Our Work in Haiti: How Do You Connect?
Our work in Haiti starts with our faculty sharing expertise in mind-body medicine with Haitian health professionals and educators in a series of professional trainings. The techniques they learn are healing for them, their families and their communities.
- National Team Leader, Regine Laroche, focuses on helping traumatized individuals rebuild themselves from the inside and regain a sense of hope.
- Haiti Country Director Linda Métayer, MPH, focuses on bringing self-care programs to communities lacking mental health services.
- CMBM creates structure, context, and clinical supervision for these programs to reach a national level.
How do you connect?
Our wonderful donors provide the support that starts this movement with the individual and spreads out to a country-wide level. Please consider giving now to help provide the healing the Haitian people need.
Your support means the world!
Clear Intentions
When did you begin meditating and why?
Which meditation practice(s) did you choose?
How has meditation affected your life?
I began meditating in 1974 right after medical school.
I was a psychology major in college and deeply influenced by Albert Schweitzer, who had doctorates in music and theology when he went to medical school as a path to lifelong service in Africa.
So, with this mind-body-spirit perspective, I was thrilled to read two groundbreaking articles that Herbert Benson and Keith Wallace published when I was in medical school. In both studies, practitioners of Transcendental Meditation (TM), silently repeating their word (‘mantra’), demonstrated physiological changes of deep rest while awake. Those changes were often even greater than those found during sleep. Benson called these changes the Relaxation Response, which has formed the basis for his work ever since.
Not long afterwards, I discovered that one of the pathology faculty members was meditating behind his closed door for 20 minutes each afternoon. He referred me to his TM teacher and I learned to meditate.
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In Between Tide & Time
Recently I spent a morning in the midst of a crowd awed by the release of seven rehabilitated sea turtles on the coast of South Carolina. The largest at 600 pounds was missing a flipper; several were “cold shocked” and/or suffered fungal infections. We chuckled as two turtles reversed gear towards the dunes and those who’d restored them to health before all eventually swam away to elated cheers.
The majority watching were locals– many knew the turtle’s stories or donated to their care. I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time to witness this restorative connection of man and creature. Later reflecting on the almost surreal delight I experienced, the correlation to my personal quest and engrossment in healing work surfaced.
Our Work in Haiti: The Need
Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) in Haiti has not only ensued from the physical, political and economic environments, but also from the internal devastation felt by the individual. Our team of Haitian health-care providers, educators and team leaders recognized their own pain and saw the need in their communities for support. Follow their journey as they work to heal Haiti form the individual to national levels.
