Holistic Nursing

Teresa L. Frisch, RN, Reiki Master / Teacher 3.29.09

Sitting in the middle of Northern Indiana cornfields, my country grade school had no kindergarten. I was barely six years old when I entered the first grade, and already trying to save baby pine trees and befriending all creatures great and small. The Noble County library truck came to York Center once a week, but first graders were “too little” to use it. For an entire year I watched and waited, silently thinking I would surely die before it was finally my turn to climb the steps and into that treasure chest of books on wheels.

Farm families take care of each other. When my mother was twelve years old, she babysat my cousin Joey. He called her “the Readin’ Girl.” When Joey was twelve he, in turn, babysat and read to me. The words told stories, but as I heard them I had to build and paint the pictures with my mind. I knew instinctively and immediately that books were precious, and just as instinctively and immediately, I fell in love with that turquoise and white library truck the first time I saw it chug into the school parking lot.

The librarian, God love her heart, waited patiently every week, shaking her head “no” while I begged to take out “bigger kid’s books.” Transfixed and transported into worlds of people, places, critters and things far from Indiana, I maxxed out my weekly quota and most of them I read at least twice. Clara Barton and Cherry Ames were waiting for me on those shelves, and in the seventh grade, at the age of twelve, I knew. I already “had experience” taking care of my grandmothers and my brother. I wanted to help people and I was going to be a nurse.

Thanks to Florence Nightingale I was able to do that. She founded The Nightingale School of Nursing in St. Thomas Hospital, London in 1860, and “hoped to recruit women who had received some education and were accustomed to earning a wage, such as the upper servant class consisting of the daughters of tradesmen and small farmers.”ⁱ I entered St. Joseph’s School of Nursing just after my eighteenth birthday and received my diploma at twenty.

Nightingale introduced me to the profession of nursing in 1975. When I read Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer.ⁱⁱ in 2006, Barbara Dossey introduced me to Nightingale. The real Nightingale. I began to see the amazing person that she really was, and maybe understand better than most why she "was the way she was."

You, the reader, may have already researched almost any search engine and know about Florence Nightingale and her history. You may already know that she came from a wealthy, privileged, philanthropic, but nonconformist family. You may know that she was well traveled and well educated in languages, sciences, fine arts, Eastern and Western Philosophy, cultures and belief systems. You may know that she was an avid and gifted mathematician, a statistician who invented the first Polar Area Diagram.ⁱⁱⁱ

What you may not know is that Florence Nightingale was also a mystic, and that she believed that “God lays down certain physical laws. Upon carrying out such laws depends our responsibility.^iv Her statistical Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East (see Polar Area Diagram) concluded that “most of the deaths – both wound and disease-related – were due to overcrowding, poor sanitation, and improper ventilation, not to inadequate food and supplies as she had initially believed.”^v She eventually challenged the British army, reforming and revolutionizing healthcare by implementing best practice policies and procedures that promoted sanitation. Pre-antibiotics, her creativity, common sense and the natural enviroment were deciding factors that influenced her thought processes. This holistic view of patient care was directly responsible for decreasing the morbidity and mortality rates of thousands of British soldiers in the Crimean War.

At the age of sixteen Florence “experienced the first of several ‘inner awakenings.’ She did not describe the experience in great detail; she simply noted that on February 7, 1837, God spoke to her and called her to his service. She did not receive any specific instructions, only a powerful ‘inner certainty’ that her life was to be devoted to God’s service.”^vi She had been drawn to help the poor, and the sick since she was six years old^vii and availed herself of any opportunity to do so. The next seventeen years of her life were spent traveling, studying and researching healthcare, searching for further direction from her God, declining the offer of marriage because it would interfere with her “calling,”^viii and breaking free of family restraints and the social and political mores of her time.

At the age of thirty-three, with her family’s blessings and a monthly stipend from her father, Florence “began the vocation for which she had been born.”^ix She began her “professional career as superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances at No. 1 Upper Harley Street.^x Her years of studying, observing and documenting were readily apparent as she implemented her holistic vision, introducing “innovative ideas about sickness, health, and healing – what she referred to as the ‘art and science of nursing."'^xi

Florence remained a powerful political and social activist for health reform throughout her life, mentally sharp until her passing at the age of ninety on August 15, 1910.^xii “Nightingale’s letters and private notes from 1855 to the late 1880s clearly document that she suffered a variety of significant symptoms that are consistent with the specific form of chronic brucellosis.Ibid. 426-427 Initially stricken with fever on May 12, 1855 during the Crimean War, she became critically ill and suffered with chronic, recurring sequelae the remainder of her life. “At the age of thirty-seven Nightingale declared herself an invalid”^xiii to limit visitors and conserve her energy. In 1975 we diagnosed these as “fevers of unknown origin.”

Nightingale was a mystic and so am I. Nightingale, as many others, declined to talk about her spiritual or mystical experiences. I never did either, except in whispers to trusted friends as I looked for other people with similar experiences. Participating in our clinical ladder program spurred me into writing exemplars focused on nursing intuition and my personal research into these mystical phenomena continued over the years.

Eventually I came to realize that there was no common language to describe these experiences, and the only way that one would be developed would be if we, as people, began to share. As Dean Radin said in The Conscious Universe, The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena: “Some of the most famous scientists wrote in terms that are practically indistinguishable from the writings of mystics.”^xv Cross-scientific discipline studies of nonlocality and entanglement, coupled with the gathering of empirical data by human observers might provide the impetus and ground laying of future research in mind-body medicine.

Florence and I share a similar Meyer-Briggs personality type as well. We are both highly intuitive, and perhaps Florence would recognize herself as an HSP as I have. Elaine Aaron, PhD., has researched and described HSP’s, or Highly Sensitive People, as having overly-sensitive nervous systems, meaning that we “notice levels of stimulation that go unobserved by others”^xvi and sometimes almost “have no skin.”^xvii Our senses and awareness of the environment and people around us is heightened, and to cope and recover we need time in a less stimulating environment every day. Nightingale’s need for solitude might have been compounded by her heightened intuitiveness as well as the sequelae of brucellosis.

Per Dossey, Florence fit the Intuitive Introspective Thinking Judging personality type (INTJ)^{xviii xix}, or Scientist / Strategist. I am an INFJ^xx, the Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Judging personality type. INFJs are approximately one to three percent of all the personality types and supposedly the most rare. Because I filter, or perceive and interpret incoming sensory data emotionally, I am an Empath. This means I “feel” information and process it emotionally, first and foremost. To me this was common sense and it was a shock when I realized that not everyone processes information the way I do.

Common questions that come my way are: Do I read minds like tickertape (no), can I help you win the lottery (no), and can I do a “Vulcan Mind Meld^xxi (no). I do have several facets Receptive ESP,^xxii as described by Jill Stefko, PhD. in What is Receptive ESP? Clairaudience, Clairvoyance, Clairsentience, Remote Viewing and more.

So, what good is all of this? At the moment I am not sure myself, but it seems a sin to let the knowledge go to waste. As I said, I did not speak of these things for a long time because I needed to confirm them for myself and that literally takes time. My study of myself is ongoing as I look for patterns and document personal events. As you move around my website you will find evidence-based, peer reviewed scientific articles from numerous sources related to the topic of mind-body medicine and nonlocality. You will find empirical data in the form of stories describing mystical or human observer events as well.

I came to realize that if Florence Nightingale was brave enough to challenge the British Army and institute a model for holistic healthcare, then I, as her intuitive Sister in 2009 needed to be just as brave. I need to stand up and speak for the quiet ones, the ones afraid to give voice to experiences that as yet, no one can explain. If I stand up and help them form frames of reference and a language to describe their experiences then they might stand up and speak too.

Revised: tlf 3.29.09

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