Title : Inviting the sacred wound into circle: Re-storying an Indigenous mind-body medicine framework for healing
Abstract:
This research explored the ways Indigenous worldviews and ceremonial knowledge systems can inform trauma healing and mind-body medicine practices through an Indigenous framework that centers relationality, story, and ceremony. The study, titled Inviting the sacred wound into circle: Re-storying an indigenous mind-body medicine framework for healing, employed an indigenous research methodology grounded in narrative inquiry, community consultation, and somatic ethnography. Participants included Indigenous healers, helpers, and community members engaged in healing work across diverse nations.
Findings: Illuminated how the “sacred wound” the place where individual and collective trauma intersect can become a site of profound transformation when approached through cultural practices of storytelling, song, and embodied presence. From these narratives emerged the healing-centered indigenous regulation framework ©, a culturally rooted model that integrates mind-body regulation, ancestral connection, and land-based practices. The framework emphasizes cyclical processes of remembering, releasing, and returning mirroring natural and ceremonial rhythms and demonstrates how trauma healing occurs within relationship to community, spirit, and land rather than through individual symptom management.
Results: Suggest that culturally grounded regulation practices can restore coherence to the nervous system, deepen identity connection, and strengthen collective resilience. The study concludes that when Indigenous knowledge systems are positioned not as complementary but as foundational to wellness, both indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners gain access to a more relational and spiritually congruent model of care. This re-storyed framework offers a pathway toward healing that is reciprocal, regenerative, and rooted in indigenous ways of knowing.
