Ep. 107-The Interview: Dr. Erica Elliott

Dr. Elliott had no idea what life had in store for her when she moved out to teach on a Navajo reservation. From miracle healings to a WEREWOLF!! YES, a werewolf...this episode gets all cryptidy! Beware: this longer interview is a doozy!

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 107 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

I've got some really exciting news this week.

I now have a total of three Patreon subscribers.

I need to thank Helen Noakes,

Amy Svoboda,

And Donetta McGrath for loving the podcast and for feeling so strongly about it that they've chosen to support me through Patreon.

For those of you who are still curious about what that looks like,

I'll provide a link under the episode show notes.

It'll take you right to my Patreon page.

You can see if you want to support me for $3,

$5,

Or $10 a month.

You can check out the goodies I offer at every tier,

But I did want to say thank you so much to these three wonderful human beings for appreciating what I'm putting out into the world.

Now this week my interview was with Dr.

Erica Elliott.

And you know how you go to a bookstore in one place and then you go to another bookstore in another place,

Then you go to a different city and there's a bookstore.

So you stop in.

Well at all of these bookstores I found the same book.

Erica Elliott's book,

Medicine and Miracles in the High Desert.

I snapped it up at the third bookstore.

I thought there can't be any clearer sign that I'm supposed to read this book and guess what?

The word miracle is in the title so it has to be perfect.

Well I devoured the book.

It's so interesting and so enchanting.

So then I reached out to the author who lives here in Santa Fe and she emailed me back and she said absolutely I will be a guest on your podcast.

She's had quite an interesting life from teaching on a Navajo reservation,

Then leaving for a while going to medical school,

Then she returns and she becomes a doctor for the Navajo people again.

She has a wonderful website musingsmemoirandmedicine.

Com and there's all sorts of goodies on that website.

Blog posts,

Recipes,

All sorts of really cool stuff.

I urge you to check it out.

And then of course because this person is unstoppable,

She has a TED Talk.

Yes she has a TED Talk and it is on co-housing community at its best.

There will be a link under the episode show notes to her TED Talk.

I'm super excited about this episode because it engages with something that no other guest has talked about yet and that's something that occurs in the world of cryptids.

I'm not sure if you're all familiar with that but it has to do with werewolves and something that happened to her while she was living on the Navajo reservation the first time.

I think you're all gonna love it.

It's super interesting and so now episode 107 of Bite-sized Blessings.

And they said never go in the canyon at night because that's when the werewolves hang out and they might harm you.

And I said to the class,

Do they harm white people?

Biligana is the word.

Do they harm white people?

And he said,

This boy was really wise,

He said maybe not because white people don't believe in that.

I thought that was pretty smart.

Well I am an ever-evolving person but now it's sort of equilibrated and it's not sort of fluctuating all around as I explore different aspects of life.

I pretty much know who I am for the last 30 years or 40 years and I am a person who has finally found my purpose in life.

My next book is called From Mountains to Medicine,

My Search for Purpose.

But it's all about the journey to finding why I'm here on this earth because I always knew as a child I had a purpose but I had no idea what that purpose was.

I thought to myself surely there's more to this life than just being born and running around and going to school and doing some things and then dying.

I thought that there's more to it.

I'm sure there's more to this than that.

But I had to get over some of the things that were keeping me from discovering who I was.

I had to first figure out who I was and I had a breakdown in college which was the best thing that ever happened to me because it forced me to see a psychiatrist who in those days,

Psychiatrists really did psychiatry.

They didn't just give pills.

They actually talked to you and it was the most amazing experience because it was the first time in my life I was really seen and heard and treated with immense respect.

I just could figure out my own problems because he held the space.

He didn't tell me what to do.

He held that sacred space and I was able to figure out I'm not the person I thought I was at all.

It was profound the process we went through.

I write about it in the second memoir and it allowed me to go forward and really find my purpose.

How can you find your purpose when you have misconceptions about who you are?

You're not the person you thought you were or you were told you were or the way you were treated as a child and with so much criticism and stuff and you discover wow that's not who I am.

I'm infinite possibilities and I'm capable of doing all sorts of things.

That's when I burst out into my life and that's when I went to work for the Navajo people and eventually came back as a doctor.

When I did discover my purpose,

I realized that I'm the type of person that needs to understand life experientially.

It's not enough for me to read about it.

I have to live it and that means I have to live the bad experiences too.

It's interesting because I've had some very dreadful experiences like that's when my eyes don't work together.

I had a brain injury.

A snowboarder hit me and it totally derailed my life.

Every single bad experience I've had has been a portal to something wonderful.

Even though I've had all these bad things happen to me,

I have damage from the snowboarding accident that's permanent and stuff,

I've learned to find joy in spite of it all.

That's another silver lining is for a while my life was after the accident was so bad that my son said suicide is out mom.

You've got to figure out how to live with this.

I really thought okay I had to talk with God.

I have to figure out how to number one accept that this is the new me.

Number two,

How to manage what's happened to my eyes and so forth.

I have to learn to find joy in spite of it.

I trained my brain to not.

.

.

The brain naturally scans for disaster.

That's what we're wired for.

I couldn't change that but I could balance it out with scanning for what's good and right and wonderful.

I got so good at it that I could swoon over like an ant walking across the floor.

My brain caught on after a while.

It figured out what I was doing and it caught on.

Now it does it totally naturally.

I don't even have to think about it.

I had a patient who didn't know that all this things happened to me.

I hadn't seen her in 10 years.

She came and she said did you win the lottery?

I said what?

She said well are you in love?

I said well why are you asking me those things?

She said well you look so happy.

I said well she said what's making you so happy?

I said I'm happy for no reason.

I'm happy in spite of it all.

I'm really good at turning horrible experiences into pathways to something on a higher level.

I wanted to just.

.

.

Because obviously I've read your book.

I'm just so curious reading this book and you know kind of just in awe and appreciation of your spirit.

You're like what am I gonna do?

Before you started teaching you had this question.

Where am I gonna go?

What direction?

You just made this decision.

My God.

You are fierce and brave and so intrepid.

I mean I love to ask the question if you would have known how challenging it was gonna be would you still made the same decision?

I guess for the listeners describe the decision you made.

Okay so I have been given a gift and that's intuition.

It's not always turned on and it can't be controlled.

I have no control over it.

It's there when it's there and it's not when it's not.

So when I was going through the trade journals after graduating from college all the positions I.

.

.

They sounded so boring to me.

I just thought I'm not attracted and maybe this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing in life and then I saw too many boarding school on the Navajo Reservation looking for a fourth grade teacher and this big yes came in me and I don't know why because everybody questioned my decision and saying oh you know why did you choose there?

It's in the middle of nowhere and the boarding schools are famous for the white people doing very bad things to the students and I said without even knowing well this I think this will be a different kind of school.

I didn't know I didn't know what I was talking about but it turned out to be true they didn't do all these awful things there's just one teacher who was bad he whipped with his belts when some of the boys talked in class and stuff but he retired soon but and the principal was a black man who is very sympathetic to the students very very and he he was encouraging me to go all out I mean I wasn't even following their curriculum and I was waiting to get in trouble because I thought their curriculum was really stupid but the Dick and Jane books and stuff they couldn't the kids couldn't relate to that at all and they they couldn't even speak English and I thought something's really wrong with this school if they can't speak English in the fourth grade and and you know it was obvious what was wrong the teachers didn't care about them and the curriculum wasn't relevant at all to them and so they they just didn't have any interest.

I do have to say that I was just very enchanted you seem to have a facility with languages I think I'm understanding okay first of all I have to tell you I'm so jealous of you because you know I do I do speak a little Spanish and I appreciate you know the Latin root of Italian French and Spanish but here you are talking or relating stories in your book and and you just say kind of I'm gonna learn to speak Navajo which I thought what?

My God,

Deanna,

You did!

It was the hardest thing I've ever done I mean it it has nothing to do with any language we've ever heard I mean it's more like Chinese with the tonal sounds you know a has about nine ways to pronounce it we have two ways to pronounce it a and ah and if you don't get it just right you're saying something different so it was so hard I can't tell you and that you couldn't really write it back then because there were some sounds that don't exist in English and now they figured out ways symbols they've made new symbols they've come a long ways but there there was no dictionary there was no nothing so I had to really train my ear to listen so carefully I mean when I first started I I thought you know I'll never learn this language it's way too hard.

It's such a beautiful language though it's so it's almost like singing that's what I think of when I hear it it just sounds like a song I think it's so beautiful so I but when I read that I thought good God I mean you're so next level your next level I thought oh my goodness and I really have to say that I appreciated your first of all the book you do so much in this book I mean you live on this sheep ranch you are a teacher you do it just encompasses so much of your adventures from that time and your experiences and I really loved the way there's a whole section of the book that are like journal entries and so we kind of get to hear your voice in real time at that time and so I really and I also you know I really appreciated and loved that you showed up you 100% showed up from day one you know once you learned some of the correct ways of interacting or the ways to be respectful right to be a successful kind of maybe nonverbal conversationalist let's say yes you it seemed to me that the children your principal you know the family that lived on the sheep ranch everyone grew to love you was was that your feeling at the time yeah and they tell me they tell me all sorts of things they tell me that I had the heart of a Navajo they tell me I was a Navajo woman in a prior life they tell me all sorts of things but I think the real thing is I was so accepted because they had never been treated like that they had never been treated with I mean I truly loved those people and they knew it my students knew how much I cared about them and that's how they learned English so fast they they the white teachers thought they were not very smart that that is so not true they are so smart they learned English so fast by you know me asking about their life and stuff and they so they wanted to be able to write so they could tell me about their grandma and their aunties and the sheep and the werewolves and the coyotes and stuff that here's the real miracle by the end of the year I entered three students into a regional speech contest these were kids who could not speak English and this was nine months later they all won in their category I mean that's that's miraculous these kids were really smart and they knew they were loved and so I I learned how important that whatever my purpose was in life it had to be delivered with love whether it was whether I ended up being a gardener or a cook or a doctor I wasn't even thinking about that at the time it had to be given with love I was raised because my father we moved around all the time I started school in England came back to Texas with the heavy British accent which I had to get rid of immediately so the kids wouldn't bully me because I talked like a foreigner and so and so I had to learn all these different accents wherever we lived and then I finished high school in Germany and and so since we moved around a lot we were non-denominational we were Christian but non so we go whatever church was there and so we weren't stuck with one dogma and do you think that your your time you know both teaching and then as a doctor later on in your life after you got your medical degree do you feel that the cosmology the worldview of the Navajo is incorporated do you incorporate it into your life now oh yeah I mean I view nature as my brother and sister the trees the animals they're they're all my family and that's how the NAPCOs view it and that's how I view it and that's why it's so painful to see what's happening in the earth on the earth today and the such disregard for our brothers and sisters non-human brothers and sisters and they they regard everything as alive every rock is alive every mountain is alive so I talked to these things I talked to the trees in my backyard and stuff and we have a very nice relationship well there's so many of these magical mystical and unexplainable a miracle my definition of a miracle is something wonderful that happens and you can't explain it with your logical mind or the science you've learned in school it just doesn't explain it and so I that was real I struggled to try and explain what I was saying I struggled and struggled and I just couldn't if I was being honest I couldn't explain it and and I I had to accept it but when I tell other people about it you know white people about it you could tell they didn't believe me at all so I just stopped talking about it you know it took me 50 years to write the book because I I went through a stage where it hurt my feelings when people didn't believe me I was telling something so important to me and not to be believed it just hurt my feelings terribly and then I reached a point where I didn't care as I matured I tell this I would tell the story and not care if they couldn't handle it but by then I was so deeply into medicine I didn't have time to tell these stories and I how I made time to tell write the book is because during the elections there's so much divisiveness in the country that I I thought my story is a healing story I have got to find a way to write it and it turned out it just flew out of me you know I'd be so tired at the end of the day and then it would just fly out of me and because it was waiting 50 years to tell this story so it's just bursting forth I didn't have to really it's like I was plugged into some other source of energy because usually I'm wiped out I really knock myself out for my patients I'm wiped out but then I'd sit down and boom all this writing so anyway so there's so many miracles and stuff to choose from do you have a favorite one like there's the healing of the tumor there's the suddenly speaking fluent Navajo when I just had been there about a month or so and I mean that is totally I can't possibly explain that I mean I can say what a physicist in the audience one time explained it I can say what he said he wasn't shocked he said that can all be explained in new physics but it still it still was amazing and so if you have a favorite story I'll tell it gosh you know I I'm willing to hear two stories if you wanted so I would love to hear the story about the tumor and then in the healing you know which I thought was so fascinating and then I don't know I would love I don't know if this was one of the stories that you would like to share if not not a big deal about how you were in that Canyon that night with your friends okay that's a funny story okay so the kids in my class used to kind of try and counsel me not to make mistakes you know like like when I found a skeleton up in the canyon I rock climbed up there and and found the skeleton under a pile of rocks and then it was a woman she had beautiful turquoise and she she had sandals woven out of yucca fiber that were all rotting and but preserved because it's so dry there and a basket next to her and stuff so I was very respectful I didn't do anything I put put her back and put the rocks exactly where they were I didn't didn't do anything but when I told the students they were terribly upset they they said they all said Cindy Cindy that means ghost sickness you're gonna get ghost sickness and they urged me to get a medicine man to undo the harm I had done to myself and so they were always sort of counseling me so I didn't make mistakes and they said never go in the canyon at night because that's when the werewolves hang out and I and and they might harm you and I said to the class do they harm white people Billa Ghana is that word do they harm white people and he said this boy was really wise he said maybe not because because why people don't believe that I thought that was pretty smart and I said you know I I live on the first floor of a government housing apartment which was a dump but I thought it was really nice because it was my first apartment I said I'm on the first floor can can they harm me and he said no no they'll leave you alone but you mustn't you mustn't encounter that you mustn't meet them like in the canyon because then they could hurt you and so anyway so there were these Mormon women who were training to be teachers teachers in training and they were doing an apprenticeship on the reservation at my school and so they had said would would you take us into the canyon and and I said yeah I'll be happy to do that sometime and it never happened then at the last minute they said will you take us in the canyon we're leaving tomorrow I said no I can't it's nighttime we're not supposed to go in there at nighttime they said but you said you take us and and we really please do it so I thought okay well I'm white they're gonna leave me alone as long as I don't meet up with them and so I went with them and they were chattering the whole time it's a full moon and it really annoyed me that they were talking so much you know the canyon is so silent and then all of a sudden I looked across the canyon and I looked up there was a cave way up high and there's no way to really get there there are little Anasazi those are the ancient people little carved out where you can put your toe but it'd be extremely dangerous and and there was a fire there and I said look and and and they said oh yeah it's a fire I said put us up in that cave and the girl said oh there's just somebody camping I said no it's not you're not allowed to camp in here and white people can't go here and and they weren't phased and they kept I said can you please let's just whisper okay and they they didn't get it they're chattery chattery and then I said look at that and there was a shadow a huge shadow of a man dancing or something moving on the back of the cave wall and they stay still weren't faced and then all of a sudden everything went the fire went out everything went silent and it was really creepy and then we kept walking and then oh there's an old woman who lived at the bottom of the trail where we were and she lived in a Hogan very traditional and she had sheep and all of a sudden in her area where she had sheep there was total chaos and and the sheep were going crazy and dogs barking it's just a big chaotic bunch of noise and then all of a sudden it went quiet and then in the moonlight we saw this thing that we didn't know if it was a horse or a man but it looked like it was a man loping along like a like a giant animal and it looked like he just had a skin on his back and now the girls were completely freaked out and they ran as fast as they could up to the top of the canyon to our car they were so frightened and so I drove them back and my adrenaline was so high even though it was late at night I couldn't go to sleep I was so wired up and so I thought I'm gonna go see my friend who's a public school teacher and his light was on in his trailer and so it turned out he was still grading papers so I knocked on the door I told him the story and he looked at me so skeptically it hurt my feelings not being believed was worse than scaring the daylights out of me I if I had to pick I'd rather pick being scared to death and so I said well you know you don't believe me but can I show you so so you'll believe me she said sure so he went there and I think he was scared because he didn't talk at all so we went down the steep path and wound back and forth back and forth and then we got to the bottom where they're dried cornstalks and that made a lot of noise as we're going through there and then we came to the base of where the cave was I was scared to death the whole time and I could tell he was too but there was a talus slope going halfway up the wall and then these little carved out areas and he started up the talus slope and he heard a noise up there he said what was that that must have been a mountain lion I said there are no mountain lions in Canyon de Shea he said well it must have been some animal and he started going up again and then this voice boomed out get the fuck out of here white boy and he almost fell over backwards and he said we flew out of there and then he never questioned me again about anything I said he was so scared on the reservation they didn't get much iodine and salt wasn't iodine iced at that era and so it wasn't rare to see people who have goiters from iodine deficiency that's an enlargement in the thyroid area I felt a lump under my right jaw and I just thought oh it'll go away it's sort of like what my patients do they just say oh you know it'll just go away and it didn't it got bigger but I kept ignoring it because I didn't want to face it and one day I guess it got so big that one of my students said miss Elliot you have a goiter now that's not what a goiter looks like goiters are the whole gland is swollen this was a lump but she thought maybe it was a young goiter or something a new onset goiter and I thought oh my god it's so big that the kids are noticing it gee I guess I better do something about it and so I took an afternoon off and I drove to the nearest charity hospital called Conado's it's Sage Memorial Hospital and I really didn't like being in a hospital who would guess that I'd end up being a doctor I hated the smell I hated that everything was disinfected and white coats and it all looked so heartless to me and so I was really scared to be there as a young woman and then this young man came out in a crisp white coat with a stethoscope around him and he felt the mass and it was really hard and it was not mobile he said this is a bad sign I think you have lymphoma and I said what's that and he said it's a cancer of a lymph node and he said he wanted to schedule a biopsy okay and then I walked out the door and never came back I was too scared I have compassion for me because that's why some of my patients get really scared when they find something and so I told my teacher and she said oh we can deal with that and there's a medicine man and if you go down this Arroyo and you turn at the sagebrush and then you go down and then you turn left at a juniper anyway it was impossible but I finally found this medicine man and he I told him my story and he said it's not my specialty Wow you have specialties he said but here's a Hopi medicine man who can probably help you so that was even harder to track him down I had to go to the Hopi reservation and I finally tracked him down he was herding sheep and to my dismay he said the same thing I said it's not my specialty so I was so discouraged and I told my Navajo family this family that it's sort of unofficially adopted me and called the mother called me her daughter and I was supposed to call her Shima my mother and and all the children called me my sister so she said don't don't worry we'll have a peyote ceremony for you and they're very expensive for the Navajos you have to butcher sheep and sheep are like money in the bank it's it would be like the equivalent of taking $5,

000 out of your bank account or something and they had to pay the road man the people who conduct peyote ceremonies are called road men and not medicine men because this religion was borrowed from the Plains Indian it's not native to Navajos it's not traditional Navajo medicine so that they had to share it with another family with a sick baby to cut share the cost they sang and prayed and smoked the sacred tobacco from the San Francisco Peaks and did the water drumming and everything and I was focused on the baby and I forgot that it was all the ceremony was also for me I completely forgot and I watched the baby get well you know it started out just sort of floppy and stuff and it get more color and the cheeks and started making eye contact with the mom and I thought wow that's really amazing and again I forgot that this was about me completely forgot because you get in an altered state with the peyote and your mind is all over the place and when daylight came we filed out out of the teepee and we touched our forehead with the earth and then blessed ourselves with our eagle feather fans and then we went to the cinder block house next door where some of the women had stayed up all night making breakfast and we sat on the floor the dirt floor and there was a big sheet laid down and there was mutton stew and fried bread and canned peaches and stuff and they're all gathered around and they were all staring at me and I I didn't know what they're staring at and I was really uncomfortable and sort of squirming in my seat why are they all looking at me and suddenly I remembered and my hand flew up to under my job and the mass had gone and to this day this is 50 years later I still put my hand to make sure it's gone it became a habit I can't I just couldn't believe it so for 50 years every once in a while people will see me touching under my right jaw where the mass was I I didn't know how to explain it I just did not know how to explain it I was gonna ask do you have any explanation for what happened well I have an explanation of suddenly being able to speak fluent Navajo which which the physicist gave me this is what he said he was I was talking to a group of about a hundred people and he was in the audience and I said I just can't explain it and and he said that new physics supplies an explanation and here's what he said everything is out there all all that's ever been known on earth is out there in the greater sea of consciousness we just don't have access to it and somehow you being on peyote dropped your logical inquiring mind that and living in a certain reality mind frame that was dropped from the peyote and so you had access to that infinite information out there and somehow your psyche was able to access that for some reason and that's why you could speak fluent Navajo and that's why when the peyote wore off you you were back to your how old are you what's your name and how many sheep do you have that's about it I thought that was a really beautiful story I thought it was so interesting because I love physics and so I 100% understand and appreciate what he's saying the peyote kind of dropped the gates dropped the barriers and that knowledge was able to enter and you were almost like a channel for it it came through you and I think that's so profound and beautiful it's very profound and beautiful and you know maybe if I want to learn Spanish better French better I maybe should have a peyote ceremony with the road yeah you probably be fluent Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Bite-sized Blessings.

I need to thank my unstoppable guest Dr.

Erica Elliott and I need to thank her for telling all of her miracle stories and the most interesting one about a shapeshifter or werewolf I think I'm never gonna get over it I need to also thank the creators of the music used for this episode Stephen O'Brien Frank Schroeder Sasha End that sounds and Alexander Nakarada for complete attribution please see the Bite-sized Blessings website at bite-sized blessings.

Com on the website you'll find a link to Erica's TED talk under the episode show notes and then on the treasures page I'm gonna have a link to her book the book in which I discovered her so be sure to click on it to check it out thank you for listening and here's my one request be like Erica keep telling your stories yes there may be a lot of naysayers out there there might be a lot of people who say I don't believe you but someday someday you'll be able to tell your story someday you'll be able to tell your story find your audience and you'll be able to spread a little more magic and some more miracles into the world

Reviews

I enjoyed hearing about another way "to Be" in the world! Thank you.