Lewis Mehl-Madrone, in his studies of traditional healers throughout history and all over the world, discovered a number of principles that guided their work, including:
- the importance of spending time with patients, providing them with complete and undivided attention
- the power of the mind to transform the physical body, encompassing the self-healing response, and the power of the inner healer who lives within us all
- The awareness that healing a major illness requires profound life change--a transformation of one's relationships to all aspects of life
- The healing power of spirit and the spiritual dimension in our lives, including the role of ritual and ceremony in catalyzing change, in connecting us to nonphysical energies, in giving us a view of ourselves as capable of more than we had previously thought, and by enfolding us in the comfort of the Divine
- The role of family and community in healing physical conditions and in serving as the unit for study for healing, instead of the individual, as mainstream medicine believes
- The shamanic concepts of taking ourselves apart and reassembling the pieces, coupled with a story-based approach; life is a story that we weave, and the healing requires an understanding of the story, the plot, and the characters and how to change them.
The beauty of this approach is that it doesn't discount modern medicine. It doesn't ignore the role of faith or define faith in terms of one specific tradition or set of beliefs. What it does is bring all the elements together. To be healed, we must be made whole. We must take into account the whole of our lives, from the physical ailment to the emotional attitude to the spiritual realm. We must bring in friends and family and assemble all the pieces in a manner that is right for us at this moment. Rather than curing one particular ailment, this is true healing, a bringing together rather than a taking apart.
