The aboriginal people call themselves Anangu (an nah new), and their healers Ngankari (nahn gree). I had hoped to meet one of them when I visited Uluru, their holy mountain, but once I got there it seemed unlikely in the extreme.



Uluru has a Disneyland feel to it; surrounding the great monolith is Voyages Ayers Rock Resort. It is a corporate conglomerate that owns the five hotels, apartments, campgrounds, RV parks, its attendant services, and (as of a recent court decision) also the land just outside the National Park boundary. Buses disgorge thousands of people from all over the world at sunrise who stand three-deep clicking away at the gorgeous colors sipping coffee, tea, and hot chocolate prepared by their drivers.

We had booked a tour with the only aboriginal-owned company (managed by non-native people). I shared my disappointment and wish for a more authentic experience with our driver. After talking with me, he gave me the telephone number of an Anangnu interpreter. I called him and told him a little about myself and my interest and he suggested we meet for coffee the next morning.

We talked, he checked me out, and said many spiritual seekers came to this holy place, not all of whom were sincere. After an hour, apparently satisfied, he said he would take my wife and I to meet Reggie Uluru (his real name) and, perhaps, some other friends.
We drove through the flat, red earth of central Australia’s high desert landscape; it seemed all too familiar, including the signs of native poverty and neglect of essential services. We were introduced to Reggie, who was sitting on a sofa under a tent awning. He was about 80 years old, with a glowing smile, a full white beard, and blind in his left eye from some trauma many years ago. He understood more English than he spoke and was more comfortable speaking through our interpreter. He greeted us warmly, called me kuta tjilbi (old brother) and over the next day told us his healing story.

Reggie Uluru is the son and grandson of Ngangkari; they have been healing “the people” as long as the Anangu have lived on the earth. He says the Ngangkari are effective because they get straight to the problem. The heart of healing he said is to see into the person’s spirit (kurunpa). Kurunpa is inside all of us; it is what gives us life. He can work with the spirit of the sick person whether they’re awake or whether they’re asleep.

“Sometimes I work at night,” he said, “when all is quiet I move among the people’s sleeping spirits the same way an eagle soars. My special healing power is called ‘mapanpa’; it is in my hands and in my breath. I search around inside the person’s spirit for a negative force that shouldn’t be there, we call it ‘mamu’. The mamu is the same as having an alien spirit that displaces your own. When I come to a patient I look at the person, feel with my hands and then capture it, or suck out the sickness with my mouth. Sometimes it’s a piece of wood, a bone or a small round bundle that I remove and show to the sufferer.”

Before you cast this aside as primitive mumbo-jumbo, consider that the process of psychotherapy is also about helping patients get out all kinds of negative introjects (traumas we keep inside that come out in symptomatic ways) by getting them to see and identify with a power greater than that causing their illness. I do it by talking, identification, insight, and sometimes creating healing rituals and ceremonies. Reggie does it by moving his hands over the body, rubbing, and sucking to get the rubbish out. The crucial aspect of healing is a belief in the practice and in the practitioner.

Reggie asked me if there was something that I need healed. I told him I had been suffering from a sore throat and chest congestion since coming to Australia. He motioned for me to take off my shirt and worked on me. Then he asked Elaine if there was something she wanted healed, and she said she suffered from chronic migraines, and then told him, more as an afterthought, that she would soon have major gynecological surgery. He told her to pick up her blouse (there is no inhibition to nakedness here). He felt her abdomen, spit on his hand, and rubbed her belly. He moved around her body spitting out the bad spirit to the wind. When he finished he told her not to worry, that she would be all right.



This is the Uluru I came to see . . . not the mountain, but the embodiment of its soul.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I boarded Quantas flight #1104 to Ayers Rock three days ago. That’s what it said on the ticket and how it was announced before we were invited to board. The Australian aborigines call it Uluru, and it is among their most sacred sites. Tourists come here from all over the world to appreciate its awesomeness and also to climb this holy mountain, even though the aborigines ask them to respect their laws by not doing so. “This is a really important sacred thing that you are climbing . . . . you shouldn’t climb. It’s not the real thing about this place. The real thing is listening to everything.” The tourist industry, however, encourages the climb, hotels offer authenticated certificates attesting to the fact that you made it to the top.


Native people, whether American Indians, African tribes or Australian aboriginals, do not name great mountains after small men. Mount Rushmore is an insult to Native Americans! To carve faces of men into sacred mountains, says to indigenous people that nature is always subordinated to the will of man, and we keep doing it. For example, Bear Butte, just outside Sturgis, South Dakota, is a sacred peak for the Lakota and Cheyenne people; it is the source of their spiritual life. It is now a National Park where their vision quest grounds are open to anybody who happens to be strolling by.

Last week Sturgis became the site of a yearly motorcycle rally. It is a week-long celebration of leather, bikers and beer that draws 500,000 bikers to this town of 6,400 in a state with only 776,000 people. Recently, an entrepreneur bought land next door to Bear Butte, and he intends to build a giant biker bar and entertainment complex where he will stage a rock-and-roll extravaganza. This is always the basic cultural clash between indigenous and Western cultures — if you can buy it, you can do whatever you want to it. The fundamental difference between the two is that Westerners think of themselves as separate from the natural world in which they live.

According to anthropological calculations, the aborigines have lived here for 42,000 years. The Anangu (the people), as they call themselves, say they have lived here since the earth was created. Once numbering in the hundreds of thousands, their population has declined as have tribal people everywhere. Infectious diseases, federal resettlement, the removal of children, alcoholism, and cultural disintegration have all taken their toll.

Here in the middle of this gorgeous desolation, I watch the magnificence of this monolith unveil its holiness in the sunrise. I listen to my Anangu guide who speaks his language and teaches it to his children. He tells them this land is their Mother and that she made sure everything was here to keep them healthy, organically grown and free-range fed. He tells them, “Do not bite the hand that feeds you because it will make you sick.”


Indigenous society’s model for sustainability has the longest proven track record on earth. If we keep climbing to our own drummer, we will become sick in spirit.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I’m writing from Australia where I’m visiting for the first time; this is the world’s smallest continent but sixth largest country. When I landed in Sydney, the first real surprise was to discover that this is not an English-speaking country. After 20 hours in the air and feeling a bit disheveled, my friend greeted me with a hug and said, “Are you right?” I had no idea what he was talking about and he said, “It’s Strine [the Aussie dialect] it means how are you doing?” and then he added, “You’re a bit on the nose.” I wiped my nose, thinking there was some remnant, while he laughed and said, “No, no, it’s just time to take a shower.” When I patted his bald head and told him I might be tired and smelly but that he looked wonderful, he responded, “Don’t come the raw prawn with me” which meant don’t B.S. me. I discovered that when Aussies speak to each other I am lucky if I understand every sixth word.


My wife and I arrived at 6:30 AM, and we all went to breakfast on the boardwalk at Manley Beach. It was 50 degrees at 8 AM and the surfers were out en masse in full-body wet suits, but there were also bikini-clad swimmers. Seeing me gaze, my friend said this appreciative awe was called “perving.” To ogle is “to perve,” a verb that is also a national sport.

People are irrepressibly friendly and helpful; when they get off the bus, they thank the bus driver. The Prime Minister just celebrated his 67th birthday and was given a congratulatory hug on the street by one of his countrymen. The guy, who happened to be working at the time, was holding a screwdriver when he embraced the Prime Minister. Can you imagine someone in America getting that close to the President with a screwdriver in hand and not getting shot?

After speaking in Sydney, we drove 800 miles through the desolate Outback to Adelaide, which most Australians found incomprehensible because they fly everywhere. We passed a billion sheep but never passed a single car. Road signs warned of kangaroo crossings and that’s what the road-kill is around here.

In the small town of Hay, we came upon the Sheep-Shearers Hall of Fame. I held a Merino sheep between my legs and tried to cut its fleece and ended up with a sore back and a hernia; the pros can do 200 a day. Hay is also the site of a WW II Internment camp. In July 1940, the English arrested German and Austrian Jews whom they still considered to be enemy aliens, and these doctors, lawyers, professors, artists, farmers and craftsmen were loaded onto a cargo ship in Liverpool and sent to this place so remote that escape was impossible.


The people here have made a museum of this episode in Australian history. Paranoia is running high in these days of Red Alerts; let’s hope these terrible days will also pass as unpleasant memories.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here

I just finished reading Richard Nisbett’s book “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently (Free Press, New York, 2003). Nisbett is a social psychologist who says that East Asian cultures are more interdependent than the individualists in the West. He says it’s because in Eastern cultures, social constraints and central control were necessary in order for a rice farming culture to survive.


Jonathan Pritchard, a population geneticist at the University of Chicago, agrees with the observation and adds that such cultural traits are the result of genetic changes that are determined by a how society adapts to local pressures. Pritchard theorizes that 7,000 years ago when rice farming began in the East, cooperation was necessary and the genes responsible for producing such behavior were activated. Those genes produced oxytocin, a neurotransmitter that stimulates trust and harmony.

In societies where trust pays off generation after generation, the more trusting individuals have more children and the oxytocin producing gene becomes more common in the population. On the other hand if societies are engulfed by warfare for generations, oxytocin levels fall and then the more paranoid produce more children.

I’m reading the morning paper about the escalation of the fighting between Muslims and Jews, civil war in Iraq, fighting as a blood sport in High Schools, and thinking that strife not harmony may soon become the dominant genetic imprint.



We have got to stop this escalation of violence and spread genetic love not paranoia.

Registered for the Healing Cafe? If not, click here