Coyote Healing by Lewis Mehl-Madrona

Author:Lewis Mehl-Madrona [Mehl-Madrona, Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781591438762
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2003-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

The East: Discovering Spirit

All of us possess in our DNA cellular memory of a past in which shamans attended to the souls of the afflicted. Our ancestral past sings to us from the music of the codons that form our genetic messages. The ancient shamans live within the history unraveled by decoding the messages of those DNA base pairs. However unconsciously, we carry the healing wisdom of our ancestors within our molecular makeup.

Native healers believe that healing must begin with the spirit and its permission, even if the treatments are radiation therapy or surgery. Healing the spirit is necessary to heal the body, which is why the journey starts in the East.

The idea that our spiritual faith helps us recover from illness is as old as the human race, yet it’s still current news. A 1996 USA Today poll showed that 56 percent of Americans believe that their religious faith helped them recover from injury, illness, or disease.1 More than half of patients undergoing long-term kidney dialysis reported that their religious beliefs played an important role in their ability to cope.2 Three years later these same patients saw their religious beliefs as being crucial to their survival.3 These same studies showed that loss of interest, feelings of worthlessness, social withdrawal, and lack of hope are particularly infrequent among those with strong religious coping strategies. These scientific findings represent what Native healers knew without the need for research: The journey begins with spirit, and the first miracle is the miracle of hope, purpose, and meaning. Spirit feeds these three healing aids.

Unlike academic medicine, the majority of Americans are quite religious. More than half of geriatric patients admitted to the cardiology or neurology departments of Duke University Medical Center attended religious services at least once per week. Fifty-eight percent prayed or studied the Bible daily. More than 85 percent held specific religious beliefs, and more than 40 percent spontaneously told interviewers that their religious faith was the single most important factor that enabled them to cope with life.4 Regular religious attendance was associated with less severe illness and less depression. More important, people weren’t staying away from hospital services because of illness or depression. This tells us that patients know more than doctors in the area of faith; patients know how much they need spirit.

Unfortunately, mainstream medicine’s authoritative voice remains skeptical or indifferent to the power of spirit. Faith, religion, and prayer are rarely studied. A systematic analysis of more than four million published scientific studies from 1980 to 1996 showed that only 364 included spiritual or religious factors in their research plan.5 Only 45 of the 364 explicitly mentioned a religious professional, and only 8 described collaboration between medical practitioners and members of the faith community. Eight studies out of four million are not very many! Primary-care researchers are equally uninterested. Among 1,086 studies from the Journal of Family Practice in the years 1976 to 1986, only 21 measured a religious factor.6 During five recent years, only 2.5 percent of published

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