Nursing as an Aesthetic Praxis

The loving person is not rebellious, but accepts the heart.  The heart is two curves coming together, sinking into each other and fusing.  The heart is not two counter forces that stop each other.  The heart is a flaming jewel of life that has beautiful colours, emanates waves, and inundates the human being with messages.  It is in effect a state of creation.

Pierrakos (1987, p.253)

Thinking, as process, begins in our structure of family, and is then created and recreated in adult life.  Teilhard de Chardin and Nietzche (cited in Paterson and Zderad) viewed being as man’s fundamental project, and in this way there is no fixed nature per se, but rather “each person takes on a mode of being in his world dependent upon his degree of freedom, and the how and what of the world is presented by his family and perceived by him” (Paterson and Zderad, 1976, p.45).  This is the Spiritual Law of Reincarnation.  In other words, we incarnate into families that reflect the degree of freedom within our own being, therefore engaging in our own reflections or patterns, held unconsciously, but created in our engagement of being human.  As limited beliefs they are boundaries/filters/blocks, limitations based upon fear.  We then move into the world and the world I am speaking of is nursing.  To perceive that a nurse is synonymous with nursing is to lose sight of the fact that the nurse is a human being necessarily related to other human beings (Paterson and Zderad, 1976).  The nurse is also her history, the nurse, as a human-being, is also required to think. 

Each time a nurse calls it is thinking that as memory is attached to a particular emotion, then she too can continue to act in a way that reflects her old code or pattern so as to repress, project or deny that emotion which at some point in her history she has deemed bad, and therefore judged.  She has alienated herself from her core.  The Isness of that now moment, which just is, is then no more.  But in the first instance, as I have already explained in the process of reprogramming, in choosing to allow the feeling of that emotion, then in that allowance what is allowed is, the presence of the presence.  It is a response to her own call of Being, that lies embedded in the relationship with another human being.  In the allowance of what is, then there is a quality of intimacy that is felt.  It is lovemaking.  When two human beings, nurse and patient, experience this depth of relationship, it does defy description, and yet it is known. 

Therefore, we call ourselves to one another energetically in the mutual process of pattern making, to (re)think.  And as we think we empower ourselves.  As empowered nurses we are more able to assist others in empowering themselves, to assist others in their process of thinking.  As I remove my filters/blocks then I know how to assist another in their process of removing their filters/blocks.  This I perceive to be Nursing’s true service.  For in freeing myself, I refract my light.  I am no longer a reflection of an image, because I am that image in it truer sense.  In this unconfused state what I am is more love.  The more love I am being, the more love can love through me. 

And so from the core of my being I call, I AM that, and response to being is, that I AM.  As I AM, so it is.

Summary

This chapter has began to explore the nature of thinking, from both an unconscious and conscious perspective.  This chapter has taken the position that most thought is unconscious and that the world is perceived through filters created from ‘what has been thought abou