Tagged with Native American

As a physician, a Western-trained scientist, I believed everything could be explained. In Indian Country I got to meet some traditional healers. When I saw what the medicine man did, I thought that was magical, but they saw their practice as perfectly logical and explainable. Working with American Indians changed my life; they challenged my medical school assumptions about how people got sick and how they got well. Part 1 of the memoir Kindling Spirit: Healing from Within. (more)

Storytellers need to find new fireplaces around which to tell the tale, and Reality Sandwich is one; a community of kindred spirits who share a mythology about how to sustain ourselves (and the planet) in a civil society. Kindling Spirit: Healing from Within, is my story about ordinary triumphs, tragedies, miracles, indigenous wisdom, radical self-acceptance, shamanic healing, and altered states of consciousness; they all reveal how, if we are willing to look at the familiar in new ways, we can create new endings to old stories. (more)

When the peyote takes effect and the energy really gets rolling, the songs begin to sing the singers, the drum is a living spirit, and the fire has things to show us. It's a radically different way to pray. If we can find skillful ways to combine the visionary, teaching, healing medicines with our intentions, with our prayers, a whole new landscape of possibility opens up. (more)