Healing Spaces Research Articles

Worship in an age of anxiety: how churches can create space for healing

Worship in an age of anxiety: how churches can create space for healing

The impact of Covid-19 on recovery after sexual violence and abuse: Voices of help-seeking survivors and those individuals working within specialist support services in England

We examined the impact of Covid-19 on service delivery within specialist sexual violence services and the healing journeys of survivors of sexual violence and abuse through the experiences of 22 professionals and 221 service users in England. The pandemic posed challenges across all sectors and economies across the globe, but practices and innovations that emerged at that time could enhance future services and user experiences. Thematic analysis was used to identify key themes within the data. Overall, the negative impacts of Covid-19 outweighed the positive changes: survivors reported increased feelings of depression, anxiety, and worry, exacerbated by isolation and lost connections with friends and family, and access to strategies for managing their mental health. Difficulties/delays in accessing support, service provision, and disruptions to rapport, trust, and safety were widespread in participants’ reports. Conversely, for some, requirements to remain at home provided safety from the world, and space for healing, and even prompted survivors of non-recent abuse to seek help. Remote service delivery was beneficial where clients could be ‘at a distance’ in discussing sensitive issues. Together with insights from professionals about their own isolation, blurred boundaries, and concerns regarding client confidentiality and engagement, this research highlights an agile sector responding to an unprecedented situation. Moving forward, survivors’ preferences for flexible/remote support must be integrated into everyday delivery.

Re-modelling the Space of Healing: Interpersonal and Spatial Configurations

Re-modelling the Space of Healing: Interpersonal and Spatial Configurations

Aboriginal Practitioners’ Perspectives on Culturally Informed Practice for Trauma Healing in Australia

Colonisation continues to impact Aboriginal children and families through perpetual cycles of transgenerational trauma. To achieve culturally safe and effective healing, practitioners working with Aboriginal people must be culturally competent, yet existing research suggests culturally informed practice (CIP) is often poorly understood and implemented by many practitioners. Centring Indigenous perspectives, the present study explored how Aboriginal practitioners in Australia conceptualise and use CIPs when supporting Aboriginal children and families to heal from trauma. Six Aboriginal women practitioners from mental health and social work settings participated in individual research yarns. Reflexive thematic analysis was used to generate four themes, including centring Aboriginal ways, approaches to healing, creating space for healing, and reflexive and responsive practice. CIPs are embedded within Aboriginal approaches to healing, consider the impacts of trauma and colonisation, and require all practitioners to actively engage with Aboriginal people and their ways of knowing, being, and doing.

Carving to excise, carving to create: Conversations on creating and sustaining safe spaces in higher education

AbstractIn this piece, we grapple with the conditions of creating and sustaining liberatory, healing spaces connected to higher education, delivering our analysis through a fictive podcast format. We present three different scenes authored by undergraduates, tied together by common, intersecting threads of both struggle and resistance, community in/as healing amidst layered crises and traumas, and deep desires for universities to fulfill their potential as learning spaces of safety, structural critique and connection. We consider our individual and collective roles as faculty and program directors in these institutional settings, and the conditions that help and hinder opportunities for students to co‐construct or live into liberatory spaces. We also consider the threats to the sustainability and viability of these initiatives, as well as the disproportionate impact on minoritized students, staff, and faculty. These learnings are in line with research that highlights the importance of students' sense of safety and belonging, the role of student agency, and perspectives that position educators through the lens of accompaniment.

Pediatric psychiatric inpatients' perspectives of aggression management: Discernment in the doorway.

Aggressive behavior is common on psychiatric inpatient units. Seclusion and restraint interventions to manage patients' aggressive behavior may have the consequence of being traumatizing for patients. Pediatric psychiatric patients' perspective on the use of seclusion and restraint interventions is not present in the literature. This hermeneutic nursing research study asked the question, "How might we understand children's experiences of seclusion and restraints on an inpatient psychiatric unit?" Four past pediatric psychiatric inpatients shared their hospitalization experiences that occurred within the previous year when they were 10 years old. The texts of the research interviews were compared to Attachment Theory for a deeper understanding of the meaning of the message. Participants commonly described experiences with seclusion and restraints as feeling trapped and alone in a dark room. They recommended the nurses step into the room with them to help them heal. Interpretively, the rooms on inpatient units could be considered as actual and metaphorical spaces of possible harm or healing. The participant's voices expand understanding of nurse's use of discernment at the doorway of a patient room to ensure the most therapeutic care is provided to the patient in these spaces through a secure nurse-patient relationship.

Black Water Women Collective: A Theatre of Care Syllabus (Redux)

This care syllabus was first presented at the 2023 conference for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), Building from the Rubble: Centering Care, in Austin, Texas, as part of an interactive workshop titled, “Black Water Women Collective: A Theatre of Care.” The session, chaired by Dr. Mysia Anderson (UC San Diego), sought to consider the ways theatre has and can operate as a space for reflection, healing, and collective reconsideration for Black women. Across the African Diaspora, the element of water has been a conduit for such intentions, and our session conjured its cross-generational embodied epistemologies as they appeared in works and ways of Black theatre. The goals of the session were to create a space that embodied care through Black feminist rituals, performances, and studying and creating care together; to support academics, artists, and activists who believe that theatre, theory, art, and spirit can reside in one place; and to share works of care and pedagogies of care.

Catatonic Cocoon

This poetic mediation explores catatonia from a personal perspective and sensory geography, including its interrelationships with trauma survival, threat responses, and the use of catatonia to create a safe harbor within the self. This creation of a world within the self allows a shutting down and shutting out of broader realities to find healing space when no safety can be found, and a recuperation in self-sanctuary. The catatonic cocoon is untethered from time and the expectations of movement, sound, speech, and performance. By re-positioning catatonic experiences as having emotional and physical functions outside of biomedical conceptualisations of neuropsychiatric disorder, these experiences can be explored as both incidents of vulnerability and as powerful survival strategies, at times subconscious and at times agentic. Approaching this concept with curiosity provides the opportunity to consider how to connect with a person experiencing catatonia, and insights into its timeline, meanings and purpose.

Pathways to Thriving in Palestinian Women Citizens of Israel Experiencing IPV: The Contribution of Personal Resources and Recovery Actions

ABSTRACT Personal resources and recovery actions to face trauma are known to impact the wellbeing of survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). Although acknowledged as a key component, scant research has been conducted on the recovery trajectories of survivors from Arab societies, especially in Palestinian citizens of Israel. This study examined the contribution of personal resources (empowerment related to safety, dispositional optimism, and potency) to engaging in steps toward recovery and ultimately thriving in 157 Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI) victims of IPV. A Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach was applied to test a mediation model that estimated the extent to which personal resources (empowerment related to safety, dispositional optimism, and potency) predicted survivors’ thriving directly and indirectly through the mediating variables of engagement in specific recovery actions. The model revealed direct associations between empowerment related to safety, dispositional optimism, potency, and thriving. Women’s empowerment toward safety positively predicted thriving via establishing healing spaces. Contrary to predictions, although women’s empowerment toward safety positively predicted women’s engagement in connecting/sharing, women’s connecting/sharing negatively predicted their thriving. These findings highlight the importance of women’s personal resources by showcasing their strengths and the steps they take to enhance their thriving within the Israeli- Arab context.

Community environmental healing benefits: A systematic review comparing intervening variables, environments, and outcomes.

As the smallest spatial unit in the city, the community should be an important space for healing the urban population. This paper presents a systematic review summarizing studies on community healing environments. The study identified 75 publications. The research findings are as follows: the main intervening variables include restorativeness, emotions and mood, stress, and well-being. Little attention has been paid to the intervening variables including social support, environmental preferences and satisfaction, place attachment, behavior types that respond to personal will, self-fulfillment, and the spirit of personal culture. The various types of natural environments in communities have been given focused attention for a long time. However, the superiority of the natural environment should not be a reason to underestimate the healing benefits of community spaces. The mechanisms by which environmental characteristics are transformed into positive individual influences through intervening variables should be explored.

Claiming Space to (Re)generate: The Impact of Critical Race Professional Development on Teacher Educators of Color

As educational systems are confronted with attacks under the guise of “Critical Race Theory bans”, teacher educators of Color navigate the contradictions of preparing teacher candidates to be culturally sustaining within a suppression of racial discourses. For many teacher educators of Color, who are often tasked to carry out the social and racial justice work of teacher education programs, they are experiencing an exacerbated racial harm. In this article, we explore how a racial-affinity critical race professional development (CRPD) space for teacher educators of Color committed to racial justice serves as a space of support, healing, and regeneration amidst systemic racism and protections to white comfort in teacher education. Weaving together three counterstories from participants in the CRPD, we examine how this space supports teacher educators in recentering communities of Color knowledge systems and ways of being to sustain themselves and reclaim teacher education. These counterstories also offer implications for teacher education to address the ways in which it supports and maintains white comfort and the need for a restorative framework for addressing past and ongoing racial harm.

Neither a Beast Nor a God: A Philosophical Anthropology of Humanistic Management

AbstractIs freedom and capability enough to sustain our well-being? For human flourishing to progress, defer, and avoid decline, managers as persons must grow in virtue to transcend to the ultimate source of the good. In our definition of a person we develop an anthropology of gift through the communication of one self to another and whose form is love, the willing the good of the other. We ask four questions about the humanistic manager as a person: what is the goal, end, good; what form, structure guides the manager; what materials, resources, technology, and context does the manager use within the structure to meet the end and exceed the goals, what is the means of effecting the change needed to meet the manager’s goals. Each of these questions form the basis to construct a philosophical anthropology of humanistic management. To these four questions we add three types of finality: the usual absolute terminal and horizontally immanent finalities plus the vertical finality of every growing and developing person among other persons in community. The need for a philosophical anthropology derives from a concomitant ethical requirement of what does and ought the manager, as person, undertake. What and how the person knows, wills, acts on provides the reality within which the manager, as person, operates. Along the way we will visit topics of transcendence, secularism, vulnerability, authentic personhood, and virtue. We conclude with a description, which is a dynamically evolving scheme of the meaning of a manager in the world, the social, and perhaps, the terminal goods of order. We move far from the homo farber of a technology-led world whose thought conforms being. We have begun to extend our manager into the species homo transcendens where being conforms thought and responsible action. We conclude with a sketch on the emerging role of spirituality in the workplace with connections to compassionate leadership, organizations as sites for healing and growth, and examples from the experience of humanistic organization who seem to have survived and thrived centuries of global operations. From an anthropology of gift we can identify several implications for managers. Humanistic management education would subsume the rational choice hegemony of economic modeling to a technological subset of tools, subject to the goals and nature of human persons. The scientism of thinking that psychology, sociology, political science, and economics would suitably describe, explain, and model human decisions would be replaced by an overarching framework leading to higher levels of knowledge, especially wisdom based educational experiences and content based on the natural integrity of human beings as learners. Since all technology follows, rather than leads, persons in an anthropology of gift, workplace practices would be founded in the structures immanent in persons and communities of persons. This would imply practices which transcend appraisal and assessment of performance to heights of contemplation and implementation of meaning in every task. Instead of beginning with a deficit of “what’s in it for me?” practices can begin with the surplus “how can I help you?” Proposed are practices which impound wisdom-based attributes of compassion, active listening, alterity, mercy, companionate and agapic love in decision analyses, interpretations of results, and incentives. The objective of the humanistically managed organization under the aegis of an anthropology of gift would be to minimize the maximum grief for the the most vulnerable. The objective would be applied as a policy across all authorities delegated by jurisdictions over organizations, and by boards, oversight groups, over decisions within organizations. This view from an anthropology of gift is consonant with emerging definitions of organizations as healing spaces where a balance of solidarity and subsidiarity guide decisions as opposed to simplistically applying supply and demand trade-offs.

Community-engaged Research Partnerships as Healing Spaces for Health Professionals and Researchers

Abstract: Drawing from collective experiences in our capacity building project: Health Equity Activation Research Team for Inclusion Health, we argue that while community-engaged partnerships tend to focus on understanding health inequities and developing solutions, they can be healing spaces for health professionals and researchers. Data were obtained from a 15-month participatory ethnography, including focus groups and interviews. Ethnographic notes and transcripts were coded and analyzed using both deductive and inductive coding. Practices of radical welcome, vulnerability, valuing the whole person, acknowledging how partnerships can cause harm, and centering lived experience expertise in knowledge creation processes were identified as key characteristics of healing spaces. Ultimately, health professionals and researchers work within the same social, political and economic contexts of populations with the worst health outcomes. Their own healing is critical for tackling larger systemic changes aimed at improving the well-being of communities harmed by legacies of exclusion.

Research on User Satisfaction in Kayseri Province Primary Health Care Buildings

The design criteria determining the spatial quality of family health centres, one of the primary health care institutions where diagnostic, therapeutic and rehabilitation services and preventive health services are provided together, were determined as the subject of the study. Within the scope of the field study, the location, number and distribution of family health centers, where primary health care services are provided in the central districts of Kayseri city, were investigated. The selected family health centers were examined according to the evaluation criteria. A survey was conducted to understand how family health centers are perceived by patients, one of their users, and to evaluate their satisfaction rates regarding space quality. It was determined that these small-scale health centers are produced as structures that have no relation to the context since most of them are derived from typical projects. It was concluded that health buildings, where only physicality is considered while the psychological and social needs of the users are ignored, are inadequate in terms of healing spaces. Based on all the findings obtained as a result of the study, suggestions were made on the design criteria for family health center buildings, which concern the whole society, to become qualified buildings that contribute to healing in the future.

Becoming octopus: Indigenous ways of knowing and green leadership

On 30 June 2014 we (a small group of academic women) opened our first Green Leadership School, an experiment in decolonising the classroom, exploring indigenous environmental knowledge, and creating a space of healing and love. This paper documents the process of healing and rejuvenating the lives of activists, government officials, trade unionists, and university students. Similar to the concept of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) “becoming animal” and “becoming wolf”, we represented the school as “becoming octopus” – a creature with green blood (becoming green), the highest brain-to-body ratio of any invertebrate, many slithering arms to twist and escape oppression and slide away from toxic spaces, and three hearts for the three-hearted practices of love, bodily integration, and mind-spirit awareness. Therefore, the pedagogical experiment focused on transmutation – connecting with the environment through merging human with animal, ritual and magic, gardening, yoga, storytelling, music, and art alongside more conventional lectures such as understanding climate change through South African vernaculars, ‘land grabs’ in Africa, pollution in South Durban, and environmental communication. Damaged by apartheid and post-apartheid wounds and worldwide ruptures in the socius – the participants experienced psychic healing. This paper discusses the role of joyful pedagogies in decolonising education.

The Role of Environmentally Responsible Interior Design in Healthcare for Enhanced Patient Well-being

While the healthcare industry is struggling with environmental impacts, it is also trying to bring together holistic design practices to create sustainable, patient-centered and ecologically responsible, energy-efficient healthcare areas. With the increase in studies focusing on the positive effects of the ecological design approach on the well-being and recovery processes of patients, the integration of green elements into healthcare structures becomes even more important. Integration of environmentally responsible design (ERD) principles into hospital interior design; It contributes significantly to reducing carbon emissions, resource consumption and environmental waste. At the same time; by optimizing energy-efficient systems, adopting sustainable materials, and creating patient-centered healing spaces by utilizing natural light and natural ventilation, it can be both contributed to the treatment process and reduce carbon footprints. This study proposes a new approach that integrates ERD elements with healthcare interior design. Recognizing that the built environment and human health are interconnected, the research examines innovative design strategies to promote healing through environmentally responsible interior design (ERID). The focus of this approach is on combining ERD strategies such as healing design, patient-centered design, evidence-based design and the use of sustainable materials, daylight, natural ventilation, energy-efficient design, sustainable design, biophilic design. As a result of this integration, by drawing attention to the role that patient-centered green interior designs play in improving the health and well-being of patients and the efforts to minimize the negative effects of hospitals on the environment. Also, it is aimed to encourage the health and construction sectors in this sense and proposed a path towards a green future.

Virtual Reality and Multi-Sensory Interactions: Enhancing Emotional Wellbeing of Urban White-Collar Workers in Shanghai

This research focuses on how to use virtual reality technology to realize emotion detection and adjustment. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of moderate use of virtual reality therapeutic technology in physical space on the mood and productivity of mental workers. White-collar employees (n = 414) from various industries were asked to take part in an online survey to investigate the relationship between virtual reality technology, emotional health, and work performance through the mediation effect.Through data collection and in-depth interviews, This study had examined the perceptions of designers (n = 3) and urban white-collar professionals (n = 3) regarding their personal levels of work stress and experiences with the workplace. The purpose of this study was to determine whether effective usage of virtual reality spatial healing technology would improve employee wellbeing and work productivity. The findings revealed that using virtual reality to design healing spaces would improve emotional health, which would then result in better work performance from employees. Objective: To design and develop innovative therapeutic environments that incorporate multi-sensory interaction and virtual reality, with a focus on optimizing the potential for emotional wellness to create immersive and engaging environments. Theoretical Framework: A multi-method (QUAL→QUAN) research design has been adopted for this study (Creswell, 1999; Tarafdar et al., 2017). In the following sections, a brief literature review of the key constructs used in the study is explained, followed by the study descriptions, discussion of findings, and managerial implications (Banerjee, P., & Gupta, R. 2023) Method: A multi-method (QUAL→QUAN) research design has been adopted for this study (Creswell, 1999; Tarafdar et al., 2017). In the following sections, a brief literature review of the key constructs used in the study is explained, followed by the study descriptions, discussion of findings, and managerial implications (Banerjee, P., & Gupta, R. 2023), The questionnairs had been selected by interviews、expters and literature review, The data had been collected online. The mediation effect analysis had been use in this study to test the hypothesis. Results and Discussion: The results obtained that the integration of art and technology in interactive equipment will allow for personalized adjustments, enhancing user engagement and experience in the future. [synthesize the main results of the research]. In the discussion section, these results are contextualized in light of the theoretical framework, highlighting the implications and relationships identified. Possible discrepancies and limitations of the study are also considered in this section. Research Implications: 1. Advances in the discipline: This study is expected to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on multi-sensory interaction and the application of virtual reality in therapeutic environment design. It will provide a deeper understanding of how to use elements such as sight and smell into the overall design to promote emotional well-being in office Spaces. 2. Design innovations: The research will lead to the development of innovative therapeutic environments incorporating multi-sensory interaction and virtual reality. These designs could serve as a model for future projects aimed at promoting emotional health in a variety of Settings, which could be used in office Spaces and eventually, hopefully, in public places to promote public health. 3. Social benefits: The study can also increase people's motivation and level of work by raising people's awareness of the importance of emotional health. In the long run, regional productivity can be increased. Finally, the purpose is to make the environmental gain produce social benefits under the role of promoting emotional health. Originality/Value: This study contributes to the literature by: 1. Advances in the discipline: This study is expected to contribute to the existing body of knowledge on multi-sensory interaction and the application of virtual reality in therapeutic environment design. It will provide a deeper understanding of how to use elements such as sight and smell into the overall design to promote emotional well-being in office Spaces. 2. Design innovations: The research will lead to the development of innovative therapeutic environments incorporating multi-sensory interaction and virtual reality. These designs could serve as a model for future projects aimed at promoting emotional health in a variety of Settings, which could be used in office Spaces and eventually, hopefully, in public places to promote public health. 3. Social benefits: The study can also increase people's motivation and level of work by raising people's awareness of the importance of emotional health. In the long run, regional productivity can be increased. Finally, the purpose is to make the environmental gain produce social benefits under the role of promoting emotional health.

Indigenizing Blankness in the Works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gerald Vizenor, and Jordan Abel

ABSTRACT The article examines the strategic use of blankness in the literary works of Indigenous authors Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Nation Anishinaabe) and Jordan Abel (Nisga’a). The study begins by tracing the broader tradition of blank books, blank works of art, and blank pages in English language literature, discussing the techniques that have evolved to make blankness speak. We then trace the potential implications of blanks in work specifically by Indigenous artists, where it can be made to speak as a commentary on erasure, genocide and epistemicide. However, in our readings of all three writers, we discover that each uses strategies of blanking to take the audience through such a trauma-centered reading, but also to go beyond it. By emphasizing the creative renewal that blankness embodies, each author uses it as a (literal) space of healing and imagination. This space is then linked via various narrative associations, most importantly by invoking the ancient art of petroglyphs, to Indigenous land sovereignty and survivance.

Healing properties of residential balcony: Assessment of the characteristics of balcony space in Shanghai's collective housing

The balcony is open, connected with the outside, and close to nature, which can provide sunshine, air, vision, leisure, and social functions, bring a variety of health benefits, and gradually become a healing space in modern family life. However, current research lacks a systematic knowledge of the healing properties of balcony space features. The purpose of this paper is to determine the healing performance of balcony space characteristics of urban collective housing and its correlation with healing and to provide a theoretical basis for the design and optimization of residential balconies. Firstly, based on the literature review, the main spatial characteristics of a balcony and its healing index are determined. Then, based on the review results, a spatial assessment and analysis framework for a residential floor plan is developed. A combined qualitative and quantitative approach was used to assess the healing of balcony space characteristics of 1641 housing types in Shanghai. The results show that the healing of the balcony is at a low level, which has great potential for improvement. The spatial characteristics that affect the healing assessment mainly include structural type, connection mode, area, vision, and furniture. It was found that the spatial characteristics of balconies have interrelated and interacting role relationships that directly or indirectly affect the healing performance of balconies. This study provides a valuable reference for the renovation and design of residential balconies, helps to provide targeted design suggestions for real estate development departments and designers, and helps to improve the quality of living and the health and well-being of residents.

Changes in Social Media Big Data on Healing Forests: A Time-Series Analysis on the Use Behavior of Healing Forests before and after the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Korea

This study aimed to identify changes in visitor behavior and visitor interest in healing forests before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The study used text mining analysis techniques to identify changes in visitation behavior over time, divided into three periods, as follows: pre-COVID-19 (1 January to 31 December 2019), during the COVID-19 pandemic (1 November 2020 to 31 October 2022), and post-COVID-19 (1 November 2022 to 31 October 2023). After the COVID-19 outbreak, healing forest use behavior did not revert to pre-COVID-19 patterns. Moreover, the keywords “tourism” and “hiking” stood out as the main drivers of this change in behavior. Therefore, the Korea Forest Service and related authorities must examine the scalability of the functions, services, and programs of healing forests from a general healing space to a space for leisure and tourism. These findings will contribute to the development of future marketing strategies and programs for healing forests.