Sarajevo: Healing the Hidden Wounds of War

When people think of war, they often think of the visible destruction: ruined buildings, shattered roads, and damaged infrastructure. Yet long after the buildings have been repaired, the deeper wounds often remain hidden within the people who lived through the conflict.

Since 2005, I have volunteered six times with Healing Hands Network in Sarajevo, offering healing therapies including Angelic Reiki, massage, reflexology, and other complementary treatments to civilian survivors of the Bosnian War. What continues to astonish me is that, more than three decades after the war ended, many people are still carrying the effects of the trauma they experienced.

The first time I arrived in Sarajevo, ten years after the war, the scars were everywhere. There were bomb sites across the city, bullet holes in almost every building, and many visible reminders of the siege that had lasted nearly four years. It was impossible to walk through the city without being confronted by the reality of what had happened there.

Today, Sarajevo looks very different. Modern hotels stand where damaged buildings once stood. Most of the bullet holes have been repaired. Cafés and restaurants are full, and tourists stroll through the historic streets. To a visitor arriving for the first time, it might seem that the city has completely recovered.

Yet beneath this outward transformation, many people continue to live with the physical, psychological and emotional consequences of war. Many lost family members. Some lost limbs, eyes and have shrapnel in their bodies. Others endured years of fear, deprivation, shelling, and sniper attacks. Many still struggle with anxiety, grief, chronic pain, sleep disturbances, and the long-term effects of trauma.

One lady I treated had been continually raped and made to dig holes in the ground with her bare hands. Another had seen her two young daughters blown up by a bomb as they went into their garden. One mother, then at the age of thirteen saw her father blown up by a mine as he walked out of their front door.

One child of six, now in his thirties, had picked up a toy car in the street, taken it home and when he dropped it on the floor had his right arm blown off and lost the sight in one eye. Can you imagine the mentality of people who put bombs in children’s toys. He is now a determined athlete and weight lifter and has had many medals for his achievements.

Many of the clients have bad backs and shoulders from having had to carry heavy containers of water every day to their homes and many of the men have lasting injuries from being beaten with iron rods in the concentration camps. Mindless cruelty.
As therapists, we often witness how deeply these experiences remain embedded in the body, mind, and spirit. Time alone does not heal every wound. For many clients, the opportunity to receive a caring, compassionate therapy session provides something they rarely experience in everyday life: a safe space where they can relax, feel supported, and reconnect with a sense of peace.

Over the years I have seen again and again how healing touch, presence, and genuine compassion can make a difference. Sometimes the changes are subtle. Sometimes they are profound. A client who arrives tense and withdrawn always leaves smiling. Someone carrying years of emotional burden may finally feel able to release a little of what they have been holding inside. We do not erase the past, but we can help people find moments of comfort, resilience, and hope.

The work of Healing Hands Network depends entirely on volunteers. Sadly, since the covid pandemic, the number of therapists able to travel and participate has fallen significantly. Many of the long-serving volunteers are now reaching an age when travelling and working abroad becomes more challenging. Last year, one of our therapists was still volunteering at the remarkable age of 80, having returned year after year for 24 years. I am now 75 myself.

This dedication is inspiring, but it also highlights an urgent need. We need a new generation of therapists to continue this work.

If you are a practitioner of Angelic Reiki, massage, reflexology, or another complementary therapy, I encourage you to consider volunteering. You do not need to be a hero. You simply need a willingness to offer your skills, your compassion, and your presence to people who continue to live with the consequences of conflict.

We are not just from the UK. Therapists come from Italy, Germany, France, even the USA and New Zealand, so the opportunity is open to any therapist from anywhere. It helps to be able to speak English. The younger clients can speak English and the older clients speak German and Russian as well as their native language. We have two wonderful translators, Nadija, who is also our secretary, and Amela, who accompanies us when we go to outreach places. We have a beautiful clinic with stunning views over the city, mountains all around.

You can go for a week, two weeks, three weeks or more and we have one dedicated masseur, Nick, who is there for 7 weeks this year. I was with him for three weeks in May and he’s returning for the last four weeks.

It costs us money to go. We have to save up or fund raise, but the rewards are immense. Volunteers often speak of receiving as much as they give. Working alongside therapists from different backgrounds, meeting extraordinary people, and witnessing the resilience of the human spirit can be a deeply moving experience.

Sarajevo may no longer display the visible scars that greeted me in 2005, but the need for healing remains. The wounds of war do not always disappear when the rebuilding is complete. Through our therapies, we have the opportunity to help heal those invisible wounds and bring comfort where it is still needed.

If this article speaks to you, please consider joining Healing Hands Network and helping to ensure that this valuable work continues for many years to come.

Contact Sue Stretton – he*****************@***il.com
www.healinghandsnetwork.org.uk

Being Different

By Sara Neves de Sousa

In a world that constantly preaches the gospel of “authenticity,” there is a quiet, uncomfortable truth we rarely talk about: being different is still heavily policed.

We love the idea of uniqueness, but the moment someone’s reality diverges from the cultural norm, the social tax is demanded. In the modern era, standing out doesn’t just make you an outlier; it often makes you a target for a modern, subtle kind of stigma.

When we view this dynamic through a spiritual lens, the experience of being “different” transforms from a social grievance into a profound, often painful, evolutionary journey.

The Modern Paradox of Diversity

We live in an era of hyper-individualism, yet true deviation from the collective script is met with immediate friction. Today’s stigma rarely looks like overt exile.

Today’s stigma manifests through pathologization, where normal variations in human processing, sensitivity, or introversion are frequently treated as defects that need to be “fixed” or medicated to maintain corporate or social productivity. Additionally, it appears in digital spaces that promise belonging but often demand rigid ideological conformity, meaning that to hold a nuanced, independent perspective is to risk immediate alienation from both sides of any given aisle. Finally, we see a superficial acceptance where society celebrates “difference” only when it is aesthetically pleasing or marketable, while deep, disruptive differences, those that challenge systemic norms or foundational societal beliefs, are still met with deep discomfort.
Historically and spiritually, the archetype of the outsider is not a tragedy, it is a necessity. Every major spiritual tradition, myth, and philosophical shift was initiated by individuals who could not, or would not, fit into the existing machinery of their time.

Spirituality, at its core, requires an individual to step away from the collective to find truth. When you begin to question inherited dogmas, societal definitions of “success,” or the relentless pace of modern consumerism, a gap opens between you and the crowd.
This gap is where stigma breeds. To those deeply embedded in the matrix of status-seeking and conformity, an individual choosing a different metric for fulfillment can feel like a silent condemnation of their own choices. The response is often ostracization or mockery.
Many who feel profoundly different in today’s world possess high levels of empathy or sensory sensitivity. In a loud, aggressive world, this sensitivity is often stigmatized as weakness or an inability to “hack it.”

From a spiritual perspective, however, this sensitivity is an antenna. It is the capacity to feel the undercurrents of human suffering, the disharmony in our environments, and the subtle beauty of existence. The stigma felt by sensitive individuals is simply the world blaming the mirror for the reflection it shows.

In psychological and spiritual systems alike, certain individuals, often called the “black sheep”, inherit the role of the disruptor within their families or cultures. They are the ones who refuse to carry forward generational trauma, unspoken secrets, or unfulfilled expectations. Because they break the familiar (even if toxic) rhythm of the group, they bear the brunt of the group’s discomfort. Being the one who changes the script is a lonely, highly stigmatized endeavor.

The weight of being misunderstood or judged is a heavy psychological burden. It triggers our primal fear of being cast out of the tribe, a fear deeply wired into our nervous systems for survival.

But the spiritual invitation of being different is to move from rejection to sovereignty.

True spiritual maturity is achieved when the desire to belong to oneself finally outgrows the desire to belong to the crowd.
When you accept the stigma of being different without letting it embitter you, the nature of the isolation changes. It stops being a prison sentence and becomes a sacred sanctuary. You realize that the friction you feel with the world isn’t a sign that you are broken; it is proof that you are awake.
A monoculture cannot survive; it stagnates and eventually collapses. The people who are “different”, the thinkers, the healers, the highly sensitive, the non-conformists, are the genetic and spiritual diversity that keeps humanity viable.

Experiencing stigma today is an exhausting reality, but it is also the fiery forge of the spirit. It strips away the superficial desire for cheap approval and forces a deeper anchoring into what is real, what is kind, and what is true. To be different today is to be part of an ancient lineage: the keepers of nuance in a world of binaries.

Love Blessings

Sara

Sara Neves de Sousa
Angelic Reiki Master Teacher, New Shamballa Master Teacher and Golden Heart
Merkabah of Creation Master Teacher

Some Zen Wisdom
Abraxas continues its exploration of posts from Kevin Core’s blog, which he started in January 2008 and focuses on a book by Tim Freke called Zen Wisdom.

Below you will find a quote selected from Tim’s book which is followed by Kevin’s explanation.

You may also like to visit Kevin’s blog at shamballazen.blogspot.co.uk

Shamballa Zen

5th January

There are in Zen no sacred books of dogmatic tenets. If I am asked, therefore, what Zen teaches, I would answer Zen teaches nothing.
Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they came out of one’s own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
D. T. Suzuki

The Enigma of Zen is here illustrated. Zen cannot be quantified, described or explained. It is non doing. It is everything that is not. All the books and teachings describing Zen are not Zen. They are a path to a state of non -consciousness where the books, teachings and reader disappears.

16th February

However much you try through logical reasoning and definition to know your original
face before your birth or your original home, you are doomed to failure.
Even if you search the core of your being, becoming full of questioning, you won’t find
anything that you could call a personal mind or essence. Yet when someone calls your
name, something in you hears and responds.
Find out who it is! Find out now!
Bassui Tokusho.

At the very core of your being there is no personal mind or essence. If someone calls your
name and you respond, ask, “Who is it that hears?”

10th March

In a certain sense Zen is feeling life instead of feeling something about life.
Alan Watts.

This quote is reiterating that life is meant to be lived not thought about. Expressing life
not thinking about expressing it.

4th May

The person who dallies on the edge of the stream, wondering how best to take the
plunge, testing the water with his toes, and thinking about how it will feel when he is in,
soon gets into the habit of putting off the issue. The Zen disciple must walk quietly to
the edge and slip calmly into the water without further ado, without allowing himself
time to conjure up fears and anxious speculations as to what it will be like, or to find
elaborate reasons as to why he should not get in at once.
Alan Watts.

No explanation needed.

Your daily existence here is the rice. See how we constantly boil it?

Thank you

We hope you’ve enjoyed the newsletter and we’ll be back for the Autumn Equinox edition.
In the meantime, to get in touch about any of the articles or share any AR experiences, please contact Sara who will love to hear from you.

Previous issues of Abraxas can be found here