CENTER FOR MIND-BODY MEDICINE

CMBM's program model is one of the world’s most comprehensive and effective for healing population-wide psychological trauma. We have trained more than 8,000 clinicians, educators, and community leaders in the U.S. and around the world.

Over the last 30 years, CMBM’s trained clinicians, educators, and community leaders have successfully brought a program of self-care and trauma relief to hospitals, clinics, and faith-based organizations in the US and around the world. CMBM has focused on developing programs that address some of the world’s most challenging health and mental health issues. These include psychological trauma experienced in areas of war and natural disaster; life-threatening illnesses; the aftermath of mass violence; incarcerated individuals; stress and burnout among healthcare workers, first responders, and teachers; and much more.

CMBM’s international faculty of 150 experts have trained more than 8,000 health professionals, educators, and community leaders in our pioneering mind-body medicine model of self-care, self-awareness, and group support; they in turn integrate our model into their communities and use it with the populations they serve, benefiting millions of people.

CMBM has implemented successful, large-scale programs with conflict-affected populations in Kosovo, Gaza and Israel, Syrian refugees in Jordan, and in Ukraine. We have worked extensively with communities that have experienced natural and climate-related disasters in Haiti, Southern Louisiana; Houston, Texas; Northern California; and Puerto Rico. CMBM has also implemented dozens of city- and county-wide programs in the U.S., including with the Broward County School District, FL, and with the Mayor’s Office in Baton Rouge, LA. CMBM has also partnered with the US Veterans Administration since 2019, integrating our model into its core services throughout VISN 8 (Florida, Southern Georgia, and the Caribbean), the largest division of the VA, serving 1.6 million Veterans.

The efficacy of CMBM’s model with traumatized children, adolescents, and adults, as well as highly stressed health professionals, has been demonstrated in over 25 studies published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals. CMBM published the first randomized controlled trial of any intervention with war-traumatized children. In that and subsequent studies, CMBM’s group model has repeatedly reduced the percentage of adults and children who qualify as having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) by 80% or more, with gains holding at 3- and 10-month follow ups. Published research also demonstrates statistically significant decreases in depression, hopelessness, anxiety, anger and sleep disturbance, and increases in mindfulness, self-efficacy, and quality of life.

CMBM was founded in 1991 by James S. Gordon, MD, a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown Medical School, and former chair of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy under Presidents Clinton and G.W. Bush.

CMBM's trauma healing programs have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Forbes Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Jerusalem Post, as well as on CBS' 60 Minutes, the NBC Nightly News, and MSNBC. Writing about CMBM's program with war traumatized US military, The New York Times Pulitzer prize winning columnist Tina Rosenberg said: "The Center for Mind-Body Medicine’s Program..is the most comprehensive of all of them..and it is the one with the strongest evidence that it works to cure PTSD."