Exceptional Experience and Health

Essays collected here explore interactions between the mind and physical and mental health, manifested as exceptional experiences such as anomalous healing effects, religious and transpersonal experiences, and creative experiences. Contributors are university teachers, researchers, and practitioners in psychology, in addition to energy healers and hypnotists. An introduction reviews current research on the mind-body relationship and parapsychology and offers an overview of clinical approaches to exceptional experiences. The first part of the book looks at the connections between belief, mind, and body, with essays on mental imagery and healing, shamanic experiences and the drug ayahuasca, and the use of religious beliefs and practices to buffer the impact of traumatic events. Chapters in Part 2 delve into connections between exceptional experiences and mental health and approach exceptional experiences from the clinical perspective, reporting on clinical parapsychology in the UK and Germany. The book's readership includes students, scholars, and researchers in various fields. Chapters were originally presented as papers at a September 2009 conference held in Liverpool, England. Simmonds-Moore teaches psychology at the University of West Georgia. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Christine Simmonds-Moore is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of West Georgia and has received several Bial research grants, given to promote exploration of a variety of exceptional experiences.