Lewis in Cincinnati, Ohio, November 21 & 22, 2009

Lewis in Cincinnati (Sharonville, Ohio) for November 21st and 22nd

at the Victory of Light Festival, Sharonville Convention Center

For more information: VictoryofLight.com

Hours: 10am-7pm. Admission $12. (2-day pass $20.) Seniors & Students $2 off.
Children 12 & under FREE! Parking FREE! 513-929-0406.

NATIVE AMERICAN CEREMONY & RITUAL, 2pm Saturday, November 21st.

North American traditional healing operates from different assumptions from conventional biomedicine. Disease is located in relationships, including our relationships with family members, with food (plants and animals), minerals, other people, spirits, the place we live, and more. When these relationships are distorted and out of balance, dis-ease ensues. Traditional healers see the changes found in autopsies as footprints of the illness and not the illness itself. From this perspective, traditional healers engage in very different diagnostic procedures than conventional physicians. They seek the areas of disharmony and imbalance in relationships rather than looking for diseases in physical tissues. From this point of view, each person becomes their own story about their suffering and the treatment relates to that story as it unfolds to all the stakeholders in that story. The treatment becomes a story that merges with the illness-person story to move in a direction of balance and harmony. Every treatment is different because every person is different. There is no treatment for arthritis, only for the individual people who suffer. With this brief introduction to Native American thinking about health and disease, we will see the necessity and usefulness of ceremony for healing through restoring harmony and balance with elements of the natural and the spiritual world. We will focus on Lakota Ceremony and ritual, including the sweat lodge ceremony, the yuwipi ceremony, the hunka, or making of relatives ceremony, the hanbleciya, or vision quest, the making of women ceremony, and the sundance ceremony. We will conclude with a short pipe ceremony so that everyone has the opportunity to pray.

Narrative Healing: Change the Story, Change the Person, Sunday, 3pm, November 22nd

In this lecture, we will learn about the narrative movement in psychology and medicine. Within this framework as interpreted by the presenter, we see that story is the basic building block of social life. We tell stories continually. We negotiate our relationships with others through story and we remember and manage a complex social map through storing and recalling stories about the people with whom we interact. More profoundly stories live us. We are born into the stories of a family, a country, a culture, and sometimes a religion. We are given the prevailing stories to perform in such a way that we rarely question whether or not these stories are true. Sometimes the enactment of these stories makes us sick or causes us to suffer or have pain, for these stories into which we are born are not always the best stories with which to be happy. We learn how the stories we tell hold clues to our hidden assumptions and restrictions as well as to potentially unrecognized resources, strengths, and abilities. We will experience an exercise to become aware of the dominant stories that we are living, what characters we are playing, who serves as our audience, and what is our plot. We will reflect upon how to change the story living us so as to suffer less, be healthier, and experience greater wellness.