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\u201cNow the tragedy, in one sense is a tragedy, that often people only become open when they've suffered horribly when that is both the tragedy of trauma, but also the promise.\xa0It's one thing to be trauma informed. It's another thing to inform our experience of trauma with some kind of courage and some kind of hopefulness for profound change. That's what's got to happen. If that can happen, then maybe out of all this contentiousness that is present in our 21st century United States, maybe something really good can happen, but we've got to pay attention, we've got to act on it, and take responsibility.\u201d\nSo says Dr. James Gordon, a Harvard-educated psychiatrist, former researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy, and a clinical professor of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown Medical School. He\u2019s also the founder and executive director of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a prolific writer on trauma. This is because he\u2019s spent the last several decades traveling the globe and healing population-wide psychological trauma. He and 130 international faculty have brought this program to populations as diverse as refugees from wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa; firefighters and U.S. military personnel and their families; student/parent/teacher school shooting survivors; and more.\nI met Jim many years ago, and he\u2019s become a constant resource for me in my own life and work, particularly because he packages so many of the exercises that work in global groups into his book Transforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing. We talk about some of those exercises today\u2014soft belly breathing, shaking and dancing, drawing\u2014along with why it\u2019s so important to address and complete the trauma cycle in areas of crisis. This is the first part of a four-part series, and James does an excellent job of setting the stage.\n\nMORE FROM JAMES GORDON, M.D.:\nTransforming Trauma: The Path to Hope and Healing\nThe Center for Mind-Body Medicine\nFollow Jim on Instagram\n\nRELATED EPISODES:\nThomas Hubl: \u201cFeeling into the Collective Presence\u201d\nGabor Mat\xe9, M.D.: \u201cWhen Stress Becomes Illness\u201d\nGalit Atlas, PhD: \u201cUnderstanding Emotional Inheritance\u201d\nThomas Hubl: \u201cProcessing Our Collective Past\u201d\nRichard Schwartz, PhD: \u201cRecovering Every Part of Ourselves\u201d\n \nTo learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy\n \n Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices