Yoga as Self-Care for Healthcare Practitioners: Cultivating Resilience, Compassion, and Empathy

by Aggie Stewart

Overview

An introduction for healthcare practitioners on using yoga to help manage stress and reach one's full potential. The importance of self-care to prevent burnout and stress is increasingly recognised within healthcare professions, and is being incorporated into education and training programs. This book gives students and practitioners across healthcare disciplines the tools they need to face various challenges on a multitude of interrelated fronts and help process the stress that these bring.

It covers the foundations of yoga practice, and how the different building blocks can be combined to develop resilience, compassion and empathy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848193963
Publisher:	Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Publication date:	08/21/2019
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.63(d)

About the Author

Aggie Stewart is a yoga teacher, yoga therapist, and former Accreditation Manager at International Association of Yoga Therapists.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Essence of Self-Care. 1. We are Multi-Dimensional Beings: The Holistic Foundation of Yoga Practice. 2. Intention - The Driving Force behind Personal Practice. 3. Quieting the Body. 4. Cultivating Energy to Support Resilience. 5. Bridging the Physical Body and the Thinking Mind. 6. Mastering the Mind. 7. Enlarging Our Spirit. 8. Creating Responsive Yoga Practices. 9. Choosing Practice Components

Editorial Reviews

Health care experts agree that practitioner well-being is one of the four pillars of a high value health care system. How can we achieve this when the burdens of clinicians' own traumatic experiences, chronic exposure to the suffering of others, and our broken system itself yield increasing rates of clinician impairment, compassion fatigue, burnout, and most tragically, suicide? Using her deep knowledge and experience of the ancient healing system of yoga, Aggie Stewart draws a clear and practical road map for developing a personal yoga practice to support clinician health, healing, and well-being. In Yoga as Self-Care for Healthcare Practitioners, Stewart blends her understanding of this timeless, holistic practice with contemporary biological and social science, making it relevant and accessible to individual healthcare practitioners and easy for healthcare organizations to integrate into existing programs and structures to guide personal and institutional transformation. She offers prevention and treatment strategies designed to restore and maintain brain-body regulation and balance as well as right relationship to self and others, essential conditions for health and healing for both practitioners and patients. Yoga as Self-Care for Healthcare Practitioners is a welcome tool to help us build the high value health care system our nation deserves.

Audrey Stillerman

In Yoga as Self-Care for Healthcare Practitioners Stewart has created a resource that is timely and accessible for her intended audience. Moreover, this guide is much needed in the yoga community as well given the weight of teaching and offering support to a rapidly expanding sphere of students with their own health challenges. Buy it, read it, and most of all, gift yourself with the practice you design for you in the process!

Matthew J. Taylor

I applaud Aggie for the way she interweaves yoga practices and wisdom, which I find to be a helpful approach for those who might view self-care as something one might do only when time permits. Aggie's approach to yoga practice as self-care will support readers to make the needed mindset changes to see self-care as self-compassion and as a necessity rather than as something frivolous. This approach to self-care can help us be the best "tool" possible for those we serve in our helping professions. The assessments Aggie shares are an invaluable resource for clinicians to use as a starting point to help themselves and their clients find ways to be self-compassionate through yoga practice.

Susan Tebb

In Yoga as Self-Care for Healthcare Practitioners, Aggie Stewart has unpacked in clear, succinct prose the healing foundations for the practice of yoga. As a latecomer to the practice, I now find yoga indispensable to my daily life and well-being. I hope young health professionals-particularly those in training-heed her advice to begin this powerful self-care practice early on. I know I wish I had!

Kristi L. Kirschner