Contemplative Practices for Sustaining Wellness: priorities for research and education presents what we learned from research on wellness, intense emotions and health issues together with uses of complementary medicine, mindfulness practices, and interventions for self-care, and caring for others.

This groundbreaking primer illuminates contemplative methods that can improve mental and physical health. Contemplative practices, from meditation to Zen, are growing in popularity as methods to inspire physical and mental health. Contemplative Practices in Action: Spirituality, Meditation, and Health offers readers an introduction to these practices and the ways they can be used in the service of well being, wisdom, healing, and stress reduction. Bringing together various traditions from the East and West, this thought-provoking work summarizes the history of each practice, highlights classic and emerging research proving its power, and details how each practice is performed. Expert authors offer step-by-step approaches to practice methods including the 8-Point Program of Passage Meditation, Centering Prayer, mindful stress management, mantram meditation, energizing meditation, yoga, and Zen. Beneficial practices from Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic religions are also featured. Vignettes illustrate each of the practices, while the contributors explain how and why they are effective in facing challenges as varied as the loss of a partner or child, job loss, chronic pain or disease, or psychological disorders.

“Describes a larger medicine . . . rooted in the natural world and our own internal resources. This is the next step in the evolution of health care.”—Dr. Andrew Weil, #1 New York Times bestselling author For nearly a decade, award-winning radiation oncologist Dr. Matt Mumber and yoga instructor Heather Reed have led retreats for people facing health challenges of all kinds. Through their eight-week Sustainable Wellness program, participants have found that using simple tools consistently creates remarkable health benefits. Whether you’re looking for improved physical health, better ways to manage stress, or just a greater sense of inner peace and wellness, Sustainable Wellness offers a simple but powerfully effective plan for transformation. You will learn how to: Empower yourself to reclaim your health and play a more active role in shaping it. Become aware of the daily choices that affect your health and how you can transform them in a positive way. Let go of destructive habits and embrace new ones that enhance wellness. Sustainable Wellness combines modern scientific research with ancient methods that benefit the individual on all levels. The authors share tested techniques, personal stories of triumph, and daily exercises that will guide you on the path to sustainable wellness. “Offers a refreshingly mature and practical synthesis of wisdom from the field of integrative healthcare . . . proven pathways to living with greater mindfulness and satisfaction.”—William Collinge, PhD, author of Partners in Healing “A powerful, inspiring approach to creating sustainable body/mind/spirit health and wellbeing.”—Jeremy Geffen, MD, FACP, author of The Journey Through Cancer

Weaving Complementary Knowledge System and Mindfulness to Educate a Literate Citizenry for Sustainable and Healthy Lives contains 24 chapters written by 33 authors, from 9 countries. The book, which consists of two sections on mindfulness in education and wellness, is intended for a broad audience of educators, researchers, and complementary medicine practitioners. Members of the general public may find appeal and relevance in chapters that advocate transformation in a number of spheres, including K-12 schools, museums, universities, counselling, and everyday lifestyles. Innovative approaches to education, involving meditation and mindfulness, produce numerous advantages for participants in schools, museums, and a variety of self-help contexts of everyday life. In several striking examples, critical stances address a band wagon approach to the application of mindfulness, often by for-profit companies, to purportedly improve quality of education, in contexts where learning has been commodified and ideologies such as neoliberalism have been mandated by politicians and implemented by policy makers. In different international contexts, Buddhist roots of mindfulness are critically reviewed by a number of authors. Chapters on wellness focus on complementary practices, including art therapy, Jin Shin Jyutsu, Iridology, and yoga. Foci in the wellness section include sexual health, prescription drug addiction, obesity, diabetes, cancer, and a variety of common ailments that can be addressed using complementary medicine. New theories, such a polyvagal theory, provide scope for people to become aware of their bodies in different ways and maintain wellbeing through changes in lifestyle, heightened self-awareness, and self-help.

The rapid changes in many dimensions that have occurred in the past decade have resulted in many changes in people’s conditions and lifestyles. The role of technology in facilitating the fastest pace of development in human history remains a major theme of our time, especially as humanity recovers from the most severe pandemic of the century. As tourism recuperates after the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of travelers are showing interest in special interest tourism, seeking unique and tailored travel experiences. It is essential that this resurgence prioritizes sustainability, leveraging technological advancements to create eco-friendly travel options, support local communities, and minimize environmental impacts. Special Interest Trends for Sustainable Tourism offers solutions for sustainable tourist practices, strategies, and developments. It provides the most up-to-date information and views regarding the state and special interest trends of the tourism sector in all its dimensions. This book covers topics such as sustainability, ecotourism, and volunteering, and is a useful resource for business owners, travel agencies, hospitality and tourism professionals, academicians, and researchers.

This is a book about a systematic, holistic, and action-oriented process of choosing and creating well-being. It’s a guidebook outlining a process of regularly assessing your well-being across ten Mindful Choices dimensions, focusing your attention, sustaining a high level of motivation, and creating lasting positive changes through ongoing intention, awareness, focus, and practice. It’s not just another self-help book, but rather a complete “how-to” manual for life-planning. This book integrates knowledge from mindfulness and contemplative traditions, Buddhist psychology, Stoicism, positive psychology, neuroscience, and acceptance and mindfulness-based behavioral therapies. It will not only give you the tools to manage stress, anxiety, and depression but will also take you well beyond “normal” to a life of “thriving.”

How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along. Life writings by Harriet Jacobs, Sadie and Bessie Delany, Eartha Kitt, Rosa Parks, Jan Willis, and Tina Turner are only a few examples of personal case studies that are included here, illustrating how these women managed traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression. In more than fifty yoga memoirs, Black women discuss practices of reflection, exercise, movement, stretching, visualization, and chanting for self-care. By unveiling the depth of a struggle for wellness, memoirs offer lessons for those who also struggle to heal from personal, cultural, and structural violence. This intellectual history expands conceptions of yoga and defines inner peace as mental health, healing, and wellness that is both compassionate and political.