Healthy Body, Healthy Mind Overview

Tibetan Nuns Project Dharamsala, India

Published in summer 2005, Healthy Body, Healthy Mind is a book by the Tibetan Nuns Project produced to enhance body awareness and teach basic health concepts to Tibetan-speaking nuns and laywomen throughout the Himalayan region. 

The Tibetan Nuns Project (TNP) was founded in 1987 in order to provide humanitarian aid to refugee nuns arriving  in India and Nepal from Tibet. Today TNP continues to help nuns who have just arrived from Tibet and also provides food, clothing, housing and basic medical care for more than 500 nuns resident in India and Nepal. It has established an educational institute for nuns and laywomen—the first of its kind—and supports the growth and development of educational opportunities for nuns in the exile community (see www.tnp.org for more details).

In 2000, arising from a conference on women’s leadership in India, Dutch health advocate and educator, Marlies Bosch, conducted a week-long workshop on women’s self-help and leadership skills at one of the nunneries. Marlies used Our Bodies, Ourselves (OBOS) in this train-the-trainers program and, subsequently, the Global Fund for Women awarded a grant to the TNP to produce a book, inspired by OBOS, in Tibetan. 

Through an extensive adaptation process – drawing on OBOS, Changing Bodies, Changing Lives and Where Women Have No Doctor – Healthy Body, Healthy Mind is a shortened and simplified edition with substantial original content. It is designed to address the cultural realities of Tibetan women living as refugees in India and Nepal. Because the book also has relevance for women of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition in Ladakh, Zanskar and Spiti, the Tibetan Nuns Project will distribute the book throughout the region. For young women of the tradition who have been mostly educated in English, the TNP will produce an English version in late 2005.

Healthy Body, Healthy Mind is self-published by the TNP, with a first print run of 2000 copies. It can be purchased online through Paljor Publications.