Spirit in Action
Alaine Duncan - Crossings HealingWorks
Alaine is an acupuncturist, a Quaker and a peaceworker who has found her "divine enough". Through Crossings Healingworks she does healing work with soldiers and their healers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and a Veterans Administration Hospital in her area.
- Broadcast on:
- 28 Feb 2010
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ For much of our society, peace folks and military folks are oil and water, always distinct, always separate, always other. Elaine Duncan and a number of other healers doing acupuncture, acupressure, massage, and other modalities have crossed the invisible barriers and brought peace and healing to war. Elaine Duncan is founder and executive director of Crossings Healing Works. She and other healers are doing peace and healing work within the military, with the wounded of the war and with their caregivers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at a VA hospital. Elaine shared her experience at Friends General Conference Gathering in late June, where I met her, and a week later at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Ligonier Valley in Pennsylvania. Today, we have the privilege of listening to Elaine's address to the UUs of the Ligonier Valley, and then we'll go to the phone and speak with Elaine directly. Her address was entitled Courageously Faithful, Bringing Peace to War. Her work with Crossings Healing Works is inspirational, her spiritual journey and insights are powerful, and I'm pleased to have Elaine Duncan for my guest today on Spirit in Action. The short story for why I'm here this morning is that the Quaker gathering in Johnstown was this last week. We gathered there in the theme of Courageously Faithful, and I was invited to give an address at the opening plenary, which I'm going to offer to you here this morning. The longer story for why I'm here is that 30 years ago I married Rob Duncan. He invited me into this loving basket of family that has been supportive and encouraging and patient and kind and loving towards me from before 30 years ago. So my thanks to Wes Gordon, who joined me in joining this family and to Kathy for inviting me to speak this morning. So this room is familiar to most of you, and I want to invite you to simply take some time to arrive in it. Take a minute and just notice your molecules, some of them perhaps still at the breakfast table, others left behind at work or activities of last week, and just notice them trailing along behind you and perhaps sliding in through the ventilation system or the windows or the doors and arriving here in your skin. Just go inside and give them all the time they need to arrive here with you. Take a moment and just let your eyes explore this familiar room. See if you can find a place where your eyes would like to rest. Just let them rest there. And then be with whatever you notice in your whole body as your eyes are allowed to simply rest where they'd like to. And notice how you notice that you are here in the UU fellowship that has come to me so much to you. And from this place, notice how you experience yourself as safe. Take some moments and just be with your sense of safety. And be with what happens as you orient yourself to your sense of yourself as safe. Notice have your shoulders dropped? Do you feel heavier or lighter in your body? Are you just a little bit more present? Has your breath gotten deeper? Has your heart slowed? Do you feel just a little bit more relaxed, easier, better? Notice how you notice the atmosphere in the room. Notice how it might be different than when you first walked in. I want to invite you to just be with yourself, be with what you notice in yourself, and listen from that place. I am a Quaker. I am a Taoist, a Buddhist, a Christian Quaker. I'm an acupuncturist, a trauma therapist, a peace activist, and a healer. Every Thursday morning, I travel to the Veterans Administration Hospital to their war-related illness and injury study center. It's called the Risk Center. War-related illness and injury study center always seems kind of interesting that they call it risk. I serve there as an acupuncturist. I use needles as instruments of peace to veterans of war. And early every Wednesday morning, I sit and gathered silence in the belly of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I sit with a group of acupuncturists and body workers. Our restore and renew wellness clinic will treat around 70 nurses and doctors, social workers and chaplains, administrators and order leads physical therapists and food service workers, civilians and soldiers. We bring peace to the very tangible experience of war that soldiers bring home with them and give unknowingly and unbidden to their caregivers. Each day and in every treatment experience I call on Abba, on Father God, for his bedrock of protection and safety and forgiveness. I call on Amah, Mother God, for her peace in the quiet dark places, for her mysterious gifts of healing and for her unbounded presence. I feel their presence fill the room and it carries my words, my hands and my needles. Together, Abba, Amah, Mother Father God, welcomes home warriors, forgives them the sins of war, and heals the wounds of the bodies and souls of soldiers, of soldiers and their nurses, soldiers and their lovers, soldiers and their children, soldiers and their chaplains. How did this work come to be the pivot around which my mind and my heart revolve? What have I learned that is worth sharing with you today in the context of faithful courage and bringing peace to war? It all started in 2004, perhaps it started before then, but in a conscious way, it started in 2004, when I happened to hear Kevin and Joyce Lucy interviewed on the radio. Their son Lance Corporal Jeffrey Lucy had come home from Afghanistan in 2003 and unable to cope with what he had seen and what he had been asked to do, he committed suicide. His dad is a social worker and his mom a nurse and he could not have asked for more active, involved loving and caring and attentive parents. My first thought, acupuncture could have made a difference for this young man and for his family what a shame his veterans administration wasn't set up to offer it to him. I was filled with a feeling, a knowing that it didn't have to be this way for Jeff or for his family. I lost that thought in the day-to-day busyness of life until three months later, I again happened to have the radio on when his parents were interviewed again. This time I woke up, I said I'm the director of a healing center, I'm in a position to bring together a group of healers who can make a difference for soldiers and their families and their caregivers. It was a leading and it picked me up. Quakers have this concept leading, perhaps our cousins over here in the Unitarian community have a similar sense. It's when something compels you to action. It's as if there's a force moving inside you that's bigger than yourself and that was the sense that I had on that day and that has carried me. We birthed our nonprofit affiliate, we call it Crossings Healing Works. Our mission reads to bring ancient healing traditions that restore and renew the body mind spirit of people touched by trauma, creating peace for one family, one community, one world, one person at a time. Did it take courage? Yes. I had to take the bumper stickers off my car and went underground, under cover with my teeth chattering. First times I walked through the gates of Walter Reed. What if I was found out? Would they cast me out? Would they ridicule me, court marshal me, or worse yet would they Google me? Did it take faithfulness? Yes. This is something I've learned about meetings. They carry us past through and over our fear. It was no longer an option for me to not engage in a deeply personal way with people wounded by war. My leading to do this worked helped me transcend the "I Thou" dichotomy that exists not only between Quakers in the military, but between all of us who are outside the gates with those of us who live and work inside the gates. This is a different kind of peace work than I have done in other times in my life. I never thought I was doing enough for peace because I wasn't doing big things like organizing massive demonstrations. Now I discover that the small act of placing a small needle in a small ear of an army medic at Walter Reed is absolutely and unequivocally peace work. I discover that not only is it okay for me to work for peace within my domain, it is my calling to work for peace within my domain and not someone else's domain. I've found what I call my divine enough. Between God and me, it's enough. I am enough. I have found my divine enough. I have immersed myself in a study of trauma. I have learned something of how it impacts our bodies, our minds and our spirits and how we heal from the disorganization that it creates. My goals, first, to keep these folks out of the criminal justice system. An important task since we know that unresolved trauma is a principal cause of violent and impulsive acts. Traumatic reenactment is one way our unconscious minds attempt to complete and bring closure to life-threatening experiences. To keep these folks in healthy relationships with their children, an important task since we know that the children of parents who are so dramatically frozen that they can't gaze lovingly into the eyes of their infants have higher rates of drug abuse and suicide than those whose parents made visual and tactile connection with them as infants. This is how the dynamics of trauma get passed on in families. To help these folks make thoughtful, flexible, creative contributions in our political discourse, decisions that are not straight-jacketed and molded by fear sold cheap by our political leaders. I've learned a few things and I have a lot more to learn. I've learned that the impact of war is not limited to the person who served, to their time of service or to the geographic boundaries of their service. Their caregivers, their families, their communities, our whole nation is impacted by soldiers coming home and bringing the trauma of war home with them. Trauma is a vibrational illness and it is catching like the flu. I've also been heard to say that recovery from trauma is equally catching. It spreads like honey on warm toast. In the face of trauma, our neurological systems go on high alert. We flee, we fight, we freeze. The response we make is highly variable and dependent on how our creator wired us and our unique neurological systems. Some of us are made to fight. We are she bears. We charge when attacked. And others are made to flee. We are more like white-tailed deer. We run and get out of the way. Still others become immobilized and freeze. We are possums. It is not better to be a she bear, a white-tailed deer, or a possum. We are all part of creation and we are wired to survive. The most primitive parts of our brain govern our survival responses. It is not under our conscious control. Our response has nothing to do with our valor, our honor, our dignity, our compassion, or our value as a human being. Our cognitive minds play no role in these decisions. They are not engaged, nor are they particularly useful to survival when we're facing danger. We cannot will our fight, fight, freeze response away. We cannot educate it away. We cannot pretend it doesn't exist and be in meaningful dialogue about violence or passivity in our families and communities about war and peace at home or abroad. We wouldn't really want to lose our fight response anyway. It is what allows a 110-pound woman to lift a car off her child. When I think about the query, do my actions serve to take away the root cause of war? I think about this primitive survival response. How do my actions help to bring some measure of freedom to this primitive instinct? I say unwinding, transforming, releasing, stuck trauma responses in the body-mind spirit of individuals who have experienced war is fundamental to finding peace in our families, our communities, and our world. Tell you a story. Joe was a patient of mine. In addition to our project at Walter Reed, we offer sliding-scale services at our home center on an individual one-on-one kind of basis. Joe came to me from Walter Reed where he was in what they call the Warrior Transition Brigade. This is for people who have been injured and they're in the process of making a decision about whether they can go back to serve in battle or whether they need to be discharged from the Army. Joe is a nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare specialist. He was fresh home from Iraq. He had migraine headaches and ruptured discs in his neck from carrying armor in Iraq. He described his sleep as saying, "I flip-flop like a fish on a pier." He admitted to using alcohol to excess for his sleep and to medicate his nightmares. He knew that as a Christian, his task was to love others, and he named his job as a soldier to be a necessary evil, and he used his forefinger and thumb to pick off people behind the furniture in my treatment room. He appeared dissociated and disconnected, frozen, as he described this. His primary complaint was that he had lost 70% of his vision in his left eye due to a retinal bleed, and he was also concerned that his memory was not what it used to be. Difficulty sleeping is very common for trauma survivors as our nightmares. The stress chemicals that help us be alert to danger get frozen and stuck on high alert and don't turn off easily. Protective at one time in our past, they now get in the way of sleep and healing, helping to thaw that freeze and find internal peace and quiet as part of trauma recovery. Symptoms in the head and neck are also very common in trauma. We use our sense organs to orient to trauma, and that orient response leaves us hypervigilant. It is common for people to grind their teeth, have neck pain or restricted range of motion in their necks, ringing in their ears or eye symptoms after trauma. These are some of my notes. I'm like a turtle, slow, still quiet. Where do you feel that in my chest? When I'm not a turtle, I'm a dragon, fire, fighting, hot. Touch into the edge of that, also in my chest. He discharges with some light trembling and shaking in the liver and gallbladder meridians in his legs. When I make contact with my spiritual self, I feel expanded in my chest and more like a man. My legs are lighter and my shoulders are relaxed. I'd like to poke a needle in my eye to let the blood out. See yourself doing that. I'm a beekeeper, calm, resistant to stinging. Feel that feeling. I feel so different in my psyche since coming home. I'm trying to come back. People have me in a groove, and I'm different. Some parts of me I like and some I don't. I don't feel at home. I'm trying to come home. My skin feels like dragon skin. It's hot and tight. Feel that. I'm trying to turn it over to God. Feel that. Take all your time. My skin feels new. It's cool and green and full of life. Feel that. There's a bubble in my belly. It wants to rise. I feel like laughing and smiling. It's also ridiculous. I want to send this feeling to my wife. Feel that. This is all over the course of four sessions. I used acupuncture points primarily on his liver and gallbladder pathways. Meridian's that run from the eye across the head in multiple bands down the neck along the side of the body, along the outside of the leg, and then up the inside of the leg ending at the chest. They help us with our vision, both our eyes and our mind's eye, with our ability to see the future, a new future. They help our emotions move smoothly past life's obstacles that might otherwise leave us frustrated and angry. They help soothe and settle stuck fight responses. Some of the points I use had names like gate of hope, wilderness mound, sun and moon, suspended regulator, bright and clear, loathsome jaws, chapter gate, rooted spirit, flowing valley. His last session, his eye had recovered, his memory was better, he was sleeping and he felt more relaxed. He had interviewed for a position with a strategic war command, cloth napkins, crystal glassware, and a six figure salary. He was bubbling over, talking very fast. I asked him to slow down and check in with his body. How did he feel when he was there? Numb in my head, pain in my belly and he touches his liver, I want to get drunk, feel that. Those people are crazy, feel that. It's not for me, I don't belong there, feel that. I feel a lump in my throat, feel that, and he begins to tear up. He wants to cry and to scream. I encourage him to see himself screaming as loud as he needs to and crying as much as he needs to, silently. This guy's a pretty stoic guy. He says profanity and he holds his head in his hands and he weeps freely. And then he says violence and he holds his head in his hands and weeps more. He says rage and he holds his head in his hands and weeps, then killing and he holds his head in his hands and weeps. And then grief and he holds his head in his hands and weeps more and then loss and he holds his head in his hands and weeps. We sat quietly with each other for a long time. And then he speaks of his fear of meeting other's expectations of the rejection. Who will I be to the world of violence if I'm not violent? When I'm here I am more powerful than all the world's armies. I feel hope for the first time in a long time. I am a simple man who no one can see. He left the army. He left a $400,000 retirement package and the possibility of a very cushy job at the Pentagon. He went home to the Midwest to be the spiritual leader for his fourth children and his wife. He went to tend his bees and go back to his civilian job. He told me he was going to write the Dalai Lama and ask him how to heal his karma. I don't know if he ever did. I think he healed his karma that day. He sent me this poem a couple of weeks later, The Simple Man. I am a simple man. No one can see me. Sometimes a few see me. I was born green. When I am hidden is when I am most visible. I am more powerful than all the world's armies. I can kill you, but I choose not to. My body strikes like the leopard or my mind hands you a blossoming flower. Go slowly. Your time for peace is near. I am a simple man. I will stop the tears and bring a joyful silence. Friends, this is peace work. This is the grittiest, grimiest, dirtiest and most meaningful peace work that I have ever done in the shattered hearts and minds of veterans of war. The ancient Chinese said that life happens in dynamic tension between opposites. We'll look at courageously faithful, which was the theme of our recent gathering. Courage. Do you hear the Latin root for heart? Core. In courage. Courage belongs to the heart. The heart belongs to the fire element. Fire is summer, passion, expansion, connection, fullness, love. Fire is yang. Faithful. Faithful belongs to the water element, to the kidney, to the winter, to the questions "Do I have enough crops stored away? How long will the cold last? Will I survive?" Water is cold, contemplative, quiet, interior wise. Water is yin. Fire without water to temper it burns wildly like the wildfires we have seen out west. Water without fire to warm it is inert and frozen. Neither lives without the other. Courage cannot live separately from faithfulness any more than the front of your hand can live without the back. All courage without faithfulness is a bull in a China shop on a manic episode. All faithfulness without courage is an icicle in a very dark and cold cave. Life happens in dynamic tension between water and fire, yin and yang between courage and faithfulness between war and peace. Two poles, one life force. There is a structure in our aorta called the respiratory sinus node. The Chinese called it by its acupuncture point within the breast. It governs the electrical current that brings coherence and relationship between our breath and our heartbeat. It is profoundly impacted by overwhelming life events. Those of you who have experienced car accidents or falls or other jangling events may remember your heart racing or your breath becoming quite shallow. This is part of a whole body response that allows you to survive what your body perceived to be life threatening. When we find our way to safety, like I asked you earlier, in our bodies, not only in our intellects, there is a greater congruence between our heartbeat and our breath. And there is greater congruence between our heartbeat, our breath and the generation of alpha waves in our brains. Alpha waves are highly correlated with states of compassion, empathy, creativity and serenity. The Chinese use the same character for heart and mind. They knew that when we are troubled in our hearts, we are also troubled in our minds. And vice versa, that peacefulness in our hearts brings peacefulness to our minds. When I have a greater sense of internal coherence, when I am embodied, present, feeling safe, when my heart is beating peacefully in the kingdom of my body, my brain generates alpha waves. And this is important, so listen very closely. My heart entrains your brain's creation of alpha waves, if we are touching or in close proximity. My peaceful heart entrains your brain to create electrical currents that are highly correlated with states of compassion, empathy, creativity and serenity. Our restoring renew wellness clinic at Walter Reed has treated over 1,100 members of the staff of Walter Reed. That's 15% of their 7,000 staff members. More than 300 have come five or more times. Each one goes back to work with a more peaceful heart, a quieter mind, a more coherent energy system. Each one goes back to work as an alpha wave brain machine, carrying vibrations of compassion, empathy, creativity and serenity to their patients, their patients' moms, dads, lovers and children. Friends, this is peace work. Being fully present with each other in embodied states of compassion and love affects our biology and our energy field. It creates more order, more flexibility, more balance, and the electrical currents that guide our nervous system and all the nervous systems we touch. Trauma resolution spreads like honey on warm toast. Small things done in big ways, a smile, a hug, care filled and thoughtful listening, being embodied and present, living from our experience of safety, rather than our fear, helps to create more peaceful, creative, compassionate vibrations in the minds of people close to us. I'm going to close with some what Quakers call queries, these questions. And when I finish, we'll take just a little bit of time for you to consider them in your own hearts, in your own minds, and see where they carry you. Here are a few of the queries that Elaine Duncan shared with the audience. Who do you think of as other, and can you find your way to being embodied, present, engaged when you are with them? Who do you think of as other, and can you meet them outside of judging their trauma response as inferior or superior to yours? What is a small thing you can do in a big way for peace within your domain? What is your divine enough? Again, that was an address by Elaine Duncan of Crossing's Healing Works to the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of the Ligonier Valley in Pennsylvania. Elaine is an acupuncturist, a healer, a Quaker, and she is my guest for today's Spirit in Action program. I'm your host, Mark Helpsmeet of Northern Spirit Radio, and you can listen to this and other programs via the web at northernspiritradio.org. While you're there, post a comment about this and other programs, or follow the links to crossingashealingworks.org, for example. We'd really like to get to know our listeners better, and we welcome your feedback. As you know by now, we'd rather fill your belly with soul-deep connection than leave you starving on word bites. This is Northern Spirit Radio, but right now, let's go to the phone and speak directly with Elaine Duncan, my guest for today's Spirit in Action. Well, Elaine, thank you so much for joining me for Spirit in Action. You're welcome. I'm glad to be with you. Where do you live, exactly? We've been hired to fill Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Is that where you originated from? Is that hometown for you? No, I actually was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and then I grew up all over the Midwest, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, and came here to the Washington area about 25 years ago. Actually, more than that, I've been here since 1976, time flies, 1975. What took you over to that area? Why would you leave a dear place like the Midwest and like Fargo? I got a job, and I graduated college and I had some wanderlust. I got a job working with an agency that worked with Runaway Youth in the late '70s and came here, and then I met my husband. I still missed the Midwest. I love going home to Minnesota. I think that your work with acupuncture is something that originated in the '80s. Is that true? What were you doing before? Were you social worker kind of thing before and switched over or what happened? I've done a lot of different things in my life. I'm quite a generalist. I've been everything from a women's health counselor, administrator, and a program for Runaway Youth to a kidney dialysis technician. I was a legal secretary. The thing that brought me to acupuncture school was my own personal health journey. I contracted Hepatitis C working as a kidney dialysis technician. I stuck myself with a needle from an infected patient and struggled for about 25 years with chronic Hepatitis C infection and acupuncture. Probably saved my life and certainly helped me cope until science and medicine developed to a point where I could make use of Western medicine in 2003 and successfully eliminate the virus with interferon and bibabyrin treatment. I was very bored as a legal secretary and felt my wanted to do something more with my life that made it in greater alignment with my heart and my mind. At the time I was receiving acupuncture treatment and was very moved by the experience and woke up one day and said, "I can do this too." As a child, I think what I wanted to do was either be a minister or a doctor. I'm old enough that my era girls didn't grow up to become doctors and so I didn't pursue it. My brother was a minister and there wasn't room for more than one in the family I didn't think, so becoming an acupuncturist was a way to be both a minister and a doctor. Your ministry with crossings healing works involves interfacing with the military. Because I know you're Quaker, I don't think of you as mixing a lot with military. Was that anything in your childhood background or growing up? My father served in both World War II and Korea in the Navy. He was on a minesweeper in the Pacific during World War II, came home from his service as an early 20-year-old man with a complete head of gray hair, living in the fear of floating over a mine. And although he didn't talk about his war service until we sat together around the time of the first Gulf War, and I just remember so vividly him weeping and saying, "Those poor sons of bitches are going over to fight. I lost my dad about 10 years ago, but I certainly carry his spirit and his service with me in this work that I'm doing now." Well, let's talk a little bit about the specifics of crossings healing works. First of all, mention your website crossingshealingworks.org, right? Correct. How did this get started? We just listened to your speech there. There's a big leap that happens in your talk there that I didn't get from how you had your motivation to how you actually ended up walking into Walter Reed or the VA Hospital. How did you really get from one to the other? In 2003, I just happened to be listening to the radio, just like folks are listening to the radio right now, and I heard the parents of Lance Corporal Jeffrey Lucy being interviewed. They were incredibly loving parents, dads, a social worker and moms and nurse, and their son Jeffrey came home from Afghanistan and was struggling in deep and profound ways. They were fabulous parents. They worked with their Veterans Administration Medical Center, and they worked with their son, and they advocated for him, and they did everything that good and loving parents would do to try and help their son, and it wasn't enough, or something wasn't enough, or he had a different destiny, or I don't know. But he ended up committing suicide a year after he got home, and it was very clear that he just simply wasn't able to live with what he had been asked to do and what he had seen. I have children in their 20s, and I identified with his parents greatly, and I said to myself, "You know, it didn't have to be this way." That acupuncture could have made a difference for Jeff and could make a difference for his family, and that I was in a position where I could bring together a group of clinicians that could respond in an organized way. I'm a founder and co-director of Crossings of Center for the Healing Traditions, which has been around for about 20 years, and that I could make use of the contacts and networks that I developed over that time. And that's how Crossings Healing Works was developed as an outgrowth of Crossings. But how did you actually get invited into Walter Reed? I mean, here you are, acupuncture is doing Chinese origin type medicine, you're a peacenick. How did you get through the gates? Yeah. We're just a couple of miles from Walter Reed, our office, and we started, you know, networking and inviting people to come in for care. And the Family Medical Assistance Center there at Walter Reed was involved with organizing the National Nurses Week celebration in 2005, which happens every May. And we were in a coalition kind of meeting organizing that event, and the fellow who worked there was able to contract with us, got some private funding, to bring us in to offer three days of wellness services to the nurses during National Nurses Week. And that first year in 2005 we treated 213 or something like that. Not just nurses, the nurses were very gracious and generous as nurses often are with opening up their celebration to anyone who wanted to come. So we treated nurses and we treated doctors and social workers and custodians and food service workers and anybody who came. It was a profoundly meaningful experience for us because of that big us and them thing that happens between civilians in the military, we somehow transcended the gate. We walked through the gate and we lived inside with people who live and work inside the gate. And then in 2004, the nurses committee invited us back again. That year we saw 300 people in three days time. We saw some of the same people and we were so profoundly moved by what they were carrying by the bags under their eyes and the ashen look in their faces and the clear burden that they were carrying and serving the severely injured soldiers that come to Walter Reed. And we said to ourselves it is not enough for us to come here once a year for three days. We need to be here once a week on an ongoing basis. So we started talking with the command and with the JAG office, the legal people and with contracting and with the department of nursing and you know all the different people and they were so welcoming and so grateful to work with us. And you know there were a lot of iced out and teased across to make it happen but in November of 2007, we opened up our weekly restore and renew wellness clinic. And we're there every Wednesday now and we treat an average of about 70 people a day using acupuncture offered in a group model where we use just use points in the outer ear so no one has to get undressed and I can treat people in a circle of chairs. And then we have three massage tables set up and offer some therapeutic bodywork modalities. We offer an acupressure modality called SAVA and zero balancing which is another bodywork that works with the interface between energy held in the bones with the energy that flows through those bones. So our sense is that we've now treated about 1,200 members of the staff of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. There are 7,000 people on the staff there so we've treated right around 15% of the staff. Our sense is that that's enough east to raise the dough and that we're making an impact on the impact of war that soldiers bring home with them. How many of you are going and doing this? We keep four or five people working at a time, five people during the busy time of the day around the lunch hour and four people the rest of the day. And these are all people who are with Crossings Healing Works? Yep. Yep. We're all licensed providers who've had some additional training and working with compassion fatigue and trauma traumatic stress. You know, I'm part of a Quaker meeting here. I've certainly worked with a lot of different peace groups and it's rare enough that a peace group will engage constructively with the military. There's a lot of fear there and you certainly know the saying that, you know, "way will open when you have a leading" which certainly sounds to me like you had. But there's also the saying, "way will open when I get out of my own way." How much of it was your experience of you had to get rid of the stuff that was holding you back from this industry? You know, that's probably been one of the most meaningful aspects of this piece of my journey is transcending that us and them dichotomy that lived in me at a time. And, you know, the day that I sat in a meeting of other complimentary care providers at Walter Reed and one of our members in full military uniform, you know, camouflage pants and jacket and all that, a woman spoke of her time with the Dalai Lama who was in town and how she was learning meditation practice from him and was teaching John Kabat-Zinn's mindfulness based stress reduction at Walter Reed. It was a real wonderful moment for me because he was a person who speaks my language who, you know, thinks how I think and there she sits in a military uniform. There are a lot of things that are really beautiful about the military that I never, you know, had an opportunity to experience before. I think of buddy culture, I call it, people really profoundly care about each other. They often come to our clinic in groups, they come with a friend, they bring a friend, they receive our care and then they go back to work and bring their friend back because they want their friend to share what they got. There's a lot of love, there's a lot of care, there's a lot of concern and a lot of compassion. Being able to break that sense of differentness has been really important for me as a faithful person. Do you have the feeling that you've fully transcended that or do you still feel like a sheep in wolves clothing going in there? You know, less and less. I feel more and more genuinely myself. In every interchange I've been welcomed and appreciated by people in the military. You know, this is like gritty, grimy, dirty, greasy piece work, but it's the most meaningful piece work that I have ever done because it's up close and personal. It's right in the hearts and minds of those who are most personally affected by war. The more that we can make an impact in any vector of a veteran's life, a combat veteran's life, could be their family member, could be their caregiver, could be the veteran themselves, or making an impact on a vibrational system that if untended can result in violence because it's natural for a system that has experienced profound trauma to try and unwind and rework and complete that trauma response in order to come back to their state of coherency and resilience. One of the things that trauma does is it leaves such a profound imprint that when a slightly similar situation occurs, we get sent right back to that experience. So we want to help unwind those previous experiences so that we can be free to respond in a moment. Let me tell a story. This will be the best way to tell this. I had a client will call him Sam. I treated him four times using this constellation of points in the outer ear that I use. He was a veteran of the first Gulf War and also the current conflict in Iraq. He was on his way to New York that weekend to visit his daughter. He got on the subway train and like many veterans, when the train got really full, it triggered memories of being in crowds in Iraq. It was never safe to be in an Iraq because you didn't know who was a suicide bomber. So crowds are very activating and every other time that Sam was in a crowded place, he would come to in handcuffs having gotten into a big fistfight with anybody who was in his way because his instinctive survival response was triggered. The thing that got him home safe got triggered. This time after four acupuncture treatments, the train stopped. He collected himself and he got off the train. He got off the train. He allowed himself to get collected again to catch his breath, to find himself where he was. The next train came along. It wasn't so crowded. He got on the train and he went on to meet his daughter and have a meaningful visit with her that day. His daughter told him he was cool. So in that day, this is how I think of acupuncture as Vibrational Medicine and PTSD as a Vibrational Illness. In that day, my guy Sam treated himself with just a little more internal space. The acupuncture gave him just a little bit more internal space so he didn't have to react so instinctively and quickly. He treated himself. He also treated his daughter who got to have a relationship with her dad who was cool. He treated everybody who was on that subway car who got to go on to wherever they were going in a peaceful and unencumbered way. He treated the New York City Police and jail staff. Everybody got a treatment that day and that's piece work, creating that vibration that allowed space for him to not react out of his survival response but instead react in the present moment with an appropriate response. In your speech, you gave a description of a guy you called Joe. What you described in your sessions, it sounded like a mix of what I know with kind of therapy of other sorts. Are you practicing a particular form of acupuncture or are you mixing different disciplines or insights? How are you doing that? Where does this come from? Yeah, I'm mixing some different disciplines. I'm also trained in somatic experiencing, which is a mind-body approach to trauma resolution. It has trained me in ways to both see and create ways to access energy states that are held in the brain stem. This is the more primitive part of the brain, the animal brain or the hind brain. This is where our fight flight and freeze response is mediated. And it's the part of our brain that understands metaphor and image and sensation, different from our forebrain that understands more analytical and memorized facts and details and things like that. When I work with a person verbally before I use the needles or in concert with using the needles, I'll use some of these practices that I've learned in somatic experiencing so that I'm working with the brain stem when I insert my needle. The key that I'm working with is this very primordial, deep survival energy that is mediated from the brain stem. Those imageries of my skin feels hot and I want to send this image to my wife. I feel a bubble coming up out of my belly and all of that. Those are images that are coming out of his brain stem. Another thing about your discussion there with Joe and your progress with him, at the beginning you mentioned him as a Christian and later on towards the end he's made this decision not to continue in the military and stuff, but that he was going to write to the Dalai Lama to help him clear his karma. That seems like a major religious spiritual change. What happened? I don't know if it was a change so much. He was a very expansive person and when he came to my office for treatment we have this big picture book of the Dalai Lama and he would always sit with it as he waited to come in for a session. He was another example of, I don't think before I got involved with this work, I would have thought of a person in the military as someone who would be interested in what the Dalai Lama had to say or think. He certainly did and I've met many people in the military who do and are active meditators and certainly active members of their church communities and feel like what they're providing is a sense of police action or providing safety or protection. There's a lot of sense of honor and valor and service that's involved in what calls some people into the military. For them it's completely consistent with their faith journey. One of the hesitations I think a lot of people on the peace front people who think of themselves as peace leaning, peace advocates and anti military. One of the fears I think that is common is that they don't want to enable bad behavior regardless of whether the people are going for what they think is a good reason or if they're just doing it to put themselves to college or whatever. They're afraid that if they help support, encourage that person that that'll just help that person continue in their military agenda serving whatever the directions of the military are. Do you have that fears or is that not really relevant? One of the first questions that came up as we started thinking as a group of clinicians and with our board about our work and we came to a place of faithfulness in that question and we just decided that we can't control it. We can't control outcomes that we need to honor that and that we needed to trust that if we put a vibration of healing out. That while we couldn't control what would become of that that we had to have some faith that good would come of it and that even if someone does choose to go back to reenlist or to go back in theater as they say. That they would go back with a more thoughtful and embodied and engaged presence and might make some different choices about how they serve than they would otherwise. The parable of casting the seed on the soil and knowing that some weeds will grow and some seeds won't sprout at all but other seeds will create beautiful flowers and we just decided that we had to trust the beautiful flowers. That that ocean of light is bigger than the ocean of darkness. You know Elaine there's a phrase that you used in your speech that was particularly striking for me. You talk about your divine enough. Could you expound a little bit on what you mean by that? You know even back when I was a little girl when I blew out my candles and my birthday cake my wish was always to make the world a better place and I've been plagued most of my life with feeling like I wasn't doing enough. I could never really get a sense of that in spite of all of my efforts and actions that it just wasn't enough. In doing this work for the first time in my 55 years I feel like I'm right with God that between God and me I'm doing enough. That it's right for me to do my piece work within my domain as an acupuncturist and that it's not my domain to be a lobbyist or to organize large demonstrations or to write bills into law or to run radio programs and do communications work like what you do. But if you have found your divine enough by doing a spirit in action every week I applied you. I just think we all need to find what's our divine enough, what's our soul's journey towards making the world a better place and then reside in there in that container in that domain and do small things in big ways. Amen. You're listening to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet and this is a production of Northern Spirit Radio. It's called Spirit in Action and we're speaking with Elaine Duncan. She is Executive Director for an organization called Crossings Healing Works and their mission is to bring ancient healing traditions that restore and renew the mind-body spirit of people touched by trauma. In particular they've been going into Walter Reed Medical Center and into VA Hospital doing healing with staff and soldiers connected with war to prevent that traumatic vibration from continuing and expanding into our population. Did I say that well? Let me give you the full mission is to bring ancient healing traditions that restore and renew the body-mind spirit of people touched by trauma creating peace for one family, one community, one world, one person at a time. And doing it one person at a time is so different than getting out there as part of a peace demonstration and saying down with war, down with war. I assume you've made a lot of friends. Do you have now on your personal contact book? Do you have people who are military now? Absolutely. One of the most meaningful experiences, well two meaningful experiences, what allowed us to open at Walter Reed, the first thing was a check for $10,000 that came from an individual, a woman who came into my office and handed me an envelope and I expected a check for $100 or so, which is what most of our checks our donations are. And when I opened the envelope and saw what it was, I came out to the waiting room and I said, "Well, my goodness, thank you very much." And she said, "Well, I recently came into some good fortune and I realized that I've been a peace activist all my life, but I needed to offer peace to these people too, that it wasn't right for me to exclude peace from the military. I needed to offer them peace too and so I wanted to help your work." Then the first day we were open, I got a phone call from Soldiers Angels, which is a funding organization that, you know, lots of red, white and blue and lots of patriotism on the website and lots of pro war kind of language. The woman called and said, "You know, we don't have much, but I really appreciate what you're doing. They need a little TLC over there Walter Reed and we'd like to send you a check for $1,000." So this is a place where, you know, the right and the left, the red and the blue, you know, we can all come together and that's healing because in America, this is one of the most divisive issues in America today, the war, and this is a place where some of that divisiveness is being healed. I wanted to cover a few more strands of your spiritual journey that got you from where you were to where you are. You mentioned you have a brother who's a minister, so I'm thinking you didn't grow up Quaker. What did you start out and how did you get to hang out with these Quakers? I started out as a Presbyterian, kind of drifted away in my college years during the early 70s, you know, with a sense of disenchantment about the lack of presence in the civil rights movement and the women's movement and the anti war movement that felt so meaningful to me in that era. 10, 15 years later, all of a sudden, I'm married and I've got kids and I want to have a place that's larger than just our household to raise my children and to give them a sense of a world community and some values that were larger than what I felt my husband and I could offer them. So we went seeking a safe community. We went shopping around to a number of different congregations and when we arrived at the Delphi Friends Meeting, we felt completely at home. We didn't have to filter anything out of what was said and we really appreciated the depth of faithfulness that was underneath the social action that the meeting members were involved in and it became a rich source of support for our family and particularly for our children. I have one more crucial question. I just have to ask you, you mentioned in your speech about nervously getting ready to walk into Walter Reed Hospital and all the things you got rid of in your Birking Stocks and you said you took bumper stickers off your car. Did you really and what were those bumper stickers? You know, I did really take bumper stickers off my car. I don't remember what they said but there was something about peace and I just didn't want to create the opposition. I didn't want to be in an us and them posture and I'm glad I took them off. Well, I was just wondering if it was going to be one like "My other vehicle is a broomstick" that's what I like. Good question though. Good question. Well, Elaine, wonderful work you're doing so inspirational and it's clearly a way that you're helping those of us who are in the peace end of the spectrum to engage respectfully, healingly with the military. I so respect you for the physical medical healing work that you're doing but also for the spiritual forefront that you're leading us into a peaceful battle, a battle of spirit where we're going to engage in healing. So thank you so much for doing that Elaine. Well, thank you Mark. It's great to be with you. That was Elaine Duncan of Crossings Healing Works. Their website is CrossingsHealingWorks.org, which you can of course find at NorthernSpiritRadio.org. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)