Recipes for Mindfulness in Your Library: Supporting Resilience and Community Engagement

Mindfulness not only offers the possibility of a healthy life/career balance for librarians themselves, but in challenging times of rapid social change and uncertainty, it also represents a powerful way to build community resilience. In fact, mindfulness experiences can be structured to nurture the kind of civic engagement and discourse essential for library support. This collection explores a wide range of approaches that demonstrate how librarians have integrated mindfulness into their teaching, collections, services, programming, spaces, partnerships, and professional development. An inspirational idea generator for library administrators, marketers, and outreach staff, in this book the contributors delve into such mindful activities as

• using a work journal to practice reflective writing;
• mindful strategies for leading library teams;
• yoga and meditation groups at public libraries;
• helping students destress with a library Zen Zone;
• deploying digital resources to promote mindfulness;
• mindful scholarship at Minneapolis College; and
• overcoming research anxiety using a mindful approach.

As more librarians commit to individual and sustained reflection and practices in their own lives, those approaches can expand to include the communities they serve. This collection offers more than a dozen in-depth examples of mindfulness in action.