Leslie Gray has for decades been one of the most creative
innovators to blend ancient and modern healing practices. She has
evolved a form of “shamanic counseling” (a term she coined) that
combines the insights of modern psvchology with the time-tested
practices of indigenous healing and ceremony.
Of Oneida and Seminole ancestry, she is a psychologist in
private practice in San Francisco. She also teaches ecopsychology and
Native American studies at several Bay Area universities, including the
University of California at Berkeley, the California Institute of
Integral Studies, and San Francisco State University. She leads unique
travel and study programs to sacred sites in the southwestern United
States. A member of the Society of Indian Psychologists and board member
of the Association for Transpersonal Psychology, she is founder of the
Woodfish Institute, which promotes ecological education grounded in
indigenous wisdom.
Leslie knows we will need to draw from the best of the
world’s ancient wisdom traditions as well as the leading edges of
contemporary creativity to begin to heal a wounded civilization. She
shows us that, with exquisite attention and intention. we can blend old
and new. passion and intellect, to create the psychological and
spiritual wholeness that will help us rediscover our place in the web of
life.
A PARTICULAR WORLDVIEW, model of healing, and system of
values underlie our current treatment choices in the field of mental
health. But how would we be thinking and what would we be doing if we
had a genuinely “ecotherapeutic” model of mental health that portrayed
human beings as part of the natural world? I believe the emerging field
of ecopsychology offers such a model and a framework in which to
rediscover and re-create very effective ancient healing practices.
The prevailing Euro-American version isn’t a model of
health; it’s a model of illness. That’s why so much of our materia
medica is “anti”—- antibacterial, anti-inflammatory , antidepressant,
and so on. The Native American model of health emphasizes restoring
balance—-aligning body, mind, and heart in balance with the
environment—and understands that this is a process: You lose the
balance; you regain it. You lose the balance; you regain it. That’s why
in Pueblo ceremonies, at the most sacred of moments, they send out the
clowns to make fun of all the elders and the medicine people there, and
indeed of the entire ritual. They resist a naive notion of “holy.” They
do not try to get rid of all problems or all evil: They try instead to
find nature’s balance between positive and negative. That’s very
different.
The term koyaanisqatsi, which means “life out of balance,”
is now well known because of a popular film, but very few people know
how that concept is used in healing. In one Navajo healing ceremony, for
example, patients sit on a sand painting throughout what is often a
four to seven,day process to go back through their lives and review
them, trying to get from the place of koyaanisqatsi, where their life
went out of balance, to hozho nahasdlii, to harmony restored. The
patient is in a hogan with friends and family around, harmonious songs
are sung, and the patient sits in an exquisitely balanced sand painting,
with beautifully carved fetishes placed on various parts of the body.
All the imagery suggests harmony restored, a return to balance or
health. In Navajo, the word for balance, the word for harmony, and the
word for beauty are the same word: hozho.
The Judeo-Christian worldview tells us we have been kicked
out of Paradise due to our sinful ways and that we must rid ourselves
of sin to ascend to paradise. That’s a fractured or broken image, and,
though science has challenged the church’s dogmas, that altruistic model
still unconsciously informs Western psychology.
Asian cultures that see existential phenomena as resulting
from the interaction of opposites such as yin and yang, and which focus
on energy flows in nature and in the body, are informed by a more
dynamic and holistic model than the West’s, but those cultures have
still produced some of the most hierarchical and patriarchal of all
societies. Both the European and the Asian models have resulted in
hierarchical, patriarchal societies. That, in my view, is because both
focus on unity or ‘paradise” as an abstraction, whereas the indigenous
worldview is that this world is already paradise. It’s an earth-based
spirituality, rather than an attempt to transcend the earth with
spirituality.
Through Woodfish Institute, we’ve been trying to help
introduce indigenous approaches to mental health into the mainstream. We
funded a researcher to present a paper at the annual American
Psychological Association’s meeting, a paper on how psychologists and
psychiatrists have traditionally misperceived shamans and classified
them as schizophrenic. I’ve also been doing training for the outpatient
psychiatric staff at some Kaiser hospitals, as well as for the Japan
Institute of Psychotherapy. At Kaiser I set up a medicine wheel, right
there in the windowless rooms of their outpatient psychiatric facility
.I established north, south, east, and west and got everybody up on
their feet, focused on a question, and started drumming. We walked
around the wheel and asked questions of the wheel from different
perspectives. It’s astonishing how quickly the participants’ worldviews
shifted and how much creativity was released.
A case study from my practice highlights how an indigenous
approach to individual therapy can work. I call this case “a dream of a
red spider:’ Jane was a psychotherapist I met when she attended several
prayer tobacco circles. Recently divorced and new to the San Francisco
Bay Area, she still hadn’t found work and was adjusting to living with a
new lover. She described herself as depressed. At the prayer smoke, she
would cry for most of the two hours. She had a rash on her hands, which
a dermatologist had said could not be accounted for medically. The
discomfort of the rash only added to her ever-present anxiety. A turning
point in my three months of individual work with her occurred after a
session in which I restored her guardian spirit. The next night, she had
a nightmare in which a red spider attached itself to her vagina. At our
next session she asked, “What does it mean?”
She was a psychotherapist. so meaning was important to
her. I told her that meaning is only one way of working with dreams. The
shamanic way would be for me to remove the spider. She looked baffled
but agreed to a ceremony for removing harmful power instrusions. I had
her lie down on my office floor. and I sat behind her head with a power
object in one hand and a rattle in the other. As I shook my rattle and
began to enter a non -ordinary consciousness, I noticed a spider
strolling up the pillow on which I was sitting. At first I ignored it.
trying to stick to the business at hand, but finally I stopped rattling,
picked up the creature, and held it in my open palm. I sat up, Jane sat
up, and we looked into my palm. She turned white as a sheet and
shrieked. In her dream, she had seen a red spider exactly like the one
in my hand, with the same red markings on its back. I picked up the
ordinary spider. took it outside, released it, and returned to my
original task of removing the non-ordinary spider .After that session,
Jane showed dramatic improvement. She reported feeling more energy. and
began to go for job interviews and actively pursue new relationships.
More important, she no longer described herself as depressed.
I think that to restore our personal and
collective sanity we need to get back on track, to rediscover a
universe of living beings intimately related: the biosphere as our
family. This family has values: respect for life, harmony with nature’s
cycles, gratitude, balance, and above all, reciprocity—don’t take
anything without giving something back. This is the key. Reciprocity
with Being underlies indigenous cures. Another project I’ve begun is the
Woodfish Prize. I decided to offer a prize for a Native American and a
Euro-American who could work together in a mutually transformative way
on a project. At the end of the first year, I had decided not to give
the prize. There were about two more days before the dead- line was up,
and I’d read all the submissions, and I felt no one had really gotten
the idea of “mutual.” But right at the deadline, I got a perfect example
of what I’d been looking for. A professor at a university took a
sabbatical and went to the only Native American traditional ground in
central California and helped dig a ceremonial ground. He had been at a
talk I had given and had heard me mention that frequently people asked
me how to meet an authentic Native American shaman. I said that rather
than wandering around reservations looking for enlightenment, you might
try going and seeing what the people say they actually need and rolling
up your sleeves and pitching in. He did so. and it changed him
profoundly. He devdoped a relationship with the elder who is building
the ceremonial space that was mutually transformative.
From:
Ecological Medicine:
Healing The Earth, Healing Ourselves
Edited by Kenny Ausubel,
and J. P. Harpignies
pp. 223-227
Sierra Club Books 2004
