Tapping Creation Stories For Healing and Energy

Excerpt from Coyote Wisdom, Chapter 1:

Creation stories are ubiquitous in life. Our families tell us stories of our birth. At family gatherings and holidays across the world, families love to tell memorable, hilarious, and embarrassing stories of our childhood. At business meetings, on airplanes, and at parties, we tell stories about how we got to be where we are today. We have the short version for acquaintances, the long version for our closest friends, and the cleaned-up version for first dates and potential in-laws.

Cultures also tell stories about their own creation, and people tell stories about how they got sick and how they got well. The story about how an illness arose is particularly powerful and has multiple versions. In Western society, the doctor's version is called the diagnosis, and it is a compelling story to which all members of society pay homage. People's own stories about how they got sick may or may not parallel the official medical story, and this seems like the logical place to begin a book about the healing power of stories.

Thus we begin with the idea that everyone needs a creation story, just as much as cultures need stories about their origins. And all people require a story about the appearance of their illness, whether or not that story matches the medical version. The power of the creation story lies in its predictions. The medical diagnostic story predicts what treatments will work and what the results of those treatments will be. Similarly, the sick person's story about the birth of his or her illness predicts the likelihood of healing or cure and contains clues as to what treatments will work and what treatments will not work.

I begin with creation stories, just as medical care begins with diagnosis. I want to draw out the person's own illness-creation story, and then, over time, as I shall show in subsequent chapters, I try to influence that story so that the chance for healing and cure increases. As many Native healers have told me, the limits to healing and curing are a great mystery, known only to the Divine; we are required to do our best to strive for wellness in every way possible, knowing that healing is always possible, but cure is up to the Divine.

Creation stories are important, because the final story about how you or I got well must be compatible with the story about how we got sick, or the treatment will never work. In my studies of remarkable healings, I found that every person had a plausible story (to them) for how their illness occurred and how they got well.¹ Invariably, the wellness story was logically consistent with the "how I got sick" story, even if neither story made sense in terms of my biological understanding of sickness and disease. In addition, everyone in their immediate, closest circle of family, friends, and acquaintances also believed these stories of how the person got sick and got well, buffering the person from larger groups who might challenge or question either story.

Communities of believers are powerful, and are created and maintained through shared stories. Recently I met a small group of people who had experienced miracle-level healings with a particular vitamin product. Others I knew had tried the same product and had succumbed anyway to their disease. I suspected that, helpful as it was, the vitamin product was not the actual healing agent. When I looked closer, I found that the phenomenon mirrored what I had observed among people healed by Native medicine people. In both cases, the people had a plausible theory to explain their healing (the product or Spirit), they isolated themselves in a tight fellowship group (in the case of the vitamin product, a group of fellow product consumers within an enthusiastic multi-level marketing pyramid structure), and everyone around them believed with fervor in the power of the product (or Spirit) to heal them, thereby reinforcing the stories.

The vitamin users who were healed loudly proclaimed testimonials about the product; they had absolute faith in it. Their involvement with marketing the product and with others who marketed the product had forced an intense, present-centered mindfulness upon them. They had no time to be bothered by the past or worry about the future--the immediate needs of marketing the product and giving testimonials about it consumed every waking moment. I had to be happy about their healing. Some people in their group had recovered from documented lupus, metastatic cancer, and other serious illnesses. Naturally, since I didn't share their absolute faith in the product, I worried about what would happen to any of them if their complete committed involvement with the product faltered, but I realized that could happen to any of us. We can all have crises of faith and lose our way.

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