Any effort to honour human dignity and all creation must first entail Healing.

Our world is full of stress and trauma that typically occur in abusive, violent environments and impact especially those who are poor, women, children, soldiers, police, health care workers, and teachers.

Stress, however, affects us all, often in serious ways, causing sleeplessness, headaches, muscle tension, soft tissue blockages, arthritis, and more. The body keeps the score. As compassionate people, even global news of what others suffer touches us more deeply than words. This secondary trauma can also build up in us.

To restore self-respect and enable us to find peace, we need to help each other heal whatever stress and trauma we have experienced.

There is good news. A method called the Capacity to Empower provides simple, popular, multicultural techniques. They are very effective in healing stress and trauma, and in nurturing non-violent communities.

Trauma is a normal, biological response to a violent or overwhelming situation. It affects the whole person -- body-mind-spirit. It is not a life-sentence. Throughout South Sudan, we taught teams to lead workshops and saw amazing healing daily of headaches, stomach pains, nightmares, insomnia, blood pressure issues, and even paralysis.

​Basically, we wake up our bodies, our brains to heal: by tapping all over our bodies, picturing our full health, massaging ears, hands, feet and doing gentle flowing exercises that deepen our breathing. And by imagining easy mobility without stiffness and pain, we may gradually discover that our brains make it happen.

We used the Capacity to Empower Method -- Capacitar -- which is multi-cultural, popular education. Their website offers resources and an Emergency Tool Kit which you may download free, in many languages.

Photo by Paul Jeffrey

Healing Through Play

After school, I usually went to the stadium in Malakal where internally displaced people were staying. People quickly gathered around as they do … so I got them moving. They loved doing informal exercises that later became part of our Healing workshops.

Sharing significant moments

This Red Crescent/Red Cross nurse  assisted in the birth of tiny Istifa -- Referendum -- held by her mother in the stadium.  People had come by the thousands to vote for Independence in 2011. It was their first time to vote. 99.6% voted to separate from the north/Sudan.

Evidence of Stress and/or Trauma

People in South Sudan have suffered far beyond what I have known. All have lost many loved ones. Since we are compassionate, even if not suffering from direct, major grief or abuse,  we take in what is happening around us and in world news. "The body tells the truth. The Body Keeps the Score" by Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. Stress and/or trauma can show up as headaches, arthritis, stomachaches, insomnia, nightmares, rampant diabetes, low self-esteem, withdrawal, anxiety, aggression or fear.

​

Capacity to Empower Method of Healing

Trauma is not a life sentence.  We used the Capacity to Empower Method (Capacitar), founded by Patricia Mathes Cane PhD. This method of popular education to "Heal ourselves, heal our world" has spread globally. Joan Rebmann Condon and Sophia Hunter produce resources, provide training on several continents and have a very informative website.

We added some focus on

• healthy/unhealthy expressions of anger, grief and sexuality,

• blessings,

• tapping and ear, hand and foot massage and 

• an explanation why this easy method of doing gentle, flowing exercises actually heals.

Leading psychologists currently promote using body work in therapy. We know it works!  We see it in action!  

The Capacitar Emergency Tool Kit is available to download free, in 30 languages.  https://capacitar.org

South Sudanese Lead Healing Programs

With the capable leadership of Constance Nabwire Langoya, a social worker who became our country director, we not only gave healing workshops, we taught people how to lead these programs and supervised their first experiences of doing it.  They also continue to assist leading other workshops to gain confidence.

Examples of Healing

Men carried 22 year-old Chuol in a wheelchair over a narrow, boulder-strewn path in a UN Protection of Civilians Camp to join our Healing Workshop. Although he had neither been injured nor experienced one major trauma, Chuol had gradually lost his ability to stand and walk. All the trauma around was too much for him.

With us, he learned to tap all over his body, to imagine himself often walking and running easily, to massage his ears, hands and feet frequently and to breathe deeply picturing the oxygen going to every part of his body. By the end of two weeks with us, he could, with support, take a few stiff steps.

About a year later in Juba, I couldn't place where I had met the person before me. He glowed, "I was the man in the wheelchair." Chuol is now at University, playing basketball and a member of our Healing from Trauma team.

Reference for the 'map' of the ear, hands and feet: Roger Jahnke, OMD, The Healer Within.

A True Story of Healing

In a UN Refugee Camp in Maban, South Sudan (near the Ethiopian border in the north), a man needed to go to the hospital every morn and evening to have his blood pressure checked. The medical staff was baffled that, after one day with us, his test showed normal blood pressure. It was the same every day. I always tell them, "Do NOT stop taking medicine for blood pressure unless a medical professional tells you." In addition to the other general exercises, he often tapped on the acupressure point for blood pressure under his nose, just above the lips.

I have seen many find healing for blood pressure problems.

Another True Story of Healing

At a Healing Workshop for 100 women in Rumbek, Lakes State, we talked about healthy ways to grieve. Then I invited them to write on a paper 'tear' some names of loved ones killed in the war. Then in turn, we listened and offered words of support as each read aloud one or a few names -- if she wanted to -- and drop the tear into a simple 'crying well' I had constructed. 

With a few tears gently running down her cheeks, Rebecca said one name. Later when I saw her waving her arms and dancing, I asked what was happening. She said she had had painful, frozen shoulder for fifteen years, and when she said her son's name, the frozen shoulder fully released. 

Her son had committed suicide fifteen years before and the grief had lodged in her shoulder.