How a Physician Was Called to the Medicine Bear

A woman physician in Alaska dreamed that her two grandmothers, one Athapaskan Indian, the other Euro-American, paid her a visit in the same dream. They told her, “Go to Robert Moss. You need to meet the Bear. Until you meet the Bear, you will only be a doctor, not yet a healer.”

    At the time, the doctor had never heard of me. But she made a search and immediately pulled up the details of a workshop I was leading in Oregon a few weeks later. The title of this program was “Dancing with the Bear: Reclaiming the Arts of Dream Healing.” The physician did not hesitate. She booked a plane ticket, flew down the coast, drove in a rental car out to a small center near Bend, and was soon singing an indigenous song to call in the healing power of the Bear. On our first morning together, we journeyed together down into the Cave of the Bear to receive its gifts.
    After the drumming, the physician from Alaska came back with tears of joy in her eyes. She told us, “I now know what is required for me to be a true healer as well as a physician. When my patients come to me, they will get the best that modern medicine has to offer. At the same time, they will receive the healing power of the Bear because that is all around me.” She told me later that when she worked with patients in her office, she felt Bear paws over her hands, gently guiding her in diagnosis and healing. And that when she had to accompany a patient to an operating room, she would get everyone present - nurses, orderlies, even the occasional radiologist - to sing the song I had given her to call the Bear.

Art by Cristina Craciun. In RM private collection