Hannah Wallace

Healing our Troops

The best treatment for PTSD may not be pharmaceuticals or one-on-one therapy, but a revolutionary non-drug approach developed by Dr. James Gordon at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine.  In this feature in the February issue of Spirit Magazine (now called Southwest: the Magazine), I report on how military health care providers—and the veterans they treat—are embracing unorthodox therapies like meditation, biofeedback, and guided imagery because they work.

During the ten weeks they partipated in the Department of Defense's study on mind-body therapies, these veterans found support in one another

 

I’m standing in a dimly lit hotel conference room packed with 200 strangers as the German electronic music is cued up. “Start shaking,” a reassuringly calm voice intones. “Don’t open your eyes. Let everything go.” I wriggle my arms and move my shoulders up and down in a shrugging motion. At the same time, I’m bouncing in place and jiggling my butt. Forcing myself to keep from laughing aloud, I think, How ridiculous we must look! 

But I keep at it, and as I do, something interesting happens. All the tension from that morning’s drive through beastly San Francisco traffic begins to slough off like snow from a rooftop. My neck and back feel looser, almost as if I’d had a massage. My self-consciousness fades, and I start to enjoy the sensation of shaking. A minute or so in, I crack open an eyelid and see that everyone—including our instructor—is bopping wildly.

“Three minutes left!” the voice says. There are a few loud whoops from around the room. 

A few minutes later—though it feels like an eternity—the percussive, electronic sounds stop abruptly, and we are told to breathe deeply for 60 seconds before launching into a freestyle dance. “Let the music move you!” says the voice. As Bob Marley wails “every little thing is gonna be all right,” the mood in the room shifts to that of a beachside nightclub. We’ve opened our eyes by now, and people are really boogying—gyrating their hips, raising their arms in the air. It’s exhilarating. By the end of the song, I feel bound to these strangers by a shared joy in movement. 

The soothing voice is that of James S. Gordon, founder and director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. And this is not some strange New Age aerobics class but the beginning of the CMBM’s intensive, five-day training of an assortment of health professionals in the science of mind-body medicine—a range of techniques that facilitates the brain’s ability to affect bodily functions and symptoms. Dr. Gordon, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist and professor at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, is constantly crisscrossing the globe to lead trainings like this one at the Sofitel in Redwood City. 

A charismatic presence with a grandfatherly demeanor, Gordon starts each session with the “shaking” meditation—a jubilant, freeing exercise that helps people break up fixed mental and biological patterns. Gordon’s book Unstuck: Your Guide to the Seven-Stage Journey Out of Depression describes this and other mind-body therapies in detail. “Expressive” meditations like shaking are not new. They have been used in many cultures and include the whirling of Sufi dervishes, Native American chanting and dancing, and the spontaneous movement that is part of the Indonesian spiritual exercise called the latihan.

Continue reading here or download the PDF of my article: Download PTSD

Joe Cimperman, a Leader of Cleveland's Good Food Revolution

You hear a lot of talk in the sustainable food movement these days about how each of us needs to "vote with our fork." The notion is that political change is hard to come by—and while we are waiting and waiting for our elected politicians to curtail insane subsidies to commodity crops like corn and soy and pass common-sense measures like a soda tax—we might as well choose foods that are good for us, the planet, and the people who harvest and cook them. Judging by the recent explosion of farmers' markets in the U.S., this maxim is—at least in part—working.

But voting with your fork isn't enough. We also need to campaign for and elect politicians who will fight for our values—who will fight against charges of "nanny statism" and big corporate interests (hello, Coke) and pass legislation that will give people of all income levels incentive to grow their own food, buy locally, and eat more sensibly.

Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman is one of these politicians. When I first heard him speak about his city's efforts to tackle health inequalities, I was transfixed. He shared a dire statistic that has stuck with me: In Cleveland, residents of the African American community of Hough live on average 24 years less than residents of the predominantly white community of Lyndhurst. Twelve of those years, Cimperman said, are attributable to smoking and diet.

This kind of life expectancy discrepancy is not O.K.—and clearly it is not O.K. with Cimperman, who went on to tell the assembled audience of food justice activists, anti-hunger organizations, union advocates, and public health experts (we were at a food policy conference) how Cleveland was working to fix these health inequalities. He spoke about how the city had just banned trans fats and made it illegal to smoke in playgrounds and other outdoor public places. How City Council had passed legislation making it legal to keep chickens and bees and also passed a resolution committing to a community garden within five blocks of every resident by 2020. He wrapped up his talk by boasting that every farmers' market in Cleveland now accepts food stamps. As Cimperman spoke, I realized that if we want to transform our food system and ensure that fruit and vegetables are more ubiquitous than fried chicken and Froot Loops, then we need more elected leaders like Joe Cimperman.

This spring, Spirit (Southwest Airline's in-flight magazine) sent me to Cleveland to report on Cimperman's role in the city's agricultural renaissance. Though my story, part of a package on "the Power of One," focuses on Cimperman, he would be the first to tell you that these changes have come about because of the hard work and collaboration of many Clevelanders. You only get a glimpse of these folks in my article—people like Rich Hoban of Cleveland Crops, Mansfield Frazier of Chateau Hough, Bobbi McDermott (who worked on Re-Imagining a More Sustainable Cleveland), Morgan Taggart at OSU Extension, Marge Misak at the Neighborhood Housing Services of Greater Cleveland, John Yokie at EcoVillage Produce... (I could go on and on).  But suffice it to say that I will be re-visiting Cleveland in future articles and blogs. To read this article, click Download JoeCimperman for the PDF.