You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 38: Dr. Lia Naor - A New Mental Health System

Starting point is 00:00:00 I've spent my life trying to understand how to develop systems that sustain life. And what we have in the world are systems that do the opposite. The systems are making us more and more sick. The systems are not supporting life, and they're not supporting thriving, and they're not supporting healing. what usually happens. It's sedating the people and then them feeling like here, in order to get support from the government, you need to go through a process in which you are titled head and cap, then you can get a certain amount of money. But if you go back to working, you can't

Starting point is 00:00:42 get that money. So you need to keep on being sick in order to get support. That is what's happening in the world. This is the opposite of what sustains life. I have a dream. I think we can open healing centers in Gaza and in Syria and in Egypt. I think this whole region and the whole world needs healing and needs healing that's healthy. So this is kind of like an innovative model for how we can deal with trauma holistically combining what we know in psychotherapy and in traumatic intervention but also with community and also with art and music and body work and somatic work and all this is coming together into this magical experience. Hello, Liana Orr.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Hello, Efrat. So good to be here with you. Thanks for being with me. I love our conversations. They're always so meaningful. I know. I love them too. Welcome to another episode of You're the Voice.

Starting point is 00:02:02 I have the honor of being here with Leah, who is in the other side of the world right now in Panama. And I'm in Israel at the moment. And so it's really cool that we get to connect for my audience that doesn't know who you are. I'm going to do a quick intro and then we'll dive into a conversation. OK. Yeah. All right. So let's do it. So Liana Ohl has a Ph.D. in human development and counseling, researches positive transformation and has a private practice as a nature based therapist. Leah trains therapists and educators seeking to work with nature through ways of knowing. That's the name of her center for nature-based therapy that she founded and she's managing today.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Leah has published many articles in leading academic journals and heads various programs centered on the processes of human development through initiation towards fulfilling potential and deepening our humanity she founded the healing space which you may have seen if you watched the last episode that we released with the healing space an integrative and innovative response for trauma that is nature-based empowering the individual and the community and we visited at the healing space a few months ago and this episode is also going to be special So like the previous one where I have two parts in the first part, Leah and I will have a quick conversation and catch up. And in the second part, I'll actually show you the work that Leah has done at the Healing Center when we met there and I interviewed her there.

Starting point is 00:03:46 So we have two parts for this interview. So Leah, give us a quick catch up on where you are today, what you've been doing since the work you started doing after October 7th at the Healing Center. Yeah. Thank you, Efrat. I think what's important to understand is that on the 7th of October, I had an understanding that the people that were at the music festival were not being treated. Of course, there was so much chaos and they're not a specific community or place. And I guess that everything I learned throughout my life and my expertise and experience pushed me on the 9th to open a nature-based, community-based room for trauma, for healing, but so different than everything we know through the regular Ministry of Health or what health has to offer. And now in perspective, looking back at what we did in those months and are still doing as a researcher and scientist, I ask myself the big questions of how do we help heal people and what does becoming healthy, what is it about? What does an ER for trauma, an emotional ER need to have and how do people heal? So with the thousands of survivors that I've met within the last months, I think that the knowledge that we are gaining through this work is right for both sides. I have a dream.

Starting point is 00:05:28 I think we can open healing centers in Gaza and in Syria and in Egypt. I think this whole region and the whole world needs healing and needs healing that's healthy. So basically, I've spent my life trying to understand how to develop and create systems that sustain life. And what we have in the world are systems that do the opposite. So basically, all the systems that we work with, and I come from a system, but the systems are are making us more and more sick and the systems are not supporting life and they're not supporting thriving and they're not supporting healing and i don't know to say what's in back of this but maybe they just don't know how to do it you're the voice is brought to

Starting point is 00:06:30 you by trezor the original bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013 empowering individuals with an open source device enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins i find my treasure super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family enjoy my five percent discount on treasure product by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code flat so what i'm on now is how do we infuse systems that support and sustain life and thriving, starting with the fact that educational systems want to connect people to their innate and natural gift. And each one is unique and each one to gain meaning in life needs to know what they have to bring

Starting point is 00:07:24 into life and what their gift is. And it's also right with going through trauma or deep, deep damaging like we have now. It's what's the meaning of all this? Is the meaning of all this who's wrong and how do we get back? Or is there an opportunity here personally in what I've gained knowledge about myself through these dark, dark times, things that I didn't know I could do or didn't know I could go through, people that have ligaments cut off, people that have lost family members, people that have lost their homes, people that have lost everything they believe in. And the difference between post-trauma or post-traumatic growth is the ability to change your basic beliefs in yourself and in life and in systems. So we have an opportunity.

Starting point is 00:08:22 Are we going to take it to a place where I can't believe in anybody or anything, and the only thing I can do now is get back or hate or bring more violence? Because that is the biggest risk in the world after going through traumatic incidents is violence. And we can see that on the rise. We can see it everywhere. In the way people talk, in the way, in the separative way people think who's right and who's wrong and how to, it's, it's just, it's integrating into the nitty gritty of our DNA. We have to be so, so careful of this risk because that violence or who's wrong or who's right is not going to get us anywhere into healing or healthy. But we also have an opportunity to change our beliefs

Starting point is 00:09:20 in what gives us safety. This started in the corona, right? Okay, everybody's looking for safety all the time. There's no way against viruses. And there's no way against wars. People were attacked in their homes, in their safe rooms, beyond barbed wire, beyond steel metal doors. Nothing's going to keep us safe. The only way for us to thrive and to make sure that our children are healthy and are well nurtured and that our elders are listened to and that people know what their gifts are and that we know that we can break, but we can also survive and not only survive, but we can strengthen from what we're going through is to change our views of who's supposed to keep us safe or who's wrongdoing, how things are

Starting point is 00:10:22 supposed to look and go introspective into into a wider world view of what what are we being called to to do now how do we leave the separate ideas that we're holding and go through going through more unifying and the basic basic question is what does it mean to be deeply human what does it mean are those some of the questions that you bring up with the people that you work with and the programs that you do in the last few months yes because most of the survivors felt that they should have died and even me personally after listening for hours and days and months to stories that i don't think hell could even write this goes beyond anything we can believe that humanity can do to one another anything beyond it it's it's so such deep deep cruelty

Starting point is 00:11:28 and darkness um that i also asked myself do do i want to be a human in these times do i want to do I want to be alive in these times? And it wasn't easy to say yes. And I remember having this discussion with God. And I'm like, okay, if you want me here, then I have to understand why should I live this life? Or how do I live this life? How do you live in such dark times, still connected to that light. But I also feel that there's like this deep crack in consciousness and in humanity and in the earth. And that when you go to the depth of that crack, you can touch creative energy that it was not so close before. And it's tangible now. And it's here. And I felt that in the past nine months like I've never felt anything before and I've done big things in life but this was like

Starting point is 00:12:29 I had an idea of something that was needed and then it was there and I and I said a sentence to somebody and then it happened and it was being able to see 900 volunteers for six months creating a system that had nothing to do with money or control or power but had to do with people bringing their gifts. Each one did what they knew how to do. Some were drivers, some took out the garbage, some made the food. Nobody felt there was more or less than anybody else. We knew we needed every single person there doing what they were doing. And if I had to pick up the dog's crap in the morning, that was fine because I wanted it to be a temple for these people. and healing is a sacred journey to go on and healing is not about somebody telling you

Starting point is 00:13:25 how you need to do it it's about figuring out how you take those parts that have been so fragmented and put them together not going back to who you were because that's another mistake many people make is how do we get them back how do we get them back to work how do we get them back to being they were they're not going to be who they were anymore their whole world was shattered some of them have lost 10 20 friends those people that were out there and nobody came nobody came to help them right who and what are they supposed to believe in now how do they gain that safety How do they connect deeply to their body and to the world in a way that maybe goes beyond what we were expecting before? The police will do this or the army will do that or my parents.

Starting point is 00:14:25 I think it's asking us to open up to a wider story that goes beyond separative ideas and even nations and even borders. everywhere there are borders in the world there's weakness can we take a global view now of asking ourselves how do we want to deepen our humanity and how do we want to bring more healing and how do we want this light to fight the darkness i remember telling the survivors on the first Friday evening that we got together, I said, you have seen such darkness that we are going to have to work hard to show you so much light that you're going to believe in. And that's what we did with very, very loving eyes and touch. And I think we all need, we are all in a traumatic state of humanity. And I think everybody feels under threat of some kind, whether it's the global

Starting point is 00:15:36 warming or what's happening with the governments or our leaders or what's going to be with our children. I think we all have these questions. And this is calling us to go back into what's natural to us. And that's why I work in nature, because nature takes us back to our roots. so tell me about a classic program what does it look like when you take people out to nature what do you do with them so it's a process of remembering so it's not only remembering who we are in a deep sense but it's remembering to that we are part of life and we are a member and that our part in life is unconditional. So it doesn't matter how much money I have

Starting point is 00:16:27 or what family I come from or how many friends I have, but my being here, my being alive in this time means there is something I have to give to the world and I can be of service and that is going to give me meaning and that is going to keep my humanity deepened and it's unconditional it's unconditional that connection what kind of activities what do you do with them during the program so it's it's a it's mindfulness it's going in and learning to to work with our thoughts and um and our feelings and it's kind of making those connections again to everything that has been fragmented

Starting point is 00:17:14 so it starts with trusting our bodies and our thoughts and our feelings it has a lot to do with forgiveness and learning to love and learning to love those parts of us that um maybe didn't act as we expected and um forgiving those who were there and those who were not there um and leaving our heart and our grief and our pain soft and open because it's really easy after going through hard times to have a stone heart and to build up walls and there's so many logical reasons for that nobody was there and you see what i love there are so many logical reasons not to love. So many logical reasons. And the risk of having a heart of stone is that we will be so shattered and so violent to one another that we will lose connection to what it means to be

Starting point is 00:18:26 human. And we will lose the softness and we will lose the ability to see beauty in others and in life. So in all the programs I do, it works on opening the heart. So it's going beyond the mind that's telling us, keep up those walls. And I'm inviting people to feel, to feel the pain, to feel the distress, to feel the forgiveness, to feel the most difficult, harsh feelings that we have of ourself and others in an environment that is very, very safe, very loving, and no judgment. Because everybody I talk to has judgment, right? About how things are supposed to be. You know, Rumi says, beyond right or wrong, there is an area I will meet you there. That is healing space. Beyond wrong or right, there is a healing space. If we want healing, we have to be in an

Starting point is 00:19:28 unjudgmental space of just, can I see you seeing me seeing you? Can we breathe together? Can we feel each other's hearts? This goes beyond what I did or I didn't do or what you did or what you didn't do. This is being human. And we all make mistakes. And I think that people make a mistake thinking that forgiveness means we're going to do wrong again. No. Forgiveness means we can keep our heart warm. And this means we need to feel the pain. So in my programs, we have an unconditional and unjudgmental loving space that we open. We prompt the people to be willing to share their deepest fears and feelings and grieve together.

Starting point is 00:20:24 And that it's okay to grieve. People don't know how to grieve. People are, we're in a hero society. Tough it up. Good for you. You went through that and you're back to normal. you had a miscarriage and you're in work the next day good for you no that's not good for you no that's not good for you so yes we need to some kind of buffer zone for what we're going

Starting point is 00:20:50 through because the pain is too big but we need to be able to feel what each program how long are they all different programs different ones okay but for a retreat people will usually come for a week. And we have a lot of this going on within nature and nature opens the wider perspective to life. So it's not all about me and my personal drama. Right. And it's also about seeing in nature, you see so much death, and things that are shattered and are scattered, but all together, it looks beautiful and it works and so our environments have a lot of say on who we are and how we are so we're in when we're in nature we're in a healing environment that's always looking everything in nature is always looking to grow and always looking to connect whether it's

Starting point is 00:21:48 to the sun to healing energy or to the sources of water that are underneath everything is always looking for what's healthy. So when we're in that atmosphere, we can feel more normal about being broken, being forgiving, seeing the wider picture, and being in a place that's always changing. It's chaotic. What's natural, what's growing, what's learning, and what is is chaotic. So we're always looking for equilibrium, but nothing, nothing in the world naturally develops through equilibrium life develops through things being chaotic and then going back to stability and being chaotic and going back to stability and like like the butterfly right so it has to die as a caterpillar before it can grow its wings the seed has to collapse as a

Starting point is 00:22:46 seed before before the the plant can grow that's how everything in nature is and that's how we are too but we'll do everything not to be broken so healing space is a place that you come into and it's kind of like a temple and that's the way i treat it it has to be beautiful not like a hospital so you have to come in if you're coming for a healing you need to walk into a place that accepts you not as something's wrong with you and not as you're lacking but you are being ushered into a beautiful opportunity which is very very painful but here you can change from a caterpillar to a butterfly here you can gain wings here you can go beyond everything you thought of yourself or how things should be or what's right or wrong and this is i'm saying

Starting point is 00:23:45 it to myself and i'm saying it to all of us and i'm saying it to those who are so shattered now are we going to take this opportunity to gain wings to go beyond what we thought or are we going to be judgmental and be violent and gain more and more hate and more and more fear. And that's going to take us to hell very, very, very easily and very naturally. I agree. Leah, the Healing Center, you have a big vision for it. You see it expanding in the future to any place that really people need

Starting point is 00:24:28 a good source of healing that comes from a new, compassionate point of view and not through the old-fashioned system that in many ways we know have failed us until today. And so what is your vision? How do you see this evolving to become something that could touch many people in many places around the world? That's a great question. I'm going to give you a big answer. My vision is to create a mental health system that understands health not as not having symptoms or not as being able to go back to work, but health as being able to feel, health as being able to change, health as being able to grow, health is being able to, as a community, incorporate and love and accept and be soft with those who are broken and those who are being challenged and those who are going through the

Starting point is 00:25:39 dark night of the soul, it's okay. It's okay to be very upset and maybe at times dysfunctional and maybe at times depressed when this is what's going on in the world. So I think it's healthy to be sad right now. And I think it's healthy to grieve. And I think it's okay if you burst out crying sometimes i think it's okay so i think being healthy has to do with how can we sustain our humanness and how can we find our unique gifts to the world and how we can be accepting of our different parts and how we can keep our hearts open and warm in spite of everything that's going. I think that's what health means. So I am now sitting with researchers and doctors and scientists around the world using, connecting quantum physics and biology and systems theory,

Starting point is 00:26:46 thinking of how we can create systems where people can thrive as individuals and communities, even though we're broken and even though so many of us need that healing but i think this is a global vision so basically what i'm intent on doing now is opening more and more of these healing spaces and healing centers around the world we have opened also five of these healing spaces for grieving in Israel, where people get together and understand that grieving is a holy threshold that needs to be held beautifully. And that to grieve, we need to hold beauty and sacredness and meaning and community. But until now, healing and grieving is something that people do alone in their bedrooms and try to overcome it. And that's

Starting point is 00:27:49 not right. That just keeps us more lonely and more separate. So we need spaces that are beautiful. Right. To bring our what's broken and to cry together and to hug together and to dance together because there's life energy in that deep deep pain yeah and we want to use that we don't want to be just happy happy happy yeah exactly like people will see now in the second part when we'll show them some of the footage from the healing center and and what you've created there and they'll learn more about how people actually did that during that very rough time right after October 7th so so that would be the second part and Leah and you know what so many people told me when they came is it looks like a festival yeah I mean we're taking shots and I said this

Starting point is 00:28:46 is a hospital yeah people don't get the hospital exactly we had psychiatrists we had doctors we had social workers we had psychologists working in in the most professional way possible they look at it and they can't fathom that that's a way of bringing healing to themselves and their bodies it looks to them like something you do when you're happy and yeah you need support for that do you want people to contact you is there a good place to contact you we have a website and we link to it in the show notes love contributions of any kind and i can be contacted and anybody who wants to support creating new life systems that sustain life and specifically i'm within the mental health but we need this in education and we need this

Starting point is 00:29:42 in global services and and like different types of of connections and people who have different expertise right like multidisciplinary areas okay great so it's built it's right now it's creating the web of life that can build a new mental health system that the world can use in a way that is very sacred beautiful accepting non-judgmental and healthy can become more whole and healthy instead of what usually happens which is the opposite it's sedating the people and then them feeling like here in order to get support from the government you need to go through a process that in which you are weakened it's you are titled a handicapped and when you are titled handicapped then you can get a certain amount of money and then you can but if you go

Starting point is 00:30:48 back to working you can't get that money so you need to keep on being sick in order to get support that is what's happening in the world this is the opposite of what sustains life we need to support people that go back right what a paradox huh the system encourages you to be weaker and sicker and more dependent. And we want to empower them. Sounds like the complete opposite.

Starting point is 00:31:19 So if anyone has a will to build the future of mental health with Leah, please reach out through the website. It's in the show notes. And Leah, any last words of hope

Starting point is 00:31:35 just before we pop into the second part? I'm infused with hope and excitement at this time. I feel that, as I said before, within this deep, deep fragmentation, there are so many opportunities and they're just waiting for us to open our eyes and to say, we are going to choose life and we're going to choose healing and we're going to choose to to really open our hearts um and and i think that that's the only way something can be different here the only way i have i even have a little dream of just just infusing all the government offices and all gaza and israel with md in the water just md and down their guns maybe people will see a different way of but it it starts with if our hearts are

Starting point is 00:32:39 closed then we can't do this right so we it it's starting with opening our hearts and being able to feel the pain on on all sides on just what it means to be human today and then taking the next step which needs to be very very brave of no judgments and choosing life and what that means and there are so many people that are right now not really alive even though they are alive and this is a time where we need to know that we we can walk around death we can walk around being dead so we have an opportunity to actually choose and this is what's offered to us today thank you ifrat for for showing this and thank you thank you so much for doing your important sacred work in life leah thank you for those words of wisdom and your big vision and i'm i'm very

Starting point is 00:33:32 honored to share your vision forward on my platform so yeah hopefully people will open their hearts and open their minds and and those who can't open their wallets or their connections to leah and her team and find the connections on the on the link in the show notes and thank you so much we'll be in touch and we'll do this soon again Leah good luck my life was saved on October 7th but my soul was saved here today these are the words of one of the survivors from October 7th massacre during the Nova party I came here today to the space where that survivor and others came also in the days following the October 7th event. Those young people who only wanted to have fun and live their lives

Starting point is 00:34:30 have had to face crazy traumas from that day. And some very special people came together in order to offer these people the help they needed. so today I'm at the healing space a center for immediate integrative response to trauma and I have the honor of sitting with Liana Oh who is the president and founder of this amazing initiative thank you for welcoming me to this amazing healing space but we all need it we all think just other people needed but all of us needed I was here a week ago or so and you welcomed me here for the first time and when I stepped foot here I think I then understood what you were telling me

Starting point is 00:35:18 for a couple of months now yeah you just said come here you'll feel it you'll feel it and when I came here I felt it the energies the space the the hug the safety that people can feel here and so maybe we'll start with you telling us what this space is all about and then we'll go into your personal story and how you got to do this. So this is a place that's informal but very professional and integrative and community-based but also very connected to the natural world that offers people a place, a haven of goodness and serenity, a place to just be, to calm the nervous system to calm the body. A place that's not sterile or superficial or owned by one professional or another. We need places that are community-based

Starting point is 00:36:18 that people can come to. In Israel there is a lot of stigma about getting mental health professionals. A lot of the trauma centers are situated in hospitals. that's where most people go to after a tragic event people don't go they don't go anywhere really the youth that don't want to be stigmatized or have trouble bringing themselves to a place like this would rather try to treat themselves which usually doesn't happen and I think that's one of the special things about this place is that it's it it doesn't have any stigma and it doesn't have um it doesn't it's it's really okay to not be okay here it's really okay and um we started with the survivors from the

Starting point is 00:37:14 nova festival massacre people young people that were out in to celebrate life which made the The trauma is so much more complex. A lot of them were also in states of altered consciousness. And it's just... Because of substances they took? Yeah, just like a regular trance party. And they were a minute before the sunrise, but that's a big part of the party.

Starting point is 00:37:44 It's like the height, the peak of celebrating life and waiting for the sun to come up. and all of a sudden heard missiles and it for a lot of them it took a long time to understand that this wasn't the music and this wasn't part of the celebration and then to be just faced with horrendous horrors of i don't even want to speak about it here but just like bodies and massacres and rape and just just such awful awful within the state left more than 3,500 people that were at this parties and their parents and their relatives that they were on the phone with for hours not knowing if they would if they would survive or

Starting point is 00:38:34 not in those hours when parents can't even come to help or save their children and the and the feeling of being betrayed by the children that didn't understand why nobody was coming to help them so it's all that together and the first thing I realized on the 8th of October is that these people need to be held they're not situated in a special area as a community and so there is nothing that's being offered to them and we know that only 20 percent of people that go through trauma traumatic events develop post-trauma okay but that has to do with how much you're contained and get professional help immediately. And so immediate was really what I wanted.

Starting point is 00:39:19 There's a critical emphasis on the timing. Right. So there's a window opportunity that we're still going through because the, and this is also what makes it more complex, the trauma hasn't stopped. We're still at war. We're still losing people every day. We're still under the danger of our existence.

Starting point is 00:39:37 People are still don't have a home to go to. We still are hearing the missiles every day. So it's this ongoing collective trauma that within this big darkness, I remember telling them the first days, the immensity of the darkness you felt is the immensity of light we want you to feel here and goodness we want you to feel here. And to know that there are people that can accept you and hold you and that you can trust in. And it starts, you know, there's so much fragmentation with trauma.

Starting point is 00:40:08 so it starts with trusting our bodies and then it starts with trusting others and you could really see within the first days when they came so dead there was nothing alive about them there was this hollowness in their eyes they were darkness like death was stuck to them and and how the only thing i could talk about the first few days were beanbags just bring me beanbags i just wanted that softness I wanted them to be held. I wanted them to feel that something could develop them that was soft. And then we started reaching out. That's the kind of therapy we do here. So it's very different from hierarchical or anything we know. It's them sitting. And then we had, they couldn't be verbal at the beginning, so we brought in music and we brought in soccer balls and we brought in hammocks and we did everything we could to, we know that healing, just as the traumas in the body, as in the nervous system, as in the soul and the psyche, the healing has to be the same. it has to be integrative it has to be body mind soul so we had all these different networks of openings of offerings in a way so they could be sculpting and then get connected to different

Starting point is 00:41:32 parts of their soul or psyche or they could be singing and we could be there right after they got the reflexology when things open up to meet them and to speak with them and to see what's going on but basically it's this big containing environment where you can come to be and to heal but you have the agency to decide how you want to heal it might be to talk to a therapist but it also might be to just sit with your friends and we know the choice is theirs the choice how how they go through a process here their healing process right because I'm here they say I need help or Or I want to be around people that are like-minded or are going through the same thing.

Starting point is 00:42:15 Or they don't even know. They don't even know what they want. Here there's a place that they can be and that nobody will judge them in. And that there's goodness. And that they can quiet their system down. And then they can choose. And we know that trauma is about feeling helpless. And here they get the agency.

Starting point is 00:42:33 You are the boss of your healing process. That's very different to what they would experience in traditional systems, right? And I know that you told me about 2,500 survivors already passed through this place. And we're not talking about just survivors, right? We're talking about the immediate family members that have been very traumatized or that don't know what to do with them. And we're talking about the parents that have group therapy here. And we're also talking about the parents of the ones that lost their children at the party. and that also needs support um so there are a lot of lot of circles around them that you are

Starting point is 00:43:18 taking care of and today it's not only the survivors of the nova we're working with police and investigators and people that have the front up caregivers yes the immediate caregivers at that time that faced atrocities human atrocities that are beyond what we can imagine and that even just seeing the pictures or seeing the bodies is enough to be very deeply traumatized. And we don't want people that are dysfunctional. And so as much as possible, if we can get in as soon as possible and help them connect and take on responsibility and agency for their healing

Starting point is 00:44:03 and offer them the different ways of connecting what has been so fragmented and based in community and in this beautiful area of nature with many, many professional people that are here to hold and help whatever is needed. So what type of healers and therapists did you have here? So we have... And how many? Hundreds, right? Yeah, we've probably had around 400 therapists. All volunteering?

Starting point is 00:44:32 Everybody's volunteering, 900 volunteers. Wow. Um, so we have, um, psychologists, uh, psychotherapists, um, psychiatrists and social workers, but we also have body therapists that are doing body work with the people. And we have, um, many, many different people that are leading beautiful and very deep workshops. So it's sculpting and it's making music and it's doing art and it's writing poetry. And it's doing acrobalance and connecting back to being trusting others. And it's lying in hammocks and just letting my body feel.

Starting point is 00:45:15 And it's working with the keepers of the garden that are doing with them work with the ground and with earth and with touching the earth and weaving. And so it stops the loop of thinking because what happens in trauma is we get stuck in the traumatic event. it doesn't matter how much time we are after that our our psyche is still doing those loops of what happened and how it happened and and that stops once we start using our fingers or hearing music and so we're trying to get them be in the here and now and expand that narrative of who you were before what happened then but also who you want to be and in event of that still what you want to become and who you are becoming and maybe what you found out about yourself that's important for you and that's true to you and most of them feel that the person they were before is dead wow but

Starting point is 00:46:17 we're working with them and what is your identity now and so we also have four-day workshops with them it's the workshop of how we can become a supporter of life is that's the name of the workshop and so instead of just being supported how you become a supporter because once you can help another person that is really empowering and a lot of the people with us are volunteering with us wow so beautiful beautiful so they're working them power back yeah and and and that's their way to thank us for those first weeks and okay the healing center sorry I'm I just I really want to understand this the healing center which is having here thousands of people with

Starting point is 00:47:07 hundreds of volunteers is operating on a daily basis every day people don't sleep over here right they come in and they go they come in for a few hours and they go and if there are organized groups so they come like from the morning until the afternoon and from the for like the survivors of the music festivals we still have three evenings a week right and group therapy that they can come to but we're already getting them into volunteer and already working with us so it's kind of getting them back to life and and because that you want to bring them back to life they're not here all day right right so it's only minimizing that okay so with time it's less and less hours that they spend here that's why we're here like

Starting point is 00:47:50 on our own more or less and it's lunch time so they'll come later they'll come later and we're already open to get other groups that really really need this and got it the vision is that every municipality will have a healing space and it will be community-based so the community will know how to hold this and they know each other and that the people from the community will be be the therapists and the body workers and the ones doing art and whatever with them but also it could be the grandmas making the cakes and making the food and bringing that in and the people that already feel that they have more of their power back and already volunteer with them so that there's this flow and that's what we felt here is and I told them you don't have to thank

Starting point is 00:48:39 me I need to thank you because I have no idea how I would have gotten through this period if I wasn't hear giving and I wasn't being meaningful in this time where I lost everything everything is broken we've lost trust in in who we are in humanity and what we can do and and how we can save ourselves or be safe so that's that's what we want to change is this flow is there's not this hierarchy between the health givers and the people who are patients we call them guests you're the guests we're the caregivers but we're both we're here because you're here and you're because and we also what happened that was really important is that the therapists felt that they were also a community and we were working together and hearing such awful awful stories but we knew that at lunchtime

Starting point is 00:49:31 we would meet and that we would have supervision in the evening and that in the morning we have workshops that empower us and so we're not alone in our clinics in our sterile clinics looking at the clock there are not enough therapists in the land of israel to treat nine million people so everything needs to be group-based community-based and if we help each other we're empowering each other and the vision is that over the whole land of israel and hopefully in the whole world we can have healing spaces that first will give immediate response that's integrative for trauma and that's informal it doesn't have that stigma and doesn't have that hierarchy within it but also that this will also be a place to grieve we're not we don't know how to grieve right we're

Starting point is 00:50:22 always like stick it up be strong especially yeah we're so good at um going through emergencies and traumas and tragedies yeah and we never have time to actually process that because the next thing is coming and even if we have the culture right and even if we have time we're kind of in that heroic exactly kind of state of mind ever taught me yeah exactly of how to really be sad or how to be mad or how to process my anger no one has ever taught me that it's it's all the opposite here in israel especially because you go to the army and you gotta be strong right the soldiers yeah have to be strong and most of us go to the army and we're so scared and it's not only here it's the whole modern society we're so scared of showing our yeah to break right right and we're gonna we're

Starting point is 00:51:19 good what's gonna happen and we're gonna become a mess and so instead of that we kind of put up all our defenses but then we become cold and our hearts become cold and because we're not we don't know how to deeply feel because it's too much to go through yes um alone and we have that also has to be community work and that's what all the different tribes in the world know how to do but because we've forgotten that and we think we have to go yeah so we have to medicate ourselves so that we don't feel but then it comes out in violence and it comes out in addictions and it comes out in aggression and it comes out in such awful ways we don't want to get there because that's the next step of what's going to happen to us so i see the frontier here in israel but also

Starting point is 00:52:07 in the world if we want to keep ourselves deeply human we need to feel the depths of our grief and of our darkness and of our sadness and of our sorrow and we need to do that together in a way that's holy but also in a way that sustains life so we don't want that to just break us apart but we want that to fertilize our ground yeah and just like like technat han said no mud no lotus what does that mean when you don't have the compost then you don't have the seeds that can grow into the flowers you need that processing and we in modern society don't teach that and you can't skip any step you can't step you can but it works really bad that's what i always tell people when they ask me about how how is it to live in israel and i say it's like it's living

Starting point is 00:53:00 inside the the fire and now it's my choice what i what i do with that do i stick my head in the sand and ignore everything that's going around me or do i go through the fire to become stronger from it and i have to teach myself how to go through the fire and this is what you're doing with these people here you're giving them the tools and showing them that it's possible to go through this hell but to come out of it from the other side stronger and better and capable of dealing with life and that's a gift and and your vision and i hear it when you speak and i see it and what you're manifesting here and creating here so here's where i want to ask you how did you get to this and what what is your personal journey that led you to doing this to

Starting point is 00:53:51 coming up with this amazing, unusual and amazing vision and bringing it to life. So where did Leah start? So maybe I'll just say that mental health today is discussed not as the absence of a symptom like Freudian thought, but more as how whole and healed we are so holding has to do with knowing our different facets our different part and being able to live with them and express them in a way that we have harmony and dialogue between our different parts so I've spent the past 20 years of my life as a nature based therapist working in nature taking people out mostly to processes of personal initiation and what that means is what we're going through now as a

Starting point is 00:54:58 collective is what we call a rough initiation it's not supposed to be like that very rough but initiation is always always has to do with going to your limits and beyond so that you can develop your qualities and you can gain a deep insight and understanding of what your meaning and purpose is in the world and without that it's really really easy for somebody else to tell you what you need to be and how you need to be and the only way to be free in this world and the only way to hold a center even their endless chaos around or whatever people try to throw it and fill with fear yeah there's so much of that is to

Starting point is 00:55:44 know that this is my unique gift that I have brought to the world and this is what I need to do so in nature-based societies before a child is born the mother gets in touch with the soul of that child and that's the name that that child is given or as the child in the first years develops the elders will look at the child they'll see what he's good at and that is the name that he will be given so it's very it's what's in your nature it's what you know how to do best it's what comes easy to you to do that that's your gift and without you developing and bringing that gift to the world the community will be in loss of

Starting point is 00:56:27 that so there is no question about can i live a meaningful life no if you bring your gift which is your name so if you forget when every time you're called you'll know your gift right so if every time i call out your name i say speaking truth instead of saying if rat you won't forget what you're supposed to do in this life or or my name is walking people through the dark if you call me hey walking people through the dark how are you today I'll remember even if I have a hard day that I know how to walk people through the dark and I'll be on it that that's what I'm doing so basically that's what I've developed and I think we need process of initiation more than we need therapy I think that's where people lose it and I think that it's getting out from the

Starting point is 00:57:16 personal story and getting into the story that wants to live through me for how i am in service of humanity and what it means to be deeply human in these times and you talk about becoming stronger by being able to feel but that means being able to feel both sides winning this war by killing the other it's understanding that by killing the others we are deeply wounding ourselves and that this idea of what it means to be a hero or what it means to win or what it means to be normal or what it means to be healthy is fucked up can i say that yeah yeah you can say and um and there's so much disinformation and messing up in what it means to be human and what it means to be in hero and when people go through these process of a

Starting point is 00:58:15 processes of deep initiation and they understand what their strength is and what their gift is it doesn't really matter what's going on outside if I'm disappointing my parents or the people I'm on it to live my strength so where did you start doing that thinking that it's a long story as a philosophy of life I I never felt that I belonged I grew up in Berkeley California and I moved with my parents to Israel when I was young to an ultra-orthodox home and I never fit it in and then I decided that I wanted to fight for my country and so even though I came from a religious family I became a soldier and

Starting point is 00:59:06 And even there, I didn't feel like I fitted in. And then I went to live in the desert and started as a nature guide. It wasn't fitting in until I deeply connected with nature, and I felt so at home. And I felt, you know what, maybe I don't really belong to this kind of family, and maybe I don't find my family of people, but I belong to something that's a lot bigger than me. And that gave me such a deep sense of connection and belonging that was unconditional that I felt that this is the gift that I want to give others. And since then, I've been taking people out into nature to find their unconditional belonging. So this comes with learning social work and then drama therapy.

Starting point is 01:00:00 And I have a Ph.D. in human counseling and human development. My Ph.D. is I built a model, a working model for nature-based therapy where you work with nature as a co. So it's kind of working with mystery as a co because you can't really, right, talk to them in the language that we talk to. But there's something bigger than us that's working on us. And if we can know how to be in relationship with that and we can surrender to everything we know in our head but get a bigger feeling of what's going on in the field and what needs then we can do it right and that's the way i see healing and therapy and this is um this is where the 7th of october met me so in that moment when i said we need these people to come i knew they needed beanbags and i knew

Starting point is 01:00:50 they needed nature and i knew they needed loving kind generous eyes and and by meeting their hearts and by being with them in that state and just witnessing and just being with them but also holding the professionality of this is not the time to go deeply into the story of their trauma and knowing what the boundaries are and where to go and how to go and then listening to them. So there was a certain point where we felt that they were kind of seeking into the beanbags and then I said, take out the beanbags. Put away the beanbags.

Starting point is 01:01:27 We're doing just workshops now. and so it's changing the setting while feeling the field to provide but it wasn't saying them you can't sit in the beanbags anymore it wasn't top over it's not i'm going to tell you what you need to do and i'm just going to change the setting and then you're going to bring yourself up yeah to that place of what it means now to develop into your better self people that on the 7th of october their lives stopped people were at the party in raim in a very very traumatic situation we called them into an area to healing space maybe one of the first healing spaces which is kind of like a er for trauma in nature so this is kind of like a

Starting point is 01:02:15 an innovative model for how we can deal with trauma holistically, combining what we know in psychotherapy and in traumatic intervention, but also with community and also with art and music and body work and somatic work. And all this is coming together into this magical experience. Some of them say that after being here, they can sleep for the first time. They can eat for the first time we have herbalists we have people touching them in a way that's very very grounding and they're bringing them alive in a way that's so experiential unique holistic and full of love and we just would love any support we can get to keep this going throughout the whole lands of Israel, which so much is in need for this kind of trauma work.

Starting point is 01:03:17 Thank you.

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 38: Dr. Lia Naor - A New Mental Health System

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