“Coming home is harder than fighting in the war.”
– Congressman Patrick Murphy
Clay Hunt was a fighter in every sense of the word. He fought for years, both literally and figuratively, before finally ending his life all alone in a Texas apartment. He was educated, handsome, young, accomplished – it didn’t make sense at casual first glance. A Marine, Clay came home from multiple combat deployments with raging symptoms of PTSD and survivor’s guilt. He had lost friends and seen more than he ever wanted to.
The clash between yoga and warrior cultures –
I will always be proud to have been a Marine, but after becoming a yoga teacher, I think about pride differently than I used to. I used to think strength meant presenting an image of strong silence and always looking like I had everything together. Yoga taught me about vulnerability, honesty, and connecting authentically with the people around me, letting them see both my light and dark. We have to be honest about where we are hurting, or where we fell down.
I’ve fallen down pretty hard before and it took me too long to get back up because I didn’t know that people might be okay with an imperfect version of me. Marines aren’t supposed to be sad. Marines aren’t supposed to screw up. I was. I did.
What if I had completed training designed to increase self-awareness and promote resilience? What if PTSD was something I knew to look for in myself and others rather than ridicule as the province of the malingerer? Understanding warrior culture thoroughly only underscores the need for mindfulness training – it is all about stigma. Right now we are losing more veterans to suicide than to combat. I’m a pretty decisive person with a limited ability to ask for help and zero trouble taking risks – I was almost one of those statistics.
I teach yoga today because I know how it saved my life.
The suicide numbers among active duty military personnel eclipsed the number of combat deaths in 2011. Before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the incidence of suicide in active duty US service members was consistently 25% lower than in civilians.
Yoga offers something special and completely reframes the issue of treatment.
The idiosyncratic messages of warrior subculture make sense to me. I grew up in a military family where “civilian” was synonymous with a host of pejorative insults. I joined the Marine Corps in college to test myself. I doubted whether twenty-mile hikes or back-breaking obstacle courses were within the scope of things I could physically accomplish- I quickly learned that they were; they had to be. In those early years as a Marine, I got very good at presenting a veneer of stoic professionalism at all times. Presenting the certain, effective façade required some incredibly useful skills – skills that become incredibly destructive when you never learn how to turn them off.
The above description fits most Marines. We tend to be a driven, dysfunctional lot. I was a bit of a performance junkie and my desire to constantly display an ideal version of myself in front of others has caused incredible heartache and alienation. I weathered deployment, loss, injury of loved ones, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and divorce completely alone and in an unhealthy way. I share this not because any of it is particularly interesting, but because it is particularly common and normal in the military community, I call home.
Why Yoga for veterans?
The answer has to lie outside the contemporary standard of care. Yoga can do that.
I came across yoga as an athlete looking for something fun to try, something new to master, and something to help me bend my unyielding muscles a bit more easily. What I found on the mat changed my life entirely. I found a practice that was about more than my body, my training, and was something I could practice and study while joyously never “mastering.”
Our bodies were made to move in constant search of unity with our minds and spirits. It is a natural stillness that those who have felt it love, pursue, and fight to regain if lost. When we discuss the sorts of trauma and injuries our veterans have experienced, I believe we need to bring mindfulness into the conversation around treatment and prevention. Pills and therapy are not enough to return this active, passionate community to full health after trauma. We won’t seek them out and we won’t ask for help.
While clinical health services exist for soldiers and Marines with existing mental health conditions like post-traumatic stress, they are not stemming the rising tide of service suicides. Framing mindfulness training as a way to “bulletproof your brain” renders the practices palatable within the confines of warrior culture. Marines and soldiers are competitive individualists who respond much better to notions of challenge than to victim or patient identities. I teach yoga because it asks the practitioner to work at creating mental fitness and resilience, and I know no other way to reach my peers with such effect.
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Article by Dr. Kate Hendricks Thomas, Assistant Professor of Health Promotion at Charleston Southern University and former Marine Corps Officer. Kate serves as Co-Chair of the Community-Based Organizations track for the Service Member to Civilian Summit.