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Patricia Ann Davis - The Diné Ceremonial Change Process For Healing Oneself and The World

Patricia-Anne Davis explains her "Ceremonial Change Process" for healing oneself and the world. The process is translated from the Navajo "blessingway" ceremony and involves four phases: 1) Naming the root cause of an out-of-balance condition, 2) Emptying stagnant energy to experience authentic feelings, 3) Reframing thinking to remember one's inherent divinity, and 4) Manifesting a co-creative solution with creator, self, and others. The key is using sacred-self intellect over the ego mind to make life-affirming decisions and restore balance within the natural order. Davis learned this indigenous wisdom through her Choctaw/Navajo ancestry and

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
83 views2 pages

Patricia Ann Davis - The Diné Ceremonial Change Process For Healing Oneself and The World

Patricia-Anne Davis explains her "Ceremonial Change Process" for healing oneself and the world. The process is translated from the Navajo "blessingway" ceremony and involves four phases: 1) Naming the root cause of an out-of-balance condition, 2) Emptying stagnant energy to experience authentic feelings, 3) Reframing thinking to remember one's inherent divinity, and 4) Manifesting a co-creative solution with creator, self, and others. The key is using sacred-self intellect over the ego mind to make life-affirming decisions and restore balance within the natural order. Davis learned this indigenous wisdom through her Choctaw/Navajo ancestry and

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The Diné “Ceremonial Change Process”

for healing oneself and the world


An interview of Diné wisdom-keeper Patricia-Anne Davis
by Carol Hiltner

Choctaw/Diné diagnostician and practitioner Patricia-Anne Davis explains her


"Ceremonial Change Process," useful for true healing at all levels—individual,
commercial, societal. For the past decade, Ms. Davis has shared this profound
indigenous healing modality with the people of Seattle.

Carol: Your illustration chart (below) is very interesting. Would you elaborate on it?
Patricia: First, I distinguish between two thinking systems, because all healing takes place through thinking.
The conventional thinking system is called “consciousness,” and the affirmative system I call “conscienceness.”
The process I designed is translated from the Navaho “blessingway” ceremony. It is a curing process, not a
coping process. Curing is reawakening to one’s spiritual identity and inherent divinity. The key in this healing
system is decision-making: one learns how to make constructive and life-affirming choices for collective
survival.
My “Ceremonial Change Process” reframes thinking, out of the destructive, death-producing system into
learning how to make constructive, life-affirming choices. We experience a reframe as it occurs! Our reframed
thinking informs the body correctly. It does not require conversion and is not coping.
Comparing
CEREMONIAL CHANGE PROCESS Western coun-
seling modalities,
maladaptive
emotions are
believed to exist
in the body.
Because the
“Ceremonial
Change Process”
is in the context
of natural order,
they do not exist
in the body. The
body is the earth
element—98%
water is emotive,
fire is
temperature; and
air is the spiritual
element.
Carol: What do
you do when you
are feeling those
emotions?
Patricia: The
maladaptive
emotions are
called into the
body by the ego mind, which represents the spirit of hindrance. We learn how to use the sacred-self intellect in
decisions.
Carol: Are you saying that in the natural order, maladaptive emotions are not in one’s body?
Patricia: Yes, we are affirming our identity as a precious child of creator within the context of the natural order.
If we are claiming to feel them in our body, then we are not experiencing authentic feelings of love and joy. We
are out of balance and harmony with the natural order. This is not a belief system; not religion, philosophy, or
theory, which are within “consciousness” thinking. Belief systems are perception and not knowledge. I am
using indigenous wisdom, which is knowledge in the affirmative “conscienceness” thinking system or the
“natural order.”
The “Ceremonial Change Process” reframes one’s thinking from one system to the other. Appropriate thinking
connects with the body directly to make a correction that restores our thinking function within the natural order.
It is power within, to have power with others, and eliminates the need for power over.
There are four phases in the ceremony:
1. Naming the root cause that maintains the out-of-balance condition.
2. Emptying. In Western thought, people use catharsis, which is “talk therapy” and can be venting and ranting.
In Navaho there is a specific word that describes a cleansing and purification process to empty the maladaptive
emotions. In English “emptying” is a release of stagnant energy to experience authentic feelings like peace.
The affirmative thinking system in the natural order context reframes the ego mind into the sacred-self intellect
and prevents the ego from inviting maladaptive emotions into the body to engage the spirit of hindrance to
cause delay and suffering.
3. Reframing is remembering and re-awakening to our inherent divinity as our true identity. When we know
how to use the sacred-self intellect to make life-affirming choices, we experience that they are not our ego mind
or maladaptive emotions.
4. Manifesting the “co-creative” solution is with creator first, then self, and then others, in this order. Note, I am
not calling creator a god or goddess. I am using the word “creator” as life itself, which is what we call creator in
the natural order.
The four phases of a “Ceremonial Change Process” are experiential and affirm life. The fifth phase is the
practical application for making life-affirming choices. Reasoning always leads to truth, because truth never
needs to be defended.
The key is that reasoning guides us to affirmative choices in the natural order, because we are using our sacred-
self intellect instead of the ego mind. In reading this, one’s mind is experiencing this actual process, and energy
is reframed.
Carol: What is your background that gives you this wisdom to share?
Patricia: I am a Choctaw/Diné diagnostician and practitioner. I learned through tribal ancestry and lineage. My
father was a very well known and respected healer. I am the 11th child of 12, and he saw that I was born seeing
spiritually. He initiated me at age eight.
Carol: Was Diné your first language?
Patricia: No, are you kidding? I’m an Indian boarding school product. Learning our language was punishable
and forbidden. What I know are esoteric concepts in spiritual Navaho. I learned by participating in the healing
process within ceremonies. We had to hide with our ceremonies, because they were outlawed. I learned it in our
everyday way of life.
I earned academic degrees to learn the language of pathology—not to work in the system, but to describe and
communicate “blessingway” principles. What I know will be published soon. It is very valuable knowledge and
I treasure and teach it.
Patricia’s e-mail is [email protected]. Carol Hiltner ([email protected]) is a Seattle-based
author/artist/activist focusing on the well being of the Altai culture in southern Siberia.

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