Spiritual consciousness and healing

December 16, 2015December 21, 2015 / dannywillis2015 / 9 Comments

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.

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.

Nurses and Global Peace

November 17, 2015 / Carey S. Clark, PhD, RN, AHN-BC, RYT, FAAN / 2 Comments

This blog posting will be a bit different from others I have written, but I believe the NurseManifest page is a place where we can open our hearts and souls to the essence of nursing, which is healing, caring, love, and compassion. In a world seemingly torn asunder from fear, violence, and anger, nurses are called forth to support healing on a local and global level. The call comes from something beyond ourselves, and if you stop and listen closely, I believe you will hear that calling. You are a nurse and there is a reason you were drawn to nursing: to support healing through loving kindness and caring.

A few nights before the recent violence spread around the world, from Beruit to Paris, I lay in bed cuddling my 7 year old daughter close. Every night I am blessed to be able to spend some time reading to my daughters and cuddling as they drift off to dreamland. For a few moments that evening, I found myself floating in a space where I felt like the mother of the universe was whispering to me, not in words, but through a deep felt intuitive process. I knew the goodness, the light, and the powerful strength of peace as they came through clearly to me, carrying with them the message that the mother of all, the earth as a complex system, will heal itself. After the moment of certainty passed, I was left with the usual feelings of uncertainty: how will the good and the light prevail in these times of darkness? Who will help make this happen? What is my role in this process?

Then tragedy struck, and violence and war continue to grow. The feelings of uncertainty have not dissipated, so I sit with those, but I also do remain strongly rooted in the belief that as nurses, we can support global peace and healing through our own efforts of creating local peace and healing. And that local peace starts at the place closest to us all, right from our hearts.

As we practice our own healing, creating our own peace and loving-healing processes, we can begin to spread that healing, peace, and love to others. A practice I try and do daily is called loving kindness meditation. I feel on many levels this practice is about my own healing and self-care so that I can be a better nurse, wife, and mother… and it is also about bringing that healing into the world.

I start with focusing on myself, in my heart space, and intending for myself healing through the following words:

May I know peace, joy, love, and ease. May my heart be full. May I be safe, healthy, and happy.

I than send this intention to the loved ones in my life, wishing them all love, peace, ease, happiness, health, and safety: family, friends, pets, students, and colleagues. As the circle of intention spreads outward, I send the intention and feelings of love and peace out to my “enemies” and challengers, and I end with the whole planet, with every being being sent the intention of peace, love, and healing. The process takes 5-10 minutes.

As nurses supporting healing, we can think and act both locally and globally. Imagine if every nurse sent out an intention, a prayer, a positive thought for healing and peace for the entire mother earth and all of the beings living here. Consciousness studies show that our thoughts and intentions impact our environment and reality. I think of Jean Watson’s call for us to practice loving kindness and Martha Rogers’ concept of Unitary Beings. We can reflect the patterns before us, we can create shifts in consciousness to support healing.

Despite the medical system’s over-emphasis on technology-cure-illness management, I still believe that nurses are truly called toward the healing that all beings are capable of experiencing. If you have been called to be a nurse, can you return to that calling, can you spare a few moments to consider the global situation, and what you can do as a nurse to support healing from the truly local level (yourself) and on to the global level?

I would love to hear from nurses and how they are supporting peace and healing around the globe. The call has been made, how will you answer?

h call has been made… how will you respond?

The Promise of Nursing: Social Justice and Health

August 11, 2015August 13, 2015 / Peggy L Chinn / 3 Comments

Those of us who have been involved in the Nurse Manifest Project are deeply committed to the idea of social justice – the notion that reaching for social justice is fundamental to human health and well-being and that social justice is central to our purpose. It is the promise we make to individuals and to communities when we claim to care for each and every person for whom we care. But like many other social concepts and ideals, the meaning of social justice often alludes us. So I decided to ask all of our NurseManifest bloggers to share, in just a couple of sentences, their concept of social justice! Here is what they sent:

Elizabeth: On my walk the morning, I recall thinking that “social justice” is not a noun but a verb. It is not something that is, rather it is what you do. It is one’s life’s work. Well, it is my life’s work.

Carey: I think in nursing we can view social justice as our ethical obligation to support the healing of those who are suffering due to social inequities and the promotion of equality and human rights in the society which we serve.

Sue: My belief is that social justice is the process of questioning privilege and whose interest is being served. Of course, there’s also courage– to question, to act, to be vulnerable, and to be part of a collective that holds social justice dear.

Marlaine: Social justice is about creating compassionate social, political and economic structures (such as laws, policies, organizations) that preserve dignity, equity, equality and human flourishing.

Danny: Social justice in nursing means that nurses keep their focus on facilitating humanization whereby every person is provided the means for health, meaning, and well-being in both living and dying and treated with moral respect and dignity. Social justice in nursing necessarily requires nurses to examine and address the underlying person-environment root causes of dehumanization and social injustices that prevent human flourishing and individual and societal well-being.

Richard: Social justice is an expression of a society that values, appreciates, and fosters the freedom and equanimity of all peoples and all creatures to live fully in accord with their greatest and highest good, health, and well-being.

Olga: Social justice is an ideal or core value that emphasizes the creation of conditions that ensure human dignity for all. Social justice (human dignity) can be achieved under conditions of extreme poverty or ill health, and also can be destroyed under seemingly optimal economic conditions, or by well-intentioned (i.e., paternalistic) actions.

Lisa: Social justice is the equitable distribution of resources and power whereby no individual or group is privileged over another and all have a fair opportunity to contribute, receive, and flourish.

Wendy: Social justice is the embodiment of personal and professional values that uphold and protect the sacred and inherent worth of all human beings to live their lives in freedom; Freedom to express, develop and explore ones individual and unique self on all levels, without religious, societal and hegemonic constraints or condemnation. Nurses advocate for social justice when they address barriers that restrict freedom for self, others, patients and families.

Jane: For me social justice means simply treating others as we would like to be treated. It means creating a society where people feel empowered to succeed and live well emotionally and physically – in every possible aspect of life. It means building on people’s strengths, not weaknesses, so that they can become even stronger. I tend to think of things in terms of health, but I truly believe the preceding applies to work, relationships, and everything else people experience in society.

Adeline: For me social justice is both an ideal of an equitable (not to be confused with equal) distribution of societal resources and advantages and an ethic that requires us to work towards achieving the ideal.

For me (Peggy), social justice is all of these things – and my fundamental perspective rests in the understanding that we all participate in the structures that create and sustain social injustice in the world. Some of these structures we cannot change – after all we live and participate in societies that inherently structure advantage for some and disadvantage for others. For me our first step toward creating social justice is to understand the ways in which the healthcare systems in which we participate create and sustain injustice, then work with utter dedication to changing what we can. As noted in the reflections above, social justice is a verb, it is action, and it takes courage! May our words of reflection lend courage to your dedication to this human endeavor!

The UK National Health Service: What about nursing?

August 5, 2015July 28, 2015 / Peggy L Chinn / 6 Comments

We are delighted to welcome this message from Elaine Maxwell, addressing the current challenges facing nurses and nursing in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Her message has world-wide implications!

I am one of those nurses, I think the NHS is a wonderful jewel built on a shared sense of equality and justice (and I have worked briefly in private healthcare both in the UK and in the USA). The challenge for the NHS is that there are different opinions on what it is there for and how to evaluate it. Discussions are more often focused on

Elaine Maxwell

ideology (socialism versus market economies) that what the staff within in actually do.

The Commonwealth Fund (2014)¹ rated the NHS as first internationally for effectiveness, safety, patient centeredness, cost and efficiency and third for timeliness of care. In spite of this, successive UK governments of both main political parties have focused on cost savings and faster access.

Starting in 1997 with the New Labour Blair Government, the definition of a good service moved from a broad base to focus on access and cost. Targets were introduced for waiting times for both emergency and elective care and organisations incurred financial penalties for failure to achieve them whilst at the same time they had to cut unit costs in order to become quasi autonomous ‘Foundation Trusts’. Something had to give and in the NHS it was nursing.

Nurses failed to articulate their therapeutic contribution and some enthusiastically embraced the role of managing patient flow to achieve access targets. This was a tangible, visible contribution to the new managerialism agenda as opposed to more opaque, but critical, nursing interventions. This lack of visibility led management consultancies to recommend wholesale cutting of nursing posts, for example McKinsey advised that nursing posts could be cut in London to save £421 million a year without any impact on the quality of the service².

This perfect storm was exemplified by the failings at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust and described in detail by the public inquiry³ which clearly laid the blame for many of the failings at the feet of nurses. Although the report detailed the swingeing cuts in nurse numbers prior to the failures, it also suggested (without any empirical evidence) that academic nurses with the ‘wrong’ values had been recruited and that potential nurses should work as unregistered care assistants before being allowed to study. Despite concerns from nurses⁴, this idea is being piloted in the NHS and a recent BBC programme demonstrated that nurses and students have bought into this rhetoric⁵

Following the publication of the report, the Government commissioned a review of Trusts with apparently high mortality rates⁶. These ‘Keogh’ Trusts were found universally to have ‘insufficient’ nurses and those that recruited significant numbers of nurses have improved their quality outcomes the most.

So UK nursing is currently confused. There is a belief that increasing the number of registered nurses improves quality as demonstrated by Aitken and colleagues⁷ but this type of cross sectional correlation study does not explain what it is that nurses actually do to create this quality. The Chief Nursing Officer for England has focused on individual nurses’ values with her strategy ‘Compassion in Practice’⁸. The Quality Improvers, with a nod to LEAN thinking, are focused on the getting patients through the system faster with nurses managing the flow so that medical staff can provide their clinical intervention. No one, it seems, feels that nurses have a unique therapeutic contribution and nurses who trained at a time when Henderson’s definition of nursing was embraced and who learnt and practised nursing models are now in the twilight of their careers.

With increasing numbers of people with multiple co morbidities, the traditional episodic medical treatment model looks increasingly unlikely to meet the needs of our population but without nurses who actually nurse, more and more people are readmitted to our hospitals and so the vicious cycle of speeding up the flow intensifies.

When Margaret Thatcher sought to reorganised the NHS in 1983, her advisor said “In short, if Florence Nightingale were carrying her lamp through the corridors of the NHS today she would almost certainly be searching for the people in charge”^9. I contend that if Florence Nightingale were carrying her lamp through the corridors of the NHS today she’d be asking “Where are the nurses?”

So what can nurses do about it? We need to reclaim our area of practice and make it visible by articulating our unique contribution, which is often tacitly shared amongst nurses and patients but policy makers and managers can be entirely oblivious to it.

We need to use the language of those with power and describe how nursing is more than a support service to medicine. Nursing has its own independent added value that can realise benefits for organisations as well as patients. The Dutch community nursing service, Buurtzorg¹⁰ has done this by ensuring that care is led by highly educated RNs who work autonomously with few protocols. This model has been independently audited and shown 40% reduction in cost of service with improved quality scores as nurses have been empowered to direct their work to where they add the most value; nursing not management. When we speak this language, we connect with others and the value of nursing can be understood and celebrated

1 Commonwealth Fund (2014) Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: How the US Health Care System compares internationally www.commonwealthfund.org

2 Nursing Times news report (2012) http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-zones/management/london-hospitals-told-they-could-slash-nursing-bill-by-421m/5041068.article

3 Francis, R. (2013) Report of the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust Public Inquiry London: The Stationery office http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20150407084003/http://www.midstaffspublicinquiry.com/report

4 Maxwell, E. (2013) Francis inquiry: compulsory work as healthcare assistants won’t make better nurses British Medical Journal, 346

5 Grumbling Appendix blog “Do Not adjust your (mind) set “ 25^th July 2015 https://grumblingappendix.wordpress.com/

6 Keogh B (2013) Review into the quality of care and treatment provided by 14 hospital trusts in England: overview report London: NHS England http://www.nhs.uk/NHSEngland/bruce-keogh-review/Pages/Overview.aspx

7 Aiken, L. H. et al (2014) Nurse staffing and education and hospital mortality in nine European countries: a retrospective observational study The Lancet 383(9931), 1824-1830

8 Commissioning Board Chief Nursing Officer and DH Chief Nursing Adviser (2012) Compassion in Practice: Nursing, Midwifery and Care Staff Our Vision and Strategy. London: Department of Health NHS Commissioning Board. http://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/compassion-in-practice.pdf

9 Griffiths R (Chair) (1983) NHS Management Inquiry London: HMSO www.sochealth.co.uk/history/griffiths.htm

10 http://buurtzorg.com

The Legacy of Paulo Freire

April 9, 2015 / Peggy L Chinn / Leave a comment

For those who have followed this project for a while, you already are aware of the influence of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose book “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” has influenced not only this project, but the work of many of us involved with this project. Recently I became aware of a number of YouTube videos about Freire and his work, some in Portuguese, but many in English! Viewing them reminded me of the importance of returning again and again for inspiration that arises from these ideas — inspiration that keeps our gaze on what is possible and that overcomes the distress that comes from some of the discouraging events that surround us every day! I will post one of the short videos below, but also want to be sure that everyone knows about the online “Paulo Freire Formation” course offered by the Freire Institute. Here is a brief description of what this course is all about:

This is an in-depth online programme for activists, organizers and volunteers committed to social transformation. It provides training for those wanting to become more effective change agents. The six courses are taken online but with live input; those progressing to the next part of the programme will have the option to attend a 5-day ‘Intercultural Formation Meeting’. Courses can be taken flexibly according to your needs.

Freire wrote his “Pedagogy” book in the late ’60s, and it was published in English in 1971. The importance of his ideas has only increased over time, and many important scholars and activists have continued to build on his work, including a number of feminist scholars including bell hooks. Her book “Teaching to Transgress” contains a full chapter in which she examines Freire’s work and its lasting and significant contribution to feminist thought.

For me, Freire’s ideas have a close connection and deep meaning in terms of our ongoing exploration of what it means to care and to be cared for. Freire, in his later years, talked more and more about the concept of love – particularly what he called “radical love” – which is quite similar to Margaret Newman’s ideas of love as the highest form of expanded consciousness. Freire never wavered in his belief that real social change could become a reality, with the essential element of radical love – the coming together of all forms of love – as the underpinning for social change.

So watch this brief video to become more familiar with these ideas, and if you want more, just search for Paulo Freire on YouTube and/or Google, for more than a bit of inspiration!