Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

She burned Copal all night, and for the first time since she took ill, we
didn’t have to tie our mother down on the bed.”
After the seventh day Angelina had fully recovered but her family had
continued the treatments for two more days as Panti had ordered.
Panti told me to feel her pulse. I felt a slow, steady beat characteristic of
a person in physical balance and health.
It was fortunate, I thought, that her sons had brought her here. If she’d
been delivered to a more conventional clinic, she probably would have been
drugged and restrained, languishing the rest of her life in a mental
institution where no one would have considered the possibility of demonic
possession.
I asked him later how he discerned the difference between possession
and madness, which he acknowledged was rooted in natural causes and
psychological dementia. “Had she been mad,” he answered, “I probably
wouldn’t have been able to help her as easily. Madness takes much more
time to heal and sometimes is incurable.”
As Angelina and her sons left, Panti remarked that madness was caused
by thinking too much. People go mad fretting over circumstances for which
they have no control—an unhappy past or a doomsday future. No
psychology book could say it much better than that.