Native American Church [NAC]

Many Native tribes across the Americas participate in the ceremony of communal prayer and spirit flight/consciousness expansion known as the Native American Church [NAC] ceremony. The NAC is an Indian tradition amongst tribes extending from South American to Alaska which has been practiced for centuries.
[Chip Thomas]

Within this religious healing tradition of the NAC, medicine meetings are held for patients who are suffering mentally and/or physically. Community plays a central, primary role in a process of NAC ritual, in which diagnosis is not merely a prescriptive rite that passively initiates the therapeutic, but that it can itself constitute a cure. Viewing the NAC ritual as a "talking cure" and an example of "narrativizing" illness (something it shares with Western psychotherapy) manifests against the backdrop of Navajo beliefs about thought, speech, and health, within the context of a medicine meeting, its healers, patients and church members.