New book review! (…of a fairly old book…still worth it…) Coyote Medicine by Lewis Mehl-Madrona (1998). And some reflections.

This book was published in America by Fireside Books, Simon & Schuster.

This is such an insightful book. The author takes us on a journey of Western medicine joined together with Native American healing. He’s a mixed-race American with his feet in both cultures. He starts out as a young medical student learning the allopathic science of medicine, then journeys through a form of apprenticeship in the Native American healing rituals and arts, and then finally finishes his medical training and manages to combine both approaches in Hawaii. Along the way we learn about his personal life, one failed marriage and then the beginnings of a second marriage. It really is a whole-self engagement with the process of healing, and the healing relationships in each case-study are powerful and delicately written.

He notices many gaping holes in the Western approach: 

‘the view that people are only the incidental occupants of a set of organs’. 

’Rational explanations are destroying medicine today, as well as our society at large. To be healed, we need to believe in the possibility of healing, and in a greater world, and in higher powers than our own.’

And his frustration with his medical colleagues: 

‘Why should they consider new methods of treatment when they were so busy denying that the old ones were failing?’

He dwells on the nature of healing rituals in Native American culture: the participation of the whole community or extended family, often for several days of gruelling ‘sweat hut’ experience together, prayers and exorcisms, spiritual trance-like experiences that defy rational explanation (apart from the rational explanation that there must be a spiritual world we can’t see, of course).

Some reflections on a spiritual concept of healing for our times:

There is a sense in this book that all true healing is spiritual at its roots. There is definitely a place for allopathic (modern, Western) medicine. But the importance of inner work, an attitude of surrender, and an acknowledgement of spiritual powers that we can’t see is essential if anything long-term is to be achieved.

Many different traditions and worldviews have their own rituals for healing. The Christian church has one: it’s in the book of James in the New Testament; an anointing with oil, prayer, confession and repentance. Not to engage with this is to have a very clinical and school-textbook understanding of the Christian faith.

Mehl-Madrona emphasises the importance of belief and also engaging in a ritual. Having something ceremonial engages the whole self in a unique way. And the process of anointing, prayer, confession and repentance in the Christian tradition is very much the same psychological work as that espoused by other traditions of surrender and self-examination.

Whole-self healing involves being willing to give up a part of ourselves: in a sense, a sort of dying. It may be a dearly-held part. But it’s the part that’s making us sick. Identifying this part and using various tools to bring it into our awareness, and then do the work of surrender, is the work we’re doing here. It may feel like a relief to get into this work: like putting down a heavy load that has long been on our shoulders.

What are you holding onto that you need to put down?