Practicing Mental Illness: Meditation, Movement and Meaningful Work to Manage Challenging Moods

by George Hofmann

Overview

Practicing Mental Illness is a guide to using meditation, movement and meaningful work to help manage affective disorders such as depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety. Not a typical book on mindfulness, it acknowledges where mindfulness practices as taught today can be helpful, and where methods and teachings in popular mindfulness can be very damaging to people with mental illness. George Hofmann has written a subversive self-help book, which acknowledges that our society's low expectations of people with behavioral challenges contribute to the development of mental illness. He gives the reader the necessary tools to take responsibility to get well and stay well. In the end, Practicing Mental Illness presents a method that can help people with affective disorders predict oncoming mood changes and intervene to head off damaging emotions and maintain a balance of positive mental, and physical, health.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789046267
Publisher:	Collective Ink
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.54(w) x 8.58(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

After a series of hospitalizations, George Hofmann managed to overcome the worst of bipolar disorder by adding practices in focused attention to the usual therapies of medicine and talk. He is the author of Resilience: Handling Anxiety in a Time of Crisis, and maintains the site 'Practicing Mental Illness', which promotes meditation, movement and meaningful work as keys to growth and healing. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xii

Introduction: The Ground Rules 1

Section 1 Meditation 19

Chapter 1 Focused Attention 21

Chapter 2 Meditation and Mental Illness 34

Chapter 3 How to Meditate 46

Chapter 4 Issues in Meditation 64

Chapter 5 When Not to Meditate 79

Section 2 Movement 93

Chapter 6 Why Move? 95

Chapter 7 The Benefits of Movement 104

Chapter 8 Play 114

Chapter 9 Walking 123

Chapter 10 Maybe It's the Discipline 129

Section 3 Meaningful Work 135

Chapter 11 The Necessity of Work 137

Chapter 12 Holy Work and Hobbies 146

Chapter 13 Work as Therapy 156

Chapter 14 Work as Experience 166

Chapter 15 Work as Connection to Others 172

Conclusion: Always Return to the Body 181

Appendix: Standing Meditation 186

About the Author 188

Notes 189