Loraine Wingfield

There are not enough medicine people to go around as it is. Especially on the Navajo Reservation right now, there use to be a hundred people for every medicine man, now the stats are more like a thousand per medicine person which means that when people get sick they have to wait a very long time before the medicine man is free.

Native peoples understand that a medicine person is a servant of the people which means taking care of them comes before everything, which means you're not supposed to need to sleep, you're not supposed to need to eat. If they call you at three o'clock in the morning they can't figure out what the heck you're doing asleep, if they call you at five o'clock in the morning they can't figure out why you're not already up! So the need is too great that if that's what you're here to do, then you have to do it.

There's just a lot of suffering out there, there's a lot of pain, and there's a lot of confusion, and during this time of transition and shift and all this stuff that's going on with Mother Earth, and all this stuff coming through, boy everyone's gotta step up and do what they're here to do.

When you hear Elders talk, you don't hear about meditation, but that's only because they live their lives in a very quiet, contemplative way and they pray when the sun comes up and they pray when the sun goes down. Their whole life is a prayer it's not like a 5 minute prayer as you're eating dinner, it's you're praying over the food as you're making it, you're praying as you plant the food, you're praying as you harvest it, you know, their whole life is a prayer so the idea of sitting down and trying to meditate just sounds silly to them, but when you're in a busy world and your life isn't a prayer as you go, I think it's a real good step.

On the rez I'm more comfortable because you got real problems, you know, and I'd rather deal with the real problems then all the crazy junk that goes on in cities. I've gotten where it's real hard for me to be in cities anymore. It's not just the physical pollution, it's the psychic, and spiritual, and emotional pollution, you know, you're driving through traffic and you can just feel it. When you're on the rez, if somebody is upset, they're upset and that's it. If they're happy, they're happy, you know? I think if people could live like that more of the time, it would be better.

Somebody asked me one time about if I believed in God because they were a church person and they didn't see me going to a church on Sundays. And I said, well the difference for me is that, people who go to church and just listen to somebody tell them who God is and then they decide to believe it. For me I know God, and to me the difference between Native American Ceremony and religions, is that religions give you sets of rules and hierarchies to tell you who God is and what he expects of you. In Native American Ceremonies, they just call everybody in and you sit and you listen to them and you get to experience first hand how loved we are. And you get to know it, in your heart, in your mind, in your whole body. Somebody wrote me one time, she said she wanted to get to know me better so she had this whole list of questions and one of the things she said was, "What do you do for fun?" and I said the work I do is the most fun thing a person can do in the world. I'll tell you that when you open up that portal between the physical and the spiritual and you call in all your guys and all their guys and you're surrounded by all these incredible spirits and you don't know what animals will come and then you get to blast out kidney stones or pull out a growth. That is what I do for fun, you know work is hard, but it's a blast. I really believe in my heart and soul, every single person on this planet, if they were doing what they were sent here to do, they'd be having a blast, you know cause it's what you're supposed to do.