Every culture has ways of maintaining health and well-being. Healers throughout the world recognize the importance of maintaining or retrieving the four universal healing salves: storytelling, singing, dancing, and silence. Shamanic societies believe that when we stop singing, stop dancing, are no longer enchanted by stories, or become uncomfortable with silence, we experience soul loss, which opens the door to discomfort and disease. The gifted Healer restores the soul through use of the healing salves. (p54)

the simplest and most accessible ingredient for healing — stories

Healers in all major traditions recognize that the power of love is the most potent healing force available to all human beings. Effective Healers from any culture are those who extend the arms of love: acknowledgment, acceptance, recognition, validation, and gratitude. (p49)

We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.

That is the healing. Three simple points: the truth, forgiveness, and self-love. With these three points, the whole world will heal and will no longer be a mental hospital.

The basic law underlying all occult healing, may be stated to be as follows: Law I: All disease is the result of inhibited soul life, and that is true of all forms in all kingdoms. The art of the healer consists in releasing the soul, so that its life can flow through the aggregate of organisms which constitute any particular form. It is interesting to note that the attempt of the scientist to release the energy of the atom, is of the same general nature as the work of the esotericist when he endeavours to release the energy of the soul. In this release the nature of the true art of healing is hidden. Herein lies an occult hint. p. 5

Master: It is Love. Love is the medicine that accelerates the process of healing. There is no other medicine but unconditional love. Not: I love you if, or I love myself if. There is no if. There is no justification. There is no explanation. It is just to love. Love yourself, love your neighbor, and love your enemies. This is simple, common sense, but we cannot love others until we love ourselves. That is why we must begin with self-love.

How many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behavior, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physical pain of our emotions? If Darwin was right, the solution requires finding ways to help people alter the inner sensory landscape of their bodies. Until recently, this bidirectional communication between body and mind was largely ignored by Western science, even as it had long been central to traditional healing practices in many other parts of the world, notably in India and China. Today it is transforming our understanding of trauma and recovery.

I think healing justice is about understanding our bodies as historically constructed, full of trauma, resistance, resilience, innovation, epigenetic scars, and epigenetic resources; [about] understanding that you can't do politics that doesn't include that and then really thinking about how we assess the impact of trauma on the work that we do.

My research has demonstrated that virtually all shamanic traditions draw on the power of four archetypes in order to live in harmony and balance with our environment and with our own inner nature: the Warrior, the Healer, the Visionary, and the Teacher. Because each archetype draws on the deepest mythic roots of humanity, we too can tap into their wisdom. When we learn to live these archetypes within ourselves, we will begin to heal ourselves and our fragmented world.
The following four principles, each based on an archetype, comprise what I call the Four-Fold Way:
1. Show up, or choose to be present. Being present allows us to access the human resources of power, presence, and communication. This is the way of the Warrior.
2. Pay attention to what has heart and meaning. Paying attention opens us to the human resources of love, gratitude, acknowledgment, and validation. This is the way of the Healer.
3. Tell the truth without blame or judgment. Nonjudgmental truthfulness maintains our authenticity, and develops our inner vision and intuition. This is the way of the Visionary.
4. Be open to outcome, not attached to outcome. Openness and nonattachment help us recover the human resources of wisdom and objectivity. This is the way of the Teacher.

I am convinced, both as psychoanalyst and as cantadora, that many times it is the things of nature that are the most healing, especially the very accessible and the very simple ones. The medicines of nature are powerful and straightforward: a ladybug on the green rind of a watermelon, a robin with a string of yarn, a weed in perfect flower, a shooting star, even a rainbow in a glass shard in the street can be the right medicine.

three sources of hurt: attachment expectation judgment three sources of healing: compassion commitment observation

[his healing skills] ..lay in the ability to comfort, to comfort in the proper sense, to make strong, to fortify

You can’t heal without acknowledgment. We have to normalize therapy – not just, like, talk therapy or psychotherapy. We have to normalize different generations of Americans working through trauma.