Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona

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Lecture 1: Making Sense of Pain and Learning How to Heal It
What is pain? How do we decide that we are in pain? How do we decide that the pain is so severe that something needs to be done? Pain can be an important signal from the body to take action to prevent tissue damage. We need to know if we're stepping on a thorn or burning our finger on a hot stove. But what about visceral, internal pain. Or back pain? Or nagging pain that won't go away. Or headache pain. How do those pains make sense? Sometimes tissue has been damaged, as in arthritis, but the pain isn't really alerting us to prevent further damage. It's just hurting. In this talk, Dr. Mehl-Madrona will give a brief history of pain, how the meaning of the word has changed over time and how pain is currently understood in the modern world, different even from third world countries. We will talk about the kinds of pain that different people have and what are the stories connected to that pain. When did the pain start? What has the pain come to mean? How has it reorganized your life? We will use the principles of Native American medicine to understand how to make meaning out of pain and will review the many different approaches to pain that come from Native American principles. We will finish with exercises for reducing pain that everyone can learn how to do.

Workshop 1: Dealing with and Healing Anxiety: Viewing and Treating Anxiety from a Traditional Medicine Viewpoint 
What is anxiety? How do we know that we're anxious? Has the experience of anxiety changed over the ages? When does worry become unhealthy? When is fear excessive? And what do we do about it anyway? In this interactive presentation, Dr. Mehl-Madrona helps people explore what they mean when they use the word "anxiety", which has different meanings for different people. We discover a world of unique experiences collapsed under a common heading. Each of us has different stories to tell about our most anxious moments or how we came to be anxious. Each of us has different ideas about how that might change. Dr. Madrona explores the history of anxiety -- how it has changed over the ages and how it has come to be currently a medical diagnosis with medications for treatment. The world's indigenous cultures had other ways of seeing anxiety. Some see these feelings as important indicators of imbalance and disharmony -- warnings to re-evaluate one's life and to recover right relationships with the many different levels of being. In this talk, we will explore how to find alternatives to pharmaceuticals for wrestling with anxiety and how these alternatives can be unique to each person. We will finish with a Native American story and an exercise for reducing anxiety.

Workshop 2: "Stories that Heal and Healing with Stories"
Shamans the world over have developed techniques for helping people transform. The first transformation occurs within the consciousness of the individual and within his or her family and community groups. Healers use stories to cultivate ideas of faith, hope, and the possibility of healing. Through testimonials, the healer reinforces those ideas and the belief in them. In this workshop, we will review examples of stories that teach transformation, and will explore to what extent our personal and social system's beliefs actually guide the directions in which biology will flow. Dr. Mehl-Madrona will include an experiential section for our playful consideration of our own aches, pains, and illnesses, and what healing stories we might adopt for their transformation. We will reflect upon the hidden wisdom of stories and how these stories inculcate the wisdom of healing without the person even recognizing what has happened.

Workshop 3: "The Tried and True Coyote Healing: What We all Can Learn from Native American Medicine."
What do the world's indigenous cultures teach us about health care and medicine? Conventional medicine has evolved from what could be called a structural point of view -that illness is located within organs in the body, that the degree of illness is correlated with the anatomical changes found within those organs, and that treatment is surgical or pharmaceutical and aimed at the underlying "pathology." If you've ever had an illness that medicine can't diagnose, you know how frustrating this approach can be. If the doctor can't find an abnormal blood test or an organ that's malfunctioning, then it must be all in your head. By definition, you're not really sick. Chronic pain patients suffer greatly from this perspective because pain cannot be seen. 
Native American medicine offers a different approach, one in which health and disease relate to balance and harmony or the lack thereof. We will explore how different this approach is. Diagnoses relate to an overview of your entire life and what is out of harmony more than the ways that specific organs are suffering. Treatments aim to restore balance and right relationship to all aspects of your being. We will include experiential exercises to make these concepts come alive, including one of my favorite visualizations, "Creature Feature."

Individual Consultations are available by appointment. $275/person  
Individual consultations with Dr. Mehl-Madrona will focus on a narrative approach that explores personal beliefs about healing and illness in order to help you discover your personal pathway to healing. We will use such techniques as guided imagery and visualization, hypnosis, mindfulness meditation, Cherokee bodywork, energy medicine, and other tools to guide us to an understanding of what is your best possible path. Finally, we will examine how to use ritual and ceremony in your personal healing journey and develop a personal ritual for your daily use.

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