Profiles of Healing:
An Encyclopedia of Indigenous Cultural Healing

Almost a decade ago, Nancy Connor, the founder of the Ringing Rocks Foundation, made a decision to launch an historical mission. The nonprofit organization — whose purpose is to support the survival and future development of global healing wisdom through education, research, and special projects — made a serious, long-term commitment to creating an encyclopedia of indigenous cultural healing. Entitled Profiles of Healing, this book series aims to bring forth the experience of sitting with a traditional healer and encountering the way she or he chooses to teach their cultural ways.

The ongoing series, with ten volumes already completed, enables the voices of traditional shamans and medicine people to be heard unfettered by Euro-American explanations and theory. Each volume, accompanied by photographs and a digital recording that captures the prayers, sacred songs, and sounds of the culture, aims to express the spirit of a particular tradition. Life stories, personal accounts of visions, and detailed descriptions of complementary medicine practices are interspersed throughout these volumes, articulating a unique encyclopedia of the world's healing knowledge.

Although research has proliferated on the indigenous use of medicinal plants, less attention has been given to the spiritual relationships that diverse cultural doctors have with their patients and with nature. As Baruch Blomberg, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on infectious viral diseases, who studied hundreds of plants used by traditional healers, concludes: "We need a new way to listen to nature while maintaining all the advantages of science." Shamans are attuned to a spiritual landscape, a reality seldom seen by western scientific vision. Rather than quietly dismiss spiritual practice as a therapeutic placebo, this unique book series invites respectful attention to the equality of diverse cultural-spiritual realities.

Profiles of Healing faces the challenge of helping preserve the knowledge of indigenous doctors. It sets forth the first-person voices of shamans and healers with the belief that saving cultural knowledge is as important as saving biodiversity. Meet the healers from this series and listen to some of the words they have to say about health and healing.