About Wind Spirit Teaching
A Walk of Awakening in the Desert
Susan Randall, Casa Grande Dispatch
He's not a doctor, but doctors send him clients. He's not a medicine man, although he uses stories and traditions learned from his Yaqui grandfather. His clients describe him as a friend, a teacher, a facilitator, a spiritual guide.
If you ask Lench Archuleta what he does, he'll tell you he takes people into the desert and helps them journey within to understand and unlock parts of the self.
"Many people feel very, very detached from life," he said. "And they don't know how to find their way back.
"In 20 years of doing this work, I have noticed one common denominator," he added. "People come to a time and point in their lives when they begin to ask questions about their personal spirituality: 'What is spirit about? What is my destiny? What is my direction?'
"Wise men and wise women and sages and mystics all come to this point in their lives. And a lot have been drawn to the desert - Jesus, Moses, many others."
There is a special energy felt only in the desert, he said.
"And it helps us get in touch with who we are. Through the silence we feel the profoundness of our creation. Because we are never alone. We are in constant communication with creation in various ways. Animals, plants, events, weather - wind, rain - all speak to us and can be revealing."
Archuleta said his goal is always to help people become whole and more balanced in their lives.
He was trained for the task by his Yaqui grandfather and the U.S. Army.
The oldest of 13 children in a family of migrant workers, Archuleta had a special relationship with his grandfather.
"He singled me out and taught me things he didn't teach the others," Archuleta said. "'You need to know,' he told me. 'You're the one who's going to need this information.'"
Archuleta joined the army in 1967 and served as a "tunnel rat" in Vietnam.
"I decided to stay in the army to put my life in the Creator's hands and see where it would take me," he said. "It's been an incredible journey."
After Vietnam, Archuleta was assigned to the Department of Defense's Equal Opportunity Management Institute in Florida, where he taught human and ethnic relations.
'Coyote Medicine'
While still in the army, he met Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who later would write "Coyote Medicine," about integrating Western medicine and American Indian healing traditions.
Mehl-Madrona, now clinical director of the Continuum Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and clinical assistant professor of Family Practice and Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, described his friendship with Archuleta in the book.
"He took those of us lucky enough to know him out into the desert to learn what he knew. ...
"I learned to walk barefoot in the desert from the crazy man. I learned to talk to the animals and the insects I found there. I learned to talk - very respectfully, I assure you - to scorpions, Gila monsters, and rattlesnakes. Lynch (sic) had songs and mantras to sing, to let these beings know we were there, and coming through. Lynch had no fear of these creatures. How could he after Vietnam?" (p. 246)
"Most people could benefit from working with him," Mehl-Madrona said via e-mail.
"I don't send him people who aren't motivated and who wouldn't benefit. But seriously, what person wouldn't benefit from sitting in the desert with Lench and connecting with the earth?"
"... it is the individual with a compromised spirit who invites illness and infection. Feelings of spiritual emptiness, depression, and doubt generate conditions that encourage internal cellular breakdown." (p. 237)
After venturing into the desert several times with Archuleta, Mehl-Madrona, who is half Cherokee, decided to take clients into the desert.
"Lynch proved a willing accomplice: the two of us eventually led a number of supplicants into the desert on quests such as these. The results were often remarkable." (p. 249)
Mehl-Madrona reported that 56 of the 116 people he led into the desert for intensive healing experiences reported cures that lasted at least five years.
"Ailments. Mostly cancer it seems. Also arthritis, angina, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, multiple sclerosis," Mehl-Madrona said in the e-mail.
"Lench was involved in many of those intensives."
(The full report of the five-year outcomes of Mehl-Madrona's desert healing intensives is available at www.healing-arts.org/mehl-madrona/mmtradionalpaper.htm.)
"Conventional Western medicine stops with drugs and surgery," Mehl-Madrona continued. "Lench goes further toward the soul. That's where real healing takes place."
When Archuleta retired from the Army in 1987, he tried other jobs, but people kept asking him for help, seeking direction or understanding of the lessons brought by illness.
"They came with cancer, AIDS, heartaches, body aches, mental and emotional aches," Archuleta said. "Finally I asked myself, 'What am I doing?'
"Three years ago, I took a leap of faith. I wondered how we would survive, but people came more and more and I began lecturing and giving workshops."
Room to change
Anne Gaudio, 64, was the first client Mehl-Madrona sent to Arizona City to work with Lench.
She had been in public relations in Pittsburgh, working mostly with nonprofit organizations. But in 1993, she began experiencing job stress that triggered a post traumatic stress disorder, causing erratic fluctuations in her blood sugar.
"I was living my life through a cloud," she said in a telephone interview.
Her blood sugar would drop suddenly, causing vision problems, fatigue, terror, confusion and nightmares. If she was driving, she had to pull over.
"It's impossible to tell people that you spend every other day in bed," she wrote in her journal. "No one believes you are too exhausted to work or play. And I, like many, discovered during the years of trying to get well that the 1993 onset was the retriggering of an earlier episode that had never healed."
"In 1995, I tried everything I could to get well," she said, "acupuncture, acupressure, Rieki, massage. They helped, but they didn't cure it."
Gaudio had been training to be a holistic health practitioner before the onset of the stress disorder and began practicing in 1996.
In the fall of 1997, she attended a workshop presented by Mehl-Madrona in Pittsburgh. Impressed by his approach, she became one of his patients. He sent her to Archuleta the next May.
Gaudio said she drove to Arizona with a friend because she was not strong enough to drive alone.
"After I drove up to his house, I was terrified."
"Don't ever think being in a shaman's house is a piece of cake," she wrote in her journal. "Somewhere along the line the nature of reality begins to change. And cause and effect move from the domain of philosophical and scientific conjecture into your daily life. Everything has meaning."
In the evenings, when the temperature dropped, Archuleta and his wife, Patricia, and infant son Elijah took Gaudio into the desert.
"Lench has no agenda of any sort," she said. "He's always looking for signs of Spirit and how to work with a person.
"That's fortunate," she added, "because I'm really a stubborn person. But he was always willing to try something else. When he works with you, there's room for the unexpected. There's room for Spirit to come in."
Gaudio said she slowly began to change her perception.
"The quiet of the desert and the solitude of the desert reached me at a place where nothing else reached me. When you go deep into the desert, it is so quiet and so still. Something inside me shattered, so something new could begin to grow.
"What happened is that things began to shift inside me. By the time I left Lench, I had a totally different view of how life works. And I knew that there was room for me to change, there was room for my stress disorder to change.
"I began to believe I was not alone. I had friends in the natural world - birds, trees."
After Gaudio left Lench, she went camping in the mountains of Colorado.
"And I've been wandering since then," she said. "I got rid of my life in Pittsburgh when I came out here. My life is so different. I am so different."
Gaudio said it took about a year for her blood-sugar level to return to normal. Now she lives most of the year in a tent, winters in the desert north of Yuma, summers in the mountains of Colorado.
"I drive into town and work out in a gym three days a week. I run again. I sleep a lot. I eat carefully. I spend a lot of time alone in the desert. I take good care of myself - and I'm super."
'A metamorphosis every time'
Veronica Harris, 40, of Kent, Ohio, began working with Lench seven years ago.
"It's a metamorphosis every time I've gone down there," she said. "It's amazing the influence he's had on my life."
Harris was sent to Archuleta by some friends, one a physician, who told her: "It's time for you to go to the desert."
Recently divorced with three small children and back to work full time as an addiction therapist, Harris felt she no longer could cope.
"I felt like something awful was going on," she said. "I was very depressed, very scared, very lost."
Harris called Archuleta and wanted to visit, but she had just started a new job and had no money.
"There's no way I can come down," she told him.
But within 48 hours, her employer offered time off with pay, her mother and ex-husband offered to care for the children and she had charged a plane ticket.
Harris said she had no idea what to expect in Arizona, but brought her new hiking boots and a backpack full of self-help books.
"Hermana (sister)," Archuleta told her, "if you need to read something, write it down and then read it. Put those books away." And when they went to the desert for the first time: "Take those clod hoppers off and walk in your bare feet."
Harris said Archuleta taught her, "Creator wants us to do four things: to love, to dance, to sing and to create."
She began to see herself as a channel, and working with Archuleta as a process of cleansing the channel, so the Creator's love and creativity can pour through.
"Lench woke me up," Harris said. "He was like my spiritual midwife. Lench helped me remember how to live in awe."
Harris said she has been a full-time student now for the last three years (she graduated with honors from Kent State University last year and started a master's degree) and is now a research assistant at KSU's Institute for the Study and Prevention of Violence.
She never has been as broke, Harris said, but she still manages to come to Arizona City two or three times a year.
"Spiritual growth is hard work," she said. "It's a process of letting go of a life that no longer fits."
Harris said Archuleta taught her not to allow fear to rule her choices, that she will always have what she needs.
"I've learned to listen to my heart and do the next right thing," she said. "Sometimes doing the next right thing is very difficult."
The first step in her healing was to be seen.
"Lench speaks to the father wound," she said, explaining that we all need a father or father figure who has seen us as we really are and appreciates us.
"The power Don Lorenzo (a term of respect) gives people when he sees them and they feel seen can be both frightening and liberating," she said.
"I don't think he knows the full impact he has on people. It's on a cellular level. To recognize that you are being seen is felt in the heart."
'An ancient solution'
"In all traditional medicine, Native American, Asian - even naturopathic, which is European - you can't separate mind, body and spirit," said Dr. Vance Inouye, supervising physician at the Southwest Naturopathic Medical Center in Scottsdale, the clinic for the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine.
In the West there is a large gap between medicine and psychotherapy, he said. A patient with a chronic condition may go from doctor to doctor without success before someone eventually sends him to a therapist.
"But that's a large gap in which a lot of good work could be done," Inouye said.
"When someone has an obstacle or challenge in their life, and I don't perceive they will benefit from psychotherapy - they really aren't dysfunctional, they just need some guidance - that's pretty much when I direct them to Lench.
"What Lench does falls into the gap that we tend to ignore in the West. He has an interesting way to go about getting an individual beyond his obstacles."
Inouye, who also teaches martial arts and health training at the Heaven and Earth Institute for Health and Longevity in Tempe, said every two to three months he finds someone who can benefit from Lench's work.
"He has produced exceptional results with many of the people I've sent him," Inouye said. "He's very committed to the healing process, sometimes to his detriment financially. And as Dr. Madrona described in 'Coyote Medicine,' Lench ekes out a living doing things that benefit so many people."
Inouye said Western medicine, the way it is practiced today, is probably less than 100 years old. Native American and Chinese medicine are several thousand years old. And while conventional Western medicine has undeniable benefits, traditional medicine has much to offer, too.
"Although Lench's methods may be described as 'unorthodox' by science-based practitioners, his approach, in my view, is an ancient solution to a modern-day problem.
"I find it interesting that Native American healing methods closely resemble the methods of the Kahunas (native healers) of Hawaii," added Inouye, who is from Hawaii.
"Indigenous cultures seem to have healing methods that are similar. It doesn't seem to matter where they are in the world, they incorporate the same basic principles of healing."
'An old friend'
Herbalist Jim Fain of Eureka Springs, Ark., said he met Archuleta about three years ago in Los Angeles, where Fain, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology, practiced Gestalt therapy - a holistic type of psychotherapy - for 15 years.
"He seemed like an old friend to me," Fain said. "There was an immediate and deep comfort. I understood him and he understood me - which doesn't occur to me that often."
Fain began sending clients who were stuck - "who couldn't make a decision to even make a decision."
Fain said he has no idea what Lench did to help his clients get unstuck, but "it worked every time."
"Absolutely," Fain said. "They would come back with a sense of choice - a broader way of looking at things."
'Everyone is different'
"What Lench does with everyone is different," said Annemarie Mahoney of Peoria, 47, who manages a health-care company and went to Archuleta for personal growth.
"I knew intellectually that life is easier than I was making it and more joyful. But I really needed to go back to a place in my heart, where Lench took me, to be able experience it and live it.
"Lench is an excellent facilitator," she added. "He goes with what is right for you.
"And you don't even know what's happening at the time. You're not aware of the magic he's performing to help you through."
'Jumping Flea'
"Lench allows people to see - in my case - what fear really is. And we all have fears," said Mahoney's husband, John, 47, who owns a recording studio.
John said he was so impressed with Archuleta that he invited him to talk to an audience, so John could record the lecture and give Archuleta the master CD to make copies to sell at future lectures.
"He knows that everyone is conditioned from birth," John said. "So Lench tells stories his grandfather told him, like the 'Jumping Flee.'
"Lench went to his grandfather and asked: 'How can I serve the people?'"
His grandfather grabbed a jar and went into the yard, where he found a flea and put it in the jar.
Fleas jump, John said. When his grandfather put the lid on the jar, the flea bumped into the lid a few times, then stopped jumping so high. And when his grandfather took the lid off, the flea wouldn't jump out of the jar.
"That's how most human beings are," John said. "We condition ourselves not to jump out of the jar or color outside the lines. But once we become aware we are in a jar, we can allow ourselves to jump out."
"Coyote Medicine" by Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona is available at the Casa Grande Public Library, call number 615.882 MEH. Lench Archuleta's Web site is www.windspiritteaching.com. More information about alternative healing can be found at www.healing-arts.org.
©Casa Grande Valley Newspaper 2001