For many mornings of the past two years, 70 of my Gazan colleagues at the Center for Mind-Body Medicine have left their tents—overrun by bugs and rats, repeatedly threatened by bombs and missiles that have landed nearby—to teach basic trauma healing self-care to others in Gaza who have endured unimaginable loss.

On our weekly Zoom calls, they have described walking as quickly as they can, often for as long as two hours, to the tents and rubble-heaped spaces where they gather 20 or 25 children and adults. There, in a two-hour workshop, they teach them slow deep breathing to balance autonomic nervous systems locked in a never-ending cycle of agitated fight or flight. Then, playing rhythmic driving music on their cell phones, they ask everyone to stand, shake bodies rigid with fear, and then to dance to traditional Islamic tunes—to find a small space of freedom. At the end of the session, they hand out paper and crayons (that they have somehow miraculously found) and encourage people to draw feelings too deep for words.

As founder and CEO of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, I’ve been to Gaza 20 times since 2002, when I began to develop our program of population-wide trauma healing, parallel to the one on the other side of the Erez Crossing that I was creating with my Israeli colleagues. We have created similar programs in Kosovo, Ukraine, and here in the U.S. after mass shootings and climate-related disasters. The programs in Gaza and Israel started small. Invitations came from mental-health professionals overwhelmed by the extent and depth of trauma, and they........

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