Tara Brach - Working with Trauma: Tara Interviews Jim Gordon, MD (2020-02-19)

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Working with Trauma: Tara Interviews Jim Gordon, MD (2020-02-19) - Dr. Jim Gordon is author of the new book, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma. In this interview with Tara, he talks about his work with populations around the globe struggling with trauma, and some of the most powerful practices that can be done on our own in healing trauma. Jim's organization is the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, DC - CMBM.org.

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Welcome and Namaste and blessings. I get the distinct honor and happiness to welcome a very dear friend. The most formal thing I can say about him is he's one of the most good-hearted and giving and generous and wise beings that I know. So welcome here to Dr. Jim Gordon. And I'll let you know also that Jim is a psychiatrist

and he's the founder, executive director of the Center for Mind Body Medicine in D.C. Many of you know him for that. And this center has done amazing things around the world. And I can't keep up with how much is going on. So that's, first of all, a big welcome to you. Yeah, thank you. So where I just was, you were there with me. I was just in Puerto Rico, and I was at a, we were working with people who were,

whose homes were destroyed by the recent earthquakes and doing workshops in the countryside and doing quiet meditation and shaking and dancing with them. But then I was at a meeting of something called the Clinton Global Initiative. One of the first people I met when I was there is a woman. named Christine Nevis and we're just talking and she said oh you're from Washington do you know Tara Brock and I said yes I do as a matter of fact I do she's a friend and I'm gonna be with her in a couple of days and she said well she is so present I went to one Wednesday evening event that she has and she

talked to me and I talked to her and she was so totally there with me. I've never had anyone be with me in that way. So it was beautiful, and Tara's blushing, of course. And then the other thing she said, and you can all blush, is it was so wonderful to be in this kind of community. And she was wishing that she could establish something, she and others could establish something like that in San Juan. Wow. Well, so part of what happens is you end up going into into all these different places around the globe. And that sort of starts happening, is that communities start developing around the programs

you're doing. So the way I wanted to start off is catch me up. The last time I saw Jim, it was, I think, at my dinner table about eight years ago. And wow, everywhere I go, there's just stuff happening with what you're doing. So tell us about the center and your projects. Give us a little bit of a... First, I have two colleagues from the center here. Lauren and Tatiana. So afterwards if you want to talk with them as well as with me about

what we're doing. Do you want to stand up if you just so we can big bow to both of you. Thank you for your wonderful work. And as you said the work is very much about building and creating community wherever we go. What's happened is that our work increasingly since I last saw you has really been focused on communities or regions or whole countries that are suffering from significant trauma. And when I began doing this work almost 30 years ago, I was always having to go somewhere and see if people were interested. And I still keep doing that. Something happens and I feel like I need to go and I need to be there

and I need to see if what we have to offer, which is a comprehensive program of self-care, self-awareness, self-care and group support, sound familiar, if what we have to offer is of interest to people. But increasingly, especially in the last four or five years, more and more people are beginning to come to us. So that we began population-wide work in Bosnia just after the Dayton Accords were signed. And one of the things that was very clear back then

is that you don't want to wait till after war is over. After four years of war and 200,000 deaths and tens of thousands of women and men who were in rape camps, the whole society was destroyed, really. Everybody was frantic. So when the war on Kosovo began in 1998, I just wanted to be there. I wanted to begin work during the war. And so that's how we really began. And Kosovo became our pilot project, if you will, we trained 600 people, in Kosovo, including everyone in the community mental health system, and our work continues there 21 years later. And now what's happening is we have the work in the Balkans, the work in the Middle East,

we've done a lot of work. I know we were talking about the work on Gaza that we've been doing. We're the only organization that has major parallel programs in Israel and Gaza. And we've trained, Gaza's our largest program. They've trained 900 people. And the people we train their health and mental health professionals, but also teachers, community leaders, leaders of women's groups, religious leaders, and people who just want to help out. And sometimes the community leaders are highly educated and sometimes they're farmers or truck

drivers, but we can teach them all what we have to teach and then they can share it with the population. More recently, though, we've been doing a lot of work around the United States. states in areas devastated by climate change. So that's what I was in Puerto Rico. We began working after the hurricanes. And things have gotten significantly worse, particularly in the southern part of Puerto Rico,

since the earthquakes. We worked in Houston. But we started working after Katrina. That was our first climate-related program. And then in Houston after the hurricanes, Northern California, after the fires. Haiti after the earthquake, going down to the Bahamas on a few days, beginning a program there working with the Ministry of Health.

So people are reaching out to us more and more. We're going to be going, I was in Central Asia, I hadn't told you about this, and the U.S. Institute of Peace has asked us to work with four countries that are having to deal with returning ISIS fighters in their family, and they don't know how to integrate them. Understandably, it's not easy. So we're going to help that process of integrating these people who've been alienated from their societies

and who are kind of terrifying as they come back, helping to integrate them. It was in South Sudan, and we were working with the warring parties there who are trying to come together to form a government. So these are people who are actually still killing each other in the countryside. But much of the leadership has come to understand that this can't go on. They've killed 400,000 people in the last six or seven years. And so when one of our faculty, who's a human rights lawyer from South Sudan, suggested to them that maybe we could be helpful, they said yes. And we did a two-day workshop for the leaders, many of the leaders of both of these warring tribes,

plus leaders from the women's union and leaders in the army and a bunch of non-government organizations. And the beautiful thing, one of the beautiful things is the way it began was the minister of agriculture who looked very stern and big and tough. He began by saying, we cannot have outer peace without inner peace. And I found myself wishing somebody in our cabinet here. Anyway, so that's what we've been doing. We've been doing more and more of this work with whole populations. We also have open trainings that anyone can come to at least once a year in the United States.

This summer we have a training, and anyone who wants to learn what we have to teach, who intends to share it with others is welcome to come. So that's my segue because Jim has this fantastic book. that I've been reading and loving the transformation, and it's here, it's for sale, and he's going to sign. And that gives us a sense of when you say we go and we're teaching this workshop and we're doing healing with this group, this is the content of what you're doing with them.

Jump on in. Tell us a little of what you're actually doing. How are you helping people in these incredibly horrifically traumatized populations? Well, the basic idea of the book is that all of us, are going to have trauma sooner or later, which I know this is, of course, part of every spiritual tradition that understanding is there,

although we try often in the United States to act as if no, nothing bad is ever supposed to happen, and if it does, there's something wrong with you. So it's a kind of returning to the roots, really to Aboriginal teachings as well as the teachings of the kind of

high classical traditions. The trauma is going to come to all of us, And the transformation is a book that I wrote to help all of us, me included, deal with the trauma and the challenges that inevitably come, if not early in life, then likely in young adulthood and midlife as we deal with losses and disappointments. And certainly as we grow older and deal with frailty and the loss of loved ones and our inevitable death. So it's a program, it's the same program that we use in a war zone. I use here in my office in Washington, D.C. And it's the book, I wrote this particular book because people, I had written books, other books,

the most recent one before was about depression. And people said, well, it's really good and we appreciate what you're teaching. But why don't you write a book for all of us instead of people who were just depressed? So I said, okay. But then it took me, this is too long. But it took me a while to figure out exactly what that was.

And a very smart guy said to me, well, what are you best known for? And I said, well, I guess working with trauma, he says, that's it. I said, okay. So after several years of cogitating, starting three different books, I did this book. And so what's in it is all of the techniques, just about all the techniques that we use in our work, wherever we go. and it's organized in such a way that anybody can follow the book and anybody can use the techniques and can use this method for themselves, although I do think it's great if you can do it with one or more other people

and share your experience with other people. But I've written the book so people can do it on their own. The last book I wrote Unstuck, the book, before the transformation, because a girl in the Philippines said, I don't have any money. I've read about what you do with people who are depressed. Could you write something for me? There are no therapists where I live.

I live with no countryside. So, okay, that's a good idea. So this is, in a sense, a continuation of that idea. I want to put something in people's hands that anybody can use as a complete program. And so there are, as you know, lots of different techniques and lots of different ways of moving through and beyond.

and learning from and hopefully being transformed by the trauma that comes to us and feels overwhelming and disastrous but can actually open the door to this process of transformation. I was thinking what you just said about really the aboriginal roots and how the shaman always talk about trauma as it cuts us off and away from our soul, whether you want to think of it as spirit or whatever, and that these kind of practices are reconnecting and there's a kind of sense of truly the transformation is soul retrieval or you actually reconnect with the fullness of who you are. And right at the beginning of your book you say, you know, meditation. You bow so deeply. So given this crowd, tell us more

about how meditation works with this. Yeah, I was thinking about that as we were sitting. Yeah, meditation is central to all the work that we do. Meditation, I don't know if you've told them, meditation comes from the same Sanskrit and Greek root word as medicine. They didn't teach that to me in medical school. And it means to take the measure of and to care for, basically the science and the art of medicine. And aboriginally, anybody who was going to be a healer,

and also in the high classical traditions, the Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Hippocratic medicine, it was understood that if you were going to have the knowledge and the authority that comes with your role as an official healer, you had to have some practice that undercut the tendency toward pride and arrogance and meditation was the practice. The other thing, of course, about meditation is, and this goes back to what Christine said about you

is that meditation is what allows us to be present with other people that unless we're relaxed and in that state of moment to moment awareness how can we possibly be with another human being and be useful to that human being? So meditation is central to all of the work that we do at the Center for Mind, Body Medicine and we draw on three, there are three

basic kinds of meditation. Concentrative meditation, this is probably familiar to all of you, concentrated meditation, focusing on the breath or sound or an image, mindfulness, and concentrated meditations are part of every tradition that I know of. Mindfulness, which of course, as far as we know, comes from as Buddhist meditation to begin with, and then expressive meditations, which are the oldest ones on the planet, which unfortunately are not widely used, but are very, very important. And these are active physical meditations, fast, deep breathing, jumping up and down, whirling, shaking and dancing. And these are particularly important for people who've been traumatized.

So that when I was out in the countryside a couple days ago in Puerto Rico, working with these mostly older people, but not all older, who'd been devastated by losing their homes in a state of constant anxiety. And I asked how many of you are irritable all the time. They all raise their hands and they're anxious and they can't sleep. I got them up shaking and dancing.

And for the first time, people felt a little, oh, I can relax. Sort of smiles came onto their faces. So we use all of the things. all three forms of meditation in the work that we do. Concentrative, mindfulness, and expressive. And I teach a variety of different techniques that partake of all three of those categories

and the transformation. That's very important because no one practice, in my understanding and my experience, no one practice is good for everyone all the time. So something that may work at one point may not make sense at another point. So the idea is not to stick to it endlessly and keep on doing it, even if it's not working,

is find something that works, find another way to come into that state of relaxed moment-to-moment awareness. The Zen saying is their fingers pointing at the moon, right? All the different, they're techniques, they're ways of coming into that meditative place, which is where we hope to be. So part of what I really liked, right as we entered into your book,

was your science on trauma, just your explanation of what trauma does and how it cuts us off, first of all, it's disassociative. So meditation helps us to reassociate. But also with the freeze response, how the shaking and expressive actually helps us to unfreeze and how that happens in nature with animals. Can you share a little bit here? Because I thought it was so interesting. Basically, there are two responses to trauma.

I'm simplifying a bit. One is fight or flight, which is a life-saving response. It's built into vertebrate biology. All of us have experienced it many, many times, I assume. And the problem with fight or flight is not that it happens when an event that's challenging or traumatic comes, but that it persists long after the event is over, and we stay in that state,

or that we stay in a situation that continually puts us in fight or flight. If you think about a gazelle on the Serengeti plane, a lion comes along. The gazelles are not terribly bright, as far as we know, but they have enough genetic wisdom in them to know that they flee. They don't fight a lion. And if they're not eaten by the lion, two, three minutes later, they're happily grazing. Fighter flight came, did its job, and left.

We humans carry the lions with us. Or else we spend our time in the lions then. The other response, when we're overwhelmed and the traumatic event is inescapable, is the freeze response. And this is what you see in. In the animal world, if you have a cat that catches mice. I used to live in the country and have a bunch of cats. They're very good mousers. And they would bring the mouse back in the jaw

and they'd be shaking the mouse like that. And sometimes, of course they crunch the mouse to death, but often enough they get bored. Because the mouse would collapse. The mouse would go into a freeze response. So the cat put the mouse down. Mousie, shake herself off, go off to the mouse hole. Freeze came, did its job, and left.

Humans, and the particular example, is of abused children who are in situations that are overwhelming and inescapable. And they go into a freeze. As you were saying, Tara, they shut down physically. You can see these kids. I'm sure some of you have worked with kids like this. They're just kind of hunched over, or they're

kind of expressionless, and they survive by detaching themselves. They're putting out endorphins to numb the pain, and psychologically they withdraw. And if you talk with people who've been raped or people who've been in horrible, abusive, physical situations that they couldn't flee, they will also tell you that they withdrew, that they've, I work a lot with people who've been tortured. They say I was on the top of the prison cell watching what happened to me. So when people were in that freeze response, and these people after the earthquake, many of them were in the freeze response.

If you've ever been in an earthquake, it is utterly overwhelming, and there's nowhere to go. So they go into a freeze response, and they're really shut down, kind of expressionless, and the body's a bit hunched over. So the expressive meditation starts to open up the body, brings them back, allows them to feel in touch with the body. They've sort of forgotten they're living in the body almost. So it's really crucial.

And it's often the technique that is most appreciated by people who've been traumatized. And so when they're doing quiet meditation and expressive meditation, always have them do the expressive meditation first, and then it may be possible to sit quietly. Often they can't sit. I mean, some of them can sit quietly because they're so shut down. But you want to get things moving first, and then the calm and the quiet is not just a kind of shut down state. It's a genuine calm, aware state.

What I've found, especially because we don't start off our meditations by having everybody get up and shake around, and there's always a percentage of us here that have, trauma in our bodies and I regularly have people after class saying, well, when you told me to get into my body, I couldn't feel anything. Like I just did a body scan but I wasn't there. Or else they'll tell me I started doing a body scan and I got a clutch of real panic and I'm wondering how you guide people to work when they try to sit and be mindful or do body scans and they encounter that panic.

Well, the first thing is that what I do in the transformation and what we do when we're working in the field is we begin by doing our best to start the process of rebalancing the physiology and the mind. The other thing that happens with trauma that I meant to mention is that we withdraw from other people. That's on a physiological level. So even in a situation where everybody knows that the whole city has been through the same trauma,

each person feels alone because parts of the brain that allow us to connect with others are kind of shut down. Anyway, so we begin by doing slow, deep, soft belly breathing, and 80, 90% of people can, even in 10 minutes of doing that,

feel a little bit of a change. So that gives everyone the idea that change is possible, that they can do something. And very soon, afterwards, we get everybody up shaking and dancing. So we shake. Can we get people up shaking? I may start now.

This is very simple. Just stand out. It's good. You've been sitting for a long time. One thing, humans are not meant to sit for too long. one of the problems we have you walk into an office sometimes

I sometimes wonder are people alive because everybody is so immobile so shaking it just put your feet shoulder width yeah and we do it like that you shake up from your hole from your feet through your knees and hips up into your shoulders

and if you can't stand up you can do it sitting down we do it with people in wheelchairs and in hospital beds So, yeah, just let the shoulders go. And you can let your jaw hang open. A lot of us can. And if sounds come, that's fine, just let them come.

And it's good to close your eyes, so you're not peeking at anybody else. Not checking out how Tara's shaking or anyone else. Yeah, that's it. Just keep going. We'll just do it for another minute or so. Just let the shoulders go. Yeah, let your head go. Okay, that's good.

Thank you. Thank you. What we usually do that, do about five or six minutes of shaking. And you can read the scripts for all of these are in the transformation. Five or six minutes of shaking just to fast rhythmic music, then a couple minutes of standing. mindfully, paying attention to the body and the breath, and then put on some music that's energizing and inspiring for you.

And that's going to be different for different people. I was thinking, if you do this, emotions may well come up. We did it very briefly here, but do it for five or six minutes. If we were doing it here, probably 20, 30 percent. people would say emotions came up and that's beautiful. It's one of the things that happens to us in this society we don't have a regular way of letting loose emotions. Most indigenous people have periodic if not daily ceremonies where they have an opportunity to do something expressive and the emotions can come and we live in a world where we don't think we're supposed to have

these emotions. And it's not just here, it's many places around. Here, D.C. is a kind of capital of no emotions except anger. Right? Anger and irritability. And anxiety. But it's crucial to let the emotions come. We were working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. About a year afterwards, we're doing a workshop for about 100 nursing students. And I don't know if you remember that 90 nursing students were killed in the earthquake. And these girls, there were 17, 18, 19-year-old girls were the sisters, the biological sisters and the good friends of the other nursing students. So I did a two, two-and-a-half-hour workshop with them, and toward the end, I got them up shaken. And within two or three minutes, half the girls were weeping.

and then they stood and then I put on Bob Marley's three little birds and so the girls are dancing and crying and laughing and afterwards what they said to me is this is the first time we have cried in the years since the earthquake we lost our sisters our dear friends

but we are nurses we have to be strong I start crying every time I tell this. We have to be strong for the little children, for our parents, for our grandparents. We haven't let ourselves cry. And it felt so good to cry. And then they said, and we haven't laughed either. And we haven't danced, and we're teenagers.

We like the dance. And then one of them said to me, and she said, and Jim, we love Bob Marley. But we are Haitian girls and we have very good Haitian music. So what happened is they had came back to life and they were girls again. They were giving me the business, right, about the music. And it was like, you know, we were having a good time. Because once you suppress one emotion, it's very hard to let the others come up. So the shaking and dancing and all the expressive meditations can bring up the emotions.

And they're so good. I mean, I sometimes will do it. And emotions, I didn't know that was going on inside me. And it will come up. And so when you do this, if you decide you want to do this at home, give yourself a little time afterwards. Don't just get it in the car and rush off. So you can let the emotions be there.

Let yourself have a kind of peaceful time after doing it. You know, as I'm listening, what's really hitting me is that when people are traumatized, is one of the worst sufferings about it is feeling this prison like there's really no hope to get out of it. And what I'm hearing from you is that you get things moving again. It's like you're reconnecting with body and with life and with sorrows and with joy, you know, you're reconnecting, you're getting it moving and there's such a power to hope and I know you wrote about it too, the power when people start having hope that they can change and

I'm wondering if you could speak a little more about that because it very, very, you know, resonated with me so much. Well, absolutely right. Hope is crucial in the beginning. So one way is by, when I begin by just teaching, soft belly breathing is not mysterious at all. It's as simple as the name sounds. You breathe slowly and deeply,

in through your nose and out through your mouth with your belly soft and relaxed. And you say to yourself, soft as you breathe in, and you can do this for a bit, and belly as you breathe out. And if thoughts come, you let them come, you let them go, bring your mind back to soft belly. So it's a concentrative meditation. Afterwards, people do it, and I teach them the physiology.

So it takes about 10 minutes as I'm teaching the physiology of how this meditation works. Then I asked that question, how many people notice the change? And about 80% of people notice a change, no matter what the situation, sometimes more. And so I point out to them that that 10 minutes you were able to make a change. So that begins to bring hope. The other thing is we do drawings pretty early on too. So we said, as you know, draw yourself, draw yourself with your biggest problem, and draw yourself with your problem solved.

And this would start right off doing this. I think we have such enormous capacity to understand and help ourselves that we don't realize. So it's simply a matter of giving people some simple tools and techniques to use. So people are able, first of all, they get out of their rational mind, and they get into this kind of kindergarten style of, you know, I'm drawing and I'm a little self-conscious and everybody kind of goofs around. and they draw themselves in some form, and then they identify a problem,

and then when I say, draw yourself with your problem solved, some people say, I don't think I can do it. Just whatever comes, let it come. So something, 99% of the time, something comes out on the page. So that's another way of seeing,

well, I'm not sure this could really happen. I said, there it is. At least you can imagine it happening. So hope is crucial, and different techniques will bring hope to different people. Sometimes the shaking and dancing does it, and nothing, others don't do it. So there has to be some hope that change is possible because if not, and one of the difficulties here in this world we live in,

people are very cynical. And they don't really believe, you know, this is the way it's going to be, is the way it's always going to be. So they have to have some experience that, opens the door for them. Also, in this culture, we try to heal ourselves on our own a lot. So we're doing it solo, and we don't get the benefit of sensing other people and their unfoldings, which then say, oh, this is possible.

And you do groups, and it feels to me like the relational context, first of all, it makes it safer, it makes it less shameful to be caught in your own stuff, because you realize we've all got it. And it also gives us this kind of sense of being part of something larger. It gives a meaning to it. So maybe to tell us more about how you work with groups. The groups are really important.

And groups were used, again, averageally. If you had a minor problem, sprain or a little love sickness or sort of wondering a bit about if you're going to grow up to be okay, you go to your granny, your grandmother, or somebody else's granny. And she knew the sort of physical, psychological, and spiritual first aid. But if you had a major problem, you went to the official healer, whoever that was, whether it was a wise woman or a shaman or a Sangoma or Corrondero, whoever it was.

And that person would bring together a group for the healing, because it was understood that in order to... restore balance in oneself, one also had to restore balance with the social, the natural, and the spiritual world. So we've sort of taken that wisdom, plus, you know, the experience that coming out of, I mean my own experience when I was an intern of bringing a group of people together, bringing a group of interns together, well, how healing it was for us to just have time with each other. So what we do when we're doing a training program or when we're bringing our work to people who want an intensive

experience as we form a group of about 10 people and in the group everybody speaks in turn no analysis no interpretation no interruption so it's really a community of people who are sharing and the leader is both the leader and make sure that nobody monopolizes or nobody breaks the rules or but also the leader participates. So when I lead a group, I do the drawings. I share my drawings. When I do guided imagery, I share my images. So it's very different from most group models. And people love it. And when we do a training or when we're working with people in the field, it's really the heart of our work, is the small group work. Do any of the groups go on over time? I mean, you mentioned that you've been

at some place for decades now. Do groups get sustained? And are they ever become peer groups where They're run by, they take turns leading them. Yes, yes, exactly. I mean, the research we've done, we published a whole bunch of research on the use of our model is usually done on people coming for 10 or 11 weeks to a group. And what we've seen is that 85% of people with post-traumatic stress disorder who begin our groups with PTSD no longer have it after 10 or 11 weeks,

and those gains hold at 3, 7, 10 months follow-up. Would you just say that again? That's an amazing statistic. Listen to this again, yeah. So we published the first... Can you say it one more time? So we say it one more time? Okay.

Yeah, I just want to take it in. So there is also a caveat, though, that I have to say. These are groups that are done with people who have been more traumatized. In Kosovo and Gaza, we published the first randomized controlled trial of any intervention with war traumatized kids. Using this model of self-awareness, self-care and group support. All the kids, we don't ordinarily diagnose people. We want people to come into our group.

No diagnostic bar that they have to meet to come into the group. They don't have to identify themselves as traumatized or depressed. They just have to want to learn the skills, except when we're doing a research study, we need to have the diagnosis. So 85% of the kids, 100% of the kids, 100% of the kids had diagnosable post-traumatic stress disorder using the Harvard trauma scale, which was a perfectly legitimate way to make the diagnosis.

85% of those kids no longer had no longer qualified for the diagnosis after 11 sessions of learning the self-care techniques that are in the transformation. This is post-war Kosovo. Those gains held at three months follow-up. That was great results, even as important as the results were, is the people who led the groups. Those groups were led by rural high school teachers who had no education in psychology beyond one course in pedagogy and our training. And we had supervisors who were psychiatrists, psychologists, but they did all the work in the groups, which means that we can work on a very large scale.

And Gaza, for example, we've worked with 170,000 children and adults. We train 900 people in Gaza. About 55 or 60,000 have been through these 10-week-long groups. The rest have been part of workshops or worked with individually or in family sessions. So the groups generally go on 10 or 11 weeks, but what we found here, we did a study on war-traumatized vets here, most of whom were Vietnam vets, and they've been traumatized for. 40 years and they haven't gotten better. They're still qualified for the diagnosis of PTSD. The gains were great after the 10 weeks. The results were really good, but they didn't stay

at that same level at three months follow-up. So it's clear that with that group of people and with others that we need to continue the groups. Now what happens often with the groups, For example, we've done a lot of work with people with cancer. And those groups, they're the easiest people to work with. It's great. And those groups often continue on their own. Sometimes the group leader will meet with them, you know, once a month for a few months. And people say, great, if you want to be with us, that's fine.

We're going to continue anyway. Because they can. Once people understand how to use the techniques and once they've got the rules of the group down, and they know each other they can continue on their own and we encourage them to do that and we you know if they want us to consult with them or you know periodically come to the

group we can do that as well so I think you know any work we do here with veterans who've been traumatized for a long time we're going to continue the groups much longer and the other thing is that because they're very isolated one of the things

in other cultures and I keep thinking back to what Christine said about coming here and feeling community. In other cultures, people who come to our groups, whether they're kids or adults, they go home and they teach the family. Oh, I learned mindful eating. And they teach the whole family. I have to tell this one story. This girl, and I always ask the kids when I go around and kids have been in a group, I said, what was your favorite technique? And I was in Gaza and this little girl eight years old.

I said, what was your favorite technique? She looked at me, she said, mindful eating with this big grin on her face. I said, really? Why? Kids usually like soft belly breathing or the drawings or shaking and dancing. I said, why did you like that? And she said, well, the date that my teacher

gave us to eat and the group was so delicious. It's the best date I'd ever had. And then I went home and I did it with my family. and they loved it too. And then I said to my family, just as our teacher said to us, maybe we should eat a whole meal mindfully. So we did that.

And it was wonderful because ever since the last war, it's been like there is a war at our dinner table. My father is always irritable and angry. He's yelling at my mother, and my mother's yelling at us. and we're fighting with each other. And after we did mindful eating, everything is so peaceful at dinner. That's why I like mindful eating.

So, you know, the power of learning, little girl learning in a group, then taking it back to the family and sharing it. And it's sort of miraculous at times what can happen as people bring these techniques into their lives. So is that something you're involved with kind of creating a format for more longevity? Like when vets need something ongoing, which they do in this culture, that isn't going to cost a lot to facilitate but has some way to keep on?

Yes, and we're doing more, we're working with many communities here, and we're doing more and more work of training teenagers. So I just got, it was in Broward County. there was the anniversary of the shootings there in February 14, so I was down for the commemoration. We're training, last year, we trained 130 peer counselors in this method, who were sharing it with other kids, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. There are 20 or 30 other schools in the district that want us. We haven't had a teacher and a parent that a whole other program with the kids, and 10 of those kids came through the adult training that we do.

we want to make it more and more a part of daily life for people and make it ongoing in communities. And I think one of the important things is that working with whole institutions, we work with hospital systems, and it's not just a matter of bringing some techniques in, it's really changing the whole culture, creating a culture that is more of a culture of mindfulness, a culture of awareness, a culture of wellness and compassion, and that has to penetrate to every level. And that's the way it will continue. Beautiful.

Let me just do a little time check here. Do you want to open to questions? Sure. Yeah. So I don't know if some of you have been having questions of your own come up, but we have about five to ten minutes. We can do this. So if anybody has a question, keep your hand up.

and we'll get the mic to you and just make sure you put it right by your chin so you speak right into it. Please speak loud because I'm kind of deaf even with my hearing aids. So I'm wondering how you define trauma because I'm not really clear what counts and what doesn't. Well, trauma's a Greek word that means injury.

Injury to the body, mind, or spirit. People define it for themselves. What's traumatic for them? So it's very different for different people. You know, it may be something, a disappointment in one's love life can be very traumatic. I think what we want to do is to give credence to what people are actually experiencing rather than me making a definition. So if somebody sees something as traumatic using that very general definition, that's what I want to work with.

I want to help them deal with whatever it is that they feel has been an intimate. injury to them. So it's very, you know, Catholic with a small sea. I mean, very open to all the possibilities. Because what's traumatic? I mean, I don't know. I was just at this Clinton global initiative. And I sometimes think of Bill Clinton, who likes to talk to people constantly, night and day. For other people, that would be utterly traumatic having to talk to people all the time. So it's very individual. for people and we want to we're always meeting people where they are whatever they present is what we want to help them with and so it's really important and sometimes people just this is moving away from your question a bit we don't push people to talk about their trauma either so when you do your drawings if you do your biggest

problem may not be you may have lost your home you know the home may have been destroyed but your biggest problem may be a pain in your back. And that's what you're defining right now. So we want to not force people into any premature definition at all. It's just up to them to decide what's important to work with. I just want to add one thing to that, which is that I've had so many times that when I'm mirrored back, so is this feel like trauma to you, it was like such a relief to have the word. So I love that it's soft and has degrees and it's self-identified, and it's also so affirming because we so often hold a lot of shame around our behaviors and feelings, and when we finally go,

wow, that's trauma, and it's maybe generational trauma because of racism or whatever, but to get it actually is freeing because then we actually can have some hope that there's ways to work with it. That's a really important point. And that trauma, that intergenerational trauma, which is both communicated socially from person to person, is also changes in our chromosomes, epigenetic changes. Those are real, and they come, there are animal experiments that have been done, and Rachel Yehuda has studied it in Holocaust survivors, children and grandchildren who were separated from the Holocaust survivors,

and, you know, grew up in families that were, quote, normal, have those same epigenetic changes, changes in molecules that are in the chromosomes that affect the genes and affect how we deal with stress. But the approach that we're talking about, this work with meditation and imaginative approaches and moving the body, they can reverse and changing diet can reverse the epigenetic changes as well. So it's important, really important to appreciate those factors, those historical traumas that have been visited on us. We do a lot of work with the Lakota people who have had very considerable historical trauma. But it's not just them, just about all of us, have some historical trauma. It's a, as you kind of go back, and my ancestors were Eastern European Jews who had, you know, there were a part of,

Groms and they were living in Stettles and they were third-class citizens. And so that's there. That's there in my, I'm sure, somewhere in my genes. I can recognize little pieces of it in me, the kind of fears that, you know, where'd that come from? So we can reverse those epigenetic changes and that's really important. The other thing I just want to mention that's in the transformation is that food can play a really important

important part in dealing with trauma, and that's rarely talked about. And I have a whole chapter on that, because I've just seen the power of making some basic changes in the way we eat, how that can help people deal with stress much, much better. Hi, I was wondering if you have found healing process through exposure to outdoor spaces, gardens, and nature. What's your experience with that? Absolutely. 100%.

What I noticed early on is that in the third drawings that people did of the solution to their problems, they were often in nature. And this was, I noticed this first overseas

and then when I started looking for it, I saw it here as well. So whatever the problem was, somebody going through chemotherapy, for example. The solution, nine times out of ten, wasn't to have a smarter oncologist. It was being in nature, maybe being with other people or with animals in nature. And there's lots of research, much of which I cite in the book, showing that spending a little bit of time in nature enhances immunity,

decreases stress hormone levels, improves mood, improve sleep, all those things. So yes, very, very important. Oh, thank you. I'm wondering about the war in Syria. I see in the TV for a long time children suffering in Syria, and I see children going to Europe in boat, and some of them maybe in the way die in the boat. Who take care about them of this big trauma

that these children are going through? And the second question, I see in the TV all the time that from Gaza, they send missiles for Israeli city and children live for 10 years in shelter with a big fear who take care about the Israeli children that are in fear for 10 years. Let me respond to both of those. We are working with Syrian refugees in Jordan, and we want to be doing more work with Syrian refugees. refugees, including we're training people who are both aid workers and also Syrian refugee leaders to work with adults and children.

Right now, we're primary workers in Jordan. We have some people we've trained in Iraq. I'll make a plea. We need funding to do more of that work. And I would like to work inside Syria. I'd like to find a way

that may not be feasible to go to some parts of Syria, but to do remote training of people inside Syria. Because the problem is enormous. The Syrian refugee problem is enormous and it's getting worse all the time. So we're trying to set up a program

in Turkey as well and expand the work that we're doing also in Lebanon. But we need help to do that. And it can be done. Now, the situation that you're describing in Gaza and Israel, there's a 60-minute

did a segment. You can watch it on our website. It featured our work with both Palestinian and Israeli children. We work with both. Israeli kids are traumatized too, as well, especially in the south of Israel, where they have had to go into shelters. It's not the same as in Gaza. In the 2014 war, 2000 people were killed in Gaza. 500 kids were killed. And the video shows a group of eight kids in Gaza whose fathers were killed in that war and you can see it. And it also shows me working with some Israeli kids. So with Israeli kids, there's a lot of fear. The reason we first got, the reason I first went to both Israel and Gaza is because I almost simultaneously got emails that looked like they'd been written jointly by an Israeli and a Palestinian psychologist saying, we are very smart. We're very good at working with individuals.

We're even good at working with groups, but we are completely overwhelmed by the situation, which is what everybody over there calls what's going on between Israelis and Palestinians, and especially the violence and the children. And not that the children are killing each other, but the children are so angry and so fighting all the time, which is what happens in these situations, whether it's in refugee situations or during a war. And I'd written a couple pieces about our work on Kosovo for the Washington Post that they'd read. So we went over and began to work because of that, that original call was to help them create programs to train people to deal with the kids in the school. So there's a lot of

work that needs to be done. Whenever we can, we work with Israelis and Palestinians to train them together. It's not always possible. So we're not going to be able to take more questions, but this is the actual perfect moment for me to make a pitch, which is you can help. I mean, you really can. You can make donations. They are so leveraged now in terms of being able to get a lot done in a lot of places and your support can make a difference. And the way you do it is... The way you do it is, how do we do it? Tati, come on off, come over here.

Yeah. Hi, my name is Tati. So if you'd like to make a donation, you can visit our website. It's www.cmbm.org. And there's a button that says help us, and you can help us through there. CMBM.org.

That's our website. There's a button that says, help us. Help us. That's good. I like it. The other thing, of course, is those of you who want to use our work, want to be trained by us, please come to, every year we have a training program in the U.S., a whole cycle of trainings. We teach you how to use the work for yourself. You have to

begin with yourself, and then the second part of the training, we teach you how to use what you've learned with other people, and you lead a group, and you get feedback about how you lead a group, and pretty much everybody can lead a group who wants to, and then we can provide ongoing supervision so that you can bring the work. Yes, we welcome donations and we really need it for the work overseas, but we also welcome those of you who want to learn what we have to teach and share it in your communities. And of course it fits beautifully with what you're all practicing here, and it fits easily into many, many settings, hospitals, clinics, private practices, churches, synagogues, mosques, people are doing the work, homeless shelters,

That's a whole other subject, very interesting subject. We do a lot of work with homeless people in different cities. So a really good first step is the book is here, and read it, use it, try it on, live it, because this is really, really good stuff. Thank you, my friend. Thank you. It's really good to have you. Blessing, we'll see you.

For more talks and meditations, and to learn about my schedule or join my email list, please visit tarabrock.com.