The Write to Heal: Resilience is a Muscle (Episode 5)

Interview with Captain Moira G. McGuire, former Chief of the Arts in Health Program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence, and Sarah Moore, Community Specialist for Arts and Health at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

In this episode, you'll hear from two remarkable individuals: Retired Captain Moira McGuire, former Chief of the Arts and Health Program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and Nurse Officer with the U.S. Public Health Service and Sarah Moore, Dance Movement Therapist and current Community Specialist for the Arts and Health Program at Walter Reed.

Check out our show notes for more information about their backgrounds as well as relevant links. We hope you enjoy this conversation about the power of storytelling to inspire connection and healing. And do stay to the end because we have a provocative writing prompt we're inviting you, our listener, to sink your teeth into.

I'd like to get your reflections on how the Arts and Health Program actually started at Walter Reed Hospital, because let's be frank, when people think about a military hospital, they're not typically linking that with the arts.

We have a few pianos placed around, particularly in our outpatient pavilion in the America Building. And so he pulled a group of people together, including our Chief of Staff at the time, and said, we need more of this, make it happen. I think this was perhaps impeccable timing in many ways. And unbeknownst to us at the time, of course, we were about to enter into a global pandemic. But I said to him, you know, if you really want piano playing to be sustainable in the hospital, then it has to be part of a program.

It can't just be one or two people who are passionately, you know, shepherding this through. And fortunately, you know, some of the people at the table included senior leaders at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. And they already had a healing arts program with creative arts therapists, and they were willing to help contribute staff positions.

So it was a wonderful kind of perfect storm in a very positive way that brought the program together.

And so then when I went to nursing school and started working, I think that was really my first introduction to the fact that, oh, wait a minute, people actually don't, they don't understand this. And I thought, we need to do something about this. So that's how I got involved. I had no intention, and my first 11 years in nursing was actually in Inpatient Psych.

So again there, right, we all had art therapists, dance movement therapists, music therapists, drama therapists. I mean, it was just part of the menu. As I became more aware of the lack of appreciating the power that these tools have for individuals, that's what really kind of brought me to this work.

Everybody played a different instrument and my dad ended up serving in the Air Force, but he's also a clarinetist at the Atlanta Philharmonic. I went to an art school in high school and I danced from a young age. I started dancing around age four, and I think that arts and health or healing through the arts or sort of this connection with ourselves through the arts started for me at a young age.

I remember saying to my mom over a Christmas break when I was probably 10 or 11 years old, we had only been away from dance for two weeks or something, and I told her my body misses dancing, like I don't feel good. And I got older and really realized that you could replace that with my soul misses creating, or my voice misses singing, my hands miss painting, whatever form of expression really connects with people individually. And then I eventually found my way to the mental health field. I also worked in Inpatient Psych. We have that in common, and I think there I started to see just how necessary it is, how intrinsic it is to human nature to be creative.

I think humanity wouldn't have gotten far at all without creativity. I found the counseling framework that really resonated with me was relational cultural theory, which posits that all healing happens in connection in human relationship, and all trauma also happens in human relationship, and so I think that's where arts and health is like a perfect fit. In addition to that, being in touch with oneself, being able to connect with a deeper part of ourselves.

So one memory that comes to mind is we had a performance happening in the main hospital lobby and a father walked up with his daughter. She was probably about four years old, and she was really enjoying the music. This was what we imagine stereotypically a soldier to look like. He had really big muscles and he had a buzzed haircut. But they stopped and they were listening to the music and she started dancing around and he picked her up and started waltzing around with her.

And you could just see the joy on their faces of this connection - a moment that they got to have as father and daughter. Again, there's a lot of power in community and so I saw other people's faces also soften because they got to see what was happening. And so that definitely stands out to me as some of the magic of what arts and health is.

So that again, we could have music throughout the command regardless of whether you had a human being sitting there playing it. And so we had a little ribbon-cutting when we got our first piano there, and at the end of the ceremony, a gentleman sat down and just started playing. And anytime someone sitting at a piano is playing, I am more than happy to be their audience.

So I sat down to listen. And afterwards he explained to me that he was actually an organ transplant patient and had received an organ a number of years ago. And that the piano that he was playing, which by the way had been retrofitted to be a player piano, he considered saved his life. And I thought, you know, one of the other amazing things about our patient population is that it's really filled with people who are so humble and they do these things quietly in secret without any need for fanfare or saying, look at me.

And I think this is really what we need more of as a society when we consider the relationship between the arts and healing.

It makes a lot of sense to start what neurobiologists say from the bottom up. So from expression and then towards speech and cognitive processing. And the arts are a fantastic way to do that because they really cause individuals to drop in to the present moment and also stay present, which is really important in the process of healing.

So, you know, we do know that there's all kinds of wonderful, magical things going on in our bodies, but I think the other part of arts and health that I love is that it reminds people that whatever you need to be healthy and well, you already have, it already exists inside of you. So from a healthcare perspective, whether this is intentional or not, sometimes the message is that you can't really fix what's going on unless you come to us from an integrative health and wellness perspective.. It's actually just the opposite, right?

We want to know what are you doing well. Where are your strengths? Let's maximize those. When we talked about naming our program, we were very intentional to not use the word heal. Not that it's not very important, but heal kind of denotes injury pr illness. This is about health. This is about prevention. This is about doing these things, not when something happens, but all of the time. And in doing them, it will enhance your sense of well being. It will make you more flexible, resilient, better prepared to manage whatever might happen. Right?

And when you talk about how healthcare is supposed to be person-centered, and I think nothing is more person-centered than arts and health because it truly starts with that person acknowledging that that person is a work of art. You're already coming to us as this amazing Rembrandt, and how can we help you as this amazing work of art achieve your health goals?

Like that metaphor that resilience is a muscle, it's something that we can exercise so that when big, traumatic or stressful life events do come up, we have already this buoyancy of well being to fall back on.

Just start by connecting with your breath, taking a breath in through the nose, and sighing out through your mouth. And then tapping into our visualization, I'll invite you to just bring to your mind's eye the image of a snow globe. Like a glass globe filled with those magical little representations of snow.

And imagine just this morning, just getting into your day, if this snow globe sort of represented your body. How did it start its day? Was the snow calm? Maybe your day started really frantically and it was all shaken up. And staying with your breath again, just staying with a consistent breath, breathing in, finding a steady exhale, you can bring to mind anything that might have shaken up that snow globe this morning.

And as you exhale, just allow the snow in this image in your mind's eye to just begin to slowly fall and find rest and calm, and stay with that sense of peace that might be in that image. And then just hear this truth that you always have the ability inside of you. When things get shaken up, when things are chaotic, to find that calm, and as we start to come back together, I'll invite you to just bring a little movement into your fingers and toes.

Notice if anywhere in your body you might need to stretch. And if your eyes were closed, you can blink your eyes open and we'll just take one more of those cleansing breaths, in through the nose and really sigh it out. Awesome. Thank you.

I think it's a balance between things that we're taking care of our physical body, also taking care of our spiritual selves, and that can be hard just based on the time constraints, but I think it's really important to do it in a balanced way, not let that kind of stuff slip.

And I know for a lot of people it was very, very, very difficult. So, you know, just looking forward to returning to some of the modalities I engaged in on a regular basis and adding a few more. I want to start weaving, painting, throwing pots. I don't know. I'm going to be doing all kinds of stuff.

They received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to do this project, and they went about it in such a beautifully organic way. By asking individuals who were not dancers necessarily, not performers, to share their stories and really artistically and creatively and organically pulling this whole performance out of those stories.

So there was singing involved, there were monologues and speech, and also dance. And it was just a beautiful night and a tapestry of different people's experiences.

Some of the telehealth was going on, but in a more limited capacity, so it really pushed us into these new domains you know, and it's no small feat to create trust and establish even intimacy in an online setting with people who are coming to you from a variety of backgrounds; you have no idea what they're bringing with them.

And I have just been so in awe of June's ability to make people feel safe, to make people feel heard. I think that very, very few people could do what she does, and I will be eternally grateful that we found her and that she was there for us. Because I cannot begin to describe the impact that she has had for our patients and staff.

The Write to Heal: Soldiers Deep Dive into Storytelling is a production of Artist Soapbox in partnership with June Guralnick. This series is dedicated in memory of David Brave Heart, who's inspiring music graces our introduction and closing sections with additional music by Louis Wilkinson. The intro montage is sound engineered by Royce Froehlich with post-production by Jasmine Hunjan and Tamara Kissane.

For more information, including the list of writers who contributed to our opening montage, please see the show notes. Catch us on social media, or visit our websites: artistsoapbox.org and juneguralnick.com.