What’s Your Headache Telling You?
(Health Secrets) What are the common elements in miracle healing? In his book Coyote Healing: Miracles in Native Medicine, Lewis Mehl-Madrona distills the common elements in miracle healing for the purpose of helping people start their own healing journey. His tools are the sacred trinity of each person’s mind, body and spirit, the wholeness of self, and the authority of the individual.
What interferes with miracle healing? As he sees it, we often turn aspects of our being over to authority figures outside of our self, which results in disempowerment. We put physicians in charge of the physical body, priests or imams in charge of the spirit, and governing elites in charge of the mind. When a crisis confronts us we find ourselves in a state of shock because we have no internal resources or strengths to draw upon.
Life often bestows crises, and we are confronted by physical illness, loss of loved ones, moments where our work or work product is assaulted and insulted, trusted and treasured relationships dissolve, love seems decimated, or we feel abandoned by all that is good.
It can be difficult to believe these crises are meant for our good or our evolution. But when you make spiritual and mental peace with the crises or challenges that face you, empowerment begins its return, healing commences, and unrealized opportunities are revealed. Your inner strength and conviction emerge and you are no longer mentally tossed by the storm.
For Mehl-Madrona, crisis is opportunity, while stagnation is death.
Mehl-Madrona’s life story is that of a Native American-European hybrid (his word choice) searching for his ancestral roots. His story is that of seeking mind, body, spirit, and community integration. He rejected the traditional medical school thinking which said life is a relentless progression toward death, disease and decay, and the physician’s job is to slow the rate of decline.
In 1973 he found a Cherokee healer with whom to study, and he has continued with Native American elders. He realized that his culture had much to offer mainstream society, through its understanding of healing and transformation.
Why are we surprised when cancer patients die on the schedules predicted, he asks. How much do we program people to have the outcomes we expect? Is the increasing cancer rate due to subtle subconscious programming in a stressed mind eroding our biochemical immune system?
His focus is to rekindle “The fire of hope in all aspects of our lives… we cannot wait any longer to eat the food of hope we…rather we must find our sustenance in the present moment.” He views hope as essential to the power of inner healing responsible for spontaneous remission.
“Native American healers expect miracles and prepare in all ways possible for them to occur,” he says. In contrast when modern allopathic medicine sees miraculous recoveries, these recoveries are discarded from studies as anomalous cases. Miraculous recoveries are viewed as tainting the otherwise orderly results. In contrast, Mehl-Madrona sees his small group of ‘miracle’ patients as having everything to teach us about healing and survival. By examining the energies, attributes, and teachings implicit within Native American healing and how these relate to body-mind healing, he reveals that survivors found purpose and meaning in their life-threatening illness.
Native American healers teach us that healing requires self-awareness in:
- The importance of relationship
- The importance of acceptance and surrender
- Focusing on the present
- Valuing community
- Transcending blame
- Embracing of the spiritual dimension
- Willingness to accept profound change
For more information:
http://www.sixcrows.org/library/TheMeaningandUseOfTheMedicineWheelByRoyDudgeon.pdf)
