Unstuck: Healing Ourselves

The journey out of depression.

by James Gordon, M.D.

Letters the New York Times Chose Not to Print #2

I wanted to make sure you saw this one because it’s relevant to the second anniversary of the BP Oil Spill and because Joe Nocera’s tone and column were so troubling—and The Times’ response to informed criticism, absent. No Letters to the Editor were published about this column. Read More

Letters The New York Times Chose Not to Print: Occasional Postings

Like many people I know, I’ve long been in continual dialogue with The New York Times, my breakfast companion for over 60 years. Often I’ve nodded my head with appreciation when The Times reporters have brought back news from far away or previously ignored places, or its columnists have set out a position with which I agreed or one I was groping toward. Read More

Day Five: Images of Our Time Together

So much happens to all of us in the Jacmel training as we go deeper, become more aware, take chances, and connect over five days. Read More

Amazing Graces: Days Two, Three, and Four

The Missing Twin: Part Two Read More

Amazing Graces: Days Two, Three, and Four

The Missing Twin: Part One Read More

Amazing Graces: Days Two and Three

By the second day there are actually 135 participants-almost 180 of us altogether. The ones who didn't come to the opening are present and others from the waiting list have found a way. There are thirteen in most of our small groups. Read More

Day One of the Training

The view from Soeurs Salesiennes school where we are doing our training opens out to the sea of Haiti's south coast. Nuns glide quietly over the grounds and little girls in white blouses and blue jumpers with beribboned hair skip hand in hand. Read More

Visiting Leogane Haiti - Earthquake Epicenter to Become Center of Healing

Visiting Leogane the day after the inauguration, we are plunged into the canyon between the promise and its fulfillment. The city, which was the epicenter of the earthquake, is desolate, a combination of "the hour before the shootout" in the Westerns, and a scene from after the Apocalypse. Read More

Haiti's New Hope, and New President, Michel Martelly

May 14, 2011 in Port-au-Prince felt like January 20, 2009 in Washington DC: a new president producing unexpected smiles, and tears, too-- and in devastated Haiti, a sense of new life. Read More

Meeting Martelly: A New President for Haiti is Inaugurated

On the night before his inauguration, Haitian president-elect Michel Martelly came to the Hotel Karibe, where our US team and our Haitian program director Linda Metayer were staying. He sat outdoors among us as the band began to play. There were watchful bodyguards, but also a feeling of welcome, of fraternity. Read More

Mind-Body Medicine is “How to Heal Psychological Trauma”

On a recent trip to London, I was interviewed during Depression Awareness Week about my book Unstuck's UK release by The Guardian newspaper. The reporter was particularly interested in CMBM's Global Trauma Relief program and our work to bring population-wide psychological healing to places around the world that are afflicted by war and natural disaster. You can read the piece here: Read More

In Haiti: Signs of Healing

I'm not quite sure when or even how it happened but Haiti is starting to feel like home. Not in the sense that I have my family with me, or know where to do grocery shopping, or can lay my hands on the books I love most. Read More

Training Haiti's Healers: Father Fredy Stops By

On our first night in Port-au-Prince, while Lee Ann and I are going over the next day's schedule, Father Fredy, a Center for Mind-Body Medicine trainee, appears at our table on the Plaza Hotel's terrace. Read More

Our Work, Alive in Haiti

This weekend I'll be headed back to Haiti with my team of international faculty, to continue training Haitian caregivers in Mind-Body Skills that they can bring to their traumatized families, the more than 1 million who still live in tent camps, colleagues, patients, and students at their workplaces. This is the next step as we create a nation-wide program of psychological self-care for Haiti. Read More

Haiti Anniversary Action

Because our Haiti training in Mind-Body Medicine was interrupted by election riots in December, we scheduled half day workshops for our December trainees on January 11th, 2011. Read More

The Key to Haiti's Happier 2nd Anniversary

Sometimes, on this first anniversary of the earthquake, it feels like very large, steady hands are needed to pull together the two sides of the gaping wound that is Haiti, hands that Michelangelo might fashion for this purpose. Read More

Haiti Earthquake Anniversary Reactions

On the anniversary of their earthquake, Haitian men, women, and children are more likely to tremble anew with fear and contend with reawakened physical, emotional and behavioral symptoms. Chronic headaches and stomachaches that had subsided over months are now returning with renewed force in those living in their own homes as well as in the more than a million demoralized tent dwellers. Read More

Haiti's Earthquake Anniversary: Building Blocks

Helping Haitians to Heal, Part 3

After the first day our participants are already using what they have learned. Several speak of "traffic meditation," pulling over to the curb amidst Port-au-Prince's daily madness, soft belly breathing until they are "calme" and "douce," peaceful, soft and amazingly unhurried. Read More

Helping Haitians to Heal, part 2

Tears are everywhere. Like high water behind a dam, you can see them swelling, pressing for release in the stiff bodies and taut faces of men and women who gather for the first day of our training.

We’ve selected 120 clinicians, educators and religious leaders. Read More

Helping Haitians to Heal, Part 1

CMBM Training in Port-au-Prince, Day One

(Read original post with pictures here)

Our team has been gathering for the last two days, long flights and sometimes long delays as well. Read More

Trauma Healing in Gaza, the Forgotten Place

Hello friends,

I have wonderful news to share with you today, an amazing article on our work in Gaza from this morning’s New York Times. It gives such an accurate feeling for the touching , powerful, and effective work The Center for Mind-Body Medicine is doing in Gaza and for the spirit of healing, community and hope that I believe pervades everything that we do. Read More

Trauma Healing for Haitian Nursing Students

First posted at Healing Ourselves

A hundred nursing students come to our hotel. More than ninety of their classmates died on January 12th in their school building. The sense of sadness and loss are palpable. Read More

Trauma Healing for Haitian Red Cross Staff and Volunteers (Croix Rouge Haitien)

Already at 9am, the air is hot and heavy in the workshop tent. Fifty or sixty people are present, most of them quite young, taking notes, wonderfully attentive and responsive. They are a bit shy at first, but as we all introduce ourselves, they offer stories of trembling bodies, panicked hearts, of sights beyond endurance— Read More

CMBM's Drawing Exercise Resonates in Haiti

We use a variety of techniques in our workshops, including explanation of the fight-or-flight and stress responses, meditations, guided imagery, and shaking and dancing. We also do a drawing exercise that has been enormously helpful to children and adults in war, post-war, and post-disaster situations, in Kosovo, Gaza, Israel, and New Orleans, and with US military. For a while, everyone--bent over paper, crayons in hand--becomes young, earnest, playful, surprised. Read More

At School in Haiti: Andre's Story

At the end of the third class, a quiet, solemn boy asks if he can speak with me. “What,” he had wondered during class, “about memories of the lost person that come back again and again?”

Andre says that he has great difficulty falling asleep, and when he finally does, nightmares always come. “I feel so helpless. I cannot talk to anyone.” He grabs his throat with every other sentence. When I mention the gesture, he tells me that his “words are stuck in my throat. And I am afraid to cry. It is not manly.” Read More

At School: A Place to Help Haitian Children II

We keep our sessions as simple and clear as we can: an introduction to fight-or-flight, stress, and trauma, answers to their questions, and three lessons. Here they are. Read More

At School: A Place to Help Haitian Children

Today we have been invited by Frere Jacques Anthony Germeil, the principal, to College Canado Haitien. We will have an hour in each of four classrooms with eleventh and twelfth graders who have been told they will learn “lessons in dealing with stress.” Read More

Meetings with Remarkable Haitians—Dr. Jean Hugues Henrys and Dr. Alex Larsen

Our last full day in Haiti brought us another unexpected and auspicious meeting. On our first visit to Haiti the month before, Rosemary and I had met with Dr. Claude Surena, an internist who is head of the Haitian Medical Association and principal advisor to the Ministry of Health. Dr. Surena was extremely enthusiastic about working with us. This time Dr. Read More

Meetings with Remarkable Haitians: Dr. Guiteau and Dr. Amedee-Gedeon

One of the sure but less obvious signs that our work is going well, and that it is meant to go well, is the increased incidence of synchronistic experiences-- of happy, unexpected, unpredictable coincidences --that forward what we are doing. Read More

James S. Gordon, M.D., is the founder and director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine, and a clinical professor in the departments of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown.

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