Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice: A Field Manual for Helping Professionals and Volunteers

by Bobbi Patterson

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.

Genres: Reference

184 pages, Paperback

Published September 18, 2019

Reviews

[Brent]

From an article at Emory Report, here: http://news.emory.edu/stories/2020/08... quoting, "The pandemic has forced Patterson to cancel in-person community events to discuss her work, but, taking a page from her literal book, she is undeterred. She continues to give online talks and workshops.

Her publisher, Routledge, shared a chapter of her book online as part of its free resource contribution to Self-Care for Mental Health Professionals - https://www.routledge.com/go/Self-Car... - during Mental Health Month in May.

Her work also attracted the interest of the Mind & Life Institute https://www.mindandlife.org/ , a nonprofit in Virginia working to build a scientific understanding of the mind. Patterson now sits on the group’s steering council.

She is also part of a new resilience/sustainability initiative at Emory aligned with Emory’s Office of Sustainability Initiatives."