Date: Wednesday October 15, 2014
Dr. Patricia Vickers will discuss how the use of traditional law and ancestral teachings from all Nations can contribute to health, well-being and healing.
She will be presenting from her doctoral dissertation, which she completed in 2008. Her work studied the transformative teachings of the Ayaawx (Ts’msyen Ancestral Law) while attempting to articulate the abstract perspectives found in adaawx (sacred stories) using sm’algyax language as the main reference to examine North American history of cultural oppression searching for the pathway to freedom in ancestral teachings.
Session Video
Watching to see is not new behaviour for Indigenous peoples. The practice of stillness has been a part of the teachings since the beginning of time. The stillness creates space and space is an opportunity for healing and change. Through observation without judgement, one finds the ancestral pathway to freedom from inflictive traumatic memory.
For one who searches for the pathway to healing generations of trauma, the greatest challenge is to find the way out of the conditioned mind.
What are the signs and symptoms of the conditioned mind and how does one find freedom? Dr. Vickers draws from the Dalai Lama to describe how to find freedom from cyclic existence of the conditioned mind as:
- Recognizing the suffering state one is in;
- Seeing how one’s emotional response such as anger and attachment
- perpetuates the cycle of misery;
- A sense of frustration and disgust at our state arises;
- We develop compassion for self in the intention to free self and this in turn nurtures,
- Compassion for others (Dalai Lama, An open heart: practicing compassion in everyday life).”
About the Presenter
Dr. Patricia Vickers, Director of Mental Wellness of FNHA, has experience as a trainer, consultant, instructor, facilitator, program developer, director and clinical counsellor for Indigenous communities along the coast of British Columbia. She is no stranger to public speaking, being published, and engaging families, professionals, youth and the greater community. She has ancestral roots in Tsimshian and Heiltsuk nations on her father’s side and English on her mother’s side.
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