Navajo Healing (Retreat with Navajo Medicine Man)

We invite you to an exceptional 3-day retreat with ancient medicine practices by Chee Ramon one of the last traditional Navajo medicine men.

The main concern of our elder is that so much knowledge is being lost, the purpose of the course is to pass knowledge to those who may be able to use it. Those teachings are extremely ancient, some of them coming from the Ice Age, and have very rarely been demonstrated outside of the Navajo community.

Chee Ramon knows as much, possibly more, about Navajo medicine than any man alive and now, for the first time, he has agreed to bring his knowledge to a wider audience outside his Navajo homeland of Arizona and New  Mexico. The reason is that the old ways are rapidly dying. Today young people have to work in the white man's world and do not have the time or inclination to undergo the lengthy and arduous training a medicine man's apprentice requires. Fewer and fewer young people speak the Navajo language, and so the complicated concepts of Navajo medicine--and some are extremely complicated--cannot be passed on as there are no English words of equivalent meaning. Chee's visit is intended to impart at least some traditional knowledge to the wider world, where it may still do some good, while there is still time to do so.

This is a major opportunity to spend time with one of the last Navajo medicine men in a very intimate and deep container. The group we are seeking needs to be deeply interested in ancient knowledge, healing learning, elder connection, and fostering/supporting healing communities.

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Each day of the retreat will be structured as:

- Morning lecture (The idea is that attendees will find it easier to understand the techniques Chee will demonstrate later in the day if they have been explained and placed in their proper historical context).

- Afternoon with Elder healing technique demonstrations

- Late afternoon / Evening Navajo Sweat Lodge with Elder

Here are some of the content that will be shared and explored:

- The history of the Navajo, the Dine, from their origins in ice age Siberia and Athabasca, their long migration to the Southwest desert, and their present situation. This lecture will also demonstrate how Navajo medicine techniques have come to us pretty well pure from the ice age and have managed to endure to the present day.

- A history of native medicine techniques, divination, and healing, from  first contact in the 1500s. Importantly, this lecture will demonstrate that many techniques used by native peoples in North America, including the Navajo, have close parallels in other parts of the world, including  Europe and Aboriginal Australia, and this may represent an underlying universality of traditional medicine. We will also talk about Navajo sand paintings and how these provide a portal through which the gods enter our human world to bring about healing.

- A history of the peyote religion, which is deeply bound up with Navajo healing and medicine. A lot of healing, both physical and mental, is carried out during peyote meetings and a feature of these meetings is that they provide a neutral setting in which individuals and families can discuss publicly their deepest problems, seek help and advice from others at the meeting and, through peyote medicine, from the gods and spirits of the Other World. Such meetings provide a space to examine and resolve problems in a way we white people simply do not have.

- How the Navajo remove evil from the body by sucking it out through a reed

- Cedar divination ceremony

- Crystal gazing Healing in which a star is isolated in a crystal and used for divination and healing

- Sweat Lodges

- And more...

The retreat includes access to a communal kitchen, bathroom, shower, and camping on site (bring your own gear). You are also welcome to stay at local Airbnb / Hotels.

About Chee Ramon BlueHorse

At 80 years of age, Chee Ramon is one of the last traditional Navajo medicine men, brought up among medicine people, speaking Navajo as his first language, and learning the ancient ways in his native tongue. His  mother, his maternal aunt, and his father were all medicine people, who learned their medicine from practitioners who learned it from those trained by medicine men before the disruption caused by the incoming US  Army and settlers into the Southwest United States. 

 His knowledge,  therefore, is exceptionally pure and comes directly from many thousands  of years of Navajo learning, some of which may date back to the Ice Age.  Nevertheless, he is an extremely modest man who twenty years ago  declared: "I've been a medicine man for only 40 years, I hardly know a  thing." Today the only change he would admit to that sentence is that he  has been a medicine man "for only 60 years." Do not be fooled. Chee Ramon knows as much, possibly more, about Navajo medicine than any man alive and now, for the first time, he has agreed to bring his knowledge to a wider audience outside his Navajo homeland of Arizona and New  Mexico.

The reason is that the old ways are rapidly dying. Today young people have to work in the white man's world and do not have the time or inclination to undergo the lengthy and arduous training a medicine man's apprentice requires. Fewer and fewer young people speak the Navajo language, and so the complicated concepts of Navajo medicine--and some are extremely complicated--cannot be passed on as there are no English words of equivalent meaning.

Chee's visit is intended to impart at least some traditional knowledge to the wider world, where it may still do some good, while there is still time to do so.

About Charles Langley

Charles Langley was born in England and was a successful journalist before coming to America twenty years ago. A series of unlikely events brought him to the Navajo where he met Chee Ramon. He became Chee's assistant and later his apprentice, and was fully instructed in his branch of Navajo medicine, a subject so vast and complex that some ceremonies last for three, four, or even five days. He has also attended hundreds, literally hundreds, of peyote medicine meetings and will be talking on the subjects of Navajo history, medicine, and the peyote religion.

During his time with Chee Ramon he kept an extensive diary of events, some of which few if any, white people have ever witnessed.  Some restricted versions of these he divulged in his books Meeting the  Medicine Men and The Peyote Diaries. This diary of events grew to thousands of pages and more than half-a-million words of closely observed Navajo ceremony, divination, witchcraft, and healing.

It is the only detailed, long-term, record of traditional Navajo medicine practices, and the only detailed record of North American Indian medicine ever compiled by an active participant. It has taken three years to edit this work which is due to be printed at the end of the year.

Langley has a degree in Anthropology and now lives permanently in  New Mexico.