Indigenous Mind

Indigenous Ways of Knowing:

Healing Presence

as an Experience of Mitakuye Oyasin

To date in my quest to understand a particular somatosensory resonance that I call the healing presence experience I have explored various avenues of understanding from within a more or less modern Western science paradigm. That is, I stood within a point of view that recognized myself as a separate individual having an experience, and trying to figure out its empirical source. The questions I asked were typical modern science questions, even if the experience itself is too subjective for conventional scientists to quantify.

I began by identifying what I wanted to know; that is, "what is the nature of a healing presence? How is a healing presence cognitively, emotionally, physically, and spiritually distinguished from the humanistic qualities of congruence, rapport, and positive regard?" (Curry, 1999, p. 2). I asked these questions as if some certain answer could be discovered if I could only find the "right" research method to apply.

Later I asked where in my brain such a somatosensory resonance occurs (2000a), as if the experience were all in my head, or at least self-contained within the physical limits of my nervous system. I proposed that healing presence is some extraordinary clinician affect (2000b), as if the somatosensory resonance I feel originated in a clinician's ability to project some psychospiritual energy, and as if that energy had palpable, therefore measurable, substance. I considered that healing presence arises from "moving with in empathic possibility" (Jordan, 2000, p. 11), a kind of mutuality in caring relationships, as if it were primarily an emergent property of the interrelated systems of a bonded therapeutic partnership (Curry, 2000c). This last way of questioning admits to the interactive nature of the healing presence, but limits that interaction in a logical positivist way. That is, the interaction is limited to two human beings and the measurable verbal or nonverbal communicated emotional connection between them.

All of these approaches to understanding the experience of the healing presence reflect not only my novice attempts at scholarship, but also my attempts to know about a subject by following rules, albeit qualitative rules of knowledge-seeking outlined by the standard view of what constitutes modern science. This paper explores a more indigenous way of beingknowing, so that the experience of healing presence can be considered in an expanded way.

Within the Essence of Indigenous Epistemology:

Pulling Some Threads Together

I have no authority to speak about indigenous ways of knowing. What I have learned of such epistemology is primarily from books or articles, and not from the lived experience of belonging to, or even observing contemporary indigenous communities. I cannot write from within any indigenous traditions, not even my own. As an adopted child, it is as if I was stolen from my family, cut off from my roots, belonging nowhere, the people I belonged to kept hidden from me. I am saddened in beginning this paper by not knowing enough, by not having enough interaction with indigenous communities, mythologies, and cosmologies. I am not sure all my knowledge claims can be supported in the accepted rationalist or positivist ways.

Nonetheless, as I read I find that certain descriptions of indigenous ways of knowing resonate with my being as if recognizing those hidden roots; as if awakening an essential sense of belonging to an unnamed tribe. What I believe I know about indigenous ways of beingknowing is largely from some deep internal sense of rightness, of resonance with a long forgotten wholeness. I believe I have a sense of a way of being that is not inconsistent with tribal cultures, and with the writings of those more educated about aboriginal life.

For this present attempt to dialogue from within this sense of resonance, I shall draw several threads together from diverse sources, in order to expand my understanding of some commonalities among various indigenous ways of knowing. In doing so, I shall limit my discussion to those commonalities that are particularly salient to my quest for understanding experiences of healing presence. The irony of selecting---in a somewhat reductionistic fashion---only a few elements of an epistemology of wholism is not lost on me. Yet, considerations of the limitations of incomplete knowledge, and the scope of discussion urge this choice.

Some themes are clearly held in many "pre-conquest cultures" (Sorenson, cited in DeQuincey, 2000, p. 13), indicating perhaps the universality of the perennial wisdom of these common epistemological elements. Sorenson identifies the root of this wisdom as "'sociosensual' awareness...the entire thrust and motivation of this form of consciousness...to optimize feelings and well-being in the community" (DeQuincey, p. 44). This sociosensual awareness is a bodily-felt knowing. It is an internal, somatic guide to indigenous knowledge. It is awareness and knowledge that is individually felt, and communally shared.

Of interest to me in this way of knowing are the themes of (1) walking in balance with nature, self, and community; (2) the reality of other dimensions; (3) the knowledge that all things are alive, and have consciousness; and (4) the concept that spirits or Spirit can and do/does interact with the human realm in helpful, as well as mischievous or malevolent, ways. These four features are not the only features to comprise the whole of indigenous epistemology, to be sure. They are only what I have stalked in hunting for explanations of the healing presence.

Walking In Balance

And The Primacy Of Mitakuye Oyasin

Being in right relationship with nature, self, and community is at the heart of tribal life. Right relationship is about being in balance, being in harmony with all things. Ross (1993) explains this in Lakota understanding as walking the Red Road. So important is the idea of walking in balance, in harmony, that many First Nations of the Americas have ceremonies dedicated to restoring a person, and/or a community to balance. The Diné, for example, have the Blessing Way ceremony to sustain personal and communal balance, and the Night Chant ceremony that includes dancers, sand paintings, and special prayers to restore harmony to one who is seriously sick (Alvord & Van Pelt, 1999).

Navajos believe in hózhq or hózhqni---"Walking in Beauty"---a worldview in which everything in life is connected and influences everything else...Navajos make every effort to live in harmony and balance with everyone and everything else. Their belief system sees sickness as a result of things falling out of balance, of losing one's way on the path of beauty. (Alvord & Van Pelt, p. 14)

McNeley also identified the Diné concept of health as being in balanced relationship with all things.

...health for the Navajo has been said to involve a proper relationship to one's environment and not just the correct functioning of one's physiology (Witherspoon, 1974, p 54, cited in McNeley). It may also be said that good conduct and character involves such a relationship and is not merely the expression of a good, autonomous self. (McNeley, p. 55)

Jilek (1982) writes about the Pacific Northwest indigenous nations having an anomic depression, a Western academic term that points at the malaise of being out of harmony with both their native traditions, and with the norms of the modern western society (itself seriously out of balance) in which they live. Here too ceremonial dances are the traditional response of a community to the restoring of the individual to right relationship with all things.

Balance as an important attribute of the healer-community relationship among the Kung of the Kalahari is noted by Katz. "The few most powerful healers strike the same kind of balance and also stress the balance between themselves and their larger groups. These healers...have a life that...is rooted in the everyday existence of the culture" (Katz, p. 246). Kremer points out the place of balance in the indigenous epistemology of healing:

Indigenous healing practices then are based in a synthetic, integral approach to what is out of balance. Native science guides the healer to the point in the fabric where it is rent and where wholeness needs to be reestablished. The ceremonies done are the precise knowledge and practice designed to create balance on all levels and from all levels (within the person on the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual levels, and by doing so on the level of spirits, community and nature which hold the individual); they are indigenous science. (Kremer, 1999, p. 24 of an electronic version)

Underlying this indigenous striving for balance is the deep conviction that the individual is related to all living things, and that all things in the environment are alive. So ingrained is this belief that the Lakota phrase for this concept Mitakuye Oyasin---translated variously as "all my relations", or "all my relatives", or "we are all related"---is given as a greeting, in parting, as an invitation for spirits to draw near, and as a simple prayer (Deloria, 1994; Ross, 1993; Steiger, 1984).

The phrase 'all my relatives' is frequently invoked by Indians performing ceremonies and this phrase is used to invite all other forms of life to participate as well as to inform them that the ceremony is being done on their behalf. (Deloria, 1994, p. 85).

The somatosensory resonance that I call the healing presence experience might be understood from an indigenous way of knowing as the sensation of the patient returning to balance. Perhaps this resonance is what it feels like to be in right relationship, or to be open to the possibilities of having sociosensual awareness. Perhaps it is the feeling of walking in beauty with all my relations.

Multidimensional and

Micro/Macro Mirrored Realities

Not only do indigenous cultures admit to multiple levels of reality---as evidenced in the healer's travels through upper, middle, and lower worlds (Walsh, 1990; Ripinsky-Naxon, 1993), or to the realms of the spirits, gods, and/or ancestors (Katz, 1982; Kendall, 1996; Schieffelin, 1996; Desjarlais, 1996)---but also some know that the conditions existing for the individual also exist for the cosmos (Steiger, 1984, Ripinsky-Naxon). In the Kung culture, for example, "Healing seeks to establish health and growth on physical, psychological, social and spiritual levels; it involves work on the individual, the group, and the surrounding environment and cosmos" (Katz, p. 34). Dis-ease in the individual or the community may be understood as something out of balance not only on the microcosmic level, but also something disrupted or out of harmony on the macrocosmic level as well.

While virtually all sources on the subject of indigenous knowing in relation to healing focus on the role of the healer, medicine person, or shaman, Rolling Thunder (in Krippner & Villoldo, 1976) notes that the healee must have a proper attitude to get the most value out of a healing experience. He says, "The people who are being 'doctored' must have cleared up their thinking so that they can accept the Great Spirit's work" (p. 57). I infer from this statement that not only do the medicine person's otherworldly journeys and ritual ministrations, and the communal ceremonies act to restore balance in terms of the patient's relationship with the macrocosm, but also that the patient's willingness to make her/himself vulnerable to the medicine power is a personal act of coming back into balance on the level of the microcosm. As above, so below, as the universe, so the soul.

Thus, the healing presence experience may be understood as far exceeding the transfer of some empathic energy by the clinician to the client. The powerful, palpable somatic resonance I feel as a healing presence experience may be no less than the chord strumming of a macrocosmic vibration of multiple worlds coming back into harmony.

The Earth is Alive and Conscious

From what I can tell, it is only the Western cultures---and those trying to become like the West---that insist "the Earth is just a dead thing you can claim" (lyric from the song Colors of the Wind). To the aboriginal person, "every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name" (from the lyric). Deloria presents a broadly held view among Native Americans that:

...all inanimate entities have spirit and personality so that mountains, rivers, waterfalls, and even the continents and the earth itself have intelligence, knowledge, and the ability to communicate ideas. The physical world is so filled with life and personality that humans appear as one minor species without much significance and badly in need of assistance from other forms of life. (Deloria, pp. 152-153).

Walsh sets this understanding in Western philosophical terms:

All parts of this interconnected universe are usually regarded as alive and conscious to some degree. In contemporary philosophical language these would be the doctrines of hylozoism and animism. Hylozoism is the belief that all objects are imbued with life. Animism is the belief of tribal people that every object is invested with a mind or soul. When this same belief is held by Westerners, it is called panpsychism. (Walsh, pp. 114-115).

I would venture to say that these understandings of the world we live on, and in, are more than abstract beliefs to the indigenous mind. They are, rather, the lived experience when one walks in beauty, feels the aliveness of Mother Earth, and has awareness of the consciousness of the non-human world.

McNeley demonstrates how this understanding of the aliveness of the Earth is expressed by the Diné when he gives

...River Junction Curly's version of Blessingway: "with everything having life, with everything having the power of speech, with everything having the power to breathe, with everything having the power to teach and guide, with that in blessing we will live.... (Wyman 1970, p. 616, cited in McNeley, p. 28)

Assuming as I do that the Earth is alive and conscious, it is easy to take the next step down the Beauty path to the understanding that all the elements and factors present in my lifeworld cooperate in my healing presence experience. Being part of the whole of the universe, the Earth and her non-human inhabitants have a stake in helping me return to harmony. As my relatives, my healing is their healing. Perhaps what I feel as that particular somatic resonance I call the healing presence is also the feeling of recognition of being a part of a Consciousness that is larger than my western psychological self.

Spirits and Spirit Interact

with the Human Realm

Having come to the understanding that there are multiple dimensions of reality populated by spirits, gods, ancestors, and other sentient beings, it is natural to assume that spirits and Spirit can and do interact with the human realm. Mythologies around the world are replete with reports to this phenomenon, and the global traditions of the shaman are predicated on this indigenous ontological truth. Kremer writes that:

Shamanic initiation, in the indigenous sense, is deepening or reinforcing one's presence to the spiritual realities within a communal framework. While spirit(s) are part of all indigenous conversations, the awareness of and presence to spirit(s) becomes intensified and heightened for shamans. (Kremer, p. 8).

Walsh goes further in saying that "the shaman's universe is filled with life, awareness, and spirits. These spirits---ever-present, powerful and potentially malevolent---exert an enormous influence on tribal cultures" (Walsh, p. 117). Drawing on Eliade, Walsh offers:

As Eliade points out, the shaman is a "man who has immediate concrete experiences with gods and spirits; he sees them face to face, he talks to them, prays to them, implores them---but he does not 'control' more than a limited number of them." (cited in Walsh, p. 120)

Could the felt sense of healing presence be an experience of spirits? Stories and studies of indigenous healing ceremonies tell of experiences with unseen entities that are power-challenging, explosive, and in some ways assaultive as shamans or medicine men or women work to drive out evil spirits. But perhaps these dramatic experiences are only what make good stories, and not necessarily the limits of the felt experience of spirits interacting with humans. Other stories report hearing the voices of spirits, or having visions of spirits. These experiences are more benign, instructive, their power more gentle.

As I have felt, and now think about, the healing presence experience, it could be described as interactions with the spirits of Nurturance, Warmth, Embrace, Envelopment, or perhaps as an awakening of the Immanent One. Western minds may think this description is metaphor. Indigenous peoples may know this description holds truth.

Conclusion:

Indigenous Ways of Knowing

at the Heart of Healing Presence

When considering the phenomenon of the healing presence, indigenous ways of knowing shed light on aspects of the experience that deepen understanding and bring balance to qualitative methods of inquiry in the modern human sciences. If the healing presence experience strums a cosmic chord in my soma, indigenous epistemology is likely the musical key in which that chord is played, and the four aspects of this wholistic way of knowing that I have explored in this paper are some of the tonal vibrations in that chord. Walking in balance with all my relations, experiencing the multidimensional and mirrored nature of reality, knowing the Earth is alive and conscious, and allowing for contact with spirits/Spirit are epistemological features that are at the heart of not only indigenous ways of knowing, but also at the center of the healing presence phenomenon.

References

Alvord, L.A., & Van Pelt, E. C. (1999). The scalpel and the silver bear: The first Navajo woman surgeon combines western medicine and traditional healing. New York: Bantam Books.

Curry, D. (1999). Discovering the nature of the healing presence: Individual project in overview of methods. Unpublished manuscript, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco.

Curry, D. (2000a). A search for somatosensory resonance through contemporary neuroscience. Unpublished manuscript, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco.

Curry, D. (2000b). Explicating healing presence: Final paper for Critical Thinking. Unpublished manuscript, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco.

Curry, D. (2000c). Healing suffering: A personal story and comparative look at theories of shame, object relations, relational psychology, suffering, creative ritual, and the healing presence: An independent study. Unpublished manuscript, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, San Francisco.

De Quincey, C. (2000, March-June). Consciousness: Truth or wisdom? IONS Noetic Sciences Review, March-June 2000, 8-13, 44-46.

Deloria, V. (1994). God is red: A native view of religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.

Desjarlais, R. (1996). Presence. In C. Laderman & M. Roseman (Eds), The performance of healing, pp143-164. New York: Routledge.

Jilek, W. G. (1982). Indian healing: Shamanic ceremonialism in the pacific northwest today. Blaine, WA: Hancock House Publishers.

Jordan, J. (2000). Restoring empathic possibility. In L.M. Hartling, W. Rosen, M. Walker, & J. Jordan (2000). Shame and humiliation: From isolation to relational transformation, No. 88, Work in Progress, 10-13. Wellesley, MA: Stone Center: Wellesley College.

Katz, R. (1982). Boiling energy: Community healing among the Kalahari Kung. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kendall, L. (1996). Initiating performance: The story of Chini, a Korean shaman. In C. Laderman & M. Roseman (Eds), The performance of healing, pp 17-58. New York: Routledge.

Kremer, J.W. (1999). Healing and cosmology: Recovering ancestral healing ways for the future. In press.

Krippner, S.; & Villoldo, A. (1976). The realms of healing. Millbrae, CA: Celestial Arts.

McNeley, J.K. (1981). Holy wind in Navajo philosophy. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press.

Ripinsky-Naxon, M. (1993). The nature of shamanism: Substance and function of a religious metaphor. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Ross, A.C. (1993). Mitakuye oyasin: We are all related. Denver, CO: Bear.

Schieffelin, E. (1996). On failure and performance: Throwing the medium out of the seance. In C. Laderman & M. Roseman (Eds), The performance of healing, pp 59-89. New York: Routledge.

Steiger, B. (1984). Indian medicine power. West Chester, PA: Para Books, Shiffer Publishing, Ltd.

Walsh, R. (1990). Many worlds, many spirits. The spirit of shamanism, chapter 10, 113-137. New York: Jeremy P.Tarcher/Putnam Books.