Mar 16-18, 2007
Stories can help us explore the inner landscape of our body, discover the source of illness, draw on the resources of our spirit guides, and reduce suffering. During this retreat we will explore traditional, contemporary, and personal stories. Lewis will tell us traditional Native American stories and explore their deeper meanings. The characters have much to teach us about ourselves and our relationships. The plots are being replayed in our lives and culture. Our ancestors sent us messages within these stories containing wisdom intended for us. The stories set the stage for ceremony and ritual that serve as a way of enacting these stories.
We will work on our own stories. What do we tell about ourselves? What would we prefer to tell? What stories do others tell about us? What are the sources of these stories? How do they provide us with an identity? How are they related to our health or our disease?
We will enact a traditional Native American ritual based on a story about nature, spirit, mind, body, and the world. We’ll sing and pray together and experience shared healing within Lewis’ cultural origins. We’ll construct a ceremony that includes all our stories and elements of the peoples represented in our group. We’ll use talking circles to develop a ceremony and to attach story to the ceremony we are developing. We’ll define its purpose and meaning and then, after some practice and discussion, enact this ceremony.
We’ll conclude our retreat by looking into the future to see how we can use our discoveries for growth and development, how we can use stories in healing and psychotherapy, and how we can incorporate ceremony and ritual into our lives.
Thanks to his Cherokee great-grandmother, Lewis Mehl-Madrona has known Native American healing practices since he was a boy. His people believed that God heals people and that Lewis saw miracles. Now he’s grown into an internationally renowned physician and a leader in integrative medicine, combining the Western medicine he learned at Stanford Medical School with the traditional medicines he’s known all his life. He earned a Ph.D. in Psychological Studies, wrote Coyote Medicine: Lessons for Healing from Native America and three other books, and specializes in family medicine, emergency room work, and psychiatry. He has taught at six medical schools, educating doctors in how best to blend conventional medicine with the healing traditions of Native America and other indigenous cultures.
“Coyote Medicine is… medicine of the future that must be taught in medical schools, practiced in clinics, and brought to all those who seek true health.”
— Andrew Weil, M.D.
”Forty years from now medicine will be unrecognizable from what it is today, in a positive way. In an ideal setting, we’d start by treating minor symptoms with lifestyle adjustment and with psychotherapy, then graduate into herbal medicines or more aggressive natural therapies, then move into pharmaceuticals or surgical therapies. There’s a natural progression in which so-called alternative therapies are actually complementary and take their place as prevention, as early treatment, and as helpful treatments even in cases where someone has a severe illness and is on multiple medications.”
—Lewis Mehl-Medrona, M.D., Ph.D.