Page 49 - Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

NU RSING: THE PHILO S OPHY A ND SCIENCE OF C A R I N G , revI s e d ed I t I o n
• Cultivate and create meaningful caring-healing rituals: translate
conventional nursing tasks into purposive healing acts
• For example, hand washing as purification, cleansing psychi-
cally as well as physically; use as opportunity to “center,”
release, and bless patient/situation while preparing oneself
to enter into next moment
• Incorporate, translate, and expand nursing skills/tasks into
nursing arts/caring-healing modalities: for example, inten-
tional use of music-sound, touch, aroma, visual-aesthetic-
beauty, energetic approaches, and so on
• Carry out conventional nursing tasks and procedures, such as
basic needs and physical care acts, as intentional, reverential,
respectful caring-healing arts
• Cultivate own practices for spiritual growth and evolution of
higher/deeper consciousness
• Others—yet to be identified (see www.caritasconsortium.org).

We need to continue to explore models for cultivating Caring
Literacy and skill in attending to our human presence in “Being-in-
caring-healing-relationships.” These directions incorporate aspects of
caring such as silence, song, music, poetry, physical and nonphysical
touch, centering practices of “presencing”; the use of art, nonverbal
expressive forms, spirit-energy-filled conscious affirmations; holding
intentions of wholeness, calmness, healing, and so on.
Within this framework of Caring Literacy, it is important to real-
ize that the nurse is not only in the environment, able to make signifi-
cant changes in ways of Being/doing/knowing in the physical envi-
ronment, but that the nurse IS the environment (Quinn 1992; Watson
2005). Thus, the nurse is invited to engage in significant insight into the
Nurse-Self as an energetic-vibrational field of consciousness and inten-
tionality (Quinn 1992), affecting the entire environment for better or
for worse. The nurse’s (caring-loving) consciousness radiates higher
vibrational effects. A nurse without an informed, “literate” caring con-
sciousness can actually be “biocidic”—that is, toxic, life destroying,
and destructive to the experience of others (Halldorsdottir 1991). On
the other hand, a nurse who is cultivating ontological competencies in
Caring Literacy is more likely to be “biogenic”—that is, life giving and

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