Native Americans and people of other indigenous and ancient cultures have fascinated me for as long as I can remember. At the age of fourteen, I began to hear stories about the traditional doctors among the various American Indian Tribes, the kinds of otherworldly experiences they had during vision quests, and the extraordinary powers they possessed to facilitate healing. I made the decision that if ever given the opportunity, this is what I'm going to do with my life.

By the time I turned fifteen, I started making plans to leave and saved every dollar I could. I bought a car shortly after finishing my junior year of high school, and one morning, I loaded up the car with the intention of heading to Arizona. My car only made it as far as the southwestern part of Oklahoma, where I had intended to stop over to visit friends. I then found myself living among a community of Kiowa Indians.

Being out on my own at seventeen, I felt incredibly vulnerable. Alcoholism was very prevalent among the native communities. Beatings, killings, and other alcohol-related violence were fairly common occurrences. In my extreme naivety, I found myself in some very dangerous situations. Yet, I managed to adapt to my new surroundings and survived by learning to recognize potential threats and avoid dangerous people and situations.

Resonating with the Kiowa people as I did, I quickly adapted, made friends and was made to feel a part of the community. Some of the tribal elders I was spending time with, being aware of the dangers I faced and feeling a sense of responsibility for my safety and well-being, warned me repeatedly and did whatever they could to look out for me.

The Kiowa, like so many other tribes, had an extraordinarily rich spiritual tradition. Native people were prohibited, and in some instances, threatened and persecuted for engaging in their own traditional spiritual practices. Many of the old traditional ceremonial practices, such as the sun dance, had died out among the Kiowa long before I was born, and those remaining had gone underground in order to survive.

Peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus used for centuries by native peoples in northern Mexico and the southwestern part of Texas, was first introduced to the Comanche and then Kiowa tribes during the early 1900s. The peyote traditions among the Plains tribes emerged at a time when many of the old traditional practices were either dying out or being forced to go underground. The Kiowa people and their traditional doctors adapted to their changing world, learning how to work with the spirit of peyote to effect healing within themselves and others and to address their spiritual needs.

Shortly after arriving in Oklahoma, my friend Steve said to the elderly man who had raised him, “Hey Dad, Ben wants to go into the peyote meetings.” The Kiowa normally didn't allow non-natives to attend the peyote meetings. When some of the other Kiowa elders pushed back, Jack responded, “This one is different. Let him come in.”

Peyote meetings usually start at sunset and continue through the night into the morning, and are conducted in tipis. Sitting cross-legged on a cushion with no back support for all those hours can get quite uncomfortable. Staying awake all night can also be difficult. However, if you're able to eat enough peyote, it keeps you wide awake and you don't feel too much discomfort. The problem for me was that I would become nauseous and start throwing up if I tried to eat a lot of peyote all at once. After some time, I learned to start by ingesting small amounts of peyote earlier in the day. Having consumed enough peyote, I could sit up through the night, wide awake and receptive to the extraordinarily powerful presence in those meetings.

Friends would invite me to go with them to peyote meetings, and sometimes I would go on my own. I was first introduced to the man who would become my mentor, Horace Daukei, one of the last surviving traditional Kiowa doctors, in the morning after having sat up all night in a peyote meeting. Horace could be very quiet and reflective after the meetings. He didn't have much to say during our first encounter.

The following winter, Jack, the elderly man who first brought me into the peyote meetings, arranged for Horace to conduct a “doctoring meeting” for his grandson, who suffered from a rare blood disorder. I was excited by the possibility of seeing Horace work with a patient. However, I was also afraid that Horace would refuse to allow me to attend the meeting.

While talking with my friend Steve before the meeting, I saw Horace standing across the hallway in another bedroom, speaking with Jack. Horace stopped for a moment and stared at me, sending chills throughout my body. He knew in that moment that I would apprentice under him.

We all lined up outside the tipi at sunset, circled the tipi clockwise, and then entered and took our seats. Most of the men sang peyote songs. One man would sing with a staff, gourd rattle, and feathers while another rapidly beat a water drum. Then they would switch roles, with the man who sang now drumming and the man who drummed now singing. After they finished, the next two men would chant and drum. The drum made one round, and then shortly after midnight, Horace began to “doctor” his patient.

Horace was one of the last extraordinarily powerful native doctors in North America and the last among his own Kiowa people. Like the traditional doctors before him, Horace possessed paranormal abilities. He picked up a live coal out of the fire and placed it in his mouth. Sparks flew out of his mouth as he began to blow on his patient. I could feel this intensely powerful primal force unlike anything else I had ever experienced before.

Horace possessed special powers commonly referred to as “medicine” and acted as a conduit, allowing other forces or beings to work through him. Some of the power he possessed came from certain birds and animals. At one point, while working with Jack's grandson during the peyote meeting, Horace reached down to pick up a live mole, which possessed a special kind of power used to facilitate healing, as it emerged from the ground. Horace then set the mole on his patient. Once the mole completed it's task, it tunneled back underground.

For many evenings, I sat with Jack for hours on end as he shared with me historical accounts of the Kiowa that had been passed down through the generations. Jack was a direct descendent of the noted Kiowa war chief Set'tainte.

The Kiowa, like native people from other tribes, lived close to the earth, intimately connected with the forces of nature, yet also living with a foot in two worlds. There were many powerful doctors in times past. There were different kinds of “medicine,” many of which facilitated healing within the body and mind. Some possessed power that enabled them to call the rain in times of drought or to cause a tornado to change course if it was headed toward the village. Others possessed a kind of power referred to as “war medicine” that protected them in battle.

These gifts of healing and other powers were often passed down through the generations from elder family members. Native doctors, toward the end of their lives, would transmit all or a portion of their power to a younger apprentice.

My mentor Horace and other Kiowa elders said that one has to earn the right to work with these transmissions of power by going through the vision quest, which usually involves fasting alone in the mountains for four days and nights without food or water. Some fasted as long as seven days and nights. Many of the native doctors continued to go on vision quests at various intervals throughout their lives, growing increasingly more powerful and often receiving additional powers or gifts of healing.

Every aspect of native life has changed drastically over the past five centuries. Over ninety percent of the native population in the United States has been wiped out. Many died as a result of being exposed to European diseases they had no immunity to, such as smallpox and cholera. Native Americans were also subjected to a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing. The United States government sent its army to slaughter the native people, tribe by tribe, and drive them from their homelands. Entire villages of people were massacred in some instances. The native people themselves weren't helping the situation either; intertribal warfare could, in many instances, be just as brutal.

The native people who survived were herded onto reservations. Children were often taken from their families and forced to attend boarding schools, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of miles away. These children were often beaten for speaking their own native languages and were taught to be ashamed of their traditional culture. Many were also subjected to verbal, emotional, physical, and even sexual abuse, or a combination thereof.

Alcoholism began to decimate portions of the native population. Christian missionaries often told the native people that their traditional spiritual practices were evil and that their people had suffered so terribly because God was angry at them. As time went on, fewer people within the younger generations had any interest in their own traditional culture. Many just wanted to assimilate into the mainstream culture and forget about the past.

There were only four surviving doctors among the Kiowa Tribe that I knew of by the time I made it to Oklahoma. Two of the four were quite old and passed on shortly after my arrival. Ever since the Kiowa and other native peoples were removed from their ancestral homelands and forced onto the reservations, the traditional doctors knew that the power and knowledge they possessed would be lost forever if they did not find an apprentice to carry the medicine. They did everything they could to pass these gifts on to the younger generations, but they found that very few were receptive. Many of the old doctors ended up taking these powers with them to the grave.

Horace’s father, Waldo, worked for the federal government as a law enforcement officer, tracking down fugitives. Waldo was also known to be a powerful doctor, and he passed some of his power onto his son. Around that time, Horace enlisted in the Army and was shipped off to Europe to fight in the Second World War. Horace didn’t tell me very much about what he went through during the war, but he still carried small pieces of shrapnel in his back from German artillery.

Although I was having lots of fun during college, my grades started falling during my second year as I began to lose interest. I realized that I wasn’t on track with what I needed to be doing with my life. One afternoon, while spending time with a friend, I told him how I had always wanted to train with one of the traditional doctors. My friend, being very supportive, encouraged me to talk with Horace. I decided at that point that I would approach Horace and ask him to take me on as an apprentice.

Horace was living out on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northern New Mexico, but he would come back to Oklahoma on occasion. I kept asking people if they knew when Horace would return and learned after some time that he was staying with a cousin. I stopped by the house on several occasions, but the cousin kept telling me that Horace wasn’t there. When the cousin told Horace I had stopped by asking for him, Horace told his cousin that he wanted to see me the next time I came by.

When I finally met with Horace on a Friday afternoon, my whole body was shaking because I was so afraid that he wouldn't accept me as an apprentice. But Horace came out, sat in the car with me, and within a few minutes, I awkwardly said to him, “I want to learn to do the work you’re doing.” Horace then looked at me and said, “What are you doing this weekend? Can you start fasting?” Still shaking, the only words I could get out of my mouth were, “Yeah, sure.”

I dropped everything at that moment, drove straight to the Wichita Mountains as Horace had instructed, and spent the next two days and nights fasting without food or water in my car. Nothing really happened during that time. Horace was just testing me to make sure I was truly serious.

That Sunday, I met with Horace after a peyote meeting. We spoke for a while, and then Horace asked me to come and stay with him at his home on the Navajo Reservation after I finished my current semester. I packed up all my belongings at the end of the semester and headed out to New Mexico.

My friend Tim, who originally encouraged me to talk with Horace, his wife, and another Kiowa friend were all moving back to California. We all ended up traveling together in a mini caravan as far as Santa Fe, New Mexico. I then headed up to Taos with Tim's brother, Chow Boy, and from there we drove on to the Navajo Indian Reservation. Both of us knew that Horace lived somewhere between Shiprock and Farmington, but we didn’t know how to find him. We saw a tipi that had been set up for a peyote meeting outside of Shiprock, so we decided to spend the night attending the meeting. Fortunately, someone at the meeting knew where Horace lived and told us where we needed to go to find him.

From the moment I began to apprentice with Horace, I entered a whole new world. Horace began to take me along wherever he went, and I was amazed to watch him work with his patients. Horace would often start by placing a black silk handkerchief over the patient’s head. He would then push his thumbs into the carotid arteries, situated on both sides of the windpipe, causing the person to black out momentarily. In that instant, Horace was able to look deep into his patient’s body and mind to determine the nature of their illness and gather any other pertinent information.

There were other times when Horace draped the black silk handkerchief over a part of the patient’s body. He would then scan the body to observe how a particular illness or disease was manifesting. Horace had very little formal education, yet he was able to look into the body of his patient and describe the underlying pathology in intricate detail.

As Horace took a live coal out of the fire, placed it in his mouth, and then blew, I could feel an intensely powerful force being directed into the body of his patient. Horace would sometimes use his mouth, or the end of a buffalo horn to apply suction and draw toxins out of some part of the body. In some instances, he would remove fluid from the lungs of a person suffering from pneumonia. On other occasions, I watched as Horace removed blood clots or various objects that sorcerers had projected into a person’s body to inflict harm.

Sorcery is fairly prevalent among the Navajo and other native tribes in the southwestern part of the United States. Sorcerers invoke destructive, or what would be considered evil, forces to bring suffering and misfortune into the lives of others. In many instances, they use destructive powers to cause sickness and even death. Navajos refer to these sorcerers as “skin walkers.” They say that some of the skin walkers have the ability to take on the form of an animal, such as a coyote, as they do their work.

Horace was called on many occasions to intervene on behalf of those who were attacked by sorcerers. I witnessed a number of instances where Horace would gaze into a bed of live coals and describe the features of an individual who was using some kind of destructive power to inflict harm upon another. The person who was being attacked would usually recognize the attacker from Horace’s description. These attacks were often perpetrated by family members, neighbors, or someone else within the community.

There were other occasions when Horace walked out into a person’s yard and dug up a fetish that had been infused with some kind of destructive power. Sorcerers often place these fetishes near a home to inflict harm upon its occupants. Horace would then invoke the forces he worked with to stop the attack. The destructive power would usually travel back up the line of transmission to its source. In some instances, the deflected power would disable or even kill the attacker.

Horace was so deeply connected to all aspects of nature, and he sometimes used certain medicinal plants to supplement his work. He possessed extrasensory abilities that allowed him to determine the medicinal value of the plants indigenous to different parts of the country. Horace would invoke the spirit of the plant, which greatly amplified its healing capabilities.

One afternoon, as we were driving through the middle of the desert in northern Nevada, Horace asked me to pull over. He began to describe the features of a particular plant and told me to walk out in a certain direction until I found it. When I found a plant matching his description, I picked a handful, returned to the truck, and asked Horace, “Is this what you wanted?” He nodded, wrapped the plants up in a piece of cloth, stashed them in his briefcase, and then we headed on down the road.

There were all kinds of very unusual occurrences around Horace. I was often amazed at how eagles would appear out of nowhere when I was traveling with him. On one occasion, an eagle swooped down as we drove into the College of Santa Fe. There was another instance where we were cruising along the back roads of northern Nevada, and we pulled up alongside an eagle eating its prey. Horace slid open the side door of the van, and we sat within ten feet of the eagle, which looked up at us momentarily and then went back to devouring its prey.

Horace spent much of his time on the road. We made so many road trips through Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Nevada, and often traveled back and forth to Oklahoma. He was well known among many of the native communities, and the demand for his services was so great at times that it was more than he could physically handle. Horace would often hide whatever vehicle he was driving in the garage of the friends he stayed with or behind their house because people would start lining up to be doctored as soon as they realized he was in town.

Horace rarely let people know where he lived, or he would have never had any time to himself. He couldn't keep a telephone. Even though he said not to share the number, people would start giving it out, and then the phone would be ringing off the hook with people seeking help. Horace was very physically active, especially for a man of his age, but he would sometimes relax between road trips by making the ceremonial fans used in the peyote meetings from eagle, woodpecker, or scissortail feathers.

Horace could be extremely harsh at times, and training under him was often very difficult. Soon after I began my apprenticeship, he had me dispose of most of my material possessions, except for some clothing. Getting rid of my possessions was symbolic of a new beginning. Native elders believed that you had to truly sacrifice if you wanted the medicine, and Horace continually pushed me to the extreme to see how much I really wanted these gifts. He was always testing me to see if I was capable of handling these powers, and he also wanted to make sure that these gifts would be used appropriately.

Many of the traditional doctors possessed paranormal abilities and were known to physically project objects seeded with their power into other people’s bodies for the purpose of healing. Toward the end of their lives, they would transfer portions of their own power to a younger apprentice. Horace usually transferred portions of his power to me when I was out fasting alone in the desert. He would cut the end off certain types of feathers, seed them with his power, and then stand in front of me and physically project them into my body. I could always feel a tremendous impact from the force of this power, which would momentarily knock me unconscious.

Horace began to have me assist him as he worked with his patients, sometimes placing the live coals in my mouth as he did, and on some occasions, using my mouth to apply suction and remove blood clots or physical toxins from specific parts of the body. I began to feel the same forces that Horace worked with moving through me to assist the person I was working with.

Horace started encouraging me to work with people on my own, but I was very hesitant in the beginning because I wasn’t sure that I really possessed any power or that I knew what I was doing. I was also afraid that I could possibly harm someone. I kept asking Horace questions about what I should do. He told me, “I can't tell you how to do everything because these powers are going to work differently for you than they do for me. You have the medicine. Start working with people, and these gifts will reveal themselves to you.”

Horace also expected me to use my instincts to survive. One morning, he dropped me off in the middle of the Hopi Indian Reservation with thirty dollars and my backpack, and then told me to hitchhike to Las Vegas, Nevada, find work, and a place to stay. Before driving off, Horace looked at me and said, “Make it the best you can.”

I let Horace know where I was staying after I got myself situated in Vegas. He stopped in to check on me after a few months. Horace showed up again a few months later and said, “Ready to go?” I immediately packed my belongings, and we were on the road again.

Sweat lodges have, for centuries, been an important part of Native American healing practices. Willow saplings are cut, and the ends are buried in the ground in a circle. The saplings are then bent over and tied together to form a dome shape. Additional saplings are tied to the frame horizontally to reinforce the structure. Buffalo hides were used in times past when they were plentiful to cover the frame of the sweat lodge. Present-day sweat lodges are usually covered with blankets or tarps. A pit is dug in the center of the lodge to hold the rocks that have been heated in the fire. Water is then poured over the rocks to generate steam.

Horace would often sweat, and he liked to work with his patients in the sweat lodge. I ended up building so many sweat lodges during the years I spent training with him. Horace was always looking for every opportunity to toughen me up, and he made the sweat lodge excruciatingly hot when it was just the two of us. There were periods of time when we went into the sweat lodge every day. I would sweat with Horace as many as four or five times in one day when he had me on a fast.

Horace would sometimes draw upon a certain kind of power as he held the rocks that were used to heat the sweat lodge after they had been in the fire. There were also instances when he brought the spirit of the buffalo into the sweat lodge. I would feel this immensely powerful presence filling the space whenever he invoked the buffalo’s presence.

Horace was not what most would think of as a spiritual or religious person, but people from the ancient spiritual traditions operate with an entirely different set of sensibilities. Horace had no pretense about him, and he never tried to impress people because he really didn’t care what anyone thought.

Horace had served as a tribal police officer during his younger years. He was heavyset and stood about five foot six inches tall. I have never seen anyone in their sixties who possessed so much physical strength and power. In one instance, I watched him jump out of his van and chase down one of the guys from the neighborhood who was getting his adolescent daughter high. Horace caught the guy, twisted his arm up behind his back, forced him into the house, and then slammed him down on top of the kitchen table and started pulling his jacket off as the guy stood there begging for forgiveness. The same guy married Horace’s daughter a few years later.

Horace could be very harsh at times, giving entirely new meaning to the concept of tough love, but he also demonstrated tremendous compassion for the suffering of others. There were so many times when he would drop everything to assist people who were in need. He didn’t always know how to show his feelings, but I could always feel the love he had for his children.

There were times when Horace made tremendous amounts of money, but he never held onto it. Money had very little significance to Horace, and he often ended up blowing whatever he made or giving it away. Horace wasn't attached to material wealth either and had very few possessions.

I had given Horace about four thousand dollars towards “tuition” soon after I began my apprenticeship and then we took off to Nevada shortly thereafter. Horace ended up blowing much of the cash in one of the casinos in Las Vegas one evening, and I had this horribly sick feeling, thinking that I had just made one of the worst mistakes of my entire life. Horace then gave me what was supposedly his last ten-dollar bill and asked me to go get more tokens.

By that time, I was seething, yet I exchanged the ten-dollar bill, came back, and shoved the bucket of tokens into his hands. Horace calmly handed the bucket back to me, took a token, inserted it into a slot machine, and then told me to pull the handle. The slot machine hit the jackpot, and tokens started spilling out of the machine. He played another eight or nine slot machines afterward, and every one paid out. We had a bucket full of tokens by that time, and I looked at Horace excitedly and said, “Let’s keep going.” He looked back at me and said, “It’s getting late. Let’s go up to the room and get to sleep.”

Horace became bored very easily when he felt there wasn’t enough challenge in what he was doing. We would sometimes take off on road trips with as little as twenty dollars. Horace would often blow that money within a few hours, and then we would find ourselves way out in the middle of nowhere with no gas or money. But Horace would start talking with people, and he could always see where they were coming from and what their needs were. Horace would end up doing something to help the people we encountered along the way, and we always left with enough gas, food, and money to get us to our destination.

Horace tended to be very quiet and introspective, and we would often ride for hours without saying a word. He would sometimes acknowledge my questions, but months would sometimes pass before he ever gave me an answer. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Horace would hit me with something really profound.

Horace had an intensely powerful presence, and there was a very primal and even animalistic quality about him. He had deeply penetrating eyes, and I often felt he was seeing right through me. There were instances when he would start talking about events that had occurred earlier in my life as if he were watching a movie. In the beginning, I felt as though I was losing myself in Horace’s presence, and he confronted me by saying I wasn’t fit to work with these powers if I was so easily influenced.

As I grew progressively stronger, I got used to Horace's intensity and was able to maintain a sense of self in his presence. Recognizing Horace's contradictions and lack of understanding in some areas, I would sometimes push back, but he invariably knew what I was thinking and would rebut my arguments before I could even get the words out of my mouth.

Having to continually intervene in other people’s suffering can be wearing at times, yet Horace's dark sense of humor helped him cope. He could be extremely irreverent, even sacrilegious, but also playful or even silly, often saying things that made people laugh.

Of the many healers I've met from around the world, I still feel that Horace is the most powerful. He was able to address a wide range of health-related issues, often facilitating truly miraculous healings. Although Horace had attained profound levels of mastery, he had his own vulnerabilities stemming from the fact that he had never learned to work effectively with his own emotions, heal the wounded parts of himself, or resolve his own personal issues, which eventually led to him getting into trouble. I gathered from conversations that some of his own Kiowa people and another traditional doctor had attempted to intervene with limited success.

Horace too struggled with the biological predisposition to alcoholism that affects so many Native Americans and other indigenous peoples, yet I feel a lot of it stemmed from the emotional wounding that wasn't being addressed. He stayed sober for the vast majority of the time that I was around him, but he did go on occasional benders. The drinking binges increased in frequency after a few years.

Alcohol and medicine don't mix, and being around Horace during one of those drinking binges could be terrifying, with all that intensely chaotic and destructive force flying out of him. Toward the end, I witnessed a very destructive side of Horace that had been previously unknown to me. I'm not sure that he ever meant to harm anyone, but people were getting hurt, and some of the other Kiowas I spoke with indicated to me that they were afraid of him. Some of the surviving Kiowa elders confronted Horace, telling him that what he was doing was inappropriate and that he would eventually pay for it.

Horace was changing, and it was definitely not for the better. He was no longer the same person. Everything seemed to be coming apart around him, and it felt to me as though the forces or beings had left… that he no longer possessed the powerful medicine and could no longer serve people as he had.

Being only in my early twenties at the time, trying to make sense of everything going on around me, I could see what was happening with Horace, but I didn’t know what to do about it. One day, after discussing the situation with a friend, I realized that I had gone as far as I could with Horace.

Horace got into trouble for the same reasons so many others who have attained mastery do. Even though these individuals possess extraordinary power, they often fall prey to spiritual bypassing. It's actually fairly common among Indian gurus, Tibetan lamas, Sufi masters, and gifted healers—a lot of the scandals that have surfaced in recent decades highlight this issue. Despite their abilities, they are still human, prone to error, emotionally wounded in some way, with feelings and issues that need to be addressed just like everyone else.

Our lived experiences, along with our cognitive and emotional responses, need to be thoroughly digested. The wounded parts of the self need to be healed, and internal conflicts must be resolved. Those who have attained mastery sometimes fail to do the necessary work to facilitate their own healing due to grandiosity, ignorance, or a lack of understanding. The stakes are much higher for those who possess such immense power. While they may have the capacity to facilitate healing or spiritual growth in others, that tremendous power flowing through them also illuminates and amplifies the unintegrated shadow aspects of the self. Toward the end of my time with Horace, I sometimes felt as though I was existing in day and night simultaneously, witnessing a string of miracles on one hand and absolute chaos, even destruction, on the other.

Horace taught me a crucial lesson through his example that he never intended to teach. Our emotional wounding can create blind spots that prevent us from clearly seeing ourselves, our actions, other people, and situations. It can also create a destructive force resulting in harm to ourselves and others. This is one of the main reasons I place so much emphasis on helping people understand and work effectively with their own emotions and address relevant issues. Although many people are very resistant to addressing this aspect of themselves, digesting our emotions and resolving our issues gives us the clarity to understand ourselves and see where we are going. It facilitates healing and growth while helping us build a much stronger and healthier foundation so that we can handle greater power.

Horace was the closest thing I had ever known to a father, and I felt horribly disillusioned when he fell from grace. It felt as though my dream of learning from a traditional Indian doctor had come crashing down, and I couldn't help but question the validity of my whole experience. I needed time to assimilate all that had taken place and to reassemble myself, so I re-enrolled in college and spent the next two years completing a degree.

Friends who learned about what I had experienced during my time with Horace were curious and even fascinated. Some also sensed that I had a powerful presence about me. A few asked if I could assist them with some of the health-related issues and challenges they faced in their lives. I wasn't sure that I had anything to offer, but I said I would do what I could.

My confidence grew as friends started telling me about the changes they were experiencing as a result of the healing sessions, and word began to spread. Two friends with clairvoyant abilities described the beings they saw working through me to facilitate the healing during the individual sessions. This confirmation helped me realize that I really did receive something of tremendous value from Horace.

For the longest time, I felt a sense of incompletion. There were so many unanswered questions and so much more I needed to learn. I never found another person who could pick up where Horace left off. But in some ways, I feel it's similar to the way Horace received the medicine from his own father. Only years later, when one of Horace's children was seriously ill, did he begin to make use of the medicine.

Around the time I turned thirty-one, I began returning to the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma to go on vision quests. This is the same place where many of the Kiowa doctors have gone over the centuries. During the many times I've spent on the mountain, I could at times feel other forces or beings descend into my body. It was in some ways like a near-death experience; I could feel the traumas, other wounding experiences and stresses held within my body being transformed and then digested. I also received additional medicine or power to facilitate the healing of a wide range of health-related issues.

Over the years, people have come to me seeking help for anxiety, depression, heartache from a breakup, divorce, or death of a loved one, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, as well as those suffering from traumas due to childhood abuse and deeply wounding experiences. They have also sought assistance for health-related problems such as digestive, respiratory, neurological and autoimmune disorders, as well as heart disease, stroke, sports injuries, and injuries from automobile accidents, including traumatic brain injuries. Many of these issues respond quite well to the form of healing that I facilitate.

On a few occasions when I was back in Oklahoma, I saw Horace at a distance. I can't help but miss him at times. A friend came to check on me while I was on the mountain during a vision quest some years ago. He told me that Horace had recently died somewhere out in Arizona. The circumstances of his death were not clear. The Navajo Indian Reservation is in many ways like so many developing nations in other parts of the world. You never really know what happened.

Since posting the original article and a few related videos, I've had the opportunity to reconnect with some of Horace's immediate family, including three of his sons and a daughter-in-law,. Two of the sons and the daughter-in-law have passed on, but I continue to talk with another. Other people who knew Horace and whose lives were touched by him have also been reaching out to me. I'm very thankful to have these connections.