Page 252 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

t he C a rita s Nurs e /Carit as N u r s iNg an d ch ak r a S y S t e m S
the left-quadrant, nonphysical, energetic dimension of consciousness,
intentionality, and so on, that informs the outer world of physical care
practices. A Caritas Nurse seeks to work with all the chakras, allowing
an infusion of energy and awareness to work not only with the lower
three chakras but also from the fourth chakra and above, opening to
an entire knowledge system and allowing one’s evolved conscious-
ness, higher energetic openings, and left-quadrant thinking to inform/
transform all levels of practice.
The informed Caritas Nurse is one who is intentional, evolving,
and awake. The professional Caritas Nurse is one who attends to and
embraces the lower three chakra systems of the body-physical focus
as well as the other energetic systems; this type of Caritas Nursing inte-
grates the left-quadrant knowledge system with the outer world of
tasks and objective technical care. Therefore, the Caritas Nurse is one
who engages authentically in her or his own Caritas Consciousness evo-
lution, opening access to the life energy source from the left-quadrant
knowledge system, which results in concrete caring practices that are
both physical and metaphysical in nature.
The Caritas Nurse is open to work from the fourth chakra upward
to the seventh chakra. This becomes a lifelong journey to bring Caritas
Consciousness and a more complete knowledge-wisdom system into
one’s personal-professional practices and life work in caring-healing.
The Caritas Nurse and Caritas Nursing cultivate and manifest
the first foundational Caritas Process: loving-kindness and equanim-
ity, meditating on opening the heart to evolve beyond the head-
centered, ego-fear, and control mind-set so often prominent in rou-
tine, nonreflective, institutional nursing. The Caritas Nurse is one
who works from the fourth through seventh chakras—heart-throat,
third eye, and crown—to inform, embody, and embrace practi-
cal, concrete acts of caring grounded in the physical earth plane.
The chakra system is an archetypal depiction of individual maturation
through seven distinct stages (see Chapter 17). The chakras suggest
that we evolve and ascend toward the Divine by mastering the seduc-
tive pull that keeps us fixed upon and limited to a focus on the lower,
base chakras, the exterior right quadrant, and the outer physical-
material world as the supreme but limiting focus of human existence.

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