This fascinating account of a Yale-trained psychiatrist’s twenty-year experience with Native American healing interweaves autobiography with stories of the Native Americans who challenged his medical school assumptions about their methods.

While working as a family physician in a Native American hospital in the Southwest, Carl Hammerschlag was introduced to a patient named Santiago, a Pueblo priest and clan chief, who asked him where he had learned how to heal. Hammerschlag responded almost by rote, rattling off his medical education, internship, and certification.

The old man replied, “Do you know how to dance?”

To humor Santiago, Hammerschlag shuffled his feet at the priest’s bedside. Despite his condition, Santiago got up and demonstrated the proper steps. “You must be able to dance if you are to heal people,” he admonished the young doctor. “I can teach you my steps, but you will have to hear your own music.”
Hammerschlag synthesizes his Jewish heritage with his experiences with Native Americans to produce a practice open to all methods of healing. He discovers the wisdom of the Pueblo priest’s question to his Western doctor, “Do you know how to dance?”

Each life is a series of bridges. We cross new ones as we move from one life phase to another . Sometime the bridges reach over chasms of pain, of fear, or of sadness. An the only way to make it across is to be supported by something that reminds you that you are not alone.All tribes , all religions, are sustained by myths - births, rebirths, faith in miracles. These connection to our way, are the predicates on which all morality is based. The are what sustains us as good people in hard times. Healing is what works. When you choose to take the journey of enlightenment, you always find guides. Fromm reached the simplest of conclusions: we must live by love. It was the only sane way to save ourselves from meaninglessness. More progress in economy and technology does not mean more progress in people's search for meaning.Erickson said, note every tin you see is what you se it as. It is only how ou see it at the moment. A healer is simply someone who helps a person confront opposing forces within him or herself to promote health. Healing is accomplished whenever the news of such opposing forces are successfully negotiated. All of us need to connect with authentic paths home.