I was greatly troubled during the 2026 ThriveLib Conference to hear not one, but three separate presenters utter the phrase, “What we don’t need is more yoga” when discussing how to tackle the rising tide of stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout in libraries. On one hand, I understand and sympathize completely. What we’ve come to think of as “yoga” in the west is often little more than a 60-minute exercise class, and library workers are often encouraged to do yoga by HR departments as a way of addressing mental health problems that would be better resolved by addressing the system-level injustices that have crept into both our workplaces and the frequent mistreatment of librarians by administrators, politicians, and patrons.

On the other hand, the widespread misunderstanding of yoga in the West has us on the verge of rejecting not just a tool for promoting physical and mental health, but a much larger philosophical framework for restructuring how we perceive the purpose of our work, our responsibilities and interactions with each other and our stakeholders, our inner growth, and our understanding of what it means to lead our followers. I would even argue that yoga may be the very tool for social resistance that we’re looking for (Ghandi is often considered an exemplar of the karma yogi). We just need to look beyond the tiny sliver of this Indian Knowledge System that has been embraced by the mindfulness industry to understand its full potential.

In the April 2025 issue of Library Worklife, the American Library Association highlighted new research by Modern Health, which presented the following findings:

• Nearly half of employees say life was easier during the pandemic than it is today.
• 58% of Gen Z say their mental health never fully recovered following the pandemic.
• Only 16% of employees believe workplace mental health support is better than it was five years ago.

Modern Health also found that 60% of managers feel pressure to provide mental health support but don’t feel equipped to do so. One of its recommendations was to invest in “manager training, coaching, and leadership development to ensure well-being is truly prioritized.” ALA echoed the need for greater mental health support for employees.

Yoga and mindfulness are not new in libraries. According to Jenn Carson, a 2016 survey of staff in public, academic, and school libraries found that 27.8% of the respondents were based at institutions that offered mindfulness programming to staff. However, offering a yoga or mindfulness sessions can take many different forms and these practices generally lose a lot in translation when instructors in the United States adapt them for Western audiences and workspaces.

Thus far, library literature has mostly focused on offering or embracing yoga as a form of service to patrons. Carson (2019) and Charney (2019) both discuss developing and implementing yoga and meditational programs for patrons within a library context. Block and Proctor (2019) present a “Triadic Model of Holistic Advocacy” based on The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali to improve patron interactions by continually seeking a state of unity, empathy, and organic flow during the performance of service to others. Kumar (2023) draws from the Bhagavad Gītā to propose an interdependency between librarians and patrons as we both progress along a path towards ultimate truth and true knowledge through righteous action.

Kumar’s article in particular offers some tantalizing possibilities for viewing librarian-patron relationships not as a blind servant and served relationship in which librarians play a zero-sum gain of self-sacrifice for the good of the patron, but in which both librarians and patrons have mutual obligations towards one another in the form of discipline, self-control, respect, devotion, and gratitude as we rely upon one another to find greater truth through the advancement of knowledge.

However, none of these articles address the serious issue that librarians often perform service to others, both patrons and those they manage, often at the expense of their own mental health and physical well-being. Nor do they discuss how “mindfulness” translates into well-being for library managers and other employees. If anything, library staff seem more burnt out despite an increase in guidance in workplace mindfulness and wellness literature. During the 2026 ThriveLib conference, 10 of the 15 presentations addressed the topic of compassion fatigue and burnout. It’s clear there’s a pushback against professional awe and a push for selfcare, but if the 2025 issue of Library Worklife is any indication, these alone aren’t the answer.

To see if there was any correlation between managers with a background in yoga and other Eastern practices and a perceived ability to support the mental health of their employees and themselves, I conducted a survey in the Spring of 2026. Although the number of responses I received was small and only 25 of the 36 participants engaged with these practices, I was still able to identify several interesting pattens:

1. There was a positive correlation between a greater frequency of practice and participants’ reported confidence in supporting the mental health of their employees and their own self-care.
2. Respondents who practiced asānas, meditation, breathing exercise, or body scans once a week or more had the strongest confidence scores, particularly for those reporting a daily practice.
3. The four experienced teachers of meditation all practiced meditation daily and all agreed or strongly agreed to having the tools they needed for supporting the mental health of their employees and their own self-care. They also reported the lowest degree of burnout (experienced burnout “sometimes” as opposed to “often” or “always”).
4. Conversely, regular practitioners of yoga, breathing exercises, and other techniques reported a significantly higher degree of burnout despite their reported confidence in supporting their own self-care compared to the other participants.
5. Of the nine managers who reported that their employees’ mental health had improved since the Pandemic, nine engaged in some form of Eastern-influenced technique or spiritual practice with the most common techniques being sensory walks and meditation.
6. Knowledge of specific management techniques, such as mindfulness management, person-centered management, or servant management, had no notable impact on confidence scores unless the respondent also regularly practiced a somatic or contemplative technique.
7. The three techniques most frequently used with employees included self-reflection exercises (n=14), breathing exercises (n=14), and gratitude activities (n=13), although some managers also lead sensory walks, mindfulness exercises, guided meditation, and body scans (n=≤4).
8. The most commonly reported barriers to leading employees through techniques included not having enough training (n=14), concerns about employee responses (n=14), and feeling unsure how to incorporate the techniques (n=10).
9. The type of library, years of management experience, number of employees managed, and the library department managed had no notable impact on confidence scores.

Clearly there’s something to regular practice of these techniques, and I found it particularly intriguing that instructors of meditation seemed to have better tools for supporting themselves and their students. What have meditation instructors been learning about the meditation process that mere practitioners of meditation are not? There also appears to be a need for training and guidance on how to translate these skills into a management context.

If it seems like I’m out in left field, I want to close by drawing attention to the World Health Organization’s 2021 report, Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan, 2013-2030. Among the strategies listed for promoting mental health, WHO lists “Encourage the use of evidence-based traditional and cultural practices for promotion and prevention in mental health (such as yoga and meditation)” (page 27), so the medical world is eyeing eastern practices for mental health as well.

What my study did not delve into is what participants mean by doing “yoga” or doing “meditation.” While the Western world often reduces yoga to a set of physical postures, yoga in India is a complex spiritual system that—as we shall see—isn’t easily encapsulated in a one-sentence definition. There are also many meditational practices, some encompassed in their own complex spiritual systems (e.g., Raja Yoga, Zen Buddhism, contemplative Christian practices, etc.) or forged from the secularizing empirical framework designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Even something as misleadingly simple-seeming as breathwork can have a whole millennia-rich Ayurvedic medical science behind it with hundreds of techniques each accompanied by prescriptions for use and counter indications. This makes me wonder if the dexontextualization of these techniques from their spiritual roots may be the reason why these Westernized mindfulness techniques for self-care might not be staving off the stress, compassion fatigue, and burnout that are rampant in our field.

Which brings us to Indian Ethos in Management. Rather than starting from scratch by returning straight to ancient Indian texts like the Vedas, Rāmāyaṇa, Bhagavad Gītā, and the Upaniṣads to build an understanding of yoga and how it might apply to supporting the mental health and well-being of library managers and staff, I decided to explore what managers and researchers in India have foregrounded as important insights for managers. I have several reasons for taking this approach. First and foremost, I’m hoping to confront and avoid past colonialist practices of appropriating and decontextualizing fragments of whatever Eastern spiritual practices most immediately meet a management goal. To do this, it’s critical that we understand the original cultural context, the broader system of spiritual knowledge, and how managers in India are applying them.

Second, I want to acknowledge the work of Indian scholars and recognize the extremely valuable contributions their work has made, and continues to make, to Western scholarship. While translating Indigenous Knowledge Systems from India for a Western audience will always involve using my own set of social and cultural lenses to this area of research, I hope that this approach will encourage readers not just to take my word as the final truth for Western scholarship, but that you’ll be able to explore and engage with a much broader field of Indian management scholarship. After all, I’m exploring only one tiny piece of it with a very specific goal.

Although Indian management literature often argues that studies of the Indian Ethos in management is necessary because Western management contexts are focused on individualism, materialism, and self-serving goals while the Indian worldview embraces collectivism, altruism, and self-sacrifice for the greater good. I don’t feel this is completely true. I think most librarians would agree with me that libraries are highly driven by collectivism, altruism, and self-sacrifice. Perhaps western management models are failing us for the same reasons they fail so many workplaces in India.

Which brings us to the fourth and final reason that if there are new tools and management models derived from yoga and other Indian spiritual practices that help Indian managers support their own mental health and well-being and those of their employees, perhaps they’ll work in the context of Western library workplaces as well.

To start off this blog series, in addition to this piece I’ve provided a post about my background and how I first came to yoga and management. I’ve also created a post called “Defining the “S” World – Spirituality vs. Religion in the Library.” Religion will undoubtedly be the elephant in the room for anyone in the United States seeking to implement spiritual philosophies and practices in a Western workplace, so I want to address that upfront.

The remaining blog posts will explore a series of topics related to yoga and its application to supporting mental health and well-being in library workplaces drawn from a broad survey of Indian management literature. Early topics will include:

• Fundamentals of Indian philosophy, including the concepts of the higher Self and universal consciousness (i.e., Ātman and Brahman), balancing the four life pursuits, the five sheaths of the Self (pancha koṣa), and the four types of yoga.
• Karma Yoga – Or the yoga of righteous action and skill in action
• Niṣkāma Karma – Action without attachment to results.
• Yajña – Self-sacrifice
• Lokasaṃgraha – seeking to support the universal good.
• The problem of yajña and the financial compensation of library staff and the solution of artha (suitable wealth).
• Samatva – the practice of equanimity or even-mindedness in the face of dualities.
• The Sthitaprajña (stead wisdom) leadership model
• The Rajarishi leadership model
• Nurturant-Task Leadership and Participative Leadership models
• The eight limbs of Rāja Yoga
• How rāja yoga practices can support mental-health, well-being, and overall self-realization.

Although the scholars of these articles would be the first to point out that many Western scholars have addressed similar topics, particularly in articles related to Servant Leadership, Transformational Leadership, and Workplace Spirituality Studies, I will be foregrounding the work of Indian scholars. This is intentional both because I trust my audience will be able to find relevant works of Western scholarship by mining the bibliographic works these authors have cited, and because I want to make sure their contributions to the field of management studies free from the shadow of Western Scholarship. I also feel that many scholars in Indigenous Knowledge Studies go a step beyond transformational leadership to explore the beginnings of a framework for transcendental leadership where we not only look at what the workplace has to gain by support the higher aspirational needs of our employees, but also how we can transcend the often materialistic and short-term aims of these systems.

Bibliography

American Library Association. “Five years after COVID-19, Employee Mental Health Still Has Not Recovered.” Library Worklife, April 2025.

Barman, H. (2009). “Indian Ethos & Values in Modern Management.” Excellence, Ethics and World of Management. R. K. Arora and T. Saxena. Jaipur, India, Aalekh Publishers: 100–118.

Bobbi L. Newman. Fostering Wellness in the Workplace: A Handbook for Libraries. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2022.

Bobbi L. Newman, ed. Well-Being in the Library Workplace: A Handbook for Managers. Chicago : ALA Editions, 2025.

BTAA Symposium on Student Wellness. Virtual conference. April 23-24, 2025. https://uw.manifoldapp.org/projects/btaa-student-wellness-symposium

Carson, Jenn. Yoga and Meditation at the Library. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. 2019.

Charney, Madeleine, ed. et al. Recipes for Mindfulness in Your Library: Supporting Resilience and Community Engagement. Chicago: ALA Editions, 2019.

Comprehensive Mental Health Action Plan, 2013-2030. (2021) Geneva: World Health Organization.

Kumar, Subir (2023) “Implications of Bhagvad Gita on Library System in Digital Era: A Philosophical View.” Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal) 7967.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/7967

Modern Health. “Five Years After COVID-19, Employee Mental Health Still Hasn’t Recovered.” 2025. https://www.modernhealth.com/post/five-years-after-covid?

Pallathadka, H. and P. D. Roy (2025). “The Transformative Power of Karma Yoga: A Systematic Review of Ancient Wisdom for Modern Organizational Excellence and Human Flourishing.” Journal for Research in Applied Sciences and Biotechnology 4(3): 122–135.

Panda, M., et al. (2026). “Ancient Wisdom for Modern Management: Leadership Insights from the Bhagavad Gita.” PURUSHARTHA – A journal of Management, Ethics and Spirituality 18(2): 64–82.

Sinclair, Amanda. Leading Mindfully: How to Focus on What Matters, Influence for Good, and Enjoy Leadership More. Allen & Unwin, 2016.