Professional Training in Gaza

Current Status:

  • 90 Gaza leaders trained in mind-body medicine
  • 65+ ongoing Mind-Body Skills Groups being led throughout Gaza for adults & children
  • Healing the Wounds of War in Gaza: Focus on Children -- In development


For the last two years, in spite of the terrible and worsening economy and the often precarious security situation, The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) has successfully implemented its Healing the Wounds of War Program in Gaza.

As a result, CMBM Gaza trainees have:

  • led over 300 intensive, ten-week long mind-body skills groups for traumatized children and adults – for a total of 3,000 people. These groups are ongoing, and are being held, today, throughout Gaza.
  • integrated the CMBM program into:
    • therapeutic interventions with 15,000 war traumatized children and adults
    • provided highly effective ervices to traumatized nursing mothers, battered women, the chronically ill, the disabled, and ex-prisoners;
    • cooperated sucessfully with every major organization—governmental, non- governmental and the UN—that is dealing with psychological trauma and psychosocial issue

By far the largest percentage of our work has been with children. CMBM’s approach has been shown in published research (on young people in postwar Kosovo) to significantly and quickly relieve the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Click here to read the research. Ongoing research in Gaza with both adults & children is showing similarly positive results. The data will be available soon.

In this territory, where 1.4 million people are living in what Palestinians routinely call “the world’s largest open-air prison”, CMBM has created a highly effective and supportive structure by:

  • fully training 90 leaders in health, mental health and education in our approach of self-care and mutual help—which combines self awareness and self expression (through words, drawings and movement), scientifically grounded mind-body medicine (guided imagery, meditation, yoga, biofeedback, etc.) and small group support.
  • providing comprehensive and ongoing supervision to them as they implement our work in their organizations.

In this place where little reliably works, the CMBM program has become, as one of our participants described it, “a light of hope in a very dark time”.

Next Steps:

Focus on Children: A 3-year phased program training 500 health, mental health, and educational professionals to meet the psychological needs of 225,000 of Gaza’s most severely war-traumatized schoolchildren. The intensive CMBM program of psychological self-care and mutual help will make it possible for these children to achieve the level of emotional stability, personal confidence and intellectual and imaginative capacity that will enable them to study effectively in school and to participate, in the future, as productive and creative members of Palestinian society.

Children’s Training: During the next 6 months, leaders in Gaza, and the West Bank will receive training in mind-body techniques specific to working with traumatized children and adolescents. We look forward to bringing our expert faculty together to benefit the children who have suffered profoundly during this conflict.

For further information, contact: hww@cmbm.org

To donate now, click here.

Helpful Documents:

Hurting and Healing in Gaza (PDF 74 KB)

Dr. James Gordon's Gaza Diary (PDF 435 KB)

  If you cannot read these documents, please
download the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

 

I thank the group from America for coming here to help the Palestinian people — to help them to lessen the stress, to lessen the violence, and to help us to live a normal life with others.

- Najat Al Astal, PhD, Hospital Manager for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Khan Younis, Gaza