Look how far we have come, and how far we as nurses can take our personal practice using the power of our minds….
Nightingale over a century ago:
“…It is extraordinary that, whereas the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies, far removed as they are from us, are perfectly well understood, the laws of the human mind, which are under our observation all day and every day, are no better understood than they were two thousand years ago.”
Nightingale F. Notes on Nursing. London: Harrison & Sons, 1859, p 7.
Recent research on the effects of meditation in our minds and genes:
See this article that features a breakthrough in personal evolution.
Meditation and vacation effects have an impact on disease-associated molecular phenotypes. Epel ES et al (11 other authors). Translational Psychiatry, August 30, 2016.
Abstract – “Meditation is becoming increasingly practiced, especially for stress-related medical conditions. Meditation may improve cellular health; however, studies have not separated out effects of meditation from vacation-like effects in a residential randomized controlled trial. We recruited healthy women non-meditators to live at a resort for 6 days and randomized to either meditation retreat or relaxing on-site, with both groups compared with ‘regular meditators’ already enrolled in the retreat. ….”
http://www.nature.com/tp/journal/v6/n8/full/tp2016164a.html
Or access Deepak Chopra and RE Tanzi review of the research on this link.
Opening paragraph – “This week some exciting news has come out about the effect of meditation on personal wellbeing. Adding to the mounting evidence that meditation has a number of beneficial effects on things like blood pressure and depression, what’s crucial in the new study, which just appeared in Springer Nature’s journal Translational Psychiatry, is that meditation actually causes changes at the deepest level, in our genes. The study was top level, involving scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the University of California, San Francisco, and Harvard Medical School. Before detailing the research, let us paint the broader picture, because that’s where the real breakthrough is occurring. …”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/breakthrough-personal-evolution-deepak-chopra-md-official-
Ahhhhh….. Deep Breath.