Coyote Wisdom: Stories that Heal
The role of Story in Native American medicine healing traditions
Story-telling is part of every culture. Dr. Mehl-Madrona believes that the power of story can reveal hidden avenues to healing and play a role in the healing process.
Stories help us make sense of the things that happen to us and around us. They allow us to find meaning in our lives and in the behavior of others. In Coyote Wisdom, Lewis Mehl-Madrona writes about the power of stories to create healing. With a combination of traditional Native American mythology and Western contemporary culture, he paints a vivid and surreal picture of how the stories we tell ourselves about who we are contribute to what happens in our bodies and our lives.
Many healers consider the connection between emotions and health, believing that our emotional and psychological state can affect our immunity or our vulnerability to illness. Mehl-Madrona takes a different approach in his book by drawing a parallel between people's life stories and the myths and stories they tell themselves about their lives, then helping to create new stories which promote and enable their path to healing.
Mehl-Madrona is a medical doctor with Cherokee background and the clinical experience to speak with authority about a range of illnesses and the stories to which they may be linked. He believes that each person requires treatment as an individual and that generic answers to the questions posed by disease rarely hold true. He takes a fairly aggressive stance against the psychiatric and new age models which equate certain symptoms and disorders with particular causes.
Coyote Wisdom is a joyful romp through the impact of language and narrative, as we explore stories told to Dr. Mehl-Madrona by his Cherokee grandmother along with the vast collection of Western stories which he clearly loves - ranging from Greek mythology, to Star Wars, to Disney movies and Shrek. The book is a collection of stories itself, as Mehl-Madrona relates the healing process of clients he has assisted with what he calls "narrative medicine."
"What is so remarkable," he says, "is how trite the insights of the story would be without the story. A string of 'facts' distilled from this story would be unhelpful and definitely not inspirational or transformational. The flow of the story teaches and inspires so much more than its apparent facts or conclusions."
The most striking weakness of Coyote Wisdom is Mehl-Madrona's rejection of other alternative approaches to healing. He dismisses the documented impact of psychotherapy and energy psychology because of specific cases where they were ineffective, and pays supplement companies the backhanded compliment of attributing their successes to, not the merits of the supplements themselves, but solely to the sense of supportive, cohesive community created by network marketing stories. Throughout, this arrogance comes across as the irritation of a man tired of dealing with people whom the medical system (and, in some cases, other therapists) have misdiagnosed, misunderstood, and failed.
Despite his harsh stance on other alternative treatments, there is a lot of wisdom in this book and in the clarity with which he expresses his experiences. He asks, "Are we speaking healing words or sickness words?" and later says, "If story and illness are connected like chicken and egg, than we cannot just diagnose the illness; we must also 'diagnose' the story... entanglements of biology, culture, and spirit."
He highlights the role of community in both sickness and healing: "People rarely transform on their own but instead, do so in relation to others who support that transformation." He also approaches the role of therapist as one who is there to help, but is not the cause of healing - the person who is sick must be the main character in their own healing story. The narrative therapist must allow the innate wisdom of the system (be that the psyche, family, or community) to right itself.
Mehl-Madrona's approach is fascinating for its simplicity, its logic, and the beautiful way he tells both the stories of his clients, and the Native American mythos he draws on. Through chapters including "Creation Stories," "Stealing Fire," "Stories of Transformation," "Stories of Connectivity," "Archetypes as Agents of Change," and "Reauthoring Therapy," we are offered the opportunity to reconsider and, if we choose, to re-author the stories of our own lives, and to turn our stories of sickness into stories that heal.
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"Faced with the sudden onset of illness, so many of us feel like Dorothy, standing by the house that now seems so out of place, that landed where it didn't belong, a dead witch's feet sticking out from underneath. We feel completely clueless about what to do next.
"The beauty of The Wizard of Oz is the timeless message that whatever you need is already inside of you, that you already have the qualities for which you search the answers that you need. The journey only makes this apparent. This is also the essence of the wisdom of indigenous healers from around the world. One Cree healer from northern Saskatchewan told me, "Knowledge is unimportant. We can give that to anyone. What matters is wisdom, which must be earned."
- Lewis Mehl-Madrona, Coyote Wisdom
