Ex-Wonks for Inner Peace

Policy Veterans Put Holistic Healing on the Hill

Kelly Moore says that when she started with yoga, "I could not even sit up straight without pain." Now she teaches yoga and practices holistic healing. (By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post)

They were once warriors in a New World Order. Now they are envoys for a New Age experience.

During the Balkan wars, Kelly Moore was a spokeswoman for the United Nations. She later served as press secretary to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.). At the State Department after Sept. 11, 2001, her specialty was counterterrorism.

Al Colley, a career Air Force officer, taught at the War College and worked at the State Department on high-level national security issues.

Now the pair preside over a Capitol Hill townhouse with a Buddha fountain trickling quietly in the yard and a small sign saying "Harmonia Health." Inside, candles flicker and soft music wafts from the back. Visitors are asked to shed their shoes and are offered a glass of lemongrass tea.

Only in Washington could one's yoga instructor also be "some kind of expert on how terrorists move around the world and how they penetrate our borders," as Moore put it. Only here would one find a former fighter pilot who now uses his hands, as Colley said, to channel "life-force energy."

For these two former Washington workaholics -- classic examples of the species -- meditation has replaced medication, and their once-hectic lives are now an unmourned memory. With their new business, blocks from the nation's most powerful offices, they hope to reach out to their stress-filled former colleagues.

"We see ourselves as guides," Moore said, "to help people attain balance and harmony in their lives, and therefore health and wellness."

It's a tall order in a town that thrives on nervous tension. Most jobs are desk jobs, meaning necks get cricks, backs get aches and hips get wide. Moore, 38, a registered naturopath with advanced degrees in journalism and East European studies, and Colley, 53, who put aside his own master's in security and strategic studies to become a master teacher in an energy therapy called reiki, understand all that -- they've been there, too.

"I could not even sit up straight without pain," Moore said, describing her own stiff condition at her first yoga class a few years ago. "Here I was, like the Tin Man from 'The Wizard of Oz.' . . . I really couldn't move my body easily. It was almost like it was unused."

Both had athletic childhoods, Moore in suburban Connecticut, Colley in Kentucky. Colley initially wanted to become a doctor but got into "the flying game" and enrolled at the Air Force Academy. An overachiever from a young age, Moore was the cox on the men's crew team at the University of Southern California and worked for the National Football League for a time, but she quickly found "that wasn't really substantive enough."

She found something that was: working for the United Nations in the former Yugoslavia from 1995 to 2000. Among other posts, she was spokeswoman for the prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal. When searchers began digging near Srebrenica in 1998 at a mass grave that contained thousands of corpses, it was Moore who informed the world about the exhumation work.

Life in a war zone, with no electricity or heat, was grim. Fresh food was scarce. "I'd order a salad and get pickles, shredded cabbage and pickled peppers," she recalled. There was little time to exercise, and no place to do it, anyway: "Where are you going to go jogging, down Sniper Alley?"