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 authors 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.
Bobbi Patterson, PhD, M. Div, is professor of pedagogy in the Department of Religion and the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. A well-known speaker and presenter on burnout and resilience, she has helped create, direct, and reorganize a range of community-partnered service experiences and programs for over fifty years.
A must read for anyone engaged in volunteer service or in the helping professions! Building Resilience Through Contemplative Practice offers a fresh and hopeful perspective that positively reframes burnout as an adaptive phase of thriving service. A gem of a resource that grounds and renews through inspiring case examples and practical and heartful exercises. Written by a deeply wise and compassionate teacher, Bobbi Patterson, who walks the talk and uniquely understands Christian and Buddhist contemplation coupled with a life of service.
Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, President, Mind & Life Institute
This is a book that provides the balm of perspective for those whose careers or volunteer commitment focuses on serving. Rather than give in to burnout, Bobbi Pattersons deep insight is that burnout is part of the cycle of service leading to resilience. Reading this book should not be yet another task undertaken by those already burdened; rather, it should be embraced as a hopeful and compassionate refuge at the crossroad where service and contemplative practice meet.
Joseph Favazza, PhD, President of St. Anselm College; widely known expert on pedagogies of community-engaged learning
First published 2020
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2020 Bobbi Patterson
The right of Bobbi Patterson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-13376-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-13377-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-05815-8 (ebk)
To Joe
Who calls me
Barbara
Service and burnout have taught me a lot about acknowledgments. Acknowledge when services attitudes and actions come to fruition. Acknowledge when burnouts attitudes and actions come to collapse, even devastation. Acknowledge that both nourish resilience. Webs of people, creatures, and places brought these lessons to life for me too many to name, but the memories burn bright. Deep gratitude.
My first steps into serving followed my mothers trail-blazing work as a young public mental health social worker in South Carolina. In her matter-of-fact voice, she told stories of driving on the sandy dirt roads of the coastal islands to visit families requesting help for their children and elders. My grandmother Nana, I called her set the path for my mother by directing a regional Red Cross Office in the piedmont of the state. Both women rooted service in relationships before engaging their training. Pragmatists and women of faith, they admitted the work flourished and failed. I found that truth compelling and hard to take in until service and burnout showed the way. My brothers resonant path as teacher and professor delivered content while building community. He teaches me still. My fathers thick psychiatric career traveled through high and very low years of American public mental health. His mothers career in nursing and fathers pharmaceutical gifts pulled his curiosity to the healing arts of heart and mind. Watching him play ping-pong on Sunday afternoons with patients left to survive in huge public psychiatric hospitals set a direction I tried to keep. From him and my mother, I learned to assume that every person has an interesting story, one of pain and promise. Take the journey together. Stay in reality.
This book wandered in the back of my mind for over twenty years. Two formidable forces coerced it forward. The Religion and Ecology Collaborative, an urgent vision of graduate students in Religious Studies, Becky Copeland, Johannes Kleiner, and Liz Whiting-Pierce, reconnected me with Professor Lance Gunderson. In conversations, seminars, monthly colloquia, and a retreat, they brought adaptive resilience theory and models to life, including for me the life of serving and burning out. Lance Gundersons willingness to continue tutoring me over many years not only enriched my understanding but fostered laughter and friendship. I am grateful for it all and responsible for any misrepresentations of Adaptive Resilience, which inspired this books approach.
Allison Adams, the second force, invited me to apply to The Center for Faculty Development and Excellences Scholarly Writing and Publishing Fund, which she directs. She offered clear and helpful advice for my application, and I always felt her cheering me on. The funding connected me and the project with Cecelia Cancellaro, an editor-agent and founder of Word Literary. Like her firm, she specializes in books that engage public issues, diversity, and social change. With her deft clarity, she unraveled my confused writing. With her smart yet light touch, she suggested small turns in the text that greatly improved it. Cecelias professional and personal approach also helped me avoid unnecessary drama. We kept working and the books vision flourished.
Cecelia served as the books agent, and now the book is here. Gratitude to Anna Moore, publisher with Routledge, and Ellie Duncan, editorial assistant, both consummate professionals who made me feel welcomed and kept this project on track. Sioned Jones, a sharp-eyed and creative copy editor, and Caroline Watson, a quick-responding production editor, well moved this manuscript through its final paces. Still, the final manuscript including formatted diagrams and images as well as citations, indexing, and bibliography would not exist without the creative smarts of Elaine Penagos, a graduate student colleague whose attention, kindness, and hard work turned details into finished text.
