Professional Organization In Nursing

[ music ] >> so just a couple years ago i was facing my fortieth birthday and in a little life review i thought, i'm a little bit toxic. i was in one of those high-stress jobs, working 60 hours, plus being on call, and it wasn't really how i wanted to be living my life. and thinking i was interested in alternative medicine, always looking at different ways to do things in order to take care of myself, i changed my career path

and i came here to my local community college to teach nursing, and i was so happy. it was a big change. i enjoyed my days, i enjoyed my work. it just really made me feel like i was on the right path, i was in a tranquil, happy place. two weeks into that coming home from work my legs go out from under me and i can't move. i go to the hospital for a week and i find

out that i have degenerative disk disease. the doctor says my spine looks like the spine of an 80 year old. now what do i do. i had just started on this great self care path and i was feeling good and, boom, i'm knocked into the hospital. so i got to get back to tranquil, i got to get back to happy.

so i use all my science, i use all my nursing, and i start reading and i start looking for who are the good docs, what is the new, good treatment, what can i do about this. i'm not going to stay unable to walk, unable to move. so i follow through and i go through many treatments. i get on a lot of medication, taking probably six to eight different meds a couple times a day. on a bad day with pain maybe 15 pills.

when the pain gets really bad and i can't move, i go in for a one-day surgery and they inject all kinds of chemicals into my spine and that gets me up and moving again. but i'm working here at moraine and i'm happy. i like what i'm doing, i love my students. i can go to clinical, i can teach class. i'm in pain a little bit every day, but i've got a pill for that.

so i think i'm still on my tranquil path. about two years ago i was blessed with the opportunity to take a sabbatical here at moraine, and being interested in holistic nursing, that's what i followed. i went to some classes to get my certification in holistic nursing. now, holistic nursing is seen as treating the whole person, focus on healing body, mind, spirit, and i thought i believe that, that's how i work,

that's how i treat people, so this is a good path for me. i'm still in my tranquil move. and it says using complementary and alternative practices. well, i take a vitamin. i go for a massage. so i'm thinking i'm pretty good with this. so my first class the focus is self care. this is going to be a breeze. i've made it through loyola and rush and psychopharmacology

and dissecting the brain in a lab. right. self care, how hard could that be. well, in three days i got sick and vomited within ten minutes of yoga class. i couldn't stay there. i didn't sleep at all. i literally got less than two hours sleep in the three day weekend. i started breaking out and had all kinds of rashes and itching

and just discomfort that i took benadryl for, because we know as a nurse that's the answer, but still just felt horrible. of course, i'm with 20 healers and the number one holistic nurse in the united states. she was the first person to be certified in holistic nursing. that was my teacher. do i say anything to them; no, i just push on through because i'm on my path and i'm okay. so at the end i do meet with her and i say, i don't know

about this, i'm interested, it looks really good, but i don't feel well. i don't know what happened to me, but something's going on. and, of course, she says, well, is it something we're eating, you know, do you think it's the soap, are you allergic to something, you know, what's going on here. i said i don't know. so, well, let's think about it, reflect on that. go home and really look at what's going on with you.

so i start doing my first assigned readings in self care and i find out that i'm really not doing self care the way a holistic nurse would, and i start looking at all the options there would be to add to this really topnotch medical approach that i've taken to this disease, and i find that i haven't been really taking advantage of many of them. so i start a new path and i start not only learning

about holistic nursing, but living a holistic practice and making it a priority to take care of myself and making it a priority to add these complementary and alternative things into my care. now, again, i'm a scientist, i am a western society medical professional. i do not in any way say to you don't go to doctors, don't use medicine, but i am going to say to you how do we combine this, how do we bring this together

for the best path, for our optimum function, for our highest level of taking care of ourselves. right. the doctors i went to said you could get a massage if it makes you feel better, but it's not doing anything, but let me add another pill here because this is protective and it should work. and i would do that, i would follow that advice. so when i came back from my first class and i talked to my teacher again and i did more reading and i talked

to my classmates, i started stepping out into more alternative treatment. i made an appointment with an acupuncturist and i talked to him just about my issues and what was going on. and within a month i was off of half of the medicine i had been taking and feeling better than i ever did. now, he didn't tell me to stop my medicine. he said we need to work with your doctor,

we need to be careful, you need to do what you feel is right, but this treatment very well may help you feel better. and if so, and we can get you down off some of all these pharmacological interventions, right, 15, 16, 20 pills a day, that's a good idea, that's a good goal. so i worked with my acupuncturist and stayed in that process for about six months and it made a huge difference. and i started realizing a day would go

by when i didn't feel pain, and a day would go by when i could do a clinical activity with my students in the morning and come to moraine and do an office hour and even, my goodness, go to a nursing meeting and go home and still feel okay. it wasn't a stressor. it wasn't a negative experience. and i realized there's something in this holistic journey that i need to keep up with.

now, being a scientist, i still needed to know more so i've got a little bit of data, i've got me, a little [inaudible] out of one and i'm feeling better, but i wanted to really find out how to tell my friends about it because most of the nurses that i work with, they're like, oh, yeah, there she goes, she's fluffing her aura, just keep moving along, tell us how those meds work. so i needed to be able to get them to see, and my students and my family and my friends,

to see how adding this really did make sense. one of the classic bits of research on energy and energy medicine is dr. emoto's research, and it's very interesting and his pictures are very, very enthralling. so i'd like you to be aware of this, and certainly easy to find if you'd like to look more into his work. dr. emoto took water from the fujiwara dam, and that's a picture of it, two drops of water

from the fujiwara dam under a microscope and what it looked like. it doesn't look very appealing. you wonder if people are using that water to help their crops grow or to drink at all, what that might be bringing into their body, but that's what the dam water looked like in his area. now, after looking at that and taking this picture, he sent energy of love, kindness and peace to the water.

now, sending energy just means saying a prayer, taking a breath and sending an intention, giving a little meditative connection. he didn't do anything physical. he didn't add any chemicals. he didn't filter the water. he just sent vibrational energy to the water. there's what it looked like after the positive intention. and he did this over and over with different kinds of water from different places, different people sending intentions,

different kinds of intention. and he even tried some of the negative intention. so he stood over that ugly dam water and thought this is a good time to go to war, we hate the people that are drinking this water, and it even looked uglier under the microscope, if you can imagine. so this was the beginning of my looking at where's the science to all this, how do i bring this together with my very scientific approach to taking care of myself.

i did a little more reading and i found a really nice article on reiki. reiki is another kind of energetic work where you don't actually put your hands on the patient, but you stand over the patient and you try to channel energy of the earth, of the universe, of the situation, towards that person for good, for healing, with intention. so there was a study done in 2004. it was a randomized blind study.

there were three groups. one group got no treatment, one group got reiki, and one group got what's called a sham reiki. for sham reiki they had acting students who looked like they were doing a reiki treatment, they mimicked what the reiki practitioners were doing, but they weren't actually sending the intention. they didn't have the training, they weren't certified in providing reiki care.

so what they measured were the effects on the autonomic nervous system. and the autonomic nervous system controls several things in our body; one of which is blood pressure. so the function of the heart, the blood pressure, the circulation. and they found a significant difference, a significant lowering of both blood pressure and heart rate in the reiki group, and it didn't occur

in the control group, so that makes us feel good, like what we're doing is helping, but it also didn't occur in the placebo group. some of the questions i've gotten or some of the comments that are out there about holistic care are is it really the science of what you're doing, or is it just the attention of the person. how many times do we go to a doctor

and they only spend a couple minutes. we're not even sure they're listening to what we say. it seems like they have their answer before they even finish hearing our story. usually in a holistic practice more time is spent with a patient. there's more assessment, there's more engaging. and so some of the questions are is just spending time and giving attention to a person helping them feel better,

not the actual energetic work of the treatment that you're talking about. so the placebo group here seemed to answer that, because the placego [sic] ah, the placebo group see, i don't like that group even without having been part of this. the placebo group also had no effect. so it did make a difference that the reiki practitioner was certified

and doing what they said they were doing, even though we can't see it or measure it, as opposed to the theater student that was miming the same activity. so what i found is that i thought i was taking care of myself, i thought i was on a positive path in my life, and yet many things occurred to make me look at that again and challenge that again. so what i'd like to ask you is do you think you're taking care

of yourself, do you think you're on a positive path, and can you add some things to change that to be healthier, to be happier. the best evidence i have is looking at what's happened to me. so as i said, before my holistic journey i took a lot of medication and i went regularly for procedures. i lost count because you don't really like to think about people putting needles in your spine, but i had gone

through that over 12 times. and i was okay. i was functioning, i was working, i was happy, i was doing what i needed to do, but i was in pain every day. what i tried to do when i moved into my holistic journey, the biggest things that i did were to change my diet. i really learned a lot about nutrition. i learned a lot about clean eating, and i learned about the chemicals in food interacting in your body,

similarly to the way medications chemically interact in your body, and making better choices or changing things in order to help your body function at its best optimum level. so i changed a lot of what i eat and i was more active in myself care. i actually paid attention. i actually did things every day. i went through the acupuncture.

i went through the reiki training, and do that now on a regular basis. i started meditation and yoga, and it doesn't make me sick to my stomach anymore. it's some regular practice that i can keep up that i think has really helped me. so when you ask me what's the best data, here's the best data i can show you. that was me a couple years ago, 80 pounds heavier,

in body, mind and spirit. and i'm here today to ask you to check for yourself how you're feeling and see if there isn't a way that you can also feel better in body, mind and spirit. i'm going to offer a couple exercises now and i hope you'll participate with me. we breathe all the time. we take a breath, we know it's important. we take energy and oxygen into our body.

we release carbon dioxide and toxins that we don't need. but paying attention to your breath can really make a difference. and this is a small thing you can do anytime you want. you can do this in the middle of class, you can do this in a meeting, you can do it when you wake up, you could do it before dinner, you could do it before you go to bed. whenever you feel you need to support your body,

to bring in some peace, some relaxation, some general elevation of your health, you can take a breath. so let's practice that. [ bell sound ] we want to breathe in, and we want to breathe in deeply into our stomach. we want to breathe out and we want to picture releasing tension. so we're breathing in ease and positivity, we're breathing

out tension and negativity. sit in a comfortable position. allow the chair to support you. actually feel there's a chair there, it can hold your body. you don't need to have any tension in your muscles. you don't need to do anything but sit and be present with us. we're going to take three breaths and we're going to change the energy in our bodies and in our room just by doing that.

breathe in deeply, first for yourself, increasing ease and positivity. breathe out just as deeply, letting go of tension, negativity and anything weighing on your mind. breathe in again deeply, this time for your family and friends. picture them at ease, happy, letting go of any negativity or stress they're experiencing. take the third breath, deeply, deeply, deeply,

as far down as you can, feeling that we're now bringing ease to our whole community. breathe out, releasing tension, negativity and toxicity. now, that took us less than two minutes, and we can do that throughout the day to make a shift, to help us feel better, think differently, just take a pause in our day and not be caught up in the stress and anxiety of a toxic life. i'm going to give you another.

[bell sound] isn't that beautiful? there's a whole 'nother piece of information about sound and vibrational therapy for my next talk when the ctl has me back again. secondly, i'd like to teach you a little bit about some of the energy work that donna eden does. and again, donna eden is easy to find online if you're interested in reading more, learning more. if you'd really like to practice this,

she has a lot of teaching videos. she and her daughters both have done a lot out on youtube. so it's easy to find and practice. so she talks about thumping, and thumping is really just kind of focusing our energy and waking up our body so that it's working at its best possible way. so one of the thumping points is on the k-27, and k-27 is a junction of a lot of nerves in your body. so feel the clavicles, your collarbone right here,

right on the sides of your neck and drop down to the point where they end, and then right below that, maybe less than an inch, three quarters of an inch below that, just under the bone, you might feel a little divot, a little well, a little indentation, and just start tapping there, thumping there. this is a point that is seen to have an effect on all the meridians in your body, all the energy meridians in your body.

so when you're feeling stressed, when you're feeling anxious, when you're feeling like you need a reboot, this is a way to do that. you tap on the k-27 points, and you do this at your own pace and you know what's going to work for you. some people thump really hard. some people thump lightly. some people alternate. some people do it in harmony.

you'll find what works for you and that's what you need to do. she talks about this being especially effective for learners, people that are in class reading, writing, looking at things, helping connect all those ideas, bringing things together. so this is a real nice reboot for you anytime you might need it. the last one i'd like to share with you is the thymus thump, and the thymus thump is done, as you see, by a lot of animals

in nature and it's something that we can take on that can really be helpful for us when we're feeling tired, fatigued, we're feeling like there's stress on our immune system. so your thymus works to really keep your immune system organized, keep your immune system connected, and so just thumping on your thymus, it's right over your sternum, it will wake up that system, will bring your immune processes into higher energy

and help you really fight that stress, fight that attacker to feel like you're doing your best. now, you could do this in the morning, you can do this when you're feeling stressed, you can alternate and really get in there and thump. in fact, again, as i said, some of the sound can be helpful so you can add a little noise to that, ahahhahahhh, and really wake up your immune processes. so these are three simple things,

each of which just took us a couple minutes, that i hope you'll practice and i hope you'll even try just one of them once in a while and see the wonderful effect it can have on your life. these and other things are what have really moved me from totally toxic to terrifically tranquil. thank you. [ applause ]