Topic: Story of Wholeness: Community, Communion and Narrative Medicine

Presenter(s): Ronan Hallowell

Many of today’s catastrophes emerge from a profound problem of fragmentation that has infected modern thought and culture(s) – at least since the dawn of the Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology. The deep alienation characteristic of the modern world is rooted in a pathological story that yields a distorted view of the human relationship to the natural world. As Thomas Berry has argued, we need to retire these distorted, pathological stories and embrace the Great Story of the Universe. The Great Story is a multivalent story of wholeness and relationality.

This talk will discuss how stories of wholeness are emerging in contemporary allopathic medicine through the acknowledgement of the need for community and health justice, the healing potential of ‘communion’ experiences occasioned by psychedelic medicines and attention to the power of story that is emphasized in narrative medicine, a new field of study in medicine and the medical humanities.

Ronan Hallowell, EdD, MA, is assistant professor of medical education at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California where he serves as Director of the Health Justice and Systems of Care longitudinal MD course, Associate Director of the USC Center for Mindfulness Science, and faculty in the M.S. program in Narrative Medicine. He has been a student of integral philosophies, the world’s wisdom traditions and Lakota medicine ways for over 25 years.

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