Before a person can be healed, he or she must answer three questions: 1) Who are you? 2) Where did you come from? 3) Why are you here? (p 28)

I saw that we create our own world – as surely as Coyote and Silver Fox created theirs in the story. That there is, in the physical world, no objective reality. That if we refuse to believe in healing, healing does not exist. If we sing and dance only of molecules and drugs, then molecules determine our fate and drugs will be our only hope. What we believe in is what comes true,….What we sing and dance is what will be. (p 111)

In the end, I think you have to accept serious accounts of the miraculous on their own terms, or reject them altogether. You can’t have it both ways. Scientific thinkers may feel that a rational exegesis of a miracle offers a back door into belief, but those who try to enter a spiritual life that way only find themselves in an empty room. (p 120)

I had to recognize that some of my patients and virtually all of my colleagues assumed that illness begins and ends in glands, tissues, and organs. I believed the less respectable view that illness also has its roots in the invisible world of the spirits, and in the stories people tell themselves. (p 120)

One Apache shaman I revered told me, I’m about as powerful as a dead chicken. The patient must do 70 percent of the work of getting well,” he said. “The Creator does 20 percent, and I do 10, which is barely worth mentioning.” Most of what a patient can do to get well, he told me, is to make the firm decision to be well.

This is where the medicine person steps in, by taking seriously a vision of the sick person as healthy, when no one else can or does. He or she creates with a patient a shared story of a mutual spiritual quest. (p122)

Shamans frequently change what they do, based upon divine intervention and guidance.

Through repetitive enactment, ceremonies can lose their power. Healers maintain a present connection with the spiritual realm, so they need not worry over whether or not a certain action is appropriate; they know. And healers respect the spirits of different illnesses by treating each one differently. (p 125)

Faith helps the healing to occur — but the principal truth is that active disbelief defeats healing, more than faith promotes it. (p 125)

A variety of tools — drugs and surgery among them — can be used to support a healing relationship, but the relationship is more critical than any tool. (p 145)

Each direction’s spirit has its own color and meaning. North means strength, and its color is red; South, compassion, is white; East, vision, is yellow; and West is black, because it means fear. If I let the fire take its own course, the experience of the lodge would be offset according to the fire’s imbalance; too much fire in the compassionate south would make for too mild a lodge: a western fire boded an almost unbearably hot, fearful lodge.//Four Directions Song actually includes 3 directions beyond those listed: Sky (up) which is blue and means protection; Earth (down), which is green and healing; and Center, the direction from which all relationship proceeds. No one color can symbolize it. // Science hides in the light of the library. When the doors close and light is extinguished, science is gone. Magic and nature enter through the cracks in the door, seeping into the rational volumes, flowing over the factual tomes that try to explain awav their existence. There are eyes in the night which are denied existence by the modern scientific world. These eyes watch, assess, guide, cajole, and encourage. The spirits behind them lead us through the darkness back to the dawn. // The silence between noises is night’s most profound offering. Between the rustling of the branches and the creak of tree limbs, between silence and sound, is the tension of flesh and spirit. Portals to other worlds lie within that tension, portals that science is terrified to imagine but that native peoples have known for centuries. (p172)

Remember. the greatest gift you have been given is freedom, and your greatest freedom is in choosing your own thoughts, words, and actions. (p 173)

Stories have preferences about where they should be told. I want to tell you one about how the medicine lodge came to the people — the same lodge I have taught you to lead. This is an important story which you will tell for years to come. The story must be told for the first time in a sacred setting, so I have brought you to this medicine spring. The animals here will also want to hear it. The stars will listen in, too. It is proper to tell the story here. (p 194) (195+);

Looking within a chronically ill person’s soul and finding the healing resources hidden there can be a little like stealing fire from the gods. Sometimes the coping mechanisms we have learned to deal with an illness end up keeping us sick. People develop habits that nurture and maintain illness. Since, when we are sick, these habits seem helpful, we become extremely reluctant to change them. Often these habits help us manage and contain otherwise unbearable emotion. But if a healer can steal, like Coyote, past a habit’s “defenses” (the monsters guarding the fire), he or she might find something that can be used to support the healing process. (p 213)

We were accepted and blessed, despite our mistakes and inexperience. Whatever is done with love and a prayerful heart is acceptable, imperfect or not, for love is perfect. Without love and worship, a perfect lodge, following all of the traditional ways, would fall flat. Love is the key. (p 218) see also P 233-236

Most people I have known who have been through a miraculous healing experience don’t like to talk about it much. There seems to be a sense that talk diminishes the power of the cure. I was once asked to produce a list of people who had experienced miracle cures, who would consent to be interviewed and photographed by Life magazine. None of my patients who had been through fairly spectacular cures would consent. And wisely so, I thought. Only those cured of moderately severe illnesses (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, depression and the like) were willing to go public. Life scrapped the article idea. Moderate miracles don’t make good copy, though they are no less important to the lives they touch. (p 240)

My own experience indicates that with serious illness, after whatever treatment, 20 percent of patients will thrive over the long term, trusting steadfastly in their cure and in themselves. I have also observed that fully 75 percent of patients improve at the beginning of a treatment; most then gradually deteriorate. After a year, only the stalwart 20 percent remain. These stalwarts are fringe population. They are difficult to measure, because you will not find them filling out questionnaires in medical clinics. Their convictions have drawn them elsewhere….And the 80 percent who deteriorate and die as expected give the evidence majority practitioners need to persecute the fringe practitioners, to depict them as charlatans and quacks. How do the 20 percent thrive? The key, in my experience, is trust.

Trust is an implicit, deep faith that leaves no room for doubt or skepticism. “I believe this will work” is not trust’s end point; rather, trust’s starting point is “I know this will work.” Ritual helps human beings to trust. The powerful sensual appeal of ritual prayer, song, and dance allows us to forget our skeptical world view for a moment. We remember that we belong to the earth, as much as any rabbit or deer. Even our movements, our footsteps, honor the earth.

Through ritual, the earth honors us back. We are changed by a power that is not our own, an energy that transcends and understands us and engulfs us in its blessing. When we are in harmony with the earth, our cells are in harmony within us. Harmony is the music of healing. Disharmony produces cellular degeneration, viral infection, and dis-ease — AIDS, cancer, and so on. Never have we been so removed from the harmony of nature as today. Stress, sadness, or grief can be neutralized or absorbed by the earth, but only if we are in touch with her. If we have lost our connection to the earth, then we are not grounded, and we must endure, without protection, the lightning bolts flung our way. (p 241)

Ceremonial treatment methods are the most powerful I have encountered. Time and time again I have had the experience of working for weeks with a patient to change a situation, or improve a physical symptom, almost without results. Then we would do a ritual together, and an immutable problem would transform literally overnight. (p248)

Shamans did not set up schedules of meetings with patients. They did not ask them to come by the lodge once a week for an hour’s session.

Shamans worked with someone until either the person was well or there was nothing left to be done. (p 249)

See Story 252- about characters in the sweat lodge ceremony.

Clients come usually for seven days, and sometimes longer. A few clients came for a shorter time, either to sample the program or because their problems were less severe. For severe problems, a minimum of seven days seemed to be necessary. (description of his Healing Intensives) (p 255)

When we enter the past or the future, or journey into the spirit world, we meet spirits. We may find ourselves inside another’s skull or within the body of an animal, sharing its thoughts, movements, and feelings. But afterward we do not say, “I was a bear in a past life in the seventeenth century,” or “I fought Geronimo in Arizona.” This is far too linear for the Native American world view. Rather, we share an experience. “I was with a bear. My spirit mingled with its spirit and, for a time, shared its earthly robe.” Where is that place? “Over there.” One points vaguely into the distance, meaning the spirit world. Where is the spirit world? “Everywhere and nowhere.” [now here] (p 260)

Do we create forms for spirits to occupy which conform to our world views? It seems we must. Native Americans create shapes in accord with what they find surrounding them in nature. Hindus create fantastic shapes, such as the god with ten heads and eleven pairs of arms, or the god with a human body and an elephant head. Christian angels are most often represented as humans with wings. Christ walked in a human form. We create shapes we are comfortable with, and allow a doorway of consciousness to open so that the spirit can enter the shape. // The creation of spiritual well-being was always the goal of the medicine people with whom I studied. They believed that physical and emotional well-being would quickly follow. They were constantly engaged in the process of helping sick people envision a future, since you must envision one before you can have one. The ability to imagine a future leads to hope, which requires a certainty that what we seek is attainable. The medicine person turns the attention of the sick person toward the Creator, who is the source of hope; the focus is on reestablishing a person’s relationship with the Creator. (p262)

As anyone who has sat on a committee knows, cooperation takes time. Evil begins as the desire to shorten the process of creation by bypassing cooperation. If I want you to agree to my project, even though it isn’t good for you, I must find your weaknesses and manipulate them. This is what Iktomi does. Iktomi does not have the power to bypass your will entirely — only to trick you into going along with his own plans. (p 263)

Coyote as clown reminds us to laugh at ourselves and our problems. Laughter can come only when we gain perspective — a worry that isn’t funny to us in the moment may be in a few years, once we are out from under its shadow.

When I can get patients to laugh about a disease, or perhaps the foibles that are behind it, I’ve helped them on the way to the kind of perspective that can result in healing.

Coyote as trickster can be useful in generating a healing surprise, a shock that moves a patient from habitual state of illness into another more precarious one, from whence he or she can “fall” into wellness. It strikes me too how useful stories are to Coyote here — to trick pessimistic clients into unconsciously believing they can be healthy again, despite any convictions they may have to the contrary.

What about Coyote as survivor? The coyote that has extended its domain across the continent is an animal who is adaptable, who will try anything. If we truly want to be healed, we must be similarly willing to try anything that works. If we truly want to be healers, we must be willing to use anything that works, regardless of our theoretical positions. Because if it works, it’s good medicine. (p 286-7)