Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice

Recasting burnout as a crucial phase of service, Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice uses real-world case studies to teach professionals and volunteers unique skills for cultivating resilience. Viewing service and burnout as interdependent throughout phases of stability, collapse, reorganization, and exploitation, the book uniquely combines elements of adaptive resilience theory with contemplative practices and pedagogies. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working at the intersection of service and contemplative practices, this is the first book to demonstrate how and why professionals and volunteers can reframe burnout as an opportunity for resilience-building service. User-friendly case studies provide tools, skills, and exercises for reconstructive next steps. Chapters address personal, group, and structural levels of service and burnout. Illuminating the link between adaptive resilience and burnout as a normal and useful phase of service, Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice is a necessary resource for professionals and volunteers across a wide range of service settings.

Burnout, imposter syndrome, changes in higher education, issues of free speech, structural inequality—the challenges facing academics today are daunting and overwhelming. How do we balance all of our responsibilities and goals without becoming exhausted? How do scholars decide if activism is right for them, and if so, what form should it take? There is, fortunately, great wisdom, solace, and practical advice for the modern academic in ancient wisdom traditions, indigenous cultures, and contemplative practices like meditation from around the world. In Resilience and Resitance through Contemplative Practice: Zen and the Anxious Academic, the author argues that contemplative practice is not a substitute for social change or a band-aid for the difficulties academics face, but rather a powerful tool in building resilience and resistance to forces that undermine our well-being. Learn, for example, how Jungian psychology and ancient dream practices can help with academic writing, how the concept of dharma can lead us to discern our vocation and if activism is the right path for us, and how meditation can help us rediscover our innate self-worth in a culture where value is judged by narrow definitions of productivity and achievement. With these tools and insights, we can create positive change in both our inner and outer worlds.

These days it’s hard to count on the world outside. So it’s vital to grow strengths inside like grit, gratitude, and compassion—the key to resilience, and to lasting well-being in a changing world. True resilience is much more than enduring terrible conditions. We need resilience every day to raise a family, work at a job, cope with stress, deal with health problems, navigate issues with others, heal from old pain, and simply keep on going. With his trademark blend of neuroscience, mindfulness, and positive psychology, New York Times bestselling author Dr. Rick Hanson shows you how to develop twelve vital inner strengths hardwired into your own nervous system. Then no matter what life throws at you, you’ll be able to feel less stressed, pursue opportunities with confidence, and stay calm and centered in the face of adversity. This practical guide is full of concrete suggestions, experiential practices, personal examples, and insights into the brain. It includes effective ways to interact with others and to repair and deepen important relationships. Warm, encouraging, and down-to-earth, Dr. Hanson’s step-by-step approach is grounded in the science of positive neuroplasticity. He explains how to overcome the brain’s negativity bias, release painful thoughts and feelings, and replace them with self-compassion, self-worth, joy, and inner peace.

Inspired by Richard Rohr, Ronald Rolheiser, Belden Lane, and Thomas Merton, Desert Spirituality for Men reveals the transformative and healing power of the desert—for men who actively seek God. Blending a memoir of his son’s fight for life, reflections on his own desert retreats and response to the Lord’s persistent desire for relationship, Brad Karelius offers guidance to men in their holy longing for God. An Episcopal priest for fifty years, Professor of Philosophy for forty-five years, husband, and father, Karelius also tells about the power of his friendship with six remarkable men, and he describes some of their well-founded prayer practices which will sustain and nurture any man in his quest. This book will encourage men of all callings and stages in life to plan their own retreats to the desert—where God lives and gives life.

This handbook addresses the educational uses of mindfulness in schools. It summarizes the state of the science and describes current and emerging applications and challenges throughout the field. It explores mindfulness concepts in scientific, theoretical, and practical terms and examines training opportunities both as an aspect of teachers’ professional development and a means to enhance students’ social-emotional and academic skills. Chapters discuss mindfulness and contemplative pedagogy programs that have produced positive student outcomes, including stress relief, self-care, and improved classroom and institutional engagement. Featured topics include: A comprehensive view of mindfulness in the modern era. Contemplative education and the roots of resilience. Mindfulness practice and its effect on students’ social-emotional learning. A cognitive neuroscience perspective on mindfulness in education that addresses students’ academic and social skills development. Mindfulness training for teachers and administrators. Two universal mindfulness education programs for elementary and middle school students. The Handbook of Mindfulness in Education is a must-have resource for researchers, graduate students, clinicians, and practitioners in psychology, psychiatry, education, and medicine, as well as counseling, social work, and rehabilitation therapy.

Joy Unspeakable focuses on the aspects of the Black church that point beyond particular congregational gatherings toward a mystical and communal spirituality not within the exclusive domain of any denomination. This mystical aspect of the black church is deeply implicated in the well-being of African American people but is not the focus of their intentional reflection. Moreover, its traditions are deeply ensconced within the historical memory of the wider society and can be found in Coltrane's riffs, Malcolm's exhortations, the social activism of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. The research in this book-through oral histories, church records, and written accounts--details not only ways in which contemplative experience is built into African American collective worship but also the legacy of African monasticism, a history of spiritual exemplars, and unique meditative worship practices. A groundbreaking work in its original edition, Joy Unspeakable now appears in a new, revised edition to address the effects of this contemplative tradition on activism and politics and to speak to a new generation of readers and scholars.

This volume explores mindfulness and other contemplative approaches as strategic tools for cultivating anti-oppressive pedagogies in higher education. Research confirms that simply providing students with evidence and narratives of economic, social, and environmental injustices proves insufficient in developing awareness and eliciting responses of empathy, solidarity, and a desire to act for change. From the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, legal studies, psychology, and counseling, educators from a range of geographical and disciplinary standpoints describe their research-based mindfulness pedagogies. Chapters explore how to interrupt and interrogate oppression through contemplative teaching tools, assignments, and strategies that create greater awareness and facilitate deeper engagement with learning contents, contexts, and communities. Providing a framework that facilitates awareness of the links between historic and current oppression, self-identity, and trauma, and creating a transformative learning experience through mindfulness, this book is a must-read for faculty and educators interested in intersections of mindfulness, contemplative pedagogies, and anti-oppression.

This book provides an introduction to and a dynamic description of a new psychological paradigm that balances the excesses and distortions of the positive psychology paradigm. It offers valuable theoretical and practical content to its readers on the vital need for, nature of and potential for the reality psychology paradigm. It includes concrete steps for this new paradigm to restore the real power of vital psychological knowledge and techniques, which need to be brought back from their association with artificial positivity. This will provide real human benefits, including real mindfulness, real resilience, real behaviour change, and real communication. The book features a presentation of the underlying principles of reality psychology – including the value of a full connection with reality as it really is - rather than as we would like it to be. This will help people thrive in response to as well as survive our great real-life challenges, by developing a deeply practical understanding of reality psychology knowledge and related practice techniques. The book provides considerable theoretical and practical benefits to students of a variety of psychological courses, including positive psychology related courses, and also of many other wellbeing related courses. The book also provides valuable benefits to non-student readers – expert and non-expert.