Ex-Wonks for Inner Peace

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)

The human pain she witnessed also took a toll. "You were dealing with people who had lost everything," she said. "I can remember talking with displaced people, refugees, and the women were showing me their knife wounds and their bullet wounds and the photos of their missing or dead relatives."

A lingering cold cleared up only after a progressive doctor back home prescribed herbs and supplements, she said. It sparked her interest in holistic medicine, which treats the body and mind as a unit.

Although she began to feel better physically, she said, she still was unprepared for the shock of returning to the United States. The contrast with the deprivation she had grown accustomed to was "paralyzing."

"I feel like I was part of a sociological experiment on reentry," she said. "If I had to go out and run an errand, I would go to a 7-Eleven or one of those gas stations, because it was just literally too overwhelming for me to go to a supermarket."

She was about to begin study for a master's degree in public health when she got a call from Lieberman's office, a week before presidential candidate Al Gore named the Connecticut senator as his running mate. That brought a distinctly Washington-type pressure into her life, as did her later job at the State Department, where she met Colley.

He also had begun looking into alternative ways to deal with stress. As a longtime fighter pilot, he never thought he fit the aggressive stereotype, he said, but "I had to learn some things, not part of my personality so much, that you have to do to survive in that environment." In the city's power corridors, he could see the consequences of a pressure-packed existence.

"Some people are taking 14 pills every day, when they're not taking any responsibility for changing the way they think about themselves," he said.

Colley said it was a little unnerving to give up his old career and start anew. "You identify yourself with some work that you've done every day for a long period of time," he said. "But we felt we could contribute more to helping people survive that kind of environment because we know what the stresses are.

"We have a lot of friends who are still there," he said.

Matt Bennett, who has known Moore for years and had heard of her new enterprise, asked for her help in learning to relax. A veteran of government service, he is vice president for public affairs at Third Way, a progressive think tank he helped found.

"We have all the pressure of politics, combined with those of running a small start-up, so the stress is pretty severe -- plus, I have two small kids," he said. He has been trying to follow Moore's detailed instructions on diet, nutrition and relaxation techniques. And they seem to be working, he said, although "I admit that 'mindful eating' is proving tough, especially at business lunches."

But there is a limit.

"I'm sure Kelly would tell me to toss the BlackBerry in the Potomac," he said, "but I can only go so far."