Hannah Patricia Hannon moves office to downtown Lewes March 1

Hannah Patricia Hannon, LCSW, is moving her private therapy practice to downtown Lewes as of March 1. Her office will be at 108 Second St., which also houses Jerry’s Seafood Restaurant. Her practice has focused on healthy weight loss groups, which have been popular and successful and helping individuals and families through stressful times.

A rich and varied life experience enhances Hannon’s approach to her patients.  After working as a therapist for 17 years, she was accepted to Hahnemann Hospital's Physician Assistant Program, one of a handful of students over 50 in a large class of 30-somethings.

She practiced medicine in a multidoctor internal medicine practice for several years in Philadelphia, Pa. and volunteered in an inner-city clinic for homeless men, women and children. She then joined Maryknoll's Lay Mission program and was assigned for three years to rural Peru.

Rural Peru meant the Andes Mountains, altitude 13,000 feet, peopled by the Aymara Indians, who had retreated to the high altitudes as protection against land swindling by earlier Europeans.

The landscape is treeless that far up, and cold, and the farming rugged. She started a simple clinic to serve the surrounding farm communities and trained health promoters to triage patients living in outlying areas. Because she accompanied these workers into remote communities, she saw rituals and preparations for community feasts that she would otherwise not have been permitted to witness. Day to day, she saw healers curing illness with herbs and the amazing work of the bonesetters.

More than anything, she was impressed by the slow pace and the simplicity of the people's lives.  She saw that it was a treat for them just to sit together outdoors on a Sunday and be with family.

Young couples would walk home hand in hand from the fields at the end of a long day. Many of the farmers began with a dawn trip to cold Lake Titicaca to gather the reeds that grew on the bank that served as animal fodder. Her morning wake-up call was often the donkeys clip-clopping by, backs loaded. Hannon already had a meditation practice before she came to Peru, but it became an anchor and a saving grace in that setting.

And so it has been for her since moving to Lewes in 2004. Along with all the years of training and practice to become a therapist and enriching her point of view with medical knowledge, combined with the experience of living in rural Peru, Hannon credits the influence of meditation as key to her work with patients.

Working to become mindful, to be present and compassionate to people also has helped Hannon to become clear on her own path. She realized at one point that she didn't need to choose between working as a physician's assistant or a therapist; what she cared about was being a healer, a bonesetter of hearts and minds.

The new office is another turn in the road and a good place to build her practice in beautiful downtown Lewes. She currently is working at Quakertown Wellness Center in Lewes and can be reached to set up an appointment or to join the current weight loss group at 302-296-8000.