Justice Yazzie started by asking us to repeat a blessing in Navajo. We didn’t know what we were repeating, but tried to keep up the best we could. We had already spent the earlier part of the morning trying to commit to memory a simple blessing in Navajo to say to our patients after we treat them. At the time, it seemed easy enough. But it’s amazing how quickly forgetfulness and confusion descends. Throughout the morning the simple one line quickly devolved into nonsense mumbling, mnemonic silliness and conflicting corrections between us. So when Justice Yazzie again started with more Navajo for the opening prayers, I felt defeated before I began. After what felt like a long time of speaking and repeating Navajo, he finished the blessing in English. He said all things are medicine, even hardship is medicine and that one medicine speaks to the other medicine so they know what to do.
As I thought about what Justice Yazzie was saying, I realized that it was a succinct articulation of our entire project from the beginning. It’s hard to say how something like the Navajo Healing Project gets birthed and grows. Perhaps projects begin with an idea. But where do ideas come from? Marley Shebala, the journalist of the local newspaper, led me to trace the project as far back in time as I could go when she came to interview me about the Navajo Healing Project for the local paper.
She began with basic questions: where were we from? What were we doing there? After some time explaining my chance meeting with Justice Yazzie and telling her about our project, she directed her questions to me personally. Tell me about you, she kept insisting. I gave her my usual professional answer, I’m the owner and director of BCA, etc. She stopped me mid-sentence. No, she pressed, tell me about you. I paused, not sure what she was getting at. What brought you here? Where did you come from? Why are you doing this work? How do you know what you know? I saw from her direct and insistent questioning that she wanted the whole story, my real story. And I could feel from her presence that I could tell her the real story and she would get it.
I began the story with me as a baby being born in a time of war, of the impact of forced and violent displacement, of the incessant search for home, community, healing and the search for who I am and what was taken from me. I emphasized that to me, re-claiming myself is not just learning about where I came from, but actually starts from affirming all the things that make me who I am in the present moment. In the present moment, I am a Vietnamese-American woman and I find myself on Navajo Lands, with my Navajo family offering healing with Traditional Chinese Medicine to the Navajo community. While there is a different kind of displacement that perhaps I cannot understand--the trauma is familiar to me. As I spoke an unexpected torrent of emotions came through me as Marley held my hands. Through my tears, I could see tears in Marley’s eyes too -- a shared springwell of tears and recognition emerging from our eyes.
After that interview, I thought about the medicines that we all carry inside us talking to the medicine of another. I wondered how everyone’s journeys brought them to Window Rock, Arizona that weekend and I thought about the medicine each of us gives and the medicine each of us receives. I felt that healing is the alchemy of medicines informed by stories. I saw everyone with new eyes and marveled at every interaction, including my own. I saw a medicine man give our bodyworker a healing before she gave him a treatment because he sensed she picked up a pain from a patient the day before. I saw people approaching the clinic with the traumatic reflex of suspicion and caution and leave with openness and trust. I saw a small child eager to step in and perform massage on our team members in the way she experienced and watched us through the weekend. I saw elderly men emerging from the adjacent sweat lodge relaxed and joyful like children and people emerging from acupuncture and body work in the same way. I heard laughter all around, broken Navajo from our team members, words of gratitude and encouragement, greetings of kinship, offers of help and support, all carried by the tones and sounds of the healing instruments our sound healer brought back from her own healing journey to Tibet. I saw people magically appear and volunteer for crucial roles to help the clinic run smoothly-- a local bodyworker to take the place of our BCA bodyworker who couldn’t make the trip, an elder to run the women’s sweat lodge when the person who was supposed to do it had to leave, relatives to gather sacred wood in the mountains late at night to run the sweat lodge, and our last minute addition to the BCA team who had a knack of knowing exactly what each person needed at the right time and was there to offer it. I saw everyone working in magical synchronicity, naturally as things are intended in Nature and I thought of my BCA community at home, people there stepping in to keep the clinic running smoothly in our absence and the support of all kinds that made our trip possible. In this flow, give and take is blurred, your medicine or my medicine is blurred, each person’s story becomes the other person’s story and we merge into one medicine, one story of healing.
By the end of the weekend, our team had treated almost 80 people of all ages. Most received both acupuncture and bodywork. We offered healing medicinal balm that one of our patients from BCA made and donated, educational materials and instructions on self-care, food that we prepared with our Navajo family and offered to everyone who came through the clinic, and a final blessing that by the second day of clinic we more confidently spoke to our patients (perhaps because we came up with the idea to tape it to the wall): Hozhoo bae nana dolthdoo: With this (healing) may you go forth in the world in beauty. Upon hearing our linguistic attempt, some people thanked us, some laughed, some were confused. But I think everyone understood the underlying intention we all had in common, that of healing.
In community.
