Healing Zen appliew Zen insights to healing yourself and others. It focuses on healing as the experience of wholeness. Moving stories from nursing practice are interwoven with traditional Zen stories to illustrate aspects of healing such as presence,perseverance, balance and compassion. The book describes how awareness transforms ordinary daily activities like touching, eating, walking and bathing into profound experiences that are deeply healing for both caregiver and patient. Zen meditation is discussed as a way to help patients cope with illness, pain, loss and fear and to experience healing and wholeness even in the midst of illness and death. The book is significant to nursing practice because nursing is stressful and stress contributes to burnout and turnover. Meditation cultivates the energy and endurance needed in many caregiving situations. In addition to being an excellent stress management strategy, Zen practice leads to the direct experience of wholeness and connection. This promotes the depth of psychological and spiritual development required to work effectively with people experiencing life's most difficult times. The conference theme,"Building Diverse Relationships," is addressed in Healing Zen in that wisdom from the East is integrated into Western health care. These two perspectives are mutually enriching and provide a vision for humanizing and revitalizing health care. Nurses are under-represented in books being written in the field of integrative health care. It is important for nurses to step forward to share their knowledge and to assume a major role in this rapidly growing area of health care.
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