Power of Words, Sept 23-26, 2010, Goddard College, Vermont

Co-Sponsored by the Center for Narrative Studies, Brattleboro, Vermont and the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation, South Burlington, Vermont

Coyote Medicine Institute – Lewis Mehl-Madrona and Barbara Mainguy

Narrative ideas are catching hold! Narrative ideas combine contemporary neuroscience with indigenous wisdom with feminist and ethnic studies and with our ordinary understanding of how human beings work. In this pre-conference workshop, we will explore how to "narrativize" your practice and work. How do you understand the concepts of story and how stories are embodied and how stories live through us, live us, and catch us up in living through them in the form of the roles that we play in those stories. How do we understand stories as the organizing principle for how our brains actually work. We will focus on the experiential – on how to work with story in a variety of contexts including psychotherapy, medicine, nursing, counseling, education, and creative arts therapy. We will use some drama therapy techniques to explore how we embody the stories into which we are born. Participants will leave this workshop with an awareness of how to move forward and into this exciting paradigm shift in medicine and psychology.

Barbara and Lewis are both affiliated with the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation.  Lewis is Director of its Center for Narrative Studies and Barb is the Director of Creative Arts Therapies.  Coyote is based in South Burlington, Vermont.

Lewis, MD, PhD, is the author of the "Coyote" Trilogy. His work discusses healing practices from Lakota, Cherokee and Cree traditions, and how they intersect with conventional medicine via a social constructionist model. He has been writing about the use of imagery and narrative in healing since the 1980s and is  is certified in psychiatry, geriatrics, and family medicine. His research collaborations include work on various psychological conditions, issues of psychology during birthing, nutritional approaches to autism and diabetes, and the use of healing circles to improve overall health outcomes.

Barbara, MFA, MA, is Creative Arts Director for the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation, and is involved with their Center for Psychosis Studies.  She is a filmmaker and a visual artist and is currently editing a film on how society decides whom to call "mad".  Her M.A. is in Creative Arts Therapies with an emphasis on Drama Therapy.  She is the author of scholarly papers on embodied narratives and drama therapy with autism and schizophrenia.

Playing with Crazy: Using Creative Arts Therapies with Psychotic People – Barbara Mainguy and Lewis Mehl-Madrona

This workshop explores embodied narrative approaches to healing psychosis.  We explore briefly some narrative and cross-cultural views of psychosis and then show how the person living these extraordinary experiences can be helped to contain them  through narrative.  We show how dramatic arts techniques coupled with narrative can be used to give bodies to voices and to perform voices in public forums for audiences in ways that make the voices manageable and contained, leading toward healing of the suffering that came from their presence.  We talk about how language arts professionals can learn how to do this work.

Crazy is Just a Story: Narrative Approaches to Mental Health – Lewis Mehl-Madrona and  Dana Waldram

We all have moments in our lives that we never forget, moments of great joy or sorrow, fear or courage. These moments, not our credentials or careers, are the true story of our lives,  the underground river, flowing through us, beneath the day to day.  Using guided meditation, journaling and poetry, we will begin to chart our heart's voyage, and learn how to listen to our hearts everyday.

In this workshop we will present parallel views to those presented in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Standardizations Manual (DSM) that are based upon narrative ideas and are more compatible with current findings of neuroscience.  We will show how the brain is designed to function as an organ of story comprehension and construction which is both the default mode of brain function and the very best way to store and retrieve information.  We will build upon indigenous views that all of life is a story and that we embody our story as we perform it in the world to suggest that narrative provides a better understanding for mental suffering and pain than does DSM and that the narrative of a person's life supports neuroimaging findings much better than does the somewhat arbitrary and socially constructed categories of DSM.  We will explore what counseling practice would look like if DSM were abandoned in favor of story.

 Dr. Dana Waldram is a medical anthropologist and is an Associate Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.  She is also an accomplished visual artists whose paintings have been displayed throughout Vermont.  She has been teaching residents and medical students using narrative ideas and about narrative ideas for some time.

Restorying Health and Disease: the Emergence of Narrative Medicine – Dr. Robert Crocker

The beginnings of a paradigm shift are occuring in contemporary medicine in which we are rediscovering the importance of history and story in the healing process. Through the efforts of social constructionists and cross-cultural studies, we are coming to understand that cultures invent stories about health and disease and then form filters to confirm those stories and ignore conflicting evidence.  Biomedicine has dominated these stories, but other minority stories are growing stronger, such as those of China (traditional Chinese Medicine), India (Ayurvedic Medicine), and North America (Native American healing).  In this workshop, we explore this new paradigm, its implications, and how language arts professionals can work alongside and with health care professionals to further patient care, including the use of language arts to elicit more fully the patients' story, the assistance to physicians in the art of medical narrative writing, and the assistance to patients in expressing themselves, their suffering, and their healing for therapeutic benefits.

Dr. Crocker is a board-certified family physician and is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine (Dr. Andrew Weil's program). He teaches narrative medicine to fellows, medical students, and residents, and is also the President of the Coyote Institute for Studies of Change and Transformation (S. Burlington, Vermont). He has an extensive background in health care funding and the funding of alternative medical services.

Story Telling the Healer – Osese Tuti

Storytelling in African society in Kenya and in luo society was a powerful tool for entertainment and information dissemination.  With the coming of community theater, story telling has evolved into an educational tool providing interactive outlets for actors to address various social problems like HIV/aids, community violence, and the  creation of peace amongst communities.  Using the the African concept of involving your audience through the use of songs and drums, this workshop is a sharing of my experiences in Africa and is hence a journey back to the future that helps create story from what we were, are, and will be. 

Since completion of Kenyan high school in 1994, I have been involved in community theater and trainings as a participant,trainer,actor and director. I have produced stories for organizations and performed in conferences in our local scenarios.  I am currently the composer and storyteller of mbelewe afrika, a traditional music and arts performing group.