| Learning Objective #1: Discuss Zen meditation as a unitary approach to healing | |||
| Learning Objective #2: Apply Zen insights to healing both caregivers and patients |
This presentation will apply insights gained through Zen practice to healing both caregivers and patients. Healing yourself is a foundation for healing others. Meditation helps nurses and other health care providers cultivate the personal knowledge needed to care for patients who are facing health challenges or life-threatening illness and is also a way to build the energy and physical endurance demanded by many caregiving situations. For people coping with health problems, pain, loss, and fear, it is a way to experience wholeness even amidst illness or death. Nurse theorists such as Rogers, Newman, and Watson have developed nursing theories that encourage a paradigm shift to a unitary transformative perspective in health care. Zen practice is a way to directly experience a unitary perspective so the nurse can practice nursing as a mind-body-spirit whole. Often this perspective seems too abstract to apply in the everyday work of a caregiver, however, stories from the presenter’s recent book Healing Zen will be shared to illustrate a unitary approach to healing. The diverse perspectives of Zen and unitary transformative nursing theories enrich and illuminate each other to help the healthcare provider understand the link between scholarship, meditation, and practicing with awareness, presence, and compassion. This topic is significant because nursing can be highly stressful leading to burnout and exit from the profession. Meditation is an effective stress management strategy that helps restore balance among “the head, heart, and hands” of nursing, thereby nurturing both the nurse and the patient. Nurses have a long tradition of complementary care, yet are greatly underrepresented in the books written in the field of integrative health care. It is important for nurses to step forward to share the valuable knowledge they possess and assume a major role in this growing arena.
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