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, MD, University of Illinois College of Medicine
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, Ph.D., M.S.W., C-IAYT, RYT-500, Professor Emerita, School of Social Work, College for Public Health and Social Justice, Saint Louis University
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, MD, ABFM, ABIHM, ABOIM, Associate Director of Medical Affairs, University of Illinois at Chicago Office of Community Engagement and Co-Founder of The Center for Collaborative Study of Trauma, Health Equity, and Neurobiology