July 26th -August 1st 2009

Workshop by Lewis Mehl-Madrona

Community healing: the importance of shared story and storytelling for restoration of well-being. 

European-derived and contemporary globalized modernist psychotherapies have located their focus within the individual.  Even within the storytelling community, stories are for individuals and are told, written, or performed by individuals.  These individuals may be together as an audience, but the audience is not viewed as alive or connected or integrated, but rather an assemblage of individuals.  In this workshop, we will consider how storytelling changes when the stories are embedded in a group.  How would our activities be different as members of indigenous cultures which see the group as more important than the individual and the stories as providing cohesion and connectedness for the network of social relationships forming the group.

Within North American aboriginal cultures, it is a foundational assumption that the individual is intimately and meaningfully connected to everything else.  If a person is not well, that person's family, clan, and community are also not well.  In fact, the entire Nation is not well.  The presence of an unbalanced, unharmonious condition impacts everyone and must be corrected.  Among many North American tribal groups, healing involves the enactment of a ceremony that is based upon a story, handed down within the oral tradition for as long as anyone can remember.

Dr. Sandra Francis writes about the Southern Dene (Northern Arizona and New Mexico) for whom all curing ceremonies are associated with a body of stories. Within their typical narrative format, a hero commits an error that leads to some form of hardship.  The Holy People take pity on the unfortunate earth-surface-person and conduct a ceremony to restore the hero to wholeness.  The healed one is then instructed to return to his kin and teach them the ceremony so that, in the future, others may be healed.  Within all the many nights ceremonies of the Dene people lie stories, some told, some sung, that guide their healing practices.  These stories also serve the function of binding the community together.  For example, in the Nightway ceremony, on the last 2 nights, when stories are danced for all too watch, as many as 500 people can appear to view.

Within the culture derived from the presenter's father, elaborate stories exist to explain the sweat lodge ceremony, the sun dance, the yuwipi ceremony, and other sacred practices that facilitate healing.  When people participate in the story through ceremony and through the healing practices associated with those ceremonies, they become the characters of the story as metaphor and as a kind of instantiation process of mingling of spirits and energies that all the supernatural beings the opportunity to heal the unfortunate earth-surface-people. 

Within this context, the workshop will also consider how group participation in story shapes community identity, using examples from the Coastal Salish of British Columbia in their revival of their spirit possession winter ceremonial complex and the stories supporting that and in the use of stories to support communities who have reduced diabetes or become relatively free from the harmful effects of alcohol and drug abuse.

We will explore the indigenous world view in which our personal identities are shaped from the collective and community stories which tell us how to see the world and how to act to perform the roles into which we have been born, have been assigned, or have taken on.  We will see the greater power of story when it is enacted symbolically (through sacred objects) in community with coherent and connected participants for the purpose of everyone's healing.

_   Lewis Mehl-Madrona, M.D., Ph.D.