Healing Journeys

Combining Western and Indigenous Medicine in the Native American Community

Judith Kessler, PsyD

In the entirety of every man, irrespective of his heredity and education, there are formed two independent consciousnesses which in their functioning as well as in their manifestations have almost nothing in common.[1] G. I. Gurdjieff

Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on Earth and lean to hear my feeble voice. You lived first, and you are older than all need, older than all prayer. All things belong to you.[2] Black Elk

met Willem Nyland in 1972 and quickly became an active participant in the Gurdjieﬀ Work community he founded in Warwick, New York, and continue to practice Work as he taught it.

Through Work, I have learned that true self-knowledge comes not from ordinary, associative thinking, but comes from the influence of an Objective faculty, free of associations and identifications. With what Mr. Nyland called an “I” higher levels of Consciousness can be achieved. Daily eﬀorts to maintain a connection with my “I” help develop a deepening connection with a spiritual reality which I could not otherwise achieve.

At the same time, in my profession as a clinical psychologist, I became interested in hypnotherapy. In a state of trance, facilitated by deep relaxation and guided imagery, my patients were able to reach deeper levels of consciousness that helped change entrenched attitudes and long-lasting behavioral patterns in a very short time. Hypnosis had a beneficial eﬀect on physical symptoms as well and was equally useful in relieving both mental and physical disorders. New developments in neuroscience were proving the intricate connection between the body and the mind, and the uses of the unconscious mind, imagination, and intuition.

In 1976, a trip to New Mexico introduced me to Native American culture and spiritual traditions. I was fortunate enough to make contact with a group of Indigenous people who invited me to attend healing ceremonies which were not usually open to the public. On ceremonial days, prayers were oﬀered through long periods of singing, dancing, drumming, and chanting. The experience of being in a beautiful natural setting, where huge red rocks resembled cathedrals, among people in colorful costumes, was extremely moving and ultimately life changing. In the midst of people with such a deep belief and connection with the Spirit world and communicating with unseen forces gathered together—as their ancestors had done for centuries—aroused in me a wish to return and immerse myself in this culture.

Six years later, learning of the shortage of qualified professionals to help people suﬀering deeply from the traumas of their past, I applied as a volunteer with the Indian Health Services in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I thought that I had skills from my Western training to oﬀer. I believed there was much I could learn from the Indigenous healers as well. I had the great fortune to be hired by Dr. Elmer Atencio, another Western-trained psychologist, one of the very few in this system, and a Native American, raised in a traditional New Mexico Pueblo village.

Western biomedicine is defined by the National Institute of Health as a system where graduates of medical schools treat disease with drugs, surgery, and a range of allopathic medicines that are the foundation of mainstream healing approaches. Patients are diagnosed and treated based on increasingly sophisticated technology, evidence-based through rigorous scientific studies. Within this system are specialists who focus on one part or another of the body.

The diagnosis and treatment of psychological disorders are also based on clinical studies, standardized testing, and symptoms, which form a cluster that lead to what are considered “best (most eﬃcacious) practices.” As new evidence arises, both diagnosis and treatments change over time.

Indigenous medicine in contrast, looks within the spirit of a patient rather than the body since the underlying belief system puts both the source and cure of illness as originating in the spiritual realm. The healers are people who have undergone intense spiritual training, including physical suﬀering, to purify themselves. Their suﬀering is a means to access messages from that spiritual realm, usually in the form of visions that occur in a trancelike state. These healing visions show where there is a broken connection between the person and the spirits.

Because this traditional cosmology envisions life as a great circle wherein everything is connected, all forms of life are seen as animated by spirits and often healers ask for help from certain animals for their specific powers. Instead of white coats and surgical masks, these healers often wear ceremonial masks and costumes to evoke the spirits, and they conduct ceremonies that often include the whole community, of which the patient is a part. The prayers that are oﬀered by the medicine healer result in ways of bringing people back into balance, but not just in the material or physical realm. Within this cosmology, spiritual practices long-established by the ancestors include repairing broken connections by interactions with dead ancestors. In this way, there is a resonance with Gurdjieﬀ’s view that it is necessary to heal the past to prepare the future. Their medicine is more intuitive and holistic.

Elmer was not formally prepared for the role of a recognized medicine man but did believe in and practice the sacred ways taught by the elders in the Pueblo village where he was born and raised, and he still participated in ceremony. It was his idea that we work as a team, combining Indigenous and Western medicine, and recognized that there were similarities between Gurdjieﬀ and the Indigenous view of the need for harmony within the parts of oneself and the whole of life. He could appreciate my spiritual practice of trying to reach higher levels of being through a purification process and Work where the harmonious relationship between body, mind and feelings could provide glimpses of that Divine Wisdom sought for by Indigenous people.

Together, Elmer and I wrote a grant and received generous funding from the state of New Mexico to start a pilot program providing culturally appropriate treatment for Native Americans suﬀering from multigenerational abuse and addiction and the consequences of colonization and cultural appropriation by the U. S. Government. Forced, often brutal attempts at assimilation had stripped the Native Americans of a sense of belonging, which clearly called on us to provide a means for these people to heal through traditional as well as Western therapeutic practices. So many came to us without hope for change in their condition that we decided to focus on creating altered states to enhance their willingness to receive positive aﬃrmations that might give them a sense that, despite the past, healing was possible in the current moment and to help them access inner resources that they had believed been lost. Hypnosis seemed an appropriate modality to do this.

Rae was a 35-year-old Navajo woman who sought help, fearing she would do real physical harm to her nine-year-old daughter. An alcoholic from a very early age, Rae’s bouts of uncontrolled rage were frightening both of them. Lately, she had found her daughter drinking her alcohol. She recognized and despaired of the repetition of abuse and self-destructive behavior. When we asked her simply to tell us her story, our leading “diagnostic” question, she told us that she’d been raped around the same age of her daughter. Left alone in a tent, during a family gathering, an uncle made sexual advances to her and silenced the screams she made for help.

When no one came, Rae believed she had been not only shamed, but abandoned, and unloved. While she couldn’t recall details, she believed she’d been raped. Soon afterwards she began to act out, refusing to talk with her mother, attend school or participate in any of the village traditions. A year later, she found that alcohol could calm her and started stealing money to go oﬀ the reservation as alcohol was illegal on the reservation and hard to obtain. By the age twelve, she left home and began living on the streets of the local village and from there found her way to Albuquerque, where she was now living on welfare in a tiny apartment. She had made multiple suicide attempts and had lived isolated from family and community. She said she felt her life was meaningless, but she did love her daughter and wanted to rescue the child from herself by changing her own behavior.

Although guarded in her manner, unable to look at either of us, she agreed to go on what we called a healing journey. This began with a deep relaxation using guided imagery, and Rae entered a trance fairly easily. We asked her to imagine she was nine again, alone in a tent and as if from very far away, watching a movie, picture what had happened to her then. Watching her go through this experience, we were able to witness a sharp change in her behavior. Her body began to shake as she began sobbing and her facial expression revealed something so diﬀerent from earlier that we awakened her and asked what happened. She revealed that she saw that she had passed out after screaming and that before the uncle could rape her, her mother had entered the tent with others, and they dragged the uncle away. Somehow, those following moments, in which her mother tried to soothe and comfort her, had been buried. Now, she had a whole new reality to digest. Over time, we helped Rae to “reunite” with her long dead mother through imagery and her belief that it was possible to do so. When that relationship was healed, we brought mother and daughter together using cognitive strategies for emotional management. Next, we connected her with a Navajo medicine man to help her reconnect with traditional spiritual practices. Gradually, through the recall of a memory long buried in her unconscious mind, the trajectory of her life changed.

Along with hypnosis, storytelling was part of our healing journeys. Using the mythical character of Coyote, the trickster—like the role Gurdjieff gave to Mullah Nassr Eddin, the wise and satirical Middle Eastern folk hero—Coyote illustrated our human foibles and how we get ourselves stuck in predicaments. The stories teach morality, indicating how we could behave. These stories, individualized for each person, had a lightness and humor, which made them easy to relate to. The deeply relaxed mental activity of the trance state enhanced the openness to suggestions, aﬃrming our patients’ ability to change and resolve their diﬃculties.

Storytelling helped us reach young children who did not yet have the language or cognition to communicate.

Rocco, a five-year-old boy was brought to us by his maternal grandmother. Recently, he had witnessed his father fatally shooting his pregnant mother, who was trying to leave his father. The father looked unsuccessfully for Rocco, who had been hiding, and then killed himself. The boy was found, frozen in shock, by neighbors who alerted his maternal grandmother. Since this tragedy, Rocco had remained silent and withdrawn, refusing food, or forms of comfort oﬀered by his grandmother, who herself was grieving.

We turned to our program intern, Philip Crazybull, a recognized medicine man in his Lakota tribe, and who was in Albuquerque to gain his master’s degree in counseling, his “white man’s papers.”

Rocco refused to play with objects in the sand tray, a typical Western intervention often used to observe how children express themselves by interacting with toy representations of people and objects. Phil oﬀered him some drawing paper and crayons, and Rocco began drawing images of guns. He did pay some attention while Phil began telling Rocco stories about himself, how he had lost all his family members, some to shootings, and how the suﬀering he underwent was preparing him to become an Indian brave. Phil defined a brave as the hero who accepts pain as the sacrifice necessary to become a healer for his people. He told Rocco that there were many ways to look at things and began to make small alterations to the drawing.

Little by little, with Rocco participating at this point, the images were transformed into a bear. Phil then told Rocco about the power of bear medicine, and it was this new vision that started Rocco on his healing journey. Little by little, he released the pain of the tragedy from his past with the wish to become a protector, like Phil. Given a little bear fetish, he gladly accepted the symbol of his potential strength. Gradually Rocco became more like a normal five-year-old, willing to relate appropriately with grandmother, eat and sleep more regularly and months later, attend school. He developed a relationship with Phil, and during future sessions, sat on Phil’s lap as Phil told Rocco more stories about growing up brave and strong, feeling safe and looking forward to being grandmother’s protector when grown. Now known as “Little Bear,” Rocco had begun his healing journey.

Indigenous healing traditionally gives the greatest power to the medicine person who conducts ceremony and performs healing rituals to invoke the help of the spirits in restoring balance to the petitioner. The responsibility of each individual includes the prescription for ongoing spiritual practices: prayers, oﬀerings like the first bite of food on one’s plate, purification through certain rituals like the sweat lodge and flesh oﬀerings, and the carrying of sacred objects in the form of fetishes. Elmer always had with him a medicine pouch filled with cornmeal that had been blessed. Because we understood that we too had the responsibility to prepare ourselves as healers, we went outdoors to pray for guidance before each session. With a small amount of cornmeal in our palms, we turned to each of the four directions following the movement of the Sacred Medicine Wheel, as we breathed the cornmeal into the air.

Because Indigenous medicine considers whatever is used in healing to be sacred, we looked for signs and symbols from nature indicating that our prayers were heard: bird feathers, butterflies, even unusual rocks could portend success.

Purification of one’s self to develop higher levels of Being and Doing is required both in Indigenous healing and Gurdjieﬀ Work. It is a shared fundamental premise that, by ourselves, we are limited in our spiritual development, and that harmony between the parts of human beings is achieved through seeking contact with higher forces. Coming into a state of Unity, or oneness, with a Supreme Being, whether the name we use is the Great One, as Elmer did, God, His Endlessness, or our common Father Creator, requires us to believe that we are all part or a particle of a greater whole. This shared vision includes a reality that all life is sacred, all life is One. The aim of healing is “mending the hoop”—finding our place in the Circle of Life. Medicine is whatever can help us overcome that which separates us, primarily our ego. Because Indigenous spirituality is so inclusive of the natural world as part of this Oneness, Indigenous healers find it useful to invoke the qualities of plants and animals to foster healing, practices often dismissed in Western medicine.

A good part of our healing journeys began with the strengthening of our own spiritual practices to help us become channels for healing. Elmer and I understood that we needed more reliance on our intuition and imagination than on what we had learned through textbooks and training manuals. We discovered how much more we could learn from the people we worked with than by our presupposition of what they needed for their own journeys. My experiences of working with Elmer helped me strengthen and widen my own spiritual practices. I regularly attended the Sweat Lodge and suﬀered through my own four-day Vision Quest, left alone without food or water, to pray for healing visions. We reminded each other, when we shared a meal, to oﬀer the first bite of food to the spirits. And we both needed reminders, as I continue to do each day, to continue to make oﬀerings through my Work eﬀorts, to feed myself to the Higher.

Elmer died in 2007, of lung cancer. He was fifty years old, the fourth of his non-smoking siblings poisoned by the toxic waste dumped into the Rio Grande river next to which the pueblo villages were located during nuclear testing at Los Alamos. I was present in his dying moments, where he remained in a clear state of consciousness despite the physical pain, unwilling to take the Western medicine on his bedside table. I was called by his wife because Elmer wanted to dictate the ending of the book we had been working on, telling the full story of our healing journeys. These are his last words, the clearest expression of what constitutes healing which resonates with everything I learned from Gurdjieﬀ:

All this healing is about becoming Spirit—being born from the Spirit world. In that world we try to understand that death is a beginning. Each time we’re born into either death or life, it’s just about the journey. It’s better to give yourself up to the Creator: Let’s see if we can work together, making meaning out of suﬀering. Once we understand, it becomes easier to find meaning in all events in our lives.

Part of the on-going growing up process is to get the big picture. How does one gain authentic guidance? By going to an unknown place. The experience of entering sacred space creates a reminding factor. Even if I get lost, I have something to come back to. In the world of Spirit, change is the essence. Each moment brings us to a new reality, like watching skies at sunrise and sunset. Transformation happens.

Much of the time we’re disconnected, wasting time by not acknowledging simple, basic truth. We need to take steps back into that moment of connecting to remind us that, even before birth, that imprint was there. What is it that I am? Where am I headed? How am I connected to everything? What comes out of the contact with that larger reality is not what we think.

Using our own experiences as therapists, with pain and illness to enhance our work with clients, opens us up. In speaking of our own experience, clients trust that they’ll be accompanied by somebody that understands them. We have to get in touch with our own inadequacies in ourselves: unknowing, doubting, anxieties and fear.

That’s the thing about therapy: you aren’t separated from it. You become a participant in the process, not separate from it. Things work best when you’re uncertain; when you say, “I’m not sure where this will go.” Our clients challenge us to be humble. We all re-do the same stuﬀ over and over. It’s an illusion that we change. There’s the false sense of having changed what’s always there.

The journey is continuous; the illusion of having mastered something brings you right back. We need to learn what our clients learned to get them where they are, using their images, their symbols, their resources. That’s why we call them our teachers.

Healing is not about what to do. It’s about connecting. Teach people to communicate with themselves and the Great One. Teach the basics of relating to something higher. □

Judith Kessler, a clinical psychologist, is a long-time member of Willem Nyland’s Gurdjieﬀ Practice Group and co-director of Blue Sky Consultants. She lived and worked in New Mexico from 1996–2001 and currently resides in Oregon.