Main description:

Bring compassion, self-awareness, radical acceptance, practitioner presence, and caring to the relationships you have with you patients by utilizing the advice in The Zen of Helping: Spiritual Principles for Mindful and Open-Hearted Practice . As a mental health professional, you will appreciate the vivid metaphors, case examples, personal anecdotes, quotes and poems in this book and use them as a spiritual foundation for your professional practice. Connect Zen Buddhism with your human service and address issues like dealing with your own responses to your client's trauma and pain.

Contents:

Foreword (Edward R. Canda, PhD). Foreword (Joan Halifax Roshi, PhD). Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. A Spiritual Framework for Our Clients and Ourselves (Beyond Spiritual Neutrality). 2. Sitting with Clients on Uncertain Ground: Strong Back, Soft Front (Beyond Evidence-Based Practice). 3. Radical Acceptance of Clients, Context and Self (Beyond Carl Rogers' Positive Regard). 4. Mindfulness: Steadying the Mind and Being Present (Beyond Empathy Skills and Counter-Transference). 5. Curiosity, Compassionate Caring, and Inspiration (Beyond Professional Warmth). 6. Bearing Witness to Trauma and Pain (Beyond Clinical Distance). 7. The Middle Way: Embracing Contradiction and Paradox (Beyond Dualistic Thinking). 8. Having the Conversation: Making Space for Client Spirituality (Beyond the Great Taboo). 9. Dealing with Failure (Beyond Cognitive Solutions and the Paradigm of Blame). 10. Swimming Upstream with a Warrior's Heart (Beyond Working a Human Services Job). Appendix: Brief Introduction to Buddhism and Zen. References. Index.