Post-graduate Training for Health Practitioners

Certificate Program in Narrative and Indigenous Healing for Health Practitioners: a project sponsored with the Center for Narrative Studies of the Coyote Institute

Center for Narrative and Indigenous Studies (of the Coyote Institute): A Four Year Training Program in Narrative Studies for …(Medicine, Psychiatry, Psychology, Social Work, Counseling, and other human service disciplines).

This page describes the training. For logistics, please visit the page entitled "Post-graduate Training Logistics".

Goal: To further the development of a body of knowledge which integrates indigenous wisdom and practice with modern science and humanities. We aim to enrich your life and professional practice with the wisdom, medicine, culture, and spirituality of the indigenous world and provide a means to bridge indigenous culture with the post-modern world through a narrative approach, thereby teaching and honoring the wisdom of the ages and of diverse cultures, and incorporating it into our modern practice of the healing arts.”

Description of the Training:

Year 1:

A) Narrative Medicine: the role of story in illness,making meaning of illness, and meaning-full illness.

Post-modern philosophy provides a basis for understanding and integrating diverse cultures with equal validity. Social constructionism provides a way of understanding how we create our methods for healing and curing through our networks of social relationships. It downplays the role of the expert or the idea of privileged knowledge, and supports the idea of local knowledge developed by particular communities for particular contexts and needs. The wisdom of any particular culture arises from its context in geography, history, and networks of relationships to other cultures. That wisdom may not be relevant to other communities and cultures except in the sense of learning how practices arise out of context and need. Translation is necessary between cultures to consider what elements of one culture can inspire, aid, and inform another culture. Dialogue is necessary for this to happen. Through dialogue members of diverse cultures share perspectives and come to understand how local practices have arisen and whether parts or wholes of them can be useful to other cultures. Narrative practices acknowledge that these powerful cross-cultural dialogues take place through the telling of stories. Cultures maintain their integrity through their traditional stories. The passage of stories from generation to generation represents the preservation of culture. In our post-modern world of contact with multiple cultures, elements of culture pass across previously rigid cultural boundaries to enrich and inform other cultures through the global dialogue. Applied quantum theory gives us a natural science framework to understand how cultures “in-form” their members how to belong and actually shape members to achieve better fits and to evolve in culturally desired directions. Concepts of holism, non-locality, non-separability, and connectivity inform our understanding of how change occurs and practices evolve.The wisdom of indigenous cultures represents a radically different view of healing and curing than modern biomedicine. The biomedical perspective is exclusionary and dismissive in its insistence that it is the most valid and effective paradigm for healing and curing. Multiple voices are dismissed by this dominant discourse. A value and belief is emerging among a segment of health care practitioners that the wisdom of indigenous cultures and their practices are needed within modern health care in order to be more effective and compassionate. We have encountered the limits of the pharmaceutical industry as well as some downsides to the exclusive practice of constructing problems as belonging to individuals and solving them with drugs. While this method can produce results, we recognize that other ways of conceiving problems may be equally effective and more desirable.

This course will be offered March 3rd and 4th in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with ongoing online follow-up discussions and lectures.

B) Narrative Approaches to Mind and Mental Health: the stories that guide our concepts of mind, mental health, mental illness, and treatment.

1) What are the stories that guide our thoughts about mind, mental health, and how to treat the accompanying suffering.

2) What can we learn from indigenous cultures and their views about mind and mental health?

3) How do we help people to identify the stories that guide their suffering and change those stories?

This course will be offered through the American Institute of Medical Education on line with live lectures and discussion groups starting in late January 2011. See www.creativityandmadness.org for more details.

C) Narrative Healing: Changing story for therapeutic purposes

        1)     What is narrative, what is culture, what is healing? What is the relation of healing to medicine and to psychotherapy?
        2)     Techniques for changing story.
        3)     Art, dance, and movement for transformation and change.
       4)     Novels, plays, and performances for transformation and change.

This course will be offered November 18 to 20, 2011 in conjunction with Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health where it is called, Changing Story, Changing Self. See www.kripalu.org for more details.

D) Reading and Writing Medical Narratives; medical fiction; the art of the case study.

Year 2:

A) Therapeutic uses of imagery and visualization in healing

We will learn how indigenous cultures use storytelling, imagery, and visualization as part of the healing and curing process. One tribe, for example, uses a practice that translates literally as “putting them to sleep so that they dream like they’re asleep, but they’re really awake.” Stories are crucial to indigenous cultures. Some scholars have argued that our modern culture suffers in its loss of traditional stories. We will explore how stories inspire people to believe that they can be healed or cured. Stories revision people’s sense of what healing and curing means and how it comes to pass. Within the modern world, Alcoholics Anonymous provides an example of the healing power of stories. Through testimonials, other alcoholics learn to believe that they can stay sober also. The Native American Church and other cultural practices also use stories to inspire transformation. Storytelling requires the use of language as rhetoric, including the power of persuasion (often called hypnosis in the modern European-American world). Evocative visual images make the story more powerful.

B) Therapeutic uses of hypnotherapy/hypnosis and storytelling.

Words have served healers, doctors, priests and politicians from time immemorial. In this three day workshop we will learn the art of speaking the language of healing. We will consider how words affect attitudes, change beliefs, and nurture faith. Through our words, deep inner resources for self-love are kindled which become physiological changes. In at least one Creation story, the Word was sufficiently powerful to create the world.

We do maintain our identities with the words of our stories about ourselves and perhaps our stories also maintain the integrity of our body, for words are physical events, spoken by people through bodies with vibrational energy and the capacity to change those who hear these words.

Hypnosis is the art of speaking persuasively. In hypnotherapy we aim to facilitate a movement toward greater health and the reduction of suffering and pain. We persuade people to relinquish old self- deleterious stories in order to embrace those that are more life affirming.

In North America many indigenous cultures use storytelling, imagery, and visualization as part of the healing and curing process. One tribe, for example, uses a practice that translates literally as “putting them to sleep so that they dream like they’re asleep, but they’re really awake.” Stories are crucial to indigenous cultures. Some scholars have argued that our modern culture suffers in its loss of traditional stories. We will explore how stories inspire people to believe that they can be healed or cured. Stories revision people’s sense of what healing and curing means and how it comes to pass. Storytelling requires the use of language as rhetoric, including the power of persuasion (hypnosis). Evocative visual images make the story more powerful.

With voice, tonality, phrasing, and words we can change our body reality, transforming sickness to health; despair to hope; and misery to happiness. Our words flow with pictures of mountain streams, armies of blood cells, and the eternal peace of the soul. What words do we choose? How do we breathe these words? How do we learn to speak the poetry of the spirit? With this attitude, we will flow between the analytic side of technique and the experiential side of storytelling and poetry, striking a balance that will aid in the restoration of wellness for ourselves and our clients. This workshop will aim at professional development through personal experience, combining self-healing opportunities with consideration of technique and method.

Contemporary practitioners of hypnotherapy, particularly those influenced by Dr. Milton H. Erickson, depend to a large extent on their ability to a) enter into trance along with their clients, and b) invoke trance and powerful changes in trance, through ‘special linguistic circumstances’. Hypnotic language patterns encourage us to ‘invent’ our own grammar. Our minds are conditioned to receive verbal communication in certain ‘grammatically correct’ patterns. When we receive communications that have been coded differently, it creates confusion and opens the door for new and creative ways of thinking. Successful and creative hypnotherapists put more poetry into their inductions. They may even experiment with singing, chanting, or whispering to their clients while they are in trance.

Beside the words comes the music of delivery. A certain rhythm and cadence develops, seemingly by itself, as our conscious mind withdraws into the background. We begin to supply a surprising thread of images and metaphors… often with internal rhyme and rhythm! Having collected information during the intake and pre-talk with the client, we can weave a story with this thread of images and metaphors.

The use of hypnotic fables and storytelling is another overlap between traditional healing practices and the work of Dr. Erickson (who studied with the local Chippewa) and those who followed in his footsteps.

“[Traditional] healers lacking in any formal education often
demonstrate a masterful command of language in telling stories. With
their stories, they communicate complex ideas about love, forgiveness,
faith, hope, and self-transformation. They practice the sophisticated
art of a master hypnotherapist without ever demonstrating any
awareness of the techniques they are using. They use the ancient art
of storytelling – a masterful tool of persuasion and, no doubt, the
mother of hypnosis.” — Coyote Wisdom

The techniques of the imaginative hypnotherapist, like those of the traditional healer, may utilize unusual objects or artifacts in the treatment room: sound and light machines to induce alpha-theta brainwave states; burning of sage, incense, or aromatherapy with essential oils to anchor state-dependent learning in the limbic system; playing of special trance-inducing musical sounds (repetitive drumming, harmonic chanting, singing bowls, etc) which are outside of the client’s normal reality.

In Imagery In Healing: Shamanism and Modern Medicine, in describingthe healings performed by Navaho medicine men, Jeanne Achterberg says “there is emphasis on song, prayer, body painting, sweating and emetic (the purification), and vigil for concentration and clarity of thought… Throughout the long ritual, the patient is involved in symbolic drama, especially as he is encouraged to continuously develop and sustain images of the personal healing process.” Later, in the same chapter, Achterberg mentions Dr. Bergman, a physician who studied in a Navaho school for ‘medicine men’. “Bergman conducted an hypnosis demonstration for those healers with whom he was studying. He said that instead of looking half asleep, as they usually did during their meetings, they watched in wide-eyed wonder (although he noted that they scarcefly seemed to be breathing). Thomas Largewhiskers, a venerated 100-year-old medicine man, said he was surprised to see that white men knew anything so worthwhile!”

In 2011, we will offer this course in a three day format in Malibu, California, from January 27 - 30 with continued online discussion and training.:

       On the first day, we will demonstrate hypnotic technique from our respective standpoints which integrate much from indigenous perspectives, both Native American and Tibetan. We wil consider briefly some theory -- namely the neuroscience behind hypnosis and trance and will reflect upon the nature of the trance
state, upon absorption, flow, immersion, inter-connectedness, and those aspects of consciousness which are compatible with accelerated learning. We will videorecord our demonstration and will discuscs the
elements of technique with participants who will then practice technique with our guidance. In the afternoon, we will further elaborate upon hypnotic technique with an indigenous flavor and will focus upon how hypnosis can be used to change the body, to modify physical illness, and to reduce pain that Is considered in biomedicine
to be physical. We will look at the power of suggestion upon physiology. We will this time do a group hypnotic exercise and will review technique and motivations. We will practice together with guidance.

       On the second day, we will add storytelling into our mix, considering what makes a good story, a healing story, and a powerful story, asking how we tell these stories as part of our therapeutic work. We will look at storytelling as the original hypnosis from time immemorial and reflect upon how a story maintains audience attention and how stories elicit trance states. There can be deeply encoded messages for change in story that bypass conscious resistance – these may consist of universally shared myths, or fables, both ancient and modern; or of client specific stories, constructed with that particular client’s situation in mind. Or of anecdotal stories, meant to convey an underlying (hidden) message to the client’s unconscious mind. We will see how the elements of technique that we reviewed on Saturday are also the elements of good storytelling and will see how indigenous elders, healers, and storytellers have used these techniques long before there were hypnosis training courses, as these techniques naturally arise from the intuitive understanding of language and its effect on the body. We will practice telling stories as part of our hypnotic work, both as a stand alone event and within a larger hypnosis sesssion.

       On the third day, we will continue to demonstrate and practice, including now the use of guided imagery In hypnosis, exploring how to utilize the resources of memories of one’s personal experiences to choose metaphoric images – primarily from the natural world. We will review ideomotor technique, signaling methods, and enactments with the body that aid in trance induction and symptom relief. This includes various arm lift techniques, post-hypnotic suggestions, walking hypnosis, and body positioning. We will work with a participant who has a particular afflication to demonstrate how hypnosis can be used for that person/purpose and will continue to provide supervised practice time to integrate what is being learned people's ongoing practice.


C) Narrative as Performance: drama, ceremony and ritual

       1) Enacting ceremony and ritual. Why are ceremonies and rituals important? How does using dramatic (in the sense of acting physically) practices affect our conception of what we are doing. We will consider the common elements of rituals and ceremonies from multiple cultures and will consider the usefulness in health practice of daily ceremonies. These can include welcoming the dawn, greeting the twilight, removing adverse energy or entities, purification ceremonies, vision quests, and other specific practices of local tribes or groups. We will explore the concept of spiritual entities and various concepts of how they interact with humans, especially in reference to health and disease.

       2) Enacting the story of the illness.

       3) Family and historical reconstruction/Resurrecting the story.

D)    Working with Psyche and Substance:

In this course we will explore plant spirit medicine, nutrition and herbs. Indigenous cultures have different views of plants and natural therapies than the natural products biochemical point of view of European-American cultures. We wish to explore and preserve these alternative points of view regarding herbs and plants and animals and their use in healing and curing. These points of view include the idea of communicating with the spirit of plants to learn what the plants want to heal.This course will begin in August 2011 at the Creativity and Madness conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a lecture with afternoon discussion group and then Friday and Saturday workshop.

Year 3:

A) Narrative and the Body: The Physical Story; Indigenous bodywork/osteopathy

Every culture provides hands-on therapies. On Zuni pueblo, in New Mexico, for example, high velocity adjustment practices developed parallel to and preceding the development of chiropractic medicine in Iowa. Stories exist about chiropractic arising from the study of existing Native American methods. Hawai’ians have lomilomi, Cherokee have a well-developed style of bodywork, as did Apaches. In this module, we will learn one type of manual therapy from an indigenous culture, aimed at incorporation into local practices and also preservation of particular styles of practice that are in danger of extinction. We will explore the use of dialogue during touch therapies.This course will be offered through Kripalu Institute, May 1st through May 6th, 2011 as "Cherokee Bodywork". See www.kripalu.org for more details.

B) Energy Medicine

Energy healing is a common aspect of the indigenous world, largely dropped by modern biomedicine. Multiple types of energy healing practices exist. Cherokee culture, for example, uses hands on the body, hands over the body, the shaking of rattles, burning of herbs, use of crystals, and the use of feathers and feather fans to move energy. Cherokee also practices an acupuncture-like process of inserting needles (thorns, porcupine quills) into specific points along meridians to remove energy blockages. In this module, we will consider the concept of energy – what is it, how does it work, how do we work with it, what happens when we work with energy. We recognize that these are constructions to guide us and not necessarily absolutely true, but rather models to guide our practices. Energy healing is used to clear energy from ourselves, our sacred objects, and our dwelling places.

C)            Narrativizing our approaches to family and community, including large group work

1) Family

2) Community

3) Healing Circles, Round Table of Healing, Large Group Consultation.

Within a narrative stance and a post-modern framework, and entirely compatible with the practices of indigenous cultures, is the idea that groups best solve their own problems. Groups decide what constitute problems and what comprise acceptable methods for solving these problems. We will consider the practices of healing circles, large group meetings to bring social networks together to discuss their constitution of a problem and to brainstorm about solutions. We will consider the healing power of large group ceremonies for healing communities.

D) Narrative Research MethodsThis course will be offered through Union Institute as a live on-line seminar every Thursday at noon. To join us, visit http://tui.acrobat.com/mehl-madrona.

Year 4:

A) Narrative Philosophy: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Volosinov, Harre, Shotter, Gergen, and more.

B. Complexity, Systems Thinking, and Indigenous Science: the Interconnectedness of all things.

C. Special Topics Seminar (Varies from Year to Year)

D) Cross cultural communication and Narrative and Indigenous perspectives on Ethics
Each Year: Supervised clinical practice with mentorship.

One week in-residence together: Integrated Practice: Putting it all Together. Besides having time to revisit how our theories and ideas have changed over the course of the training, we will visit some modern practices that seem to build upon indigenous understanding of the world. These include practices like hypnosis, biofeedback, neurofeedback, magnetic therapies, and electrical stimulation. We will take time to explore some of these tools to wonder how they might be integrated with indigenous practices. We will revisit the world of applied quantum theory to talk about the theoretical basis for our being connected with each other and being influenced by each other, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Courses are available for audit. Costs of courses vary in accordance with who is co-sponsoring. The Center charges a $1000 per year administrative fee for those enrolled toward the certificate program. What this covers may vary from year to year. We are also working toward offering this program as a Master's degree with an academic center.

Real-time Clinical Supervision/Mentorship

Onoing clinical supervision/mentorship via webcam with Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona

4 pm Thursday, Eastern U.S. time.

Cost: $25 per week.

To register, email mehlmadrona@gmail.com or call 808-772-1099

Post-graduate Training for Health Practitioners

Certificate Program in Narrative and Indigenous Healing for Health Practitioners: a project sponsored with the Center for Narrative Studies of the Coyote Institute

Photo by Sheryl Eaglewoman