Healing Spaces

“Esther Sternberg is a rare writer—a physician who healed herself...With her scientific expertise and crystal clear prose, she illuminates how intimately the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and how we can use place and space, sunlight and music, to reboot our brains and move from illness to health.”—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages Does the world make you sick? If the distractions and distortions around you, the jarring colors and sounds, could shake up the healing chemistry of your mind, might your surroundings also have the power to heal you? This is the question Esther Sternberg explores in Healing Spaces, a look at the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place. Sternberg immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system. First among these is the story of the researcher who, in the 1980s, found that hospital patients with a view of nature healed faster than those without. How could a pleasant view speed healing? The author pursues this question through a series of places and situations that explore the neurobiology of the senses. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety or instill peace. If our senses can lead us to a “place of healing,” it is no surprise that our place in nature is of critical importance in Sternberg’s account. The health of the environment is closely linked to personal health. The discoveries this book describes point to possibilities for designing hospitals, communities, and neighborhoods that promote healing and health for all.

This collection of essays by leading scholars and practitioners addresses a timely and essential question: How can we design, plan, and sustain built environments that will foster health and healing? With a salutogenic (health-promoting) focus, Healthy Environments, Healing Spaces addresses a range of contemporary issues, including health equity, biophilic cities, healthcare facility design, environmental health, aging in place, and food systems planning. Contributors: Ellen Bassett ● Timothy Beatley ● Emily Chmielewski ● Jason Corburn ● Tanya Denckla Cobb ● Tye Farrow ● Ann Forsyth ● Howard Frumkin ● Judith H. Heerwagen ● J. David Hoglund ● Carla Jones ● Andrew Mondschein ● Christina Mullen ● Reuben Rainey ● Samina Raja ● Jennifer Whittaker

“Esther Sternberg is a rare writer—a physician who healed herself...With her scientific expertise and crystal clear prose, she illuminates how intimately the brain and the immune system talk to each other, and how we can use place and space, sunlight and music, to reboot our brains and move from illness to health.”—Gail Sheehy, author of Passages Does the world make you sick? If the distractions and distortions around you, the jarring colors and sounds, could shake up the healing chemistry of your mind, might your surroundings also have the power to heal you? This is the question Esther Sternberg explores in Healing Spaces, a look at the marvelously rich nexus of mind and body, perception and place. Sternberg immerses us in the discoveries that have revealed a complicated working relationship between the senses, the emotions, and the immune system. First among these is the story of the researcher who, in the 1980s, found that hospital patients with a view of nature healed faster than those without. How could a pleasant view speed healing? The author pursues this question through a series of places and situations that explore the neurobiology of the senses. The book shows how a Disney theme park or a Frank Gehry concert hall, a labyrinth or a garden can trigger or reduce stress, induce anxiety or instill peace. If our senses can lead us to a “place of healing,” it is no surprise that our place in nature is of critical importance in Sternberg’s account. The health of the environment is closely linked to personal health. The discoveries this book describes point to possibilities for designing hospitals, communities, and neighborhoods that promote healing and health for all.

Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on how professionals have engaged with the architecture of healing and the body, it also explores how urban dwellers have strategized and modified their living environments themselves to create a kind of vernacular modernist architecture of health in their homes, gardens, and backyards. This new work builds upon a growing interdisciplinary field incorporating the urban humanities, geography, architectural history, the history of medicine, and critical visual studies that reflects our current preoccupation with the body and its corresponding therapeutic culture.

A gifted teacher explores how both hardship and joy can lead us back to the sacredness of ordinary life. What does healing mean to you? For many of us, to “heal” is to solve a problem—to remove an illness, put a trauma behind us, or change something we don’t like in our life so we never have to deal with it again. Yet does that idea of healing serve us ... or does it cut us off from life’s gifts? “True healing is not a state where we become liberated from feeling, but freer and flexible to experience it more fully,” writes Dr. Matt Licata. “When we experience our suffering consciously, it reveals sacredness and beauty we might not expect. Healing will always surprise us.” With A Healing Space, Matt extends an invitation to explore the endless richness of your life—without minimizing or turning away from hardship, nor by seeking the shelter of comfort or certainty. “I do not have any answers for you,” he writes. “Rather, I see my role as helping to illuminate the immensity and even magic of the questions themselves.” On this journey, you’ll learn to use new tools and perspectives to find your own sources of guidance, including: • Slowness—in a speed-obsessed world, rediscover the revolutionary power of slowing down, listening, and letting the fullness of each moment unfold • Uncertainty—why we often protect ourselves from the unknown at any cost, and how we can gradually learn to open to the gifts of uncertainty • Alchemy—explore the wisdom of transmutation as an inner process of things falling apart and then coming back together in ways that are more integrated and whole • Depth Psychology—integrating modern advances in psychotherapy and neuroscience with the timeless power of a soul-based psychology • Embodied Spirituality—discover the healing potential of an approach to spirituality that honors the body, emotions, relationships, and the shadow • Love—allow yourself to awaken to the revolutionary call to love and participate in the full-spectrum of life, dissolving the “trance of postponement” with the power of an open heart A Healing Space is not a book to be absorbed and processed in one sitting—instead, you will find yourself returning again and again, whenever your soul calls you to examine, transform, and renew yourself. “At times,” writes Matt, “we need to crumble to the ground at the magnificence of it all, awestruck at the bounty that has been laid out before us. To fall apart. To fail. To get back up. To be humbled again. To start over. To be a beginner in the ways of love. To make this journey with our fellow travelers, and the sun, moon, and stars.”

Wil Gesler examines how different environments affect physical, mental, spiritual, social, and emotional components of healing.

This comprehensive and authoritative guide offers an evidence-based overview of healing gardens and therapeutic landscapes from planning to post-occupancy evaluation. It provides general guidelines for designers and other stakeholders in a variety of projects, as well as patient-specific guidelines covering twelve categories ranging from burn patients, psychiatric patients, to hospice and Alzheimer's patients, among others. Sections on participatory design and funding offer valuable guidance to the entire team, not just designers, while a planting and maintenance chapter gives critical information to ensure that safety, longevity, and budgetary concerns are addressed.

The charismatic form of healing called qigong, which at its core involves meditative breathing exercises, achieved enormous popularity in China during the last two decades. Anthropologist Nancy N. Chen examines the cultural context of medicine and healing practices in the PRC, Taiwan, and the United States, and the pages of her book come alive with the narratives of the numerous practitioners, healers, psychiatric patients, doctors, and bureaucrats she interviewed.