Page 164 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

Fr om carative Fa c t o r 8 t o C ar it as ProC e s s 8
variety, views, pets, trees, nature, children, music, color, form, flowers,
paintings, proper nutrition, a comfortable bed, and sleep as natural
environmental modalities that promoted healing (Watson 1999:253).
Recent developments in hospital architecture and design are intro-
ducing elements of beauty, local color, decoration, and historical ref-
erences, thereby helping to reintroduce harmonious connections,
wholeness, and relationships between and among people and their
environments.
A personalized, pleasant, aesthetic environment elevates one’s
experience. There is often a need for order, beauty, and symmetry as
a means of connecting with the human soul; such order and equi-
librium can help bring closure and completion to an experience, give
ritual and meaning to an important event. Nightingale was clear that
beauty is healing; the need to beautify one’s surroundings, and doing
so, make a person feel better about self and other. Such efforts intro-
duce these aesthetic dimensions as expressions of humanity and a way
to preserve human and humane connections. Indeed, environments
that contain unpleasant odors, medicinal smells, and other noxious
stimuli produce negative emotions and increase heart rate and anxiety,
whereas pleasant aromas, color, and pleasing sensory elements lower
people’s blood pressure and heart rate (Malkin 1992:20).
Today, progressive healing therapies seek to unify nature and
health. These therapies include the intentional use of clean aesthetic
surroundings, organic shapes, color, texture, and lighting, as well as
modalities such as mineral baths, massage, music, sculpture, painting,
art therapy, and all kinds of expressive arts, to harmonize the human-
environment-natural surroundings, allowing beauty and aesthetics
into the caring-healing process.
While acknowledging and building upon the original text of
Carative Factor 8 (incorporating the well-known aspects of safety,
privacy, comfort, clean aesthetic surroundings, and so on), it is also
important to bring human-environmental-nature-field consciousness
to another level as part of my evolved turn toward Caritas Process 8.
In Caritas Process 8, in which we create a healing environment at all
levels—physical environment as well as the nonphysical, subtle environ-
ment of energy and consciousness—wholeness, beauty, safety, comfort,

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