October 1, 2007
Soldier's Heart is a veterans' return and healing
project addressing the emotional and spiritual needs of veterans,
their families and communities. Soldier's Heart promotes and guides
community-based efforts to heal the effects of war based on
strategies presented in "War and the Soul".
SOLDIER’S HEART HOLDS CONFERENCE,
AT THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY
Soldier’s Heart is about healing. It is also about forming
community. On September 13th we gathered at the Theosophical Society
in Wheaton, IL to once again create a safe and trusting circle of
veterans, their families, helping professionals and concerned
citizens. We told stories, held each other, ate together, cried,
laughed and sang. When we said goodbye on Sunday, we were all
transformed. Many thanks to the Theosophical Society for providing
us with wonderful hospitality. Here are a few comments from those
who there.
David Bland, General Manager, Theosophical
Society in America:
The staff of the our Center was so impacted by the
spirit of the group and the pervading sense of healing that they
have asked me to schedule another Workshop next year. This was the
first time that we have had the opportunity to share our campus and
its aura of love and wholeness with people who have given so much.
The workshop truly became our blessing.
I saw the dream I had the night Ed and I discussed
the yet unborn War and the Soul be more than I had ever thought it
could be. To be a part of men and women finding their souls when
they had almost forgotten what a soul is has and will continue to be
one of my greatest blessings.
Patty Hall, workshop participant:
My father is a WWII vet. I never before gave this
any thought, even when looking at his old black and white crinkly
edged photographs. And as a mother of a 17 year old son, am
mortified at the thought of what it took for him to volunteer. I
also never thought back to the fact that his own father, my
grandfather, served in World War I. Their marriage and household was
also broken apart. And still our whole family wonders,"What's wrong
with dad?"
So much is clear about what had been a looming dark shadow that I
couldn't make disappear 100%. Although I had longed to hand out the
olive branch to what has been both a strained and abusive
relationship, I have been hesitant for fear of outright hurting the
man who once was a loving father. I now feel like I have the tools
and understanding I need to approach him with compassion and
understanding, which are two elements that were all but missing
before I took your workshop.
John D. Zemler, Combat veteran, Artillery
captain:
Our Journey from the Valley of the Shadow of Death
to the Holy Mountain
Massive uncontrolled healing occurred at this workshop because
within it our lives have been valued and affirmed, and called to
further service on the path of true warriorhood. The Theosophical
Society facilitated this healing by kindly allowing us the sacred
holy ground to plow, plant, and grow new and renewed life. They
allowed us to take the Hero’s Journey together and emerge as matured
warriors. Our lives and our wounds - both physical and soul wounds -
were told and expressed, honored, and embraced.
Many of us, in a multitude of ways, were suffering when we arrived.
Our souls bore the wounds of our lives. In biblical terms, we
suffered from a “fever,” an ailment that debilitates, disables, and
attempts to kill its victim; an infection that alienates us from all
of our positive relationships and reasons to stay alive. Throughout
our time together we managed to accept the hand of the Luminous
Other to raise us from our deathly fever to our new life, whether
that hand was seen as the hand of Jesus, the Bodhisattva, the Elder
Spirit, or simply another one of our own circle, our own lodge.
Souls that had been rendered dark, emerged, showing light.
Men and women were able to begin to expel the alienating identity of
PTSD, the identity of the killing fever, and to recover their own
names, their own identities, their own souls. In doing so they were
raised from a slow death to a realized life. Many of our complement
had been walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Death for
decades on an endless patrol, unable to ascend to the Holy Mountain,
a place of rest, light, and life. The workshop allowed us to walk
out of the dark valley and embrace the light. And, depending upon
where we are in our individual journeys, some of us can now walk
back in and help carry out those whose souls are still too wounded
to redeploy back home on their own.
Our current steps may still involve tears of both mourning and joy,
and a limp or a tremor. We still feel pain. This is because wounded
healers often make the best healers. Regardless of the shape of our
physical frames, because of our Hero’s Journey together, our steps
now fall with integrity, meaning, and life. Massive uncontrolled
healing occurred at this Workshop because our lives have been valued
and affirmed. and called to further service on the path of true
warriorhood. And, because of this healing, I offer all my thanks and
praise to that which is Holy.
Elik Press Presents
presents
WILD BEASTS AND WANDERING SOULS:
Shamanism and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
By Ed Tick
This important work explores the values, concepts
and practices from shamanism that are most helpful in understanding
the combat experience and healing the war-wounded soul. The
originality of Ed Tick’s healing vision is stunning in its boldness
and couldn’t come at a better time. This new essay from one of our
best practitioners draws its strength as much from a deep empathy as
it does from the radical approach to a most difficult concern.
Finally, fugitives are given a real hope of returning home.”
Andrew Hoffmann, Ph.D.,
University of Utah
Available from:
Soldier’s Heart
P.O. Box 8564
Albany, New York 12208
518-463-0588
www.soldiersheart.net
Elik Press
962 E. Lowell Ave.
Salt Lake City, UT 84102
www.elikpress.com
$6.00 includes shipping
or free upon request with your tax-deductible contribution of $25 or
more to Soldier’s Heart
Ed Tick to Speak at Walter Reed
Soldier’s Heart Director, Ed Tick, will offer an
all day seminar to the staff of Walter Reed Army Hospital on Friday,
Oct. 5, on “Spirituality and Traumatic Stress.” The hospital has
ordered 350 copies of WAR AND THE SOUL to distribute to staff at the
facility and chaplains abroad. The presentation will be simulcast to
other U.S. military facilities around the globe.
For more information or attendee registration, contact Chaplain
(Major) Kristi Pappas,
Senior Chaplain Clinician, Department of Ministry & Pastoral Care,
Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Office: (202) 782-6305 / 2090,
E-mail:
kristi.pappas@us.army.mil
A Soldier’s Heart
Dr. John W. Fisher, Viet Nam Warrior
Author, Angels In Viet Nam, Not Welcome Home
What is a soldier’s heart? It has become a
foundation structured from the work of Dr. Ed Tick and his book War
and the Soul. His work is about helping combat soldiers reconnect
with their own identity. The identity is the spirit of an individual
and is seated into the depths of the ventricles in the heart. It is
the “Being within”―the core of your very existence. In a soldier’s
heart, the very relationship with this light is gone. The
stethoscope still reverberates the thumping from its chambers and
all seems fine. All is not fine, however, because the Being and
human are no longer connected. This part of a soldier’s heart,
estranged from its soul, must weep in the darkness.
Veterans come home after combat and endeavor to
live a normal life. Then later, well after the war has been fought,
they realize that something is wrong. Their memories haunt them and
make them strangers to the rest of the world. Nobody seems concerned
how they feel or what they dream about at night. They think that
nobody cares. They try to live a normal life, but it isn’t normal.
It’s a life without an identity. Doctors describe it as PTSD (post
traumatic stress disorder), but the disorder was there way before
the diagnosis was given. The syndrome can be seen in all veterans.
Dr. Tick calls it a post terror soul disorder (PTSD).
Soldiers come home and are influenced by their
cultures and spirituality. Their reception from the community
dictates their “welcome home.” Greek and Native American, even
Vietnamese soldiers were given high regards from their societies
following battle. Culturally they were honored for their duty.
Spiritually they were honored for the deity that lives within them.
Sins were forgiven. They felt very welcome to come home and knew
that their nation cared. Honored as warriors, they felt a kinship
with their very own soul. Most did not experience post terror soul
disorder. The “welcome home” was the vital component the soldiers
needed to retrieve their souls. It made the difference between a
normal life or a self-tortured life.
Besides the retrieval of the soul, however, there
is another part to a soldier’s heart. It’s something that doesn’t go
away, no matter how well the warrior is able to sleep at night. It’s
the part which shudders at the sound of fireworks on the Fourth of
July, the part which sheds tears during a war scene in a movie, and
which feels the horror of combat when another K.I.A. is announced on
the news. This aspect of the soldier’s heart is different from the
rest of the population, except for other soldiers. This has become
the brotherhood that soldiers/veterans/warriors feel for one
another. This kindred connection is because they all know the
difference within their hearts.
And this brotherhood is world wide, including
veterans from all wars, historic or modern. On a recent trip to
Vietnam, several American veterans, some with PTSD, met their former
enemy. The Vietnamese warriors welcomed their former foes into their
arms with celebration and ceremony because they shared the bonds
from war. South Vietnamese, Lao-Hmong, Australian and Korean allies
to the Americans during the Vietnam War are also within the
brotherhood. The difference within their hearts that they have in
common keeps them from ever being estranged from each other. They
all experience the part of the soldier’s heart that keeps them from
ever forgetting, even if the light of soul has been retrieved. It is
the part that still cries.
Important for all warriors, however, is that they
realize the crying for what it is. Those coming home without an
appropriate cultural and spiritual welcoming are destined to
experience soul disorder. It may take many years to come to terms
with this loss of identity, and in the meantime those inflicted may
instead begin to identify with the disorder itself. Vietnam War
veterans have been living in the dark for more than 30 years. It’s
all they know, even if they have had profound healing. The tears
that seem to flow without reason do not indicate they have lost soul
once again. The crying is not grieving about the war. It is an
expression of the pain stored in the soldier’s heart. Warriors will
always be different from non-warriors.
There’s more room in a broken heart. One can never
erase the horrors of war. Hearts have been broken in so many ways,
but the scars that mend it back together leave more room with a
larger aperture for the reclaimed light from the “Being within” to
shine. When warriors die, they know that they’re going to heaven,
because they’ve already spent their time in hell. Leaving the hell
in the war, realizing the identity with soul, understanding tears
for what they are, the warrior becomes a unique character within his
society that traverses above the rest with honor and wisdom. This
accomplishment makes them spiritual warriors and they no longer have
to die to experience heaven.
Heaven is on earth for the spiritual warrior with a soldier’s heart.
Report From
Nome, Alaska, July 2007
Larry Winters, Viet Nam Veteran,
Psychotherapist, Author, The Making and Unmaking of a Marine
Tom Punguk is a native Alaskan Viet Nam Army veteran who was in
country from 1967 to 1968. I met him during a trip I made to Nome
Alaska in July of 2007. I am a psychotherapist working at Four Winds
Hospital in Kantona NY. I was in Nome to teach Native Alaskan mental
health workers group psychotherapy skills. I am also a Viet Nam vet
who served in the Marines from 1969 to 1970.
When I finished teaching the four day workshop my
friend Greg, a Social Work administrator for Norton Sound Health
Corporation, and the man who'd invited me to come to teach in Nome
said he'd take me to Golovin to meet Tom.
Golovin was a village of one hundred and fifty people a few
hundred miles south of Nome. The twelve seat prop plane took off
from Nome airport flying south over a vast tundra of lowing lying
shrub. We did not begin to see real trees until we neared Golivin.
Tom's house sat on the side of a hill. Several set of antlers were
nailed to fading red siding of the house. A four wheeler sat just in
front of the side door. Tools, skins, and all kinds of
unidentifiable things were nailed up to the outside walls of the
house. It looked more like the walls of a workshop than a house. As
we entered I noticed a high caliber rifle leaning against the wall
to the entrance way.
Tom invited us to sit in his living room. I sat on a
couch, Greg sat in a chair and Tom pulled out a small wooden stool
placing it right in front of us. I told Tom that I was a Viet Nam
vet and wanted to speak with him about his experiences in the War.
He agreed, nodding.
I surveyed
the room and saw a long silvery pelt hanging on the door jam that
led from the living room to the kitchen. I asked what it was, and
Tom answered, "It's a lynx. I shot it last winter and I'm going to
send it off to my sister. She said she wanted it."
I started
asked Tom questions about the war and his time in the Army. He
politely answered them but I soon began to feel awkward so I sat
back on the couch and let him go where he wanted. For the next hour
Tom told us stories.
At the time
there seemed to be no Logic to his stories. I struggled to connect
their meaning. He'd tell us how every year he'd go up river and into
the woods and shoot a moose. He said he'd been doing this his whole
life. He described how he'd skin the animal and how he hauled the
meat home. With almost no breath in between he'd then tell us a Viet
Nam story. "Did I tell you I worked on an island off of
Vietnam? Out there we were in charge of the communication tower. I
was trained in electronic communications. We handled navigational
information concerning the war. It came through our tower. I was
just thinking of the number of people's death that I had something
to do with at that time, it must be huge. The information coming
thorough our tower held the coordinates of where folks were to be
bombed, shot, and ambushed."
Another short
breath and Tom went on. "When I worked up on the oil lines…" After
that story he started with, "I fished my whole life, almost always
alone."
Not until I
got home did I realize that these stories did connect. They came
right out of Tom’s unconscious and into ours. The death, courage,
depravation, and knowledge held in these stories were a form of
teaching that village elders used. There seemed to be no linier
thread holding things together, but I remember each story better
than anything I'd been taught in school.
What I have
been thinking about after coming home is what Tom told me about when
he came home from boot camp. He said he was seen by his village as a
brave man. He had been off training to fight for his country. He'd
been one of the few villagers to leave and to see the larger world
which meant he had new knowledge. As listened I gathered what Tom
meant was that he left Golovin a boy and come back a man, and was
respected as a man by his village. He then told me when he came home
from Viet Nam his role was elevated to war hero. He was known as a
man who stood up for his people, who risked his life for his
country, a man who was well on his way to becoming an elder in his
community, which is what he truly is now. Tom never lost his
identity. In fact, the Vietnam War solidified Tom into the role of
warrior. He said, "I didn't have the same kind of adjustment
problems you guys did down in the lower forty eight. Everyone in the
village looked up to me, and they still do."
And so do I, I thought.
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