At the most recent gathering of ReVisioning Medicine, the medical people and medicine men and women – increasingly, most wear both hats – concurred that healing was potentiated by the “uncommon resonance” between all the people in the circle. In an environment of mutual respect and appreciation for each other’s particular training, knowledge and experience, and the vast store of knowledge that is available through collaboration, so much became possible because we were in council and so the dimensions and complexity of illness and healing were being addressed.
I don’t know if medical people, health professionals, medicine people, shamans, energy workers, music healer–healers of all gifts and development–have ever sat as equal colleagues in such a circle before, but I know that it was a unique and blessed experience for all of us, that portended hope for the future. It freed us even from the false divisions implied in medicine/complementary/alternative medicine. Medicine is medicine. The questions: What medicine do you carry? What medicines do you carry in your medicine pouch, took on other meanings. The opportunities for healing increased as the field of healing deepened and expanded. We saw increasingly, as the days passed, that we were being called to ReVision medicine and spirit was with us, in all its forms and ways. One of the essential questions we held, was: How do we participate in a medicine that doesn’t do harm. And how can Medicine itself be healed of its aggressive and military mind, its series of Wars On ….
Any illness is a vast complex territory. We so often fail to heal it, though we may find temporary cures that address a fraction or segment of the situation, because we are unwilling to recognize its dimensions, consequences and implications. Because illness is complex, healing must be equally complex – it requires an alliance of mind. To heal we must consider all the factors that led to the condition and everything that might participate in the full restoration of health in all its aspects. Such healing calls for Council mind.
***
The Topanga Daré held a Fire Circle on Behalf of Healing War in Topanga on February 18th. A woman relayed a story of a neighbor whose son died six months after returning from Iraq. The young man had served as a mechanic, repairing and maintaining military vehicles and equipment. On his return home, he took a civilian job at Pep Boys as if his life could continue without addressing what it had meant to be in the military in Iraq. From week to week, he disintegrated, his behavior changed, he became a nuisance to his neighbors and soon was unemployed. Just when he was going to be evicted for failure to pay rent, he found a job with a “contractor,” he said.
A few weeks later, he was killed having crashed into a border patrol car after driving at great speed and without lights. The dead in his car were people trying to cross the border between Mexico and California. The “contractor” was a coyote.
His mother, the narrator said, cannot recover from his death. She buried her son in a private cemetery, despite the cost, instead of the military cemetery, so she can visit and decorate his grave every day. The door to her house is maintained as a changing, living shrine to a war hero. She seeks out people each day to hear the story of her son, the war hero, who she asserts and everyone believes, died in Iraq.
A story of a distraught mother?
But isn’t he truly a war hero? we asked. Helping people cross borders is a time honored heroic activity.
My own father’s life was saved because someone helped him cross the Russian border to escape the Czarist army and he made his way to England and then the U.S. His younger brother did not escape that army and was killed by the non-Jews in his own regiment. Sitting in the circle with us was a woman who had just tried to bring medical supplies from Cyprus across the border the Israelis have set up around Gaza. Michael, my husband, and I were in Central Europe when the first walls of the Soviet bloc began to come down. The Polish newspapers informed us that Hungarian farmers were taking the barbed wire that had been used to maintain the borders for fences to contain their domestic animals. The Iron Curtain was coming down. Within a few months, the Berlin Wall fell.
Danelia Wild, sitting in the Fire Circle with us, quoted what Ed Tick of Soldier’s Heart had said at an earlier Fire Circle: “Healing PTSD requires making an offering, making amends that are in keeping with the wound that one has inflicted.”
Having participated in a war that has, for no reasons but greed and power, caused untold suffering, undermined the infrastructures, undone the basic ways of life, brought about extreme conditions of hunger and poverty, the desperate veteran extended the possibility of food, work and relative financial security to desperate people. He was making an offering, making appropriate amends. Having participated in a terrible war of domination, he extended the possibility of freedom to despairing people. It was the right offering, the right atonement. Assisting others and making his own life bearable, bringing healing to his own anguished soul with one and the same gesture.
“Assure his mother,” we suggested to the one who brought us the story, “that her son, who risked his life to help forsaken, hungry people cross a border to possibility, was a hero. We regret the loss of his life but we honor the sacrifice he made.”
The next day one of the participants in the Fire Circle, sent this article from the Daily Kos: Border Wall Impact Documented by Conservation Photographers, “a team of photographers, writers, filmmakers, and scientists documenting the wildlife, landscapes and human communities of the US/Mexico borderlands, and the impact that the border wall is having on them.
http://www.dailykos.com/... In order for the wall to be built, Homeland Security has had 19 American laws, regarding the environment waived.
“For all desert animals, getting to water sources they have trusted for millennia means the difference between life and death. Animals just south of the wall, particularly pronghorn, bighorn and cats, may have used the Tinajas Altas high tanks or Tule well which sit just a few miles north of the border. But with a 15 foot barrier blocking their movements, they will have to seek out water elsewhere - and in the desert, a search for water can just as easily end in death ….”
People, land, animals, water, earth, all victims of this grave illness we call war. A soldier is discharged, but the war doesn’t end. He tries to make amends by saving people from another war closer to home, at our border, where the riparian boundary is replaced by one of steel. Immediately, enemies are postulated and everything and everyone suffers.
The veteran is a casualty of the war against the Iraqi people, and a casualty of our war against the poor in Mexico, and a casualty of our war against the earth. The war doesn’t end until we change our minds and move into the No Enemy Way.
Let us honor the American soldier who fought in Iraq and died a hero’s death on the border between Mexico and California. Let us honor his efforts against the walls of war. Let us mourn the Mexican workers who were victims of the war against the poor and the desperate. Let us mourn the assault on the earth and her creatures.
***
At the first ReVisioning Medicine Council we took up the issue of the cancers developing from the poisoning of the earth by uranium mining. Almost all the mine-able uranium in the world is found on indigenous land. The native people suffer the devastating effects of toxic waste that they, themselves, would never mine. Everday gandhis called a uranium council to try to imagine new ways of meeting the tragedy in Niger erupting in guerrilla warfare and government violence as a result of such mining. Uranium from Niger supports almost all of French nuclear activity. In February 2009, the Tuareg rebels threatened to attack the mines and shut them down. Despite its mineral wealth, Niger has the worst living conditions in the world. In addition to the anguish the people are suffering from illness, poverty, interruption of their way of nomadic life, the death of their animals, and political repression, toxic waters from the contaminated aquifer are making their way into the Mediterranean.
There are similar conditions in the US on the Indian reservations. The Revisioning Medicine Council gathered around a mixed blood Native American woman suffering leukemia because of uranium mining as are so many on the Reservation[s].
In November 2006, the L A Times concluded a series on uranium mining in the Four Corners area. “The huge boom in uranium mining fizzled post-Cold War; when mines and processors shut down, they left piles and pits of radioactivity, seldom labeled with warning signs. Many houses were built with radioactive materials. The cancer death rate on the reservation doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. The series examined the effect radioactivity had on the area's water -- and the children and animals who drank from it. The cases of animals born without eyes or with three legs, or children who developed corneal ulcers and liver disease, stymied medical professionals for years.”
At the time we first gathered, she had been suffering side-effects of chemo and had decided against further treatments. Gathering a community around her to consider the many factors and causes of the illness, the personal, social, political, historic, environmental, spiritual nature of the illness, helped to bring healing to her situation. We were, as was said before, medical people and medicine men and women. Environmentalists and geologists. Peacebuilders and energy healers. Visionaries and political activists.
“Leukemia is the consequence of a war of the white against the red,” one of the shaman/physicians had recognized. The war of white cells against red cells through overpowering them – also a powerful metaphor. The war of the US government against the Native Americans. The war against cancer. Leukemia cannot be healed by western medicine protocols alone – especially with all its deadly side-effects. We have to heal the various wars. We have to heal the wars in our minds. In order to heal our bodies, we have to heal the earth.
We each brought our own wisdom:, we supported her searching out the medicine ways of her own people, we did ceremony, we followed precise instructions in dreams, we offered medical assistance that was not toxic to her system, we acted on her behalf, and on behalf of the land, we engaged science andwe helped her relocate herself with a land based kinship network. We prayed for her and for the land in concert with each other. She went into remission.
As Lewis Mehl-Madrona writes in Narrative Medicine: The Use of History and Story in the Healing Process,
“Conventional medicine can only study what works within its paradigm. In our developing narrative paradigm for medicine, we realize that biology is entangled with community, family, spirit and more.”
We became, through these efforts, a unique entity, a dynamic, improvisational healing community.
***
Recently, our friend fell ill again. She decided to try chemo again but was anguished about adding to the toxic burden of the earth through using western medicine that too often has consequences for both the patient and the environment. I wanted to find a way to stand behind her. Soon, we were aware that the community was gathering once again to stand with her. She was calling us forth as a healing community. This was one of the great benefits of her affliction; it helped to heal the separation and isolation that so many suffer particularly when they are ill. We took on her affliction as our own. Perhaps the community could find ways to diminish or protect the afflicted one from the harmful effects of the medicine.
I suggested the possibilities of a chemo/medicine offset program:
“Someone has to take a medicine in order to save one’s life. But the medicine does harm to the earth as most do these days. So others become ill and need meds. Thus the community is called to carry the burden alongside the afflicted one? How can we withdraw some of the harm we are doing in our daily life, to 'offset' the chemo he or she must take?”
Carolyn Raffensperger wrote about it this way in “The community as a guardian of health: Imagining medical offsets as one practice of ecological medicine.”
“An offset is a mechanism to compensate for an environmental problem caused by a necessary and unavoidable action. Offsets have been used with mixed results to address carbon and climate change.
“Many cancers have environmental causes or contributors. The paradox is that cancer treatments are often environmentally toxic and may raise the possibility of more disease in humans and other creatures. How then to address this paradox? One possibility is to create a program of morally responsible offsets that addresses the problem of environmentally linked diseases and their environmentally damaging treatments.”
We could, by our personal actions, reduce the total amount, making amends for the effect of chemo on the earth. Community as a healing force. We are just beginning the exploration. Can we make an offering, make amends equal to the wound to the earth?
Muz, (Richenel Ansano) wrote the following:
“The story of your life as I know it has been the transformation of violence into peace.”
He wonders if there is “a message about bringing peace to the world by balancing our toxicity with healing steps. Maybe a story about calling a community to be steadfast in being present to peace toward and respect of all lives.”
In another letter, he continued:
“I wonder how we can recognize and honor all that is being given to us. In our lives in general but specifically as your story unfolds. When I ask what it is that you carry, the answer I get is that I should not only look at what you might carry for the world but also for this group. What is it that the group (and the individual people in it) do not yet fully carry? What are we being called to carry because we can carry them?”
…
“(Chemo-offset) a really big story that fits in with so many other stories of our globe. I am especially grateful to see how different pieces are surfacing. It reinforces the commitments to right relationships, that healing of the individual is also healing of relationships, that there is a delicate play between illness, cure, healing and relationships.”
The support of the community makes a difference. Not only does the earth benefit, but our dear friend is sustained by such a gathering.
And the afflicted individual is not the only one affected. Each one of us is altered by being a member of a community in transformation.
And further: While the process of “Sacred Illness” calling individuals to their spiritual paths had been considered in the community for several years by many of us, including my husband, Michael Ortiz Hill, as he watched and documented the way multiple sclerosis was transforming him, we see that sacred illness may have another dynamic
Certainly our friend was suffering a sacred illness. Now we were seeing that her sacred illness was calling us–individually and as a community–to initiation and transformation as well. We are not just standing behind or with. We are in ‘it’ too.
And even further: The illness or affliction that anyone is suffering has the potential of catalyzing new community dynamics. In other words, the illness in an individual leads to healing the greater field. Or Illness Heals the World (by Deena Metzger, Elik Press 2008).
Everything here is related. In “Principles of Restoration,”Carolyn Raffensperger, who, considering public policy aspects of chemo/medicine offset programs and ecological medicine, says, “Restoration restores relationship.”
Council restores relationships; we work together to restore healing.
A field of illness calls forth a field of healing. Council mind is medicine mind. Community heals and is healed.
Perhaps chemo/medicine offset programs only accomplish what we should be doing anyway. But being aware, making the offerings on behalf of someone who is suffering, sensitizes us at each moment to the fate and suffering of the earth. An active and dynamic field of consciousness is created. Our friend’s suffering weaves us into the fate of the earth. Healing begins to occur in all the dimensions.
***
Now we return to the Fire Circle of February 18th. Concentric circles of consciousness interweaving.
Sitting around the fire in the cold winter night was an essential part of the ritual. When you sit around a fire in that way, you are gathered into each other’s lives as community has done for eons. Many stories revealed the pragmatic paths of atonement, making amends, and forgiveness.
Danelia Wild opened the circle by speaking of Pu'uhonua (temple of refuge) in Hawaii. “The only access was by swimming across a bay known as the shark's den. If you managed to survive, the kahuna (priest) was required, under pain of death, to offer you sanctuary and absolve you of all wrong doing.” She noted the collaboration between the one who had done great harm and the community that was obligated to offer sanctuary.
A veteran of the first Iraq war attributed some of the healing he has experienced to finding a circle that was willing to hold his stories with him, the stories of having been a young boy that had been lied to by the government and coerced to do great harm. The stories, as an older man, he could still not forget. But now having found community, sanctuary, refuge, he is no longer the outsider. He is a member of the community and his stories, his experience, his nightmares are ours. They are ours because we have also introverted war and are alongside him in the necessity of healing it also in ourselves.
A field of anguish, war, calls forth a field of healing. Council mind is medicine mind. Community heals. Community can heal illness and community can heal war.
There is a dance between taking down the walls and creating community. Community is a wall-less field. The No Enemy Way. All Our Relations. Can we live so that all our relations are recognized and honored as all our relations.
Healing the body, healing our souls, healing community, healing the wars, healing the earth – one action.
The veteran from the Iraq war makes amends to the poor of Mexico. His fate, the fate of desperate immigrants, and the fate of the animals, interwoven. His death awakens us, indirectly, to the fate of the lives of the earth.
From Border Wall Impact Documented by Conservation Photographers:
“I [Naturegal] was here [a stretch of dozens of miles of impermeable steel wall leading right to the edge of the river from the east and west side] in summer and fall 2008 and saw the progression of it. In the mornings last summer I saw javelina and jackrabbits at the wall, pacing back and forth before giving up and heading back into the brush. I saw bobcat and deer tracks following the base of the wall and then veering off...”
Debra Cohen wrote: “I have to come to this Fire Circle on behalf of the animals on whom we continue to make war unceasingly and for the most part unconsciously…”
A community of photographers, artists, scientists go out to document the horrific effects of the steel wall that so dreadfully undermines the health of the natural border, the Rio Grande. Let us honor all those who work to take down the fences that are between us. Let the community become what spirit calls it to become as it gathers us on behalf of the earth, the animals, the beings, the people who will thrive and contribute to the future when the walls come down.
In this way healing comes; may all our relations thrive.
***
I wanted to cite some ideas from Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PHD’s essay, “Connectivity and Healing: Some Hypotheses About the Phenomenon and How to Study It,” from Advances, Spring 2005, Vol 21, No.1, but, really, his essay is a parallel text, or this essay to his, as if time and space dissolved to allow these stories and his considerations to cohere, “forming an interference pattern as particle-waves do when emitted from the same source.”
That being the case, let me cite his thinking as conclusion:
“Human disease and illness, and its progression or disappearance is context dependent—it depends upon the network of relationships into which the particular individual is embedded, and it depends upon cultural and social factors yet to be determined. Disease is not purely biological or genetic. It does not have a natural history, bur rather a biopsychosocial, historical, cultural and geophysical history. “Coherence represents an intrinsic correlations among wave-particles that arise form the same source.”
“Dramatic biological change (healing) is associated with an internal reorganization of the system of the person and the systems surrounding the person.”