Post-graduate Training for Health Practitioners
Post-graduate Training Program in Narrative and Indigenous Healing for Health Practitioners: a project sponsored by the Center for Narrative Studies of the Coyote Institute
Center for Narrative and Indigenous Studies (of the Coyote Institute): A Four Year Training Program in Narrative Studies for …(Medicine, Psychiatry, Psychology, Social Work, Counseling, and other human service disciplines).
This page describes the training. For logistics, please visit the page entitled "Post-graduate Training Logistics".A) Narrative Medicine: the role of story in illness,making meaning of illness, and meaning-full illness.
1) What are the stories that guide our thoughts about mind, mental health, and how to treat the accompanying suffering.
2) What can we learn from indigenous cultures and their views about mind and mental health?
3) How do we help people to identify the stories that guide their suffering and change those stories?
C) Narrative Healing: Changing story for therapeutic purposes
3) Art, dance, and movement for transformation and change.
4) Novels, plays, and performances for transformation and change.
D) Reading and Writing Medical Narratives; medical fiction; the art of the case study.
A) Narrative approaches to imagery and visualization/use of imagery in narratives
We will learn how indigenous cultures use storytelling, imagery, and visualization as part of the healing and curing process. One tribe, for example, uses a practice that translates literally as “putting them to sleep so that they dream like they’re asleep, but they’re really awake.” Stories are crucial to indigenous cultures. Some scholars have argued that our modern culture suffers in its loss of traditional stories. We will explore how stories inspire people to believe that they can be healed or cured. Stories revision people’s sense of what healing and curing means and how it comes to pass. Within the modern world, Alcoholics Anonymous provides an example of the healing power of stories. Through testimonials, other alcoholics learn to believe that they can stay sober also. The Native American Church and other cultural practices also use stories to inspire transformation. Storytelling requires the use of language as rhetoric, including the power of persuasion (often called hypnosis in the modern European-American world). Evocative visual images make the story more powerful.
B) Narrative approaches to hypnotherapy/hypnosis and storytelling Words have served healers, doctors, priests and politicians from time immemorial. In this three day workshop we will learn the art of speaking the language of healing. We will consider how words affect attitudes, change beliefs, and nurture faith. Through our words, deep inner resources for self-love are kindled which become physiological changes. In at least one Creation story, the Word was sufficiently powerful to create the world. We do maintain our identities with the
words of our stories about ourselves and perhaps our stories also maintain the integrity of our body, for words are physical events, spoken by people through bodies with vibrational energy and the capacity to change those who hear these words.
Hypnosis is the art of speaking persuasively. In hypnotherapy we aim to facilitate a movement toward greater health and the reduction of suffering and pain. We persuade people to relinquish old self- deleterious stories in order to embrace those that are more life affirming.
In North America many indigenous cultures use storytelling, imagery, and visualization as part of the healing and curing process. One tribe, for example, uses a practice that translates literally as “putting them to sleep so that they dream like they’re asleep, but they’re really awake.” Stories are crucial to indigenous cultures. Some scholars have argued that our modern culture suffers in its loss of traditional stories. We will explore how stories inspire people to believe that they can be healed or cured. Stories revision people’s sense of what healing and curing means and how it comes to pass. Storytelling requires the use of language as rhetoric, including the power of persuasion (hypnosis). Evocative visual images make the story more powerful.
With voice, tonality, phrasing, and words we can change our body reality, transforming sickness to health; despair to hope; and misery to happiness. Our words flow with pictures of mountain streams, armies of blood cells, and the eternal peace of the soul. What words do we choose? How do we breathe these words? How do we learn to speak the poetry of the spirit? With this attitude, we will flow between the analytic side of technique and the experiential side of storytelling and poetry, striking a balance that will aid in the restoration of wellness for ourselves and our clients. This workshop will aim at professional development through personal experience, combining self-healing opportunities with consideration of technique and method.
Contemporary practitioners of hypnotherapy, particularly those influenced by Dr. Milton H. Erickson, depend to a large extent on their ability to a) enter into trance along with their clients, and b) invoke trance and powerful changes in trance, through ‘special linguistic circumstances’. Hypnotic language patterns encourage us to ‘invent’ our own grammar. Our minds are conditioned to receive verbal communication in certain ‘grammatically correct’ patterns. When we receive communications that have been coded differently, it creates confusion and opens the door for new and creative ways of thinking. Successful and creative hypnotherapists put more poetry into their inductions. They may even experiment with singing, chanting, or whispering to their clients while they are in trance.
Beside the words comes the music of delivery. A certain rhythm and cadence develops, seemingly by itself, as our conscious mind withdraws into the background. We begin to supply a surprising thread of images and metaphors… often with internal rhyme and rhythm! Having collected information during the intake and pre-talk with the client,
we can weave a story with this thread of images and metaphors.
The use of hypnotic fables and storytelling is another overlap between traditional healing practices and the work of Dr. Erickson (who studied with the local Chippewa) and those who followed in his footsteps.
“[Traditional] healers lacking in any formal education often
demonstrate a masterful command of language in telling stories. With
their stories, they communicate complex ideas about love, forgiveness,
faith, hope, and self-transformation. They practice the sophisticated
art of a master hypnotherapist without ever demonstrating any
awareness of the techniques they are using. They use the ancient art
of storytelling – a masterful tool of persuasion and, no doubt, the
mother of hypnosis.” — Coyote Wisdom
The techniques of the imaginative hypnotherapist, like those of the traditional healer, may utilize unusual objects or artifacts in the treatment room: sound and light machines to induce alpha-theta brainwave states; burning of sage, incense, or aromatherapy with essential oils to anchor state-dependent learning in the limbic system; playing of special trance-inducing musical sounds (repetitive drumming, harmonic chanting, singing bowls, etc) which are outside of the client’s normal reality.
Outline of Three Day Face-to-Face course:
On the first day, we will demonstrate hypnotic technique from our respective standpoints which integrate much from indigenous perspectives, both Native American and Tibetan. We wil consider briefly some theory -- namely the neuroscience behind hypnosis and trance and will reflect upon the nature of the trance
state, upon absorption, flow, immersion, inter-connectedness, and those aspects of consciousness which are compatible with accelerated learning. We will videorecord our demonstration and will discuscs the
elements of technique with participants who will then practice technique with our guidance. In the afternoon, we will further elaborate upon hypnotic technique with an indigenous flavor and will focus upon how hypnosis can be used to change the body, to modify physical illness, and to reduce pain that Is considered in biomedicine
to be physical. We will look at the power of suggestion upon physiology. We will this time do a group hypnotic exercise and will review technique and motivations. We will practice together with guidance.
On the second day, we will add storytelling into our mix, considering what makes a good story, a healing story, and a powerful story, asking how we tell these stories as part of our therapeutic work. We will look at storytelling as the original hypnosis from time immemorial and reflect upon how a story maintains audience attention and how stories elicit trance states. There can be deeply encoded messages for change in story that bypass conscious resistance – these may consist of universally shared myths, or fables, both ancient and modern; or of client specific stories, constructed with that particular client’s situation in mind. Or of anecdotal stories, meant to convey an underlying (hidden) message to the client’s unconscious mind. We will see how the elements of technique that we reviewed on Saturday are also the elements of good storytelling and will see how indigenous elders, healers, and storytellers have used these techniques long before there were hypnosis training courses, as these techniques naturally arise from the intuitive understanding of language and its effect on the body. We will practice telling stories as part of our hypnotic work, both as a stand alone event and within a larger hypnosis sesssion.
On the third day, we will continue to demonstrate and practice, including now the use of guided imagery In hypnosis, exploring how to utilize the resources of memories of one’s personal experiences to choose metaphoric images – primarily from the natural world. We will review ideomotor technique, signaling methods, and enactments with the body that aid in trance induction and symptom relief. This includes various arm lift techniques, post-hypnotic suggestions, walking hypnosis, and body positioning. We will work with a participant who has a particular afflication to demonstrate how hypnosis can be used for that person/purpose and will continue to provide supervised practice time to integrate what is being learned people's ongoing practice.
The remainder of the course will take place on-line.
C) Narrative as Performance: drama, ceremony and ritual
1) Enacting ceremony and ritual. Why are ceremonies and rituals important? How does using dramatic (in the sense of acting physically) practices affect our conception of what we are doing. We will consider the common elements of rituals and ceremonies from multiple cultures and will consider the usefulness in health practice of daily ceremonies. These can include welcoming the dawn, greeting the twilight, removing adverse energy or entities, purification ceremonies, vision quests, and other specific practices of local tribes or groups. We will explore the concept of spiritual entities and various concepts of how they interact with humans, especially in reference to health and disease.
2) Enacting the story of the illness.
A) Narrative and the Body: The Physical Story; Indigenous bodywork/osteopathy
1) Family
A) Narrative Philosophy: Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Volosinov, Harre, Shotter, Gergen, and more.
3. Students will write a paper describing the views about health, mind, well-being, and illness prevalent in their communities, tracing as much of the history of those views as possible.
This project will require students to interact with community members and knowledge keepers as well as reading texts and journals. Potential areas of interest include how colonization, migration, or immigration was associated with changing views from those found among historical members of this group or members of this group from other locales. As this is the major class project, we will expect 4000 to 5000 words. The instructor will work with students to potentially publish papers and will have an overarching project for exploration of community views about health and healing with Ethics Committee approval for students to talk with community members. We hope that many if not all of these papers can eventually be published often with community members as co-authors.
D) Indigenous Ethics
One week in-residence together: Integrated Practice: Putting it all Together.
Proposal to create a Center for Narrative Studies and a Master's program in Narrative Studies for Health Praactitioners
Narrative is becoming increasing recognized as “more than just story.” Narratives appear to be the building blocks of culture, human communication, and even appear to represent how the brain functions in its optimal state. Academic centers around the world, including Columbia University in New York City, St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, and Massey University in New Zealand, to mention only a few, have active, vibrant centers for narrative study. Columbia University offers a Master's degree in Narrative Studies for Health Practitioners and Massey University offers a Master's degree in “discursive practices” that lies within the psychology department. At York University in Toronto, Richard Mar's research group uses brain imaging techniques to explore the areas of the brain that produce, tell, comprehend, and store narratives, finding that virtually the entire brain is engaged by a good story, unlike other activities that are more specialized. His group has created a Journal of Studies of Fiction. Lewis Mehl-Madorna and Daniel Janik have recently launched the Journal of Narrative Neurosciene in collaboration with the Neurobiological Learning Society and the Coyote Institute for the Study of Change and Transformation.
This proposal arises from the desire to find an academic home for a Center for Narrative Studies that is steeped in both the neuroscience of narrative and the narratives and the developing narrative understanding of indigenous cultures. Our aim is toward enriching and improving human services, especially medicine and psychology, though we envision scholars pursuing a multitude of independent directions that overlap in the focus on narrative. We also propose to house the Journal of Narrative Neuroscience within this Center and to explore further the nature of narrative research in its various manifestations as appreciative inquiry, narrative inquiry, reflexive methodologies, and other qualitative research approaches that may occasionally become quantitative as well.
The steps of creating a center are to
1) begin offering interdisciplinary classes, both local and distant.
2) Develop a Master's program in Narrative Studies for Health Professionals
3) Seek research, educational, and developmental funding from foundations and government.
4) Stimulate and encourage graduate student research and provide a venue for faculty from a variety of disciplines to dialogue about narrative research.
5) Publish the Journal of Narrative Neuroscience.
1) Narrative Medicine: the role of story in illness, making meaning of illness, and meaning-full illness.
2) Narrative Psychiatry: the stories that guide our concepts of mind, mental health, mental illness, and treatment.
3) Narrative Healing: Changing story for therapeutic purposes
4) Writing and Reading Medical Narratives (4 units)
5) Narrative Research Methods
We also propose a practicum that would last two semesters (6 units) and then would propose that students sample a number of electives from the broader academic environment that relate to the narrative concept. We would propose to offer several courses for the larger academic community that would also serve health practitioners working in rural and remote environments. Conceived electives that Mehl-Madrona has already taught include the following:
1) Narrative Neuropsychology
2) Indigenous models (stories) of mind and mental health
3) Ethical narratives
4) Creating genuine cross-cultural dialogue through the appreciation of story
5) Narratives of healers and healing.
6) And others that faculty may offer from time to time.
Narrative Medicine: the role of story in illness, making meaning of illness, and meaning-full illness. In this course, we will consider how people's personal stories influence their health. We will explore potential biomedical mechanism, consider explanatory pleuralism, find how people make meaning out of illness, and consider Broom's concept of the Meaning-full Illness. We will consider how narrative approaches can be integrated into medical practice. We will discuss case examples from each others' practices.
Real Time Class via Dimdim, Tuesdays, 1 pm to 2:30 pm
Online discussions anytime.
Cost: $250 for 15 weeks
Register by emailing mehlmadrona@gmail.com or calling 808-772-1099.
Onoing clinical supervision/mentorship via webcam and Dimdim with Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona
1 pm Hawaiian Time (7 pm Eastern time) on Tuesdays. (After daylight savings time change, 2pm Hawai'ian Time and 7 pm Eastern).
Cost: $25 per week.
To register, email mehlmadrona@gmail.com or call 808-772-1099