"Carl is a wisdom-keeper, storyteller, and explorer into the mysterious. He has ventured into obscure places, worked with indigenous people, and delved into the unconscious. His is an authentic voice that will open your mind and change your world." — Andrew Weil MD, author of Spontaneous Healing, Healthy Aging.
"Carl is a master storyteller who can take a mundane and insignificant incident from his own life and turn it into a fascinating, spell-binding tale that encompasses your life. His ability to involve you in this grand ride of words and insights will make you look deeper into your own story. I am famous for being a straight talker and that's why I like Carl — he talks straight to my soul." — Larry Winget, New York Times Bestselling Author of Your Kids Are Your Own Fault.
"Carl Hammerschlag is a national treasure, a wisdom elder whose medicine pours through his wonderful stories. He has walked and danced the path of a healer and spiritual guide. I invite you to open your heart to feel his word souls." — Bradford Keeney, Ph.D., Professor and Hanna Spyker Eminent Scholars Chair in Education, University of Louisiana, and author of the forthcoming The Bushman Way of Tracking God.
"Carl Hammerschlag — a most fascination man and writer! Trained as a healer in western medicine, he is — at the same time — deeply steeped in Judaic and Native American traditions as well. His extraornidary background and penetrating insights always make his work a joy and an education to read." — Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D., author of The Shaman's Apprentice and President of the Amazon Conservation Tea.
"Dr. Carl, medical doctor and medicine man, storyteller and heart opener invites you to
enter the world of healing enchantment within. Beyond allopathic medicine he makes a way from his heart to your heart from where healing begins. Besides, the book is a good read." — Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, co-author of Jewish with Feeling and A Heart Afire.
" I need to meet and wrestle with thinkers to feed my concerns and look for solutions for a healthier world. Sometimes what I hear and see also demands that I become friends, so I can stand in any storm and still be dancing. With Carl, I instantly recognized I had to have him for life and get him (his ideas) in front of as many people as I can. Read this and wrestle too." –Patch Adams MD, Gesundheit! Institute
ABOUT THE BOOK
Kindling Spirit: Healing From Within is an experiential journey that will expand your mind and
touch your soul. Listening to Dr. Carl Hammerschlag reaching deep down inside
to share his story of self-discovery will invite you to look inside yourself
and write new endings to your old stories.
Carl is a
distinguished physician/psychiatrist and author, whose work with Native
Americans has been chronicled in three critically acclaimed books, chronicling
his transformational journey from doctor to healer. In Kindling Spirit, he
shares the cumulative wisdom of almost 45 years working with Native people. In
his inimitable storytelling style, he reveals the critical elements that allow
us to stay healthy and thrive in the face of life's challenges.
We don't sit around campfires telling
stories much anymore; contemporary storytellers have to find new fireplaces.
Dr. H. will tell his story chapter by chapter, in monthly installments, here on
Reality Sandwich. He invites readers to tell their own stories in the comments area. He says, "listening
to the stories of others helps us make sense of our lives. This is how we build
healthy communities." The conversation will also be extended through a series of monthly calls, "telecircles," organized by John Jay
Koriath
of Full Circle Learning, and you are invited. For more about the telecircles, see the letter from John below.
Join
Carl Hammershlag and John Koriath for Kindling
Spirit Telecircles and
experience learning and healing in community. Click here for more
information
and to receive instructions for joining the calls.
Kindling
Spirit Telecircles
are supported by your donations. If you find
value in our work, we invite your contribution.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
and Chapter 1: Looking Again at What You Know
We all see the world through our own filters. The way you
see it is not the only way it is, it's only the way it was. It is impossible to
see more than we already know unless we are willing to look at the familiar in
a new way. We begin with stories about working with indigenous cultures, my
transformative journey from doctor to healer, my history as the first-born son
of Holocaust survivors, and my lifetime struggle to forgive Germans (and
myself).
Chapter 2: Alter Your Consciousness
The best way to see the familiar from a new perspective is
to separate yourself from your ordinary consciousness. There are many ways to
open channels into the unexplored, unconscious mind, and the brain is
hard-wired for such mystical experience. There are many ways to get into that
space; these are stories about inducing trance states via praying, drumming,
dancing, chanting, and the use of mind-altering drugs.
Chapter 3: Everything is Filled with Spirit
Quantum physicists and shamans both understand that
everything that exists in the universe contains its own energy; they simply
describe that energy in different terms. Both also know how to tap into those
energies. These are stories of healers who connect to their sources of energy
and heal.
Chapter 4: Healing in Community
It is an essential part of our humanity to be connected to
someone other than ourselves; that's how we come into the world and are
sustained in it. At the soul level we are all tribal people; we heal better in
community because it reminds you that you do not face your struggles alone, and
everyone has a stake in the outcome. These are stories about communities coming
together in times of crisis and in times of celebration at the Oregon Country
Fair, Red Wing Minnesota, the Haitian earthquake, Virginia Tech, and the Patch
Adams Full Moon Festival.
Chapter 5: Radical Self-Acceptance
The hand that you've been dealt does not determine the
quality of your life. It's not the traumas or hardships you've endured; rather
your life path is determined by the choices you make about how you play your
hand. These are stories about coming to peace with limitations and losses (from
ordinary aging, to facing death), and about the difference between curing and
healing.
Chapter 6: Rituals, Ceremonies, and Symbols
Rituals and ceremonies provide the structure by which people
get in touch with their feelings. Symbols can be animate or inanimate; anything
can hold special/sacred significance for us. Objects can intensify our ability
to heal others and ourselves. We dramatically underutilize our power to heal by
not incorporating them into our lives. These are stories about the power of
healing rituals and totemic objects, and about how they can be abused by
charlatans to cause grave harm.
Chapter 7: The Point of the Arrow
School children in an isolated Native tribe deep in the
Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico had been suffering from a decade-long epidemic
of demonic possession. This is an incredible story of shamanic power, and its
potential for healing as well as destruction if the shaman gets hooked on The
Point of the Arrow.
Chapter 8: Epilogue: Eating the Reality Sandwich
This is the story of a healing community that comes together
around this new on-line fireplace to tell each other stories that help them
make sense of their lives. People who can come together to share their
strengths and vulnerabilities in this way represent a paradigm shift in modern
healthcare delivery; instead of the current interventional model where we wait
to get sick or overwhelmed before seeking help, here is a preventative model
where people are reaching out to one another and keeping each other healthy.
LETTERS FROM DR. CARL HAMMERSCHLAG AND JOHN JAY KORIATH
Dear RS
Relatives:
Let me
introduce myself before I invite you to join me on a unique healing journey. My
name is Carl Hammerschlag, I'm a physician, my specialtyis psychiatry, and my
clinical practice took a bit of a departure from conventional medicine. When I
completed medical school and internship, I joined the Indian Health Service
instead of going to Viet Nam. I thought I'd spend a couple of years to fulfill
my military obligation and then I'd look for a real job.
Those two
years turned into 20, because working with American Indians taught me things
about how people get sick and well that I never learned in medical school.
Those experiences moved me from doctor to healer and storyteller. I've written
about that transformational journey in three previous books. Now I've written
another, and I'm going to tell this storyfirst on the pages of Reality
Sandwich.
The
experience of life is told in myths, they are tales that teach us how to live
life under any circumstances; stories about values, wonder, miracles, and
heroes. These myths used to be told around fires, by storytellers who wove
their magic around fireplaces under the night sky.
At the
soul level, we are all tribal people. Stories, rituals, and ceremonies are the
ways we give meaning to our lives. We don't gather to listen and reflect around
campfires much anymore; nowadays the experience of life is distilled and
transmitted while it's happening. I'm interested in seeing if we, as kindred
spirits, can come together to tell each other our stories, and find in them
something that will help us make sense of our lives.
Storytellers
need to find new fireplaces around which to tell the tale, and Reality Sandwich is one — a community
of kindred spirits who share a mythology about how to sustain ourselves (and
the planet) in a civil society. Kindling
Spirit: Healing from Within, is my story about ordinary triumphs,
tragedies, miracles, indigenous wisdom, radical self-acceptance, shamanic
healing, and altered states of consciousness; they all reveal how, if we are
willing to look at the familiar in new ways, we can create new endings to old
stories.
You will
get the stories one Chapter at a time, on the third Tuesday of every month.
After you read them, if I say something that touches you, I hope you'll respond
and tell me your story. I'll publish a final bound copy, which will include
some of your stories. So if you choose to post a response, know that you're
giving me permission to use it (anonymously of course) and without recompense.
For those
of you interested in a more "up close and personal" experience, we
will gather in a teleconference that my friend and colleague John Koriath, PhD,
will describe. We will be joined by other friends such as Patch Adams MD
(humanitarian clown, healthcare visionary), Brad Keeney PhD (musician,
psychologist, Bushman shaman), Mark Plotkin PhD (ethnobotanist,
environmentalist, and shaman's apprentice), all of whom will share their unique
stories as we integrate the book's implications on us as individuals and as a
culture.
Looking
forward with joyful anticipation to joining with youon this journey, I say
this, for all my Relations, Mi Takuye
Oyasin.
* * *
Dear RS
Relatives,
I'm
delighted to join Carl Hammerschlag, my colleague and spiritual brother of many
years, on this journey of sharing the chapters of his next book, Kindling Spirit. I will participate by
developing, with you, a deeper conversation in the RS community, both in this
online space and in a series of "telecircles" that let us pioneer
ways to recreate the intimacy and authenticity of being gathered around the
fire in community, while being dispersed in time and place on planet Earth. We
will use the essence of Carl's stories, emerging interdisciplinary frameworks
and cross cultural perspectives, along with the truth of our own life
experiences, to create and hold a heartfelt space that allows us to touch the
earth while reaching for the sky.
My
purpose and passion focus on sustaining
soul in everyday life. To me this means opening vibrant portals between the
worlds of possibility and the realities that we create moment by moment with
one another. There is only so much to be learned doing "work" on
ourselves. Lighten Up! Share the journey and don't be co-opted by your own
bullshit. To know our personal power, with sanity and grace, we need to
practice with one another. If, like me, you share a sense that a profound shift
in consciousness lies in the world of possibility, yet know that a social
transformation is critical for it to be a healing reality in everyday life, I
invite you to be a participant in our telecircles and learn how to do this. The
way you see it is not the way it is. It's just the way you see it. Still, we
all need to see it the way we see it, at this moment, to move forward together.
It's time.
Each
month, in the time between Carl's Chapter postings, we'll hold a telecircle.
These will not be "sage on the stage" presentations of "the
three This's, the Seven That's," or any secret , significant, or
withheld premium content that webinars and teleseminars are known for. They
will be experiences over a conference bridgeline, in which we seek to create
rapport, and enter the sacred space of the heart. We will share our stories and
life experiences to open a portal to moments of the miraculous that let us take
our next steps with hope and joy.
I hope
you will join us on our journey to explore this terrain. We've done this face
to face for decades, in small groups around campfires, where we know the signs
of "nature" can follow body language, and see where a group is and is
going. We're still crawling and hoping to learn to stand upright doing this in
virtual time and space. This is not intended to replace our in-person work, but
to look again at what we know and begin to form reliable trails that connect us
in new and needed ways. We need ways that let us draw on the best of our
history, while we discover the path of our destiny.
Kindling
Spirit Telecircles will be offered through a gift economy. We’ll give our
time, energy, and the technology to make them happen. We hope you will
participate, find value, and make a donation to support us in our endeavor.
Click here for more
information
and to receive instructions for joining the calls.
Kindling
Spirit Telecircles
are supported by your donations. If you find
value in our work, we invite your contribution.
