be more conscious in asking about the audience. Perhaps, we should ask, who do you think about when you are alone? Do you ever have the experience of feeling that you are rehearsing what you will say to someone in your mind? We'll have to be careful because the experience of what actually happens within us sounds psychotic to the conventional psychiatric mind. To me, I suspect voices in part arise from these internally constructed imaginal beings who eventually become able to talk back to us or comment on us. When we lose the story that goes with them, they become "as if disembodied." The voice loses its context and remains to torment the individual. Psychotic voices, by the way, are almost always disturbing and critical these days. Once upon a time, perhaps they were more spiritual.

More later....

Where I grew up!

I thought I'd start a series on my background, since people wonder. Here's where I was born. More images to follow next time i get the time to post. This was mostly about figuring out how to put up images in the blog.

Lewis

American Psychiatric Association 2008

Dear friends,

I'm here in Washington, D.C., at the American Psychiatric Association's 161st annual convention. What a trip! I now realize that anything besides drugs is considered alternative medicine. I do remember when family therapy and community therapy was considered ordinary. Now it is alternative. Doing anything besides prescribing drugs is alternative.

It is so interesting to speculate upon their story, their world view -- materialist, yes. Contextualist, no. Almost solipsistic in their sense that everything arises from genes in brain and nothing is environmental determined. It's fundamentalist in the sense that it insists upon a view despite contradictory evidence that the brain develops and is shaped and formed by a social environment. In its materialism, it is infinitely afraid of magic. If you believe in magic or spirits, you are crazy.

So here's the next course I am teaching at Johnson State University in Vermont:

Syllabus: Multi-cultural Traditional Healing
Johnson State University, Summer 2008
Instructor: Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Required Textbooks:

Coyote Healing: Miracles from Native Medicine
By Lewis Mehl-Madrona
Contributor: Larry Dossey, M.D.
Published 2007Inner Traditions
Medical / AlternativeMedicine
256 pages
ISBN:1594770085


Distills the basic principles used by Native American healers to create miracles. Explores the power of miracles in both traditional Native American healing and modern scientific medicine. Cites numerous cases in which people whose conditions were deemed hopeless were miraculously healed. Enables readers to start their own healing journey through the exploration of purpose, meaning, and acceptance. By the author of "Coyote Medicine". Native American healers expect miracles and prepare in all possible ways for them to occur. In modern medicine, miraculous recoveries are discarded from studies as anomalous cases that will taint the otherwise orderly results. Yet this small group of ?miracle? patients has much to teach us about healing and survival. "Coyote Healing "distills the common elements in miracle cures to help people start their own healing journey. Looking at 100 cases of individuals who experienced miracle cures, Dr. Mehl-Madrona reveals what he learned from both his own practice and the interviews he conducted with survivors about the common features of their path back to wellness. Survivors found purpose and meaning in their life-threatening illness; peaceful acceptance was key to their healing. "Coyote Healing "also tells of another kind of miracle: finding faith, hope, and serenity even when a cure seems impossible.

Papers to be posted on the class web site about Eurasian healing/shamanism, translated by Andrei Vinogradov.



Preview this book


By Uwe P. Gielen, Jefferson M. Fish, Juris G. Draguns
Contributor Uwe P. Gielen, Jefferson M. Fish, Juris G. Draguns
Published 2004Routledge
Healing
433 pages
ISBN:0805849246
Emotional, as well as physical distress, is a heritage from our hominid ancestors; it has been experienced by every group of human beings since our emergence as a species. And every known culture has developed systems of conceptualization and intervention for addressing it. The editors have brought together leading psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and others to consider the interaction of psychosocial, biological, and cultural variables as they influence the assessment of health and illness and the course of therapy. The volume includes broadly conceived theoretical and survey chapters; detailed descriptions of specific healing traditions in Asia, the Americas, Africa, and the Arab world. TheHandbook of Culture, Therapy, and Healingis a unique resource, containing information about Western therapies practiced in non-Western cultures, non-Western therapies practiced both in their own context and in the West.

Class outline:

Friday, July 25th: Overview of North American traditional healing practices. We will follow the basic structure of Coyote Healing to explore how traditional Northern Plains North American healers work. We will look at stories of miracles and how they happen. We will explore the concept of the medicine wheel and each of the four directions. The experiential component of the time will focus on a guided imagery around the medicine wheel, exploring our four inner directions.

Saturday, July 26th: We will explore Eurasian shamanism and its relationship to other shamanic practices. Our text will be an unpublished manuscript written by Russian anthropologists and ethnographers and translated by Andrei Vinogradov who will be joining us for our online discussions after the weekend. In the morning, we will look at what happened to shamans under the Soviet system and how things changed when the Soviet Union collapsed. We will see how this influenced contemporary shamanism today. We will look at the similarities of shamanic practices across regions and the range of shamanic practices that are possible – sucking, feathering, fanning, blowing, smoking, etc. We will cross a range of Eurasian practices based upon the reading and will explore what is common and what is unique about traditional healing in a range of Northern Eurasian regions.

Sunday, July 27th: We will consider the following topics:

Culture and the Origins of Psychopathology
psychopathology, cultural evolution, Pongids

The Role of Culture in Definitions Interpretations
African American, asthma, Medical Anthropology

A Biopsychosocial Perspective on Crosscultural Healing
placebo effect, Psychoneuroimmunology, classical conditioning

The Role of Culture in the Treatment of Culturally Diverse Populations
African Americans, Young Rivers, Asian Americans

Culturally Oriented Psychotherapy with Refugees
refugees, Asian, mental health

The Role of Dance in a Navajo Healing Ceremonial
labanotation, Navajo Nation, Navajo Music
more »
The Therapeutic Aspects of Salish Spirit Dance Ceremonials
Coast Salish, British Columbia, Spiritualist healers

A Gendered Exploration in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico, mental health professionals, Spiritist

Theories and Methods
qigong, acupuncture, Taoist

A Criteriabased Metaanalysis
qigong, alternative medicine, hypertension

Psychoanalysis and Buddhism
Transpersonal Psychology, Tibetan Buddhism, contemplative disciplines

Naikan Therapy
Morita therapy, Taijin Kyofusho, Naikan therapy

Indian Conceptions of Mental Health Healing and the Individual
Ayurvedic, dharma, moksha

Problems of Insight
Angola, Yoruba, Babalawo

Native Healing in ArabIslamic Societies
Qur'an, jinn, dhikr

The online discussion group will continue until the end of the term and will involve discussion of the above topics. Students will be required to post one long and 5 short posts each week. A long post consists of a full computer screen. A short post is responsive and of any length.

The written requirement for the course is to create a document worthy of posting upon the class website. Students will dialogue with the instructor about quality until a mutually satisfactory document (or movie, or slide show, or multi-media presentation arises).

Students are also required to keep a diary or a blog about how their reactions to the reading and how it changes them or their concepts and what they have learned.