MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

A ‘must read’ for anyone working in the health care community, especially during the once-in-a-century impact of a global pandemic, Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being will have great value for readers in other stress-filled occupations and circumstances as well. Thoroughly ‘reader friendly’ in organization and presentation, Resilient Threads: Weaving Joy and Meaning into Well-Being is especially and unreservedly recommended for both community and college/university library Health & Medicine collections.

A Journey to Champion Soul-Deep, System-Wide Self-Care

*** Resilient Threads is a 2021 Silver Nautilus Book Award Winner! ***

If you’ve ever asked yourself Who am I? Where do I belong? How do I heal as I strive to serve? -whether you work in healthcare or any vocation that calls for strength of heart-you will resonate with this woman physician’s story.

Physician burnout, depression, and suicide are tearing at the fabric of our health care system, which Mukta Panda has witnessed firsthand. In a culture that privileges evidence over empathy, technology over touch, and what’s measurable over what’s meaningful, many of us-no matter our profession-feel more fragmented and isolated than ever.

In RESILIENT THREADS: WEAVING JOY AND MEANING INTO WELL-BEING, Dr. Panda gives voice to the exhaustion and gives courage for another way. As a physician and medical educator, she has fought to return human touch to healthcare. As a mother, she has committed-and sometimes failed-to balance the personal with the professional. And as an immigrant from India, she has clung to the wisdom of her family and faith in the face of discrimination and fear.

By weaving stories of connecting to her patients, students, and colleagues with her own stories of belonging, she models how we can each thrive by creating community and self-awareness.

Ritual, relationships, and reflection are key threads in how I learned to thrive, Dr. Panda writes in the introduction. So, too, are they key for the thriving of our world. The well-being of our clinicians and patients, teachers and students, parents and children depends on integrating these threads into a new social fabric, one that honors the whole of who we are with what we do.