Andrew Wong - Week 3
“What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Institution” by Stephanie Marohn, shows that the West rejects the spirituality of our mentally ill. The shaman can see that we put our people into straight jackets, and they cry and scream. If those people had been born into a village like he was, they would be celebrated for what they see as gifts. They are much like ‘The Prisoner’, the tarot card that is awaiting political and social change. The Prisoner needs our entire society to have heightened knowledge to free her, from the institutional failure of the prison industry and oppression from the community at-large. The West has yet to embrace shamanism and spiritual healers, and in it’s place they have derivative answers rooted in science, which do not incorporate an unknown. The prisoner is also a symbol for the stigma behind Asian American traditions in the west. The community and the mainstream society will often treat them as invisible, if an individual is two or three generations into American society. The sad fact is that without political change these traditions are dying out. American institutions are influential in that process.
How can we best influence political change in the West’s institutions, to make it more accepting of spirituality?
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