What is Lakota healing — really? A living Lakota elder and wisdom keeper explains the ancient tradition the wellness world keeps getting wrong
by Bunny Sings Wolf | IndigenousHealing.io
I want to start by telling you what Lakota healing is not.
It is not a smudging kit. It is not a drum circle you attend on a Saturday and leave feeling lighter. It is not a certificate, a weekend intensive, or a modality you can learn from someone who learned it from someone who read about it online.
It is not something I can sell you. It is not something anyone can sell you.
And it is most certainly not something that happens to you from the outside in.
I say this not to be harsh — I say it because the wellness world has been selling a version of "Indigenous healing" that has almost nothing to do with what Lakota healing actually is. And the people harmed most by that confusion are the ones who genuinely need what the real thing offers.
So let me tell you what it actually is. As best as any words can point at it.
Healing as Remembering
I have lived nearly 76 years inside this vision. Ten of those years I have spent waking up nine miles from Mato Tipila — the great stone the Lakota people have known as Bears Lodge since before memory begins — on land so ancient it holds the bones of every answer anyone has ever truly needed.
And in all those years, across all the stone medicine sessions, all the dream songs, all the circle calls and community gatherings and sacred ceremonies — I have never once given anyone their healing.
I have only ever helped them remember what was already theirs.
That is Lakota healing. That is the whole of it, right there.
Healing is remembering your original wholeness.
The wholeness passed down from the ancestors, needed only to be recognized and honored in our daily practice.
Not achieving it. Not earning it. Not purchasing it or performing it or arriving at it after sufficient suffering.
Remembering it. Because it was never gone — only buried under the weight of everything the modern world has piled on top of it.
What the Lakota People Actually Teach
The Lakota are one of the nations of the Oceti Sakowin — the Seven Council Fires — the great confederation of peoples who have held this land in sacred relationship since time beyond counting.
We do not separate healing from living, from walking, from land. We do not separate the body from the mind from the spirit from the earth from the community from the Creator. These are not categories.
They are one continuous breathing reality, and when any part of it falls out of harmony, the rest feels it.
This is why Lakota healing does not treat symptoms. It restores relationship.
Relationship with your own body — that first, most intimate piece of earth you were given to tend.
Relationship with the natural world — the plants, the stones, the water, the sky, the seasons that were always your first teachers.
Relationship with your ancestors — who are not gone but simply living in a different expression of the same sacred web.
Relationship with all of creation — which the Lakota greet in every prayer with the words Mitakuye Oyasin. All my relations.
Not as poetry. As physics.
As the most accurate description of reality that any tradition on earth has ever offered. ALL MY RELATIONS - all life that came before us and all life that flows ahead of us.
Every expression, every breath, every gift providing life to every part of the circle.
When those relationships are restored, honored, guarded and cherished as sacred — even one at a time, even imperfectly, even slowly — healing moves.
Not because someone performed it. Because it was always already underway in the process of building and nurturing relationship.
The Four Steps Nature Has Always Known
In my years of walking this path and coaxing others toward it, I have come to understand that the healing movement the Lakota tradition points toward follows a natural sequence. Not a formula. Not a program. A sequence as natural as the seasons.
Balance — the honest reckoning with where you actually are. Not where you wish you were or fear you are. Where you are. This step is truth, the first step of true healing, and asks you to stop running long enough to acknowledge and feel the ground beneath your feet.
Harmony — the beginning of remembering that you are not alone. That the separation you have been feeling is real, but it is not the deepest truth. Something in you is still connected to everything — and Harmony is the step where that connection begins to be felt again rather than only believed. Here we forgive ourselves for forgetting.
Abundance — the shift from scarcity to sufficiency. When you remember that you belong to the web of life, rather than standing outside it hoping for scraps, the world begins to look different. There is enough. There always was. Now the cloud clears from your perception and you can see clearly the truth of the bright reality of abundance that surrounds and embraces from every direction.
Peace — not the absence of difficulty. Not a feeling that stays only when conditions are perfect. Peace is the return to your original nature — the quiet center that lives within every storm, that no storm has ever actually let loose of, for these, in the truthful ways of healing, are relationships within and one and the same, the center AND the storm, in the gifts of transition that is a given in natures recycling ways that always contain peace at its core.
These are not stages to complete and leave behind. They are a living circle. You walk them again and again, at deeper levels each time, for the rest of your life. And each time they are walked, they are felt, appreciated, learned deeper. The circle never closes. It only deepens and widens.
What This Means for You
You do not have to be Lakota to walk this path.
You do not have to adopt our ceremonies, our language, our cosmology, or our history. You do not have to earn belonging through lineage or suffering or study.
You only have to be willing to remember.
Because here is what I have learned in nearly 76 years of dreaming this vision and ten years of living it in the shadow of Mato Tipila: every human being on this earth is indigenous to life.
Every tradition that has ever helped a human being heal has been pointing at the same moon, from the same four directions, toward the same original wholeness.
The Lakota path is one of those fingers pointing. It is not the moonlight itself.
You are the moonlight.
Come find your way home.
Bunny Sings Wolf is a Dream Song Carrier, Stone Medicine practitioner, and Ambassador for the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, a relative of Chief John Grass. She lives and works nine miles from Mato Tipila (Devils Tower) in Hulett, Wyoming, and is the founder of
IndigenousHealing.io — a free global healing community walking Nature's 4 Steps together.
All are welcome. The circle is always open.
Mitakuye Oyasin.
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