ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes the spent much of her career trying to find a way out of nursing, because she experience of it was mostly of fear and relentless doing. She explores recount her journey towards integrating a MindBody and person-centred approach into nursing practice. Her nursing training was grounded in a dualistic separation between mind, body and “heart”; in effect, the thinking mind became an entity capable of separateness from the heart. This dualistic approach has damaged nursing as a vocation, reducing it to regimens heavily governed by the importance of completing tasks and ticking boxes, and based fundamentally on a fear of getting things wrong. Integrating a MindBody approach allows her to adhere to the practical tasks of any nursing regimen as part of the whole, but not as the whole. According to MindBody theory, presence is a powerful transformer.
