Integral Nursing: Past, Present, and Future

Barbara Dossey

As an educator, consultant, researcher, and author, Barbara Dossey profoundly alters perceptions about holistic nursing. An inspired teacher, she effectively integrates non-traditional viewpoints with a high degree of scientific awareness in her lectures worldwide. Spanning the full range of current nursing and health information, her presentations provide challenging, practical, and innovative ways to combine holistic health care with high-level wellness. From nursing association gatherings to corporate meetings—all audiences respond enthusiastically to Barbara Dossey's penetrating insights and abiding compassion.

 

Barbara Dossey, PhD, RN, HNC, FAAN, is a world-recognized trailblazer in holistic nursing and healthcare. Having lectured, studied, and written extensively on the vital importance of attending to body, mind, and spirit in the practice of healing, Barbara was gracious enough to speak with us about how an integral perspective has informed her work.

In this dialogue, Dr. Dossey explains how modern nurses find themselves in a unique situation: on the one hand, they are freer to work with a wider range of healing techniques than ever before; on the other, they have lost a sense of their roots and, with them, a framework for understanding how to engage those techniques in a meaningful way.

Barbara goes on to explore how the work of 19th century British nurse Florence Nightingale could very well provide a clue for a more integral nursing in the 21st century. Not only was she the founder of modern nursing, but as Barbara explains, she was also an "integral mystic." Quoting Nightingale, "Your work must involve the personal, the political, the social, and the scientific domains."

Recasting the wisdom of Nightingale for modern ears, Barbara speaks passionately of what today’s nurses must to do to help break free from the reductionism of modern medicine and rekindle the creative fires of the artist-healer. It is the consciousness of the healer, no matter what the tools—from orthodox to alternative—that defines the integral healer. And as Barbara reminds us: may that consciousness be as comprehensive, wise, and caring as is possible.