Health, Harmony, Meaning - Navajo Wisdom

     Individuals EITHER promote the general welfare of the world & thus their personal well-being (as a healthy cell collaborates with & supports a healthy body) OR they create chaos out of a misguided, self-centered striving for their individual happiness (as a cancer cell does it's own thing, destroying the entire body).

     "Among the Navajo, all serious illness results from disharmony. To become sick, a person has somehow fallen out of harmony with himself, his family, his clan, and the network of relationships that constitute the Navajo Way. To be healed is to have that harmony restored."
     Navaho traditional healing ceremony "could 'heal' any seriously ill person, even a patient with terminal cancer, because prolonging life isn't necessarily the aim of Navajo medicine. Human beings, like plants and animals and the visible world itself, participate in a cycle of birth, development, maturity, and decline. This cycle constitutes the harmonious, natural way of the universe. Attempting to extend an elderly person's life beyond its natural span might well be seen as disharmonious or harmful, rather than healing; what the ceremony would do was to bring the dying person into a harmonious relationship with the important persons and values in his or her life."
     Their healing "address the more narrative dimensions of illness; i.e., to re-experience themselves as part of a meaningful story."

     Coulehan J. "Metaphor and medicine: narrative in clinical practice." Yale J Biol Med 2003; 76(2): 87-95.

See also: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/01/sense-of-workplace-community-belonging.html

Paul Hannon   http://paulhannon.com/