“Some filmmakers talk about the spiritual journey, but Healing Planet puts you on the road with all the travelers. Marie-Rose takes the heroine’s journey to a new level and we are invited to walk alongside her. The result has a profound impact on her life and similarly, on each of us.” -David Skinner, Executive Producer, ShadowCatcher Entertainment Outsourced, Smoke Signals, Skeleton Key (www.shadowcatcherent.com)

Excerpt from the accompanying Healing Planet book "Talking Story" by Marie-Rose Phan-Lê

In Hawaii, when an invitation is extended, the host or hostess will say, “Come over and talk story.” Talking Story is about taking the time to linger over the details of the mundane, to ponder the realms of the profound and to surrender any structure of time or agenda. It is practicing the art of listening and of being present.

As I began production of the Healing Planet project traveling from Hawaii to the Himalayas, it wasn’t long before I realized that in order for me to access healing traditions and healers in remote areas of the world, I would have to practice Talking Story. There would be no hit and run interviews, no rigid film production schedules, no way to remain an anonymous gleaner of other people’s wisdom and experiences. Talking Story is about intimate connections. In order to earn the honor of hearing the stories of another, I had to be willing to reveal my own.

This posed quite a challenge for me considering my background. I was born in Vietnam and spent some time in France before coming to America as a child. As with all well-assimilated immigrants, I was taught that survival depended on my ability to blend in. It is no wonder that the myth of the objective “documentarian,” a scientist of sorts separated from her subjects by a veil of romance and a lens of scrutiny, was so appealing to me.

My plan to remain unseen didn’t last long, for with most healers and spiritual leaders I wished to meet I had to first walk the gauntlet of the gatekeepers, a series of bridge people who could lead me to the inner sanctum of the healers. Imagine my dismay at realizing that in order to advance in my quest I would have to reveal who I was, where my family came from, what I was seeking, what I intended to do with the gift of their knowledge and what I needed to heal within myself. If I made it past the gatekeepers, if I were judged to be of pure heart and intention, then my team and I would be permitted to proceed with the work and I would be allowed to state my case to the master healers.

The more I was willing to shed my self-consciousness, my fear of being exposed and my idea of who I thought I should be, the more I learned from the people I got to know. As much as I wanted to be open, however, I truly did not wish to speak of my own healing heritage. And yet this was the one thing that, in the end, opened greater doors to deeper dialogue. I did not want to reveal that my great-grandfather was a blind man who could see the past and the future or that my aunt channeled deities to heal people and had told me that I have the gift of healing and was being tested. I had learned what was acceptable from my mother who had funneled her healing abilities into a perfectly conventional form. She became a Registered Nurse and my brother, following in her footsteps, became an anesthesiologist. I had greater confidence in my filmmaking abilities than my healing abilities. Rather than becoming a healer, I decided I would best serve the greater good by making a documentary about healers.

In practicing Talking Story, I was able to have a deeper understanding of what it means to be a healer and what it means to heal. I learned about reciprocity; for everything I wished to receive, I had to be willing to make an offering. I learned my job was not so much about preservation (capturing something and keeping it in stasis), but more about regeneration (turning loss into life, death into renewal). I learned that medicine from one culture, no matter how foreign, could benefit people of another culture if its use and meaning could be re-contextualized. I learned that indeed we are in danger of losing large chapters of our collective physical and spiritual pharmacopoeia, but that it is possible to transform ancient practices into applications for the modern world.

In Talking Story (unlike storytelling where there is a clear beginning, middle, and end), the path to the finish is not clearly defined for there is still opportunity to discover, to recover and to change the foreseeable outcome. As we walked through an area of rainforest that was destroyed by logging, my friend, Pablo Amaringo, a retired Amazonian shaman, said, “Cutting down a tree is like burning a book before it has been read.” Although we may not be able to stop the fires, my hope is that we at least open the book, become aware of what we are at risk of losing and find a way to generate something new with the seeds of what remains.