I had the pleasure yesterday of presenting the NURSE #65X89 story to holistic nurses at the American Holistic Nurses Association.

We started the workshop with a brief grounding and centering exercise and moved on toward my reading the story. Then the participants had an opportunity to dialogue about the story and its meaning, and we then beagn some goal setting around creating the future of holistic nursing, one that exemplifies the values of the Nurse Manifesto, and also supports the vision of how nurse Jane in the story lives holistic nursing. For some participants, very concrete goals that were measurable emerged; for others what may have emerged was the need to do self care and find ways to let things go so that they can begin to realize holism and healing for themselves. As I have blogged about previously, it is a must that we have our own self-care in place if we are going to be able to create change in systems and the science of psychoneuroimmunology supports this need.

Meanwhile, the idea arose for us to perhaps collect more nurses’ stories, to do another round of Rogerian Narrative Inquiry Analysis on the stories of nurses, but I wonder about what differences may have emerged over the last 11 years. I suppose my concern is that the stories will continue to be reflective of the struggles of nurses and nursing toward emancipation, and I wonder if the new patterns emerging would be any different then the patterns we identified those years ago? Or perhaps the story of nursing is declining even further, and maybe I need to realize that perhaps this part of the chaotic change process, part of the bifurcation where a new pattern may emerge.

My intention from here is to stay in touch with these amazing holistic nurses, create ways to continue to communicate about their goals, use social media to stay connected, to share our light as we head back toward the institutions where darkness may seem to still rule and oppress our desires for healing and holism.

However, I wouldn’t be doing this work if I didn’t believe that a shift is possible, that light shall reign supremer, that healing is emerging… and so let’s all shift together.