Our work in Israel and Gaza in Jerusalem Post
Hi everybody,
I hope you’ve all been enjoying your summers. I’ve been in Israel and Gaza with our team, and more recently have been working on getting our programs ready for the fall (Professional Training Program in Mind-Body Medicine begins in just a little over a month!) as well as doing some writing.
I wanted to share with you a profile of me and of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s work that just appeared in the Jerusalem Post Magazine. The JP is one of Israel’s largest and most influential newspapers–in both Hebrew and English–and I am hopeful that the profile will be helpful as we raise both awareness and funding for the trauma and other programs in Israel and Gaza.
Profile from Jerusalem Post Magazine, by Lauren Gelfond Feldinger:
From War to Ward: An Unorthodox Psychiatrist
In that connection, we are beginning to organize a joint Israeli-Palestinian CancerGuides training in the summer of 2012. The CG program is much needed in Israel, and is of desperate importance in Gaza and the West Bank where people with cancer, particularly women, are often treated as pariahs.
Over the last year or so, we have organized the first cancer support program ever in Gaza, and now, we have ten groups running concurrently. You may remember that some of these cancer group participants are featured in our short video about Gaza, “Finding Hope in the Face of Another.”
Gaza Blog Day 4
Gaza City, December 15, 2009
Day 4
Hello Friends,
The Advanced Training Program (we call it, and so do the Palestinians, “ATP”) has a complex structure that is at first a bit daunting. Our 15 Gaza faculty coach the participants in leading the same kinds of small groups that they first experienced in the initial training. The international faculty, passing from group to group provide feedback, later, in supervision, on how the Gaza faculty has helped the participants and what they could do or say more appropriately, clearly or concisely; where they could have been more sensitive to the spoken or unspoken needs of a group member; how their own reticence or preconceptions may have inhibited or biased them in their advice to a participant-leader. “Be honest with us,” our conscientious Palestinian team had repeatedly insisted. “We want to do the best job for our people. We are thirsty for learning.”
The participants lead the ATP groups in pairs; there are ten people in each group and five sessions. Hugely nervous at first, in spite of a day of reassurance and coaching, they conduct the opening meditation, and lead the check-in in which they and the other group members say how they are doing and what they are feeling at the present moment. We have encouraged participant-leaders to let go of self-conscious professional distance, to be honest about their own feelings, to be “real people as well as leaders.” Some do this with admirable courage and humility: “I am a professor at university, but at this moment I feel like I am back in grade school.” Others are more guarded. Everyone in the group speaks in turn – no interrupting, analyzing or interpreting allowed.
The participant-leaders then teach didactic material about, for example, the fight or flight and stress response that are activated by the sympathetic nervous system, and the use of slow deep breathing (which mobilizes the parasympathetic nervous system) to balance this state of hyperarousal which is so common in deeply traumatized and uneasy Gaza. Then they lead an experiential exercise – it could be guided imagery, or drawing one’s problem and its solution or quiet meditation that brings about relaxation or an active meditation of fast deep breathing or shaking and dancing, designed to raise energy in the depleted and depressed and break up fixed patterns of thought and feeling. Then they ask group members to report on their experience: “I feel like a burden is lifted” says one young, bearded school psychologist, after six or eight minutes of charged up, bellows-like arm pumping, deep breathing. “I feel free for the first time since the war to breathe the breeze from the sea.” They conclude each group with a quiet meditation. Afterwards the pair of participant-leaders say how they feel they have done and the other participants share what the experience was like for them; the Gaza faculty member concludes with his or her assessment.
This will go on for five two-hour groups over four days. It is designed to equip our participants to take our model back into their work places where they will offer it to kids and adults, the elderly and the deaf, former prisoners in Israeli jails and ambulance drivers, abused women and confused men, the anxious and angry, those bereaved by violence and those fearful they will be. In a society in which psychological problems are stigmatized and psychotherapy is often viewed, if it is considered at all, with suspicion, our model has wide appeal. It is offered as a way to develop skills and strengths, of mind as well as body, an opportunity to come together without fear of analysis or interpretation, a modern version of traditional, honored communal gathering and healing.
Each day we have a panel where Gaza faculty answer questions from the entire group of participants about the challenges of leading groups and working with individuals, about balancing the need to maintain order in the group with an openness that invites sharing, about presenting didactic material in a way that is accurate but easily comprehensible. In Gaza the questions have a special urgency and poignancy. One male psychologist, slender and graying unfolds slowly from his chair. “How do you,” he asks soberly, “deal with a situation in which during a mind-body group bombs are going off?”
“This has happened to me several times,” replies Mohammed, the psychiatrist, “You find out what is happening – I don’t want to say who is shooting,” he adds to some laughter. “You make sure your group is as safe as it can be. Then you discuss feelings so everyone can get some relief. Then do deep breathing to help everyone, including yourself, to relax. Then continue the group.”
“I was working with kids one time,” Jamil adds. “Every time there was shooting we got up and shook our bodies. Every time a bomb went off we all yelled loudly. It worked pretty well.”
“What about if you are a leader and someone says something that is very tragic and you feel like crying? Is it permitted?”
“In the war terrible things happened” responds Abdel-Hamid, “and the people come to us to talk about it: Women in my groups whose children were killed, men who saw their wives and daughters dying from burns, and I remember the things I myself saw. It is only human for us to cry as well.”
Woodstock Wisdom
Hey, I know I’m a little late, but I was a little late to Woodstock too. I hadn’t planned on going, but then another doctor as young as I was then called me up, desperate–actually, crazed. “You’ve got to get up here, man. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of people coming, and there’s no food, no place to stay, nobody to take care of them.”
“I saw on television that the roads were jammed.”
“Forget about it, man—we’ll send a helicopter.”
And he did.
And that’s how my girlfriend Sharon and I–veterans of the civil rights and anti-war movements, former residents of the Haight-Ashbury and Berkeley, and passionately committed to “health care for all”–found ourselves on the way to Bethel, New York.
Looking back this week on Woodstock, forty years later, wondering if there was anything I had to add to everything that everyone who was or wasn’t there has had to say, I realized I had actually learned a lot in those three days and that the lessons might be worth sharing.
Here they are, in the order they came to me.
* Always be ready to help. When someone asks with real need, you have to pay attention. Inconvenience–dicey travel plans, the loss of a precious few days of a psychiatric resident’s vacation—is really a small deal. Utter lack of knowledge about the conditions we were walking into or the support available to us once we got there—let it be, see what happens. Bottom line: if it feels right and necessary, do it.
* If you’re meant to do something, it’s likely, in spite of all improbabilities, that it will happen. I know, I know, this sounds hopelessly hippie-ish and “New Age,” but what am I going to do? Jung gave this acausal connection between internal intention and external events the more dignified name of “synchronicity.” Let’s call it that.
A helicopter did indeed take us from LaGuardia to a field near Bethel. It landed to pick up some performers. Questions were raised about whether we should be debarked so that Joan Baez’s mother could accompany her. “We can all go,” Sharon said cheerfully, but highly insistently. “We’re all needed.” And indeed, we did—Joan, her mother, and the two of us.
* Be patient, if it’s necessary, even when you really don’t want to be. This, I have to admit, is a lesson I’ve had to keep re-learning many times these last forty years, but Woodstock gave me a clear, undeniable glimpse of its usefulness.
Everyone was helpful, but no one actually knew how to find our friend, the doc who called. “He’s here” . . . “there” . . . “behind the stage” . . . “over by those tents.” Hopelessly lost half a dozen times, we picked our way among hundreds of thousands of bodies and got righteously irritated that no one seemed to know our friend or where we should go or where supplies could be found, or who else might be in charge—“Listen, you guys flew us up here to do this job. There are already kids all over the place with cut feet, sore throats, and bad trips. It’s starting to rain, and it’s gonna get worse.”
“Oh, wow, man,” they said. “That’s far out. Would you like some food, booze, hash, acid? Would you like a hug?” We had to laugh.
* If you build it—and they really need it—lots of people will come. Without supplies or shelter, we set up at the edge of the huge bowl where the bands were playing, Our spot was marked only by a sign, “First Aid.”
People started lining up immediately. An hour or so later, miraculously, antiseptics and bandages, sutures, and antibiotics started arriving, Wavy Gravy, the prince of hippie self-help, sent some guys with a tent.
* Opposition will come your way. The line is from reggae musician Jimmy Cliff (he wasn’t at Woodstock) but the truth is universal. By the second evening of the festival, more than 100 people were regularly in line outside our little tent. Some needed sutures—Sharon reminded me the other day how impressed she was with my one-hand surgical ties, and I am too, though I honestly don’t remember them. Others had respiratory infections and were working on pneumonias. And a very large number, quite young even to my 27-year-old eyes, had taken improbable quantities of unnamed and perhaps unnameable substances, and were deeply distressed. I went down the line triaging, and discovered about fifty of them.
“We need a bigger tent,” I told a guy who’d shown up with a two-way radio, “a real big one for 50-100 people.” The big tent arrived and I invited all the mentally, emotionally and psychically challenged to come inside. I spent time going from one to the other and realized the mission was truly impossible. There were simply too many, and despite Sharon’s best efforts the line outside our little tent was growing long.
* Self-care and mutual help are fundamental tools of all healing. This is a lesson I’ve been learning ever since my first days as a student on hospital wards, and it’s one that I’ve devoted much of my professional life to exploring and teaching to others. The couple of days in the big tent at Woodstock highlighted it luminously. Absolutely unable to care for all these people myself, and with only a couple of untutored volunteers available, I came up with a game plan. I asked all those who had taken too many ‘uppers’—amphetamines, cocaine, and the like—and were fidgety, agitated, and utterly at a loss to know what to do—to walk around vigorously, insistently holding, leading, urging on all those who had overdosed on ‘downers’ like heroin, barbiturates, quaaludes, and liquor. I asked the remaining kids, who were lost in the dark forests of psychedelia to sit on the floor of the tent in pairs or threesomes or fours. “Hold each other,” I instructed, “listen to each other. Take care of your brothers and sisters.” I told the volunteers to keep their eyes open and to get me in case of crisis. Every half hour or so I checked in.
The walking, holding, and hugging went on all night. The next morning, some of the young people, happy and calm enough, dropped by to thank me; others simply sat listening to the music.
* Nothing is perfect. Woodstock was a triumph of peace, love, and community, says just about everybody who was there. Millions of people now regard it as a touchstone, an example of what’s possible when you set aside fear and prejudice and promote love and peace. Yes. Woodstock was a self-indulgent mess, say some others, skeptical and cynical perhaps, and maybe scared of the unleashed id of the experience. And there’s some truth there too.
But there were other issues. I was, amidst the pleasure of the celebration, the impressive kindness and sharing, troubled by something else I saw and felt, a certain kind of dislocation and sadness in some of the young people.
They said they were disoriented by the crowds and uneasy being away from the cities and suburbs which were their homes. These feelings, of course, had been amplified by quantities of drugs consumed, but we heard and felt it in others who seemed more or less sober—an uneasiness and loneliness that camaraderie and crowds could not assuage. I heard it, too, in the months after Woodstock, from people who felt let down by the lack of fellow feeling in the world they returned to, by the absence of the indomitable hope that seemed to them to suffuse Bethel.
* You never know who your friends and teachers will be. I was already learning this during several years of psychotherapy and meditation and from time spent ministering to the so-called “mentally ill“—as well as hippies. It was possible, I was finding, to find solace, friendship, and even wisdom in unlikely places and with unexpected people. Woodstock reinforced this mightily.
During the three days of the festival I met apparently hapless kids with remarkable skills in erecting shelters, scrounging and preparing food, and tending to the ill and crazed. I was impressed over and over again by the exuberant effectiveness of Wavy Gravy’s Hog Farm tribe, the courtesy of celebrities like Joan Baez who really did believe in “power to the people,” the kindness and good sense of those who volunteered to help out.
It all came home to me, appropriately enough, on the way back home, in a small plane that Sharon and I shared with the chief of police of Beverly Hills, who had come to supervise security. “Great kids,” he said. “Great festival. Great view,” he added as he gestured toward the Manhattan skyscrapers over which we were flying. “People will be talking about this for a long time.”
