ReVisioning Medicine – Healing Individuals, Community and the Earth – A Talk for Palo Alto University
Join Deena Metzger for an introduction to ReVisioning Medicine, September 7 in Palo Alto, CA. Venue TBD.
For information & registration email Naz Motayar.
Introduction to ReVisioning Medicine. ReVisioning Medicine was inaugurated in response to Deena Metzger’s keynote address[1] at the American Holistic Medicine Association Annual Meetings, titled The Soul of Medicine, in 2004. Medicine itself and the Earth were the patients then and, grievously, are increasingly afflicted. As Medicine creates culture, we cannot heal ourselves or the earth if we don’t transform our ways of thinking.
We have lost the path to healing; it is obstructed on every front by commercial and political interests, which both exploit and deny Indigenous wisdom, earth knowledge and traditional values. A healthy and vibrant medical system requires us to bear witness to current conditions and the persistence of iatrogenesis in order to radically align ourselves with the deepest values that sustain health for our selves, communities and the earth. ReVisioning Medicine is a practice, an ethical position and a state of mind that is the next necessary step after Alternative, Complementary and Integrated Medicine. Essential to ReVisioning Medicine is learning to hear the Story that the illness is telling so that a healing path that addresses the affliction and one’s life might be revealed.
Metzger will also read from her latest novel, A Rain of Night Birds. It comes out of years of thinking about Indigenous wisdom and spirit, earth based ways of knowing and living. The novel is a love story in which a non-Native woman and a Native man, two climatologists, meet in sorrow and possibility. The novel bears witness: climate change arises from the same colonial mind that enacts genocide on the Native people of this county. It calls for this dominating mind to change so that we enter a trajectory of sustainability and restoration. She will read from those sections in which a country doctor who served with the Indian Health Service in lieu of fighting in Vietnam is met and mentored by a Native elder and Medicine person.
As Karen Mutter, DO, says, “Deena Metzger’s A Rain of Night Birds is a masterfully written story that simultaneously speaks to restoration of the environment, the institution of medicine, and the role of right relationships. It is a true love story: love of the Earth and Spirit, love of the Native people and Indigenous ways, love for the sake of and at the heart of healing.”
Metzger will invite a conversation with those attending so that we can, together, confront this most serious issue of our time.
Metzger began lecturing at Medical Schools and Universities after her experience with breast cancer in 1977. Her renowned “Warrior Poster” has appeared internationally since 1981 in medical offices, medical journals, lectures, newspapers, periodicals, books, essays etc. She has written extensively on matters of healing. Her books on this subject include Tree: Essays and Pieces; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, and From Grief into Vision: A Council. A poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman, she has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration. Metzger has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing.
[1] https://deenametzger.net/the-soul-of-medicine/
