International Journal of Traditional Healing and Critical Mental Health

Editorial

2024-01-23T05:37:23+00:00

The Culture of the 'In-Between' Healer: A Pilot Project

2024-01-23T06:11:16+00:00

This paper addresses questions of culture and identity arising around healers whose practice draws strongly from cultures other than their culture of origin. Using data from interviews with four Western-born practitioners who offer traditional healing modalities from non-Western cultures, the paper explores the personal and professional meaning that is accorded to the culturally foreign modality by the Western therapist. To examine the process of meaning making that such a therapist undergoes, the paper charts the stages of the therapists’ development as non-Western healers. Based on the interview data, these stages include the therapists’ disillusionment with the mainstream healing modality in their culture of origin, their sense of wonderment at the possibilities of the non-Western modality they chose, the reception they receive in the culture of the healing therapy, and eventually the way in which they locate themselves culturally with respect to their local health care settings as well as to the culture of the healing art itself. By tracing the healer’s cultural journey in relationship to the culture of the healing art itself, the paper examines the politics of authenticity, expropriation, and belonging through a description of the cultural commonalities shared by these culturally “in-between” healers.

Living Intelligence: A Traditional Weltanschauung to Promote Appreciation of a Meaningful Universe

2024-01-23T06:28:06+00:00

A materialistic and objective view of the world has predominated in science for centuries; and a strict scientific view renders the cosmos as random and personally meaningless. However, traditional medicine views nature and the cosmos as intimately related to our personal experience and growth. While the traditional view has been termed "animistic" and considered primitive by modern science, this paper will propose that the traditional view may be a more
useful and productive view of reality. Looking at examples from Native American and personal experience, this paper proposes that a traditional perspective helps foster a view of the universe that promotes psychological wellness and better fits emergent science and psychology.

Re-Contextualizing Mindfulness Meditation: Integrating Traditional Buddhist and Contemporary Approaches to Healing and Well-Being

2024-01-23T09:07:03+00:00

Mindfulness mediation has become increasingly popular inthe west as an intervention for a number of medical and emotional disorders. From its onset it has been presented as a secular form of Buddhist meditation in order to widen its accessibility. Within the Buddhist spiritual tradition, mindfulness is considered as one of several key practices that are deemed to be integral to the cessation of suffering and psychic pain, and the cultivation of unconditional emotional
health and well-being, sometimes termed nirvana or enlightenment. This article argues that modern mindfulness meditation may show more robust clinical outcomes and benefits if it is re-contextualized by integrating the key elements of the Buddhist path to well-being, each of which addresses different aspects of human functioning and which holistically can profoundly transform the personality.

Introduction to the Wisdom of the Elders

2024-01-23T09:18:16+00:00

It is a great pleasure to be here at the launch of this journal devoted to Traditional Healing and Wellbeing, and of this section devoted to Wisdom of the Elders. We all have an intuitive shared understanding of what we mean by ‘elders,’ but there is a wide range of possible meanings of the term ‘wisdom’; are people referring to personal maturity, an elusive interaction between personality and intelligence, or simply one of a small set of culturally-constructed character types? Perhaps Powell (1901) said it best by considering wisdom the science of instruction about what is most valuable to learn, when instruction is considered broadly enough to include therapeutic spiritual healing—healing that inevitably relates to cultural meanings, necessarily incorporating philosophical and religious meanings about the proximal and ultimate nature of human life in society and the cosmos. No matter how we choose to define it, wisdom certainly
spans, or is at least open to, alternative worldviews and their understanding of how to heal people who are suffering, as well as how to support effectively the researchers who have devoted their lives to studying these approaches to healing.

Connecting to the Spiritual and the Sacred through the Straight Path: Advancing the Helping Professions through Connections with Indigenous Nations

2024-01-23T09:28:04+00:00

When I saw the cover of the book authored by the clinical psychologist Richard Katz (1999) titled, The Straight Path of the Spirit: Ancestral Wisdom and Healing Traditions in Fiji lying on the floor of a local bookstore, I was quickly drawn to it; the book must have fallen on the floor before I walked down the slender aisle in search of another book. Maybe it was waiting for me and somehow or other ‘mysteriously knew’ that I would follow the path to it. I knew of Richard Katz’s passion and interest in traditional healing through his earlier work, titled Boiling Energy: Community healing among the Kalahari Kung, published in 1982. In his first and subsequent books, Richard explains and elaborates on his firm belief that healing is a process of transition towards meaning, balance, wholeness, and connectedness and that these key elements are deeply rooted in the healing traditions and practices of countless traditional shamans and healers.

Traditional Healing Research in West Africa: Respect, Appreciation, and Lessons Applied to Counselling

2024-01-24T05:26:04+00:00

I have been visiting West Africa for over a quarter of a century. I became interested in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Burkina Faso in the late Seventies. Several students from these and other African counties were enrolled in my graduate classes in counseling at George Washington University where I was a professor. Although they were excited about counseling and psychotherapy, the American way of helping, at the same time they were eager to tell me about traditional
healing which they and their families knew about first-hand. A student from Côte d’Ivoire invited me to visit his country, where the majority of the people use traditional healing for help when they have problems in living. After three or four years of library research preparing for field research on the topic, I visited Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, and Senegal. My graduate students put me in touch with their relatives and friends who helped me schedule interviews with people in cities and villages in West Africa. I visited families, dined with them, attended church services with them, and witnessed healers in consultation with their clients wherever and whenever possible. During my first trip to Côte d’Ivoire, I took my note pads and tape recorder with me. However, I soon discovered that the interview research methods I used in the United States often caused anxiety in my African interviewees. On subsequent trips, I left at home all such
paraphernalia. My interviewees were more comfortable talking with me without microphones in their face. I made my notes at the end of each day.

Healers and Counselors in Buddhist Ladakh

2024-01-24T05:34:13+00:00

During the past 35 years I have explored the psychological nature of healing and counseling in various parts of the non-Western world. Although not a practitioner, I have worked together with crossculturally oriented clinicians and counselors such as Juris G. Draguns, Jefferson M. Fish, and Roy Moodley, in an attempt to understand culturally distinctive healing practices through personal observation, the analysis of ethnographic descriptions and reports by medical
anthropologists, counseling psychologists, other specialists, and the comparative study of counseling and psychotherapy across the world (e.g., Gielen, Fish, & Draguns, 2008). I would like to give a brief overview of indigenous healers practicing in the Leh District of Ladakh, Northwest India. The district is mostly a Buddhist region situated in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir. The 1981 Indian Census counted 68,380 residents in the district but by 2011 this
number had already increased to 147,104 persons. Surrounded by dramatic high-altitude mountain scenery, barley, buckwheat, potatoes, turnips, and walnut and apricot trees are grown in some of the valleys. Most residents are farmers, craftsmen, small businessmen, government officials, monks and nuns, or are employed by the Army.
They speak a variety of languages such as Ladakhi (a Tibetan
language), Urdu, Hindi, English, and Balti. Although 23% of the
people are Muslims, this article focuses on Buddhists endorsing some
form of Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhism (Gielen, 1997).

Some Thoughts and Reflections on Therapy and Healing Across Cultures

2024-01-24T05:45:20+00:00

Nearly all my experience as a psychiatrist (before I became an academic) had been in or around UK’s capital city, London. I trained as a psychiatrist in the 1960s while working in asylums (called by then ‘mental hospitals’) located just outside London and later worked at a teaching hospital in London itself; and finally, as deinstitutionalisation took hold, I worked in a multi-disciplinary team running a community-based service linked to a district hospital serving a multicultural part of London. The change from asylum-care to community-care that happened in the 1970s occurred soon after the ‘medication revolution’—the advent of neuroleptic drugs when hopes were raised that mental illness would be cured by drug therapies. These changes led to the current mental health system in the UK where specific diagnosis and packages of treatment mostly centred around medication—a technological approach—take precedence over caring and human relationships as the bedrock of what people with mental turmoil and in extreme states of social suffering need.

Buddhism and Up (Karma): A Buddhist Priest's Wisdom to Help Suffering: A Conversation with Ji-Gong Bo-Sa

2024-01-24T05:52:42+00:00

When I met Buddhist priest Ji-Gong (Ji-Gong Bob-Sa* [Priest], Ji-Gong hereafter), it was a cold winter day in Seoul, South Korea. One of my Buddhist friends introduced him to me when I asked him if he knew any Buddhist monk he admired. I was, at the time, interviewing Koreans nominated by others as wise and moral individuals motivated to live a virtuous life. Ji-Gong graciously accepted my invitation to interview him, which I appreciated greatly because I knew how difficult it was to interview people like him. On top of that, Ji-Gong spent the bulk of the day with me, from 3 PM to 12 AM. He even graciously accepted my follow up questions for this article. It was really a great pleasure to meet someone who would happily devote their time to others. He has been sought by many who have heard that he has been helping individuals suffering from physical and emotional wounds. No wonder that he became the person to go to for help. Just judging from what I heard and what I observed, I can say that he is altruistically helping others who come to seek his help. Many times in our interview, he emphasized that he is following Buddha’s compassion.