Great Profile of CMBM Gaza Program!
Hello friends,
I have wonderful news to share with you today, an amazing article on our work in Gaza from this morning’s New York Times. It gives such an accurate feeling for the touching , powerful, and effective work The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is doing in Gaza and for the spirit of healing, community and hope that I believe pervades everything that we do.
Please read this testament—so amazing to have it so well and feelingly presented in The New York Times—to the possibility of transformational change
Finding a Steadier Path in Gaza
We’re delighted that this Gaza program, which is nurtured and sustained by so many dedicated and generous people (health and mental health professionals, teachers, community and religious leaders, and our funder, the Atlantic Philanthropies) is being so positively recognized. I hope you’ll take the time to read this beautifully crafted piece and share it with friends.
I also wanted to share a few stories I’ve been saving for you from a visit to our program there in August, (the second visit within three weeks). We were moved on both visits by the ways our Gaza team is helping children and other folks—every kind of person—to relax in the midst of poverty, danger and chaos. And it was so touching and such fun to be with our dedicated, passionate, raucous, talented and tender Gaza team (you hear some of their voices in The Times article) and with Jamil, who leads them. 
During our time in Gaza, we visited with some of our recent trainees –there are about 130 new ones this year. Throughout his training with us, one counselor—I’ll call him Abed—was so skeptical, so cantankerous: no question was too obscure to ask, no objection too small to raise. A couple of weeks ago, we watched him sit on the floor—sweet and solicitous and playful –with the most troubled five year old boys from the kindergarten with which he was consulting. The boys—cute, squirmy, solemn and giggly—showed us how to do “soft belly breathing” and told us how they have brought relaxation into their families — “and guided imagery too.” And, an excited five-year-old added, “I taught my brothers and sisters and my parents about the genogram.”
We saw two groups for women with breast and lung cancer. Cancer, we were told, is regarded in Gaza as a disgrace as well as a disease, a kind of plague which provokes shunning. “No one wants to know you,” we were told, “except in this group.” “I felt worthless…dead already,” said another woman. “The mind-body group relaxed me and brought me back to life.” Another woman, stout and older, proudly showed us “chaotic breathing”—flapping her arms up and down, breathing deep and fast. “I do it every day. It makes me feel so strong,” she said with a grin.
Then there was a group for kids with Down Syndrome, the boys lying on mats, imagining safe places “at a beach,” “in the garden,” or “at a sister’s beautiful wedding.” We now have 160 mind-body groups in Gaza. They meet for ten weeks and then 150 to 160 more begin. The film of all this and more will be ready soon, and we will share it with you as soon as it is. (I’ll be sure to post a link here.)
We’re growing—in many ways.
More soon. In the meantime, lots of love to all of you.
Jim
Labor Day Stress Relief
Dear friends,
I wanted to share with you an article I just published on Health News Digest. I hope you’ll find it useful going into the Labor Day weekend, and that you’ll share with friends and family who may be in need of some stress relief.
Labor Day Tips for Reducing Stress by James S. Gordon, M.D. (originally posted on Health News Digest: Original Article)
Labor Day is traditionally a time of rest before the renewed activity of fall. For tens of millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed it is a time of high stress, a time when anxiety caused by economic insecurity and foreclosures unsettles, agitates, and casts a shadow over the unemployed and their families.
Over the years, I have worked with thousands of people who have been made anxious and depressed by economic hardship. Here are five steps drawn from my most recent book, “Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression,” that people can take to address the pain and insecurity that may come with today’s economic uncertainty. All of them are free and all can be easily learned and done at home.
1. Begin a simple nondenominational meditation practice: Slow, deep breathing — in through the nose, out through the mouth, with the belly soft and relaxed and the eyes closed — is a sure antidote to the stress response that uncertainty provokes. To encourage relaxation you can say, “soft” as you breathe in and “belly” as you breathe out. Begin with five minutes, two to three times a day.
2. Move your body: Physical exercise may be the single best therapy for depression. It’s very good for anxiety as well. Find any kind of movement that suits you, jog, dance, swim, or walk, it all works. You’ll see and feel some benefits after 15-20 minutes.
3. Reach out to others: Human connection — to family, friends, co-workers in the same boat — is an antidote to the sense of aimlessness and isolation that may come from job loss or unexpected economic insecurity.
4. Find someone who will listen and help you take a realistic look at your situation: Allow a trusted friend or adviser to help you look for possible solutions for any stressful situations you may be experiencing. In addition to helping you unburden your mind, body and spirit, a trusted friend or advisor can often see solutions more clearly than you and can help you find ways to put these solutions to work.
5. Let your imagination help you find healing and new meaning and purpose: After breathing deeply and relaxing for a few minutes, imagine someplace safe and comfortable, it could be a place you know and love or one that comes to you. Make yourself at home there, notice what’s around you, breathe deeply and relax. My colleagues and I at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine have used this safe place imagery successfully with New York City fire fighters after 9/11, with U.S. troops going to or returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and with families in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. We teach it every day in our offices and like the other four steps, we use it ourselves.
Trauma Healing for Haitian Nursing Students
A hundred nursing students come to our hotel. More than ninety of their classmates died on January 12th in their school building. The sense of sadness and loss are palpable.
They are quiet, expectant, and perhaps a little puzzled at first. What is this “mind-body medicine” all about? And then, as I begin to talk with them about fight-or-flight and stress, they become animated—calling up the unspeakable terror of the earthquake along with the biological facts and personal experience. I explain that just as trauma can produce the symptoms of ongoing stress: difficulty concentrating, sleeplessness, anger, lethargy, flashbacks of death and destruction. The techniques we are going to teach—slow deep breathing, self-expression and self-discovery in drawings, sharing one’s pain and hopes with others, and moving one’s body—can give relief; restore a sense of calmness, provide perspective, grant them a sense of control, open the door to the possibility of a future.
By the time Amy is explaining imagery and Kathy and Lynda are encouraging them in their drawings, the young women are alive with pleasure and discovery. They share first with each other, and then with the whole group. They show us pictures bisected by the barriers between the living and the dead, whom they miss so much, and third drawings that reveal the possibility of feeling, though bereaved, whole again in nature and with family and friends.
By the time we clear away the chairs and began to shake, the girls are waving their arms and laughing. When Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds (Every Little Thing’s Gunna Be Alright)” comes on, they sing with him, and us. Some of us are still laughing, others crying in release, with gratitude as well as grief.
Afterwards, the Dean of the Nursing School speaks for a moment. “Words,” she says, herself crying, “cannot express what you have done for us today.”
“And,” I think to myself, “what you are doing and teaching to us.”
At School in Haiti: Andre's Story
At the end of the third class, a quiet, solemn boy asks if he can speak with me. “What,” he had wondered during class, “about memories of the lost person that come back again and again?”
While Kathy and Lynda teach the fourth class, Laurent, Cassidy and I sit with – I’ll call him “Andre” – in the only quiet, moderately private spot we can find: our vehicle.
Andre says that he has great difficulty falling asleep, and when he finally does, nightmares always come. “I feel so helpless. I cannot talk to anyone.” He grabs his throat with every other sentence. When I mention the gesture, he tells me that his “words are stuck in my throat. And I am afraid to cry. It is not manly.”
Andre tells us that on January 12th, he was supposed to pick up “my cousins who I love very much, at the University.” He called to them that he couldn’t. They stayed late, and died when the building collapsed.
These cousins, “my best friends,” lived with him and were more like sisters—“one light skinned, one dark,” he smiles with the memory. “I feel so guilty. I want to go back to the time and save them, but it is not possible. I have concluded,” he lowers his voice here, “I do not want to be left behind.”
I recognize the self-annihilating weight of this guilt, have seen it burden young and old in Kosovo, Israel, Gaza, have heard how it torments the nights of soldiers and marines returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Would you,” I ask him, “be willing to meet your cousins in your imagination to talk with them and ask for their advice?”
“I have them always in my heart, but when I talk with them, it makes me cry.”
I tell him that he needs to cry—that releasing his emotions will open his throat, that perhaps his cousins have something to say to him that will help him with his guilt. He nods in agreement.
I ask him to close his eyes and breathe deeply with his belly soft, as we did in class. “Imagine that you are in a safe and comfortable place—a place where you feel good.” He does and I ask him to imagine that his cousins are there with him.
“Would you be willing,” I say, “to ask them for their advice?”
He nods his head.
After a while, his face softens and small tears appear at the outer edge of his eyes.
“Did they come?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“What was it like? What did they say?”
“I was so happy to see them. They told me to keep living my life and that I was not responsible for their death.”
“Write it down,” I say to him, after he has opened his eyes “and look at it every day. “Keep living your life. You are not responsible.”
I notice that he is breathing more deeply and no longer clutching at his throat.
Making our way back to the classroom, I feel how urgent it is to train hundreds of people to do this tender, powerful, necessary work.
We’ve just returned from our visit to Haiti today. I look forward to taking a look at what you’ve got to say on this and other posts from Haiti soon.
At School: A Place to Help Haitian Children II
We keep our sessions as simple and clear as we can: an introduction to fight-or-flight, stress, and trauma, answers to their questions, and three lessons.
Here they are:
1. Slow deep breathing with the belly soft. This, we explain, is the antidote to the flight or flight and stress response that the earthquake has inscribed in the kids’ minds and bodies. Soft belly will quiet their physiology, slow their racing thoughts, give them a little perspective on the flashbacks of dead bodies, the horror of loss and the ambush of fearful anticipation. Knowing—feeling—that they can breathe deeply and relax, they will have a small but important sense of control in world where so much—whether or not they can concentrate or sleep, where they live and how they will make a living—is, or feels, beyond their power to affect.
You can experience a relaxing guided Soft Belly meditation here, at The Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s website.
2. Later we do some shaking and dancing so they can let go of fixed patterns of physical tension and mental preoccupation; can feel their bodies moving freely; can raise their energy, lift their mood, and lower their anxiety. They clap and laugh and shout and afterwards, flop happily onto their hard seats.
3. We also explain the value of sharing here in the classroom, at home, or with a friend, the pain they feel and the fears and concerns that arise.
Many of the kids would like us to do more, to tell them where they can go to practice the techniques and talk to others. For now, I say, “you have each other and your families. We are giving you these techniques, written in French. Practice them at home and we will come back to your school. Soon we will be training many people, including some of your teachers, to do this with you.”
The story of how CMBM’s model helped Andre, a Haitian boy, overcome feelings of grief and guilt, coming soon . . .
At School: A Place to Help Haitian Children
The school is the College Canado Haitien, one of the best in Port-Au-Prince, we are told, before the earthquake and afterwards, too. The students, a few weeks after the school has reopened, are sharp in well-pressed maroon and khaki uniforms—the girls’ hair pulled through berets, the boys sideburns neatly trimmed, tout propre, I think.
Instead of the pre-earthquake concrete buildings, there are open sided wood and metal sheds. Sounds flow from one classroom to another, overlapping in a kind of reverberating clamor. Toward the end of one of our classes, when time of dancing is kept by nimble palms on desktops, the whole campus rocks.
Our equipe, our “team,” –the French is beginning to emerge from deep layers of my unconscious—includes six of us: Lee-Ann juggling logistics as before, with Cassidy, my assistant back home, here to help her and me; Amy, the social worker who is our clinical director, will come tomorrow. Today, Lynda and Kathy, psychologist and family physician, are with me. They are CMBM senior faculty who are adventurous enough to come and to commit to coming again and again. They and Amy will teach our Haitian colleagues and provide consulting and supervision as we build our program.
Today we have been invited by Frere Jacques Anthony Germeil, the principal, to College Canado Haitien. We will have an hour in each of four classrooms with eleventh and twelfth graders who have been told they will learn “lessons in dealing with stress.”
I lead the first class and the third, forty twelfth graders in each, sitting shoulder to shoulder at their desks. Lynda and Kathy, experienced with kids, but new to Haiti and to the trauma and loss that overwhelms the population, will lead the second and fourth classes.
We begin our classes lightly—a little goofily—“How do you breathe?”, I ask to general puzzlement, and then talk about babies doing it easily—naturally—their bellies rising and falling, while adults, and even high school students, cramped in chairs and on benches, barely move their chests. Laurent, my interpreter, and I act out the roles of cats in full fight or flight mode—hissing and growling at each other, and then stepping back to breathe easily. Lynda has her all-boys class—a surprise—consider Kobe Bryant, cool and relaxed, imagining his shots, inspiring the boys to imagine theirs swishing the net.
When we turn the topic to relaxation’s antipode, stress, the bravado of a few—“I’m fine, we’re all fine,” claims one boy; “it was simply a natural disaster” intones another—contends with the more complex memories of their classmates.
Soon, in each and every class, there is a rush of sharing of what happened on January 12th, of how surprise and relief yielded to horror. “I thought the shaking would be eternal. Then, it stopped, and I thought, ‘that’s not so bad, I am ok,’ and I laughed, then I saw my sister covered in dust like a ghost, and I was afraid. And then, underneath my neighbor’s house, there were twisted bodies.”
And the stories come—many, we learn, shared for the first time—and the classmates’ losses pile up: a mother gone, an older brother, “my best friend,” “almost my whole family,” We hear of bodies discovered under rubble and strewn on sidewalk, of dogs chewing on corpses.
When we ask if there are questions, a small forest of hands rises: “How do you go to sleep when these memories keep coming in nightmares?” “How can you breathe deeply to relax when the air is so bad?” “How do you deal with family members who now are arguing all the time?” “What do you do with your belief that another earthquake is coming, or as some say, ‘a tsunami’?”
More about the techniques we use to address these questions coming soon . . . .
Depression’s Upside: A One-Sided View
Some thoughts on Jonah Lehrer’s article from The New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2010.
In his article on the possible evolutionary purpose of sadness, Jonah Lehrer, a talented writer and knowledgeable scientists confuses an adaptive mechanism –the capacity for greater focus that the rumination of depression may afford – with a therapeutic one. Even more important, he does not address the causes of depression and, in accordance with his emphasis on enhanced problem solving, limits his discussion of therapeutic efforts to cognitive change.
Work with many hundreds of depressed people in my psychiatric practice and tens of thousands more in war, post-war and disaster situations around the world gives me a very different perspective and leads me to different conclusions. So many of us are depressed because we are living at variance with both our genetic programming and our need for meaning and purpose. We are affected so dramatically by losses of relationships, jobs, etc. because we are not sustained by the adequate social support that is a hallmark of traditional societies. We are subject to an unprecedented level of stress and overstimulation in our environment, to toxic food, and sedentary ways of living that are anathema to our evolutionary development and detrimental to our mood. Many of us lack a sense of purpose in our lives, a connection to something greater than ourselves that gives human life meaning, and can give us hope in difficult times.
The symptoms of depression – both the rumination on what went wrong and why that Lehrer focuses on, and the lethargy, hopelessness, decreased interest in sex and food that go along with it – are best understood and responded to not as an evolutionary advantage but as a wake-up call. They let us know that it is time to address the conditions that are creating the imbalances in our lives; to use food and exercise, meditation and imagination to improve our biology and enlarge our perspective, and to reach out to others—therapists, clergy, family and friends—who can help us. The true purpose and challenge of our depression is to wake us up to what is wrong in the way we live, to point us toward ways to become more fully human.
On Our Way to Haiti
Dear friends,
We’re on our way to Haiti now, via the circuitous route that the damaged Haitian airport and the daunting US weather demand. We’ll be arriving on Thursday to begin working with people on the ground and exploring partnerships with the Haitian government and local and international NGO’s, churches, schools, and other community groups. I’m going with Rosemary Murrain, our Director of Administration and Finance, who has worked in Haiti, and Star Myrtil, a young Haitian woman who has been a Program Manager for NGO’s and speaks Creole as well as French.
We’ll let you know more when we’re on the ground; meanwhile, here’s a brief description of the work we hope to be doing.
All my best,
Jim
"Healing the Wounds of War" in Christian Science Monitor
Dear friends,
The Christian Science Monitor featured an article on our Healing the Wounds of War program in the Middle East! Ilene Prusher interviewed some of our Gaza trainees, and myself, to write this thoughtful piece. She also notes that it is the one-year anniversary of the Israel siege on Gaza, “Operation Cast Lead,” which devastated the people and landscape of Gaza, and from which they are still struggling to recover a year later.
Here is an excerpt of the article, but I hope you check out the original, with some pictures and related stories on Gaza and the Middle East, here.
Gaza war anniversary: How one group helps victims overcome trauma
By Ilene R. Prusher Staff writer / December 28, 2009
Jerusalem
Rawya Hamam was watching her son deteriorate. Hisham wouldn’t sleep, clung to her incessantly, and said he wanted to go back into her belly so he’d be safe. “Grandma is lucky she died so she doesn’t have to live here now,” the boy told his mother.
It’s not a normal statement to expect from a five-year-old child, but neither were these normal times. A year ago, at the outbreak of war between the militant Palestinian group Hamas and Israel, anything resembling a normal life disappeared into a violent maelstrom that wreaked unprecedented destruction on the Gaza Strip. More than 1,400 Gazans were killed, according to a Palestinian count, in a campaign the Israeli army named “Operation Cast Lead,” with the aim of getting Hamas to stop the daily launch of occasionally fatal rockets onto Israeli communities. Thirteen Israelis were killed in the three-week war. . . . keep reading
We’re so thankful for the recognition of our work in Gaza, alleviating psychological pain and suffering, and all of the work we do, both in the Middle East and here in the US teaching health and mental health professionals to learning to handle their stress and incorporate mind-body techniques into their practice through our Mind-Body Medicine Training as well as our Healing Our Troops program. These warm, caring professionals we train use their skill and wisdom to help families recovering from disaster, like those who survived Hurricane Katrina, as well as working with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and their families.
(If you kept reading my post, don’t forget to check out the rest of the original CSM article with pictures and related stories on Gaza and the Middle East, here.)
Jim
Day 7: The Gaza Training Ends
“We have been on a journey,” says the psychologist who is leading the final session of Mohammed’s group. She sits comfortably cross-legged on the floor, in her long coat and headscarf, next to the young man who is her partner on this last day. “We have come to know each other in a way that is not usual here in Gaza,” she goes on. “men and women speaking together from their hearts, all of us finding new friends.”
This is our last group and, as we check-in, and while my translator summons up her English, I find myself pondering old mysteries and contemplating new wonders. The dress of the woman’s co-leader: He is wearing a sport jacket and slacks, neatly pressed, and a tie, secured with a Windsor knot, a professional code of dress that many of the men favor. How much effort, I wonder, does it take to maintain such self-respect amid Gaza’s crushing, demoralizing constraints? And how does he do it with the dearth of dry cleaning facilities and the scarcity of solvents? I am impressed once again by the intelligence, dignity and, yes, elegance of a woman who, except for a tiny slit for her eyes is completely covered. Her assessment of herself this last day is so open, unsparing, witty – “I want to thank all of you,” she begins, “I realize now I have been too rigid, and often wrong, in my judgments; and I have been unnecessarily covering my feelings, not just my body.” I too realize once again – what a grace of these groups – that I have much to learn about my own preconceptions and judgments.
In this session we do drawings similar to the ones we do on the first day of the first training, pictures that often show us how much – sometimes how stunningly, satisfyingly much – we have changed since that opening group. The wires of a cage that contained an irritable, frustrated physician have turned into steps on a ladder which will bring him to a place of peace, among trees in his yard and within himself; a psychologist’s family members scattered across the landscape by misunderstanding in day one’s picture are now gathered in a comforting circle in which they are, like members of the mind-body group she is addressing, “sharing their feelings.”
Our leader has brought us candies wrapped in red foil, to celebrate our time together, and to mark its end. “I Love You” is written across them in silver. Another woman has brought us all pens “to remember this group when you write.” A third has baked a cheesecake, its top speckled with many colored candied glitter, with a single candle. “This is,” she announces, “to celebrate our journey and also,” she adds, “the Prophet Mohammed’s hijra,” his journey from Mecca to Medina in 622, “whose anniversary falls on this day.”
It was in Medina, I remember, that Mohammed created the umma, the spiritual community that is the model for Islamic society. It provides Muslims with the opportunity to gratefully practice the prayers and manifest the precepts and the code of conduct that Mohammed brought to them.
As our leader carefully divides the cake in squares I hear, as clearly as if he were once again standing in front of me, the closing comment of a young psychologist in our previous training nine months before. A tough, pale, earnest, bearded young man, he had spoken with some formality: “I did not know what to expect when I came; these techniques, it seemed to me, were foreign to Gaza. But as I have been here these days I have been so impressed. You and your faculty are so knowledgeable and such good teachers, and I have learned so much about myself as well as psychology. But even more important” – I can hear again his voice lowering, more intimate now – “you have all been so kind to me and all the participants, have made us feel so much at ease. I believe,” – I knew he was getting ready to conclude, but never could have imagined what he would say – “that this is what it must have been like in the time of the Prophet Mohammed.”
Our leader hands us plates, and we eat our cake and savor each other’s company. There is general sadness at “concluding this blessed vacation with ourselves,” as one woman observes, to general agreement. But there are also commitments to “meditate daily” and “shake and dance with my children when we are feeling overwhelmed, or stressed.” Everyone expects to “start mind-body groups for patients on the first of the year.” There are promises all around to be in touch in the months ahead – in the supervision groups that Mohammed and the rest of our faculty will be leading every week throughout Gaza, and less formally too. Phone numbers are exchanged and a paper passed around for email addresses.
And then our leader in her long coat and head scarf reaches over and turns on the CD player and stands and claps, and sways a little, while her young colleague in the sports coat, his collar open and tie now loosened, rises and steps to his right toward Mohammed and the other men, and begins the steps that will take them and me too, our arms on each others’ shoulders, in a small happy circle, around our room.
