By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 27, 2006; B01
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?"
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."