Meditation for Nurses

While this week’s post is directed towards nurses and healthcare professionals, I encourage all of my readers to have a look. Since healthcare can impact all of us at some point in our lives, it’s important for you to know what nursing is doing about showing up at the bedside, mindful and compassionate. Enjoy!

Transforming the Patient Experience through Presence and Intention

This week’s post is going to take on a slightly different format. For this post, I’m going to share a recent article that I had published in the American Holistic Nurses Association Journal, Beginnings. It was such a pleasure to write this article that I’d like to share it with you. Here’s the intro to the article, with the actual PDF as a link that you’ll be able to read and, if you chose to, download. Enjoy!

How Not to Show Up at the Bedside

Regrettably, I can recall numerous times in my career as a nurse when my mind was preoccupied and my intention was set on getting my work done. In reflection, I can’t imagine how my patients must have felt when they realized that the person charged with their care was distracted and not fully present.

The Imperative of Showing Up

Having been a nurse for more than 30 years as well as a long-time practitioner of meditation, I’ve come to understand that the transformation of my own mind can have a “ripple effect” on the minds of my patients. When I make it my primary intention to be present, aware and compassionate at the bedside, their experience of me as caregiver (and by extension their experience within the healthcare system) is transformed. This is why it is wise for our profession to promote a contemplative approach to patient care, behooving us to work with our minds as a necessary skill to providing genuine, attentive and compassionate care.

Read more…

How I Can Help You to Commit to Your Meditation Practice

To read more on how meditation can benefit nurses, check out these other posts.

(At the end of this post, read about the upcoming meditation retreat, just for nurses, in Hawai’i. It’s going to great! It’s going to be fun! But most of all, it will teach you how to turbo-boost your meditation practice, so that every day can be a meditative one! Read on…)

Maybe you’ve already got a meditation practice. If that’s the case, great! Keep it up. And feel free to use all of the content from this site to support you in your efforts. If you haven’t started to meditate, begin now.

Many people don’t meditate because they believe that they need to do “something special” in order to meditate, maybe you’re one of them. “Doing something” special isn’t the case. All you need is your breath, and a few minutes of time set aside to begin your practice. Here are some tools to get you started:

• Meditation audio for using your breath as the anchor of your attention during meditation.
• Ebook and two chapters from the book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind, on how to meditate.
• Here’s a pitch for my book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind. You can even buy it in a Kindle version! Why buy it? Because I really did write it for you. Because it’s a meditation book written just for nurses (although others who are not nurses have bought the book and raved about it!). And, because it has EVERYTHING that you need to learn how to meditate and to use your practice at the bedside.

This site has tons of tools for learning how to meditate.

I encourage you to look through the HUNDREDS of articles that I’ve written and especially check out my weekly meditation tips and other useful meditation materials provided for your health and well being. And please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything with me, have any questions or need clarification regarding anything that I’ve written about.

Thanks for visiting and have a mindful day.

Meditation Retreat for Nurses in Hawai’i

While meditation is a skill that can be practiced by anyone, it’s important to remember that learning to meditate well, really having a stable and vital practice, comes with periods of intense and sustained practice. In order to give you that practice, I’m arranging to have a small group of nurses join me in Hawaii in 2015. If you’d like to come on this retreat or have an interest in similar retreats, please visit this page.