Revisioning Medicine Council, Los Gatos, CA

A Way of Healing: Possibilities for All Beings.

November 16 and 17, 2019

Deena Metzger

Writer, Healer, Educator

in Collaboration with

Naz Motayar, Ph.D.
Karen Mutter, DO
Sharon Simone, Ed.M.
Cheryl Potts, Alutiiq Native Elder & Storyteller

History Club of Los Gatos, Los Gatos, California

A letter from Deena about this event:-

I am sending you another notice about the REVISIONING MEDICINE COUNCIL IN LOS GATOS IN NOVEMBER because we see that the times require another innovation. While the annual ReVisioning Councils in Topanga gather medical people and health professionals, this Council invites all of us to participate in creating new medical practices. It takes the burden off medical professionals who are reeling trying to provide healing while being overwhelmed by administrative requirements and questionable protocols. This vision invites the community to offer its wisdom and experience and the knowledge from our lineages to co-create a medicine that truly heals and does no harm. It is essential that physicians, therapists, health professionals are at the core of this ReVisioning work while allying with those who utilize the services (all of us) to restore vitality and inter-connection to the culture and practice of medicine. We have also gathered an incredible team to facilitate this process which will have repercussions for all of us and the future.

I/we introduced ReVisioning Medicine fourteen years ago. It is a radical contribution to remembering and recreating essential forms of healing. This community based council calls all of us to participate in healing ourselves, each other, all beings and the Earth. It asks us to validate what we deeply know about healing, about the causes of illness and the changes that are required to step out of the current illness promoting culture. It revalues Indigenous wisdom and the knowledge of our lineages and ancestors. It is spirit based, story oriented, earth based and aligned with the current understanding that climate change and extinction are causing physical, mental and spiritual illnesses in people (and non-humans) across the globe. And so we are seeking medical ways that heal all simultaneously — heal the individual and the community and the Earth. This is is a an essential council with many possibilities for the future – and we need you to attend in order for a medicine that does no harm to come to be. If you are an advocate of affordable medical care or medical care for all let it be true medicine and true healing ways that become available and support our lives. Please join us and bring your colleagues, friends and associates.

Sincerely,

Deena Metzger

We invite you to join us to walk the path of healing in a way that is respectful and invested in collective wellbeing of all beings. In a collaborative and interactive approach, we will examine the following personal and communal ways of healing:

• Understanding and attending to the inter-relationship between individual, community and planetary pain, suffering and illnesses.
• Communicating through a healing language that is respectful and restorative.
• Practicing story-telling and story-making as inquiries that lead to health and healing ways.
• Examining the impact of systemic moral-injury and burnout in health and healing.
• Relieving illnesses through community, ceremony and divination.
• Exploring healing ways that are moral, ethical and respectful of social justice.

Deena Metzger

Breast cancer in 1977 taught me that personal illnesses reflect social and political illnesses. For human beings to be able to heal themselves, society as a whole needs healing. The patterns of disturbance in human diseases repeat and duplicate themselves in our cultural, religious lives, in Western medicine itself, and now, most tragically, in our environment. I introduced the concepts and principles of ReVisioning Medicine because I believe that, together, informed by the spirits, by Indigenous ways of living and healing, by Earth wisdom, we can create medical systems that do not aggress, do no harm to humans or the Earth. We have very little time but it is enough for us to restore the possibility of a future for all beings. Gifted with the opportunity to work as a healer of individuals and social systems for over forty years, I know that healing is possible. Please read ReVisioning Medicine for detailed information.

Date: November 16th (9AM to 9PM) and 17th (9AM to 7PM)

Location: History Club of Los Gatos, 123 Los Gatos Blvd, Los Gatos, CA 95030

Registration: For registration fees and more information Contact Dr. Naz Motayar at (408) 314-6944; Email: bewellwithdrnaz@gmail.com

ReVisioning Medicine Council has been gathering since 2004. We seek to assist medical people and all interested in treating and understanding illness in becoming healers; to restore the original calling of medicine; to bring healing by acting in healing ways; and to create a medical practice that does not harm. Our medical and mental health institutions are causing harm to the people entrusted to their care. Our way of living is causing harm to the earth.

In the old days when people were gravely threatened, the spiritual leaders of their communities (the Chiefs, Medicine People, Healers, Shamans, Teachers, Writers, and Elders) called Councils. They looked for solutions by aligning themselves with the ancestors, the natural world and their wisdom traditions. Today, we meet in council because our social, political, environmental and spiritual conditions are making us and our planet ill. Council invites everyone’s unique intelligence and wisdom to contribute to the whole in order to meet the grave conditions of our lives. The council format of ReVisioning Medicine is reciprocal medicine. It is an ongoing creative, collaborative and respectful process.

ReVisioning Medicine considers patients as informants. We expect that a volunteer who has experienced serious illness will join us to provide a healing focus and teachings. Particularly attentive to and respectful of what the patient knows about his or her affliction, we listen carefully for the Story so that together we can discover new ways of bringing healing. The entire Story of an illness includes personal, familial, communal, social, political and environmental histories in order for the healing path to be revealed. We seek to expand the narrow medical focus, looking beyond symptoms, the physical and emotional components, beyond testing, seeking many ways of knowing and a range of possibilities for treatment. The goal is to learn from the wisdom of the person suffering and witness the extraordinary benefits of weaving spirit, earth and indigenous ways with medical ways so that together we might discover the deep story of an illness, its teachings, and illuminate the coexisting paths of healing that extend beyond the patient to the people and the earth.

In a circle of trust and camaraderie, ReVisioning Medicine Council allows each person to face the limitations and stresses of medical training, medical care, the difficulties of practicing medicine in these times and meeting the original call to be a healer. We examine the increasing limitations and distortions imposed on medical practice by different aspects of corporate and institutional medicine, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and government. What we are required to do and what we are prohibited from doing and their impact on health and healing of all beings.

Medicine, healing and culture influence each other through ongoing dialogue. Medicine determines culture and culture determines medicine. A culture and society that are ill promotes illness in medical and mental health systems. Healing ourselves, each other, the earth and medical practice simultaneously is the goal. When medical ways and medicine ways are aligned, community itself is healed, as are many of the grave ills and illnesses of modern life. Integrating the old medicine of Story, right relationships and respect for the communities of all beings (nature and all elements) can bring us back into alignment and health. ReVisioning Medicine Council is, we believe, more than the next step after complementary/alternative; it is, we hope, the future.

Mahnaz (Naz) Motayar, Ph.D.

Naz Motayar is a healing advocate, and a medical psychologist supporting individuals with challenging medical conditions to return to the healing path. Born with a physical difference she knows and promotes the healing path as a process of integration and illumination, personally and professionally. She has developed and taught numerous courses on healing through community and creative interventions. She has served as medical staff at several hospitals. Her work emphasizes the necessity of honoring relationships with all beings to promote individual, communal and planetary healing. A desire for healing ALL brought her to the ReVisioning Medicine Council in 2013, a way of healing she finds to be one of the most comprehensive and respectful approaches to wellbeing. She is best known for bringing joy, vitality, inspiration and enthusiasm to the healing process through creative approaches. Healing is her passion and life’s purpose.

Karen L. Mutter, DO.

Karen Mutter is a practicing physician in Clearwater, Florida. She founded Integrative Medicine Healing Center in 1998 to pursue the exploration of healing outside the confines of western medicine. Informed by specialty training in internal medicine and shamanism, she relies on dreams, the natural world, spirit guidance, nutrition, osteopathic practices and principles, compassion and love as foundational to the sacred activity of healing. She is an aspiring writer, peacemaker and policy changer of medical education and practice and has been working with Deena Metzger and others devoted to ReVisioning Medicine since the council’s inception in 2004.

Cheryl Potts, Alutiiq (Sugpiak) Native Elder and Storyteller, Kodiak Island, Alaska

My path is responding to a call from my Ancestors to help restore the Native Culture devastated by the colonization of Alaskan tribal communities. The injuries included losing our languages, sacred ceremonies and relics and right relationship with the land. I have contributed to the safe return of Alaskan ancestral bones held for over one-hundred years in boxes at the Museum of Man in San Diego. In a dream, I learned that the sacred beings, masks, fetishes, instruments, etc. unknowingly still held at the museum also wanted to go home. Their return, I was shown, is essential to restoring the broken balance. I am travelling to Alaska to find respectful ways to establish tribal connections so that ultimately, the communities themselves, who know what is needed for restoration will once again, lead the way. Walking and sharing this path of healing is my work.

Sharon Simone, Ed.M.

Intergenerational violence, its root causes and its physical, emotional and spiritual consequences has been a focus of my life and work. Personal and professional actions I took to heal from a childhood of violence at the hands of an FBI-agent father (also a nationally recognized child abuse expert) led to national changes in how medical, educational, religious and legal systems addressed such wounding. Ultimate Betrayal, a CBS television film (my life story) with Marlo Thomas portraying me, continues to be shown around the world including the U. S., South Africa, Northern Ireland, the former Bosnia-Herzegovina and other places— regions with profound histories of violence. Survivors continue to write to me saying the film and my actions opened avenues of healing for them. In 2016, after being diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer and given two months to live, I am now well and cancer free. My work is healing—personal, family, cultural and especially now the endangered planet.

Our deep gratitude to Sara Khosrowshahi for her support of ReVisioning Medicine Council, Los Gatos