The body is our vessel that carries us through life, and makes life possible.
The body is a chariot that gets us around—transports us.
It is the operating system that allows us to experience life, to walk in nature, to play, to hold others, to feel, to think, etc.
No doubt that the body is at the core of nursing, as well as other disciplines.
“Within the modern normative medical approach, therefore, the body-physical became the ‘body-as-it’, disembodied and separated from thinking, feeling, consciousness and experiencing. Such an orientation allowed us to have body parts repaired and replaced, becoming interchangeable, all at the external level, without consideration of the inner world of the body-as-self, as experience.” (Watson, 1999, p135)
I am a product of 20th century nursing, medicine and healthcare system. I am still struggling. I too default to seeing just the body, when overwhelmed with all the demands and distractions. Despite a life of learning and discovery, nursing continues to be, at my core, a mystery.
The path to freeing ourselves from the body-as-it construct is not clear.
How do we start helping each other expand our caring consciousness and practice, despite the barriers?
At this moment in time, we nurses have easy access to all the current nursing, medicine and mindbodyheartspirit sciences.
I know that our Western society’s wellness consciousness evolution is penetrating nurses’ awareness levels at large.
I know that we nurses know that there’s more to nursing than just caring for the body-physical, the body-as–it.
We each are on our own journey to understand our nursing experiences.
Caring consciousness is no longer an academic endeavor, but a real and practical one.
Our society is changing and our understanding of health and wellness is shifting in the direction of nursing and other wellness and caring /healing practices.
WE ARE NOT ALONE. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.
Saving Nurses is a time and space for each of us to surrender to the current healthcare environment and to rethink how we each want to BE in our practice.
“It seems that somewhere along the way we have forgotten that one of the greatest honors and privileges one can have as a nurse is to be able to care for another person. Such personal, intimate connections and relations touch on the Holy, as well as the horrific at times. Caring (and the need for caring) is such a vulnerable place; first, because we come face-to-face with our own humanity and ourselves. In this place, we realize that one person’s level of humanity reflects back on the other. The other reason this place of caring and healing transcends medical thinking and conventional science is, when we locate ourselves in this new space, we are remembering our own and others’ humanity and our shared belonging to the infinity of Universal Field of Infinite Love (Levinas 1969) that embraces Spirit. We are remembering we are touching the life force, the very soul of another person, hence ourselves. “ (Watson, 2008, p144)
Much gratitude to all of us who are on this journey.