Spiritual consciousness and healing


This is my first time posting a blog and the experience has been both exciting and a little uncomfortable. I am moving out of my comfort zone, writing from my heart and soul. I’m thankful for the experience and hope to get better with time.  Here it goes!

As a young child, growing up in a rural village in the Pines region of Mississippi, and spending time with my mother’s side of the family in my beloved Louisiana, I was in love with the beauty of the infinite universe. I was very connected to the earth that I loved to play in and smell, the flowers I loved to smell and pick, the tomatoes, okra, onion, squash, peas and butterbeans that I loved to eat and that I helped my grandfather nurture and pick when they were ripe, the love and care of my father and mother and older brother, my ancestors, grandparents – both maternal and paternal – and great grandparents, great aunts and uncles and cousins and the infinite universe of goodness, simplicity, love, and beauty. The freedom and love of being a child of the infinite universe allowed me to sense into the universal rhythms of light and dark, activity and rest, stability and change, being and becoming, even though I didn’t have an advanced vocabulary for these things at that time. All of these experiences represented a universe where healing, love, and nurturing occurred. In the past few years, I have come to see these experiences as reflecting spiritual consciousness. I cherish being in touch with spiritual consciousness, and, thus, carefully tend to it patiently as a potentiality for nursing’s healing mission. Can the nurse working within spiritual consciousnes help other human beings experience healing and their own spiritual consciousness in order to transcend suffering of psychic, physical, social, existential, and emotional pain? I believe so.

Within the nursing context, I view spiritual consciousness as the unfolding of loving energy and various modalities of integrating nature and meaning whereby nurses facilitate healing. The nurse’s spiritual consciousness soothes worries and brings healing to others when they are in fear, pain, or suffering. Spiritual consciousness illuminates the universal need for humanization in nursing situations whereby dehumanizing circumstances deny or strip human beings of their dignity and humanity. Spiritual consciousness is the loving consciousness and healing energy that human beings tap into to restore harmony in times of disharmony.

Spiritual consciousness is evolved consciousness for nursing. It can be cultivated by nurses worldwide to facilitate healing. The nurse, in spiritual consciousness, being loving toward another during moments of the other’s suffering, brings healing energy to the situation. Spiritual consciousness is characterized by spaciousness and lightness. It provides a glimpse into the goodness and beauty of the universe, and the freedom not to get bogged down or trapped in mere physical and limiting aspects of being. I believe it is central to nursing’s healing mission. Thus, the notion of spiritual consciousness challenges each of us in nursing to experience this loving energy and to discuss it for better understanding the usefulness and limits of spiritual consciousness for facilitating healing. images

The human mind’s binding capacity can be warded off by shifting into spiritual consciousness. Spiritual consciousness does not include limited and bounded views such as hatred, sense of division, greed and power over others, malice, or separation between us, other human beings, earth, plants, animals, rocks, trees, rivers, stars, and the moon. In spiritual consciousness, we are all universal one.

As nurses gain experience sensing into their own spiritual consciousness, nursing will be better poised to meet its social mandate. Working from within spiritual consciousness, nurses are provided with multiple pathways for healings to occur. As nursing and society evolve, ideas related to spiritual consciousness and healing need further development.

Virtual Caring Science


We have received notice from Kathleen Sitzman of a wonderful online opportunity for everyone who is interested in focusing more clearly on caring in online situations!  Here is the information that Kathleen sent:

Hi Everyone,

I am sending this message to you because you have (at some point) shown an interest in my work related to conveying and sustaining caring in online classrooms. I have completed 6 studies on the subject now, and I wanted to create something that would condense my findings and recommendations into something that people can quickly and easily use. To that end, I worked with the Office of Faculty Excellence at East Carolina University (where I am a professor in the college of nursing) to create and offer two FREE trainings. The flyer with sign-up information is attached. You will need to follow the directions for non-ECU participants.

The two trainings are:

  • Conveying and Sustaining Caring in Online Classrooms
  • Mindful Communication for Caring Online

These are self-paced, do-anytime, independent study trainings. I have placed them in a format that can be completed by anyone who has access to a computer. The first training takes about 90 minutes and the second training takes about 60 minutes. People who complete the trainings get certificates of completion for each one.

The trainings have just opened up and already 20 people (many of them outside of the nursing profession) have completed the trainings and found them to be very helpful. Here at ECU, people can complete them for their annual Distance Education (DE)  professional development requirement. Please let me know what you think and please share the flyer with others who might benefit.

 Sending love,
Kathleen Sitzman, PhD, RN, CNE
Professor
East Carolina University College of Nursing

Download the flyer here

Access the modules online here