Healing the hidden wounds of soldiers

Healing the hidden wounds of soldiers

Craig and Marc Kielburger

In yoga, the warrior pose represents the spiritual strength of the person performing the move.

As Lucy Cimini slowly leads her students into the posture at the Central Mass Yoga Institute, it takes on new meaning.

The men standing firm-footed with their arms outstretched are not your typical yoga students. They are warriors – actual ones, not just spiritual.

Cimini’s Yoga Warriors program, which was started for veterans of Vietnam and has grown to include those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, uses the tenets of the meditative discipline to teach coping strategies for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Men come out the service and they are just so stressed out,” she says. “It’s very hard to get veterans to come forward and join a group like that. When they’re in it though, they know it actually helps them.”

Help can be one of the hardest things to ask for, especially for veterans. PTSD has often held stigma in the armed forces. Historically, it was referred to as battle fatigue or shell shock before being officially recognized as an illness in 1980.
read more here
Healing the hidden wounds of soldiers