Stigma complicates the treatment of HIV worldwide. We examined whether a multi-component framework, initially consisting of enacted, felt normative, and internalized forms of individual stigma experiences, could be used to understand HIV-related stigma in Southern India. In Study 1, qualitative interviews with a convenience sample of 16 people living with HIV revealed instances of all three types of stigma. Experiences of discrimination (enacted stigma) were reported relatively infrequently. Rather, perceptions of high levels of stigma (felt normative stigma) motivated people to avoid disclosing their HIV status. These perceptions often were shaped by stories of discrimination against others HIV-infected individuals, which we adapted as an additional component of our framework (vicarious stigma). Participants also varied in their acceptance of HIV stigma as legitimate (internalized stigma). In Study 2, newly-developed measures of the stigma components were administered in a survey to 229 people living with HIV. Findings suggested that enacted and vicarious stigma influenced felt normative stigma; that enacted, felt normative, and internalized stigma were associated with higher levels of depression; and that the associations of depression with felt normative

Enhancing body awareness has been described as a key element or a mechanism of action for therapeutic approaches often categorized as mind-body approaches, such as yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method, Breath Therapy and others with reported benefits for a variety of health conditions. To better understand the conceptualization of body awareness in mind-body therapies, leading practitioners and teaching faculty of these approaches were invited as well as their patients to participate in focus groups. The qualitative analysis of these focus groups with representative practitioners of body awareness practices, and the perspectives of their patients, elucidated the common ground of their understanding of body awareness. For them body awareness is an inseparable aspect of embodied self awareness realized in action and interaction with the environment and world. It is the awareness of embodiment as an innate tendency of our organism for emergent self-organization and wholeness. The process that patients undergo in these therapies was seen as a progression towards greater unity between body and self, very similar to the conceptualization of embodiment as dialectic of body and self described by some philosophers as being experienced in distinct developmental levels.

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