Opening the Heart

It's fair to say I've been having a pretty rough time as we power through the second half of our marathon RN year of nursing school. A significant part of the problem for me is that I've been so immersed in the world of western allopathy that on a deep level I've been losing touch with where I came from. That disconnection from an approach that is both holistic both on the personal level and on the level of society and nature has even strongly affected how I do self-care. I'd started falling into a pattern where I would see various self-care practices like pills - do activity X to deal with complaint Y. Which is neither fun nor particularly effective.

Psychiatric nursing has probably been where this conflict has been most intense. On one hand, in my clinical rotations, I'm praised for my wariness of the mental health system and my seeing patients as having their own unique experiences of trauma, extreme mental states, and so on, where the psychiatric diagnosis is a contested and shifting attempt for a flawed system to get a handle on people. There, my seeing the common humanity and the connections between myself, my fellow students, the staff, and the clients is praised, and I feel like I'm being drawn back to the calling that got me started on this road in the first place: assisting people in healing and integrating their experiences of trauma.

In psych lecture, I see people continually reduced to diagnoses, and get drilled on the outdated even by the standards of mainstream psychiatry standards that the NCLEX tests on. I constantly feel the subtext that the patient is The Other and that nurses, psychiatrists, and the whole host of other mental health providers are never, ever, patients. The patients are "ill" and the providers are "well", and never the two shall meet. And, continually, in the back of my mind, I think "am I allowed to give care anymore? Or am I too broken?" when all the scarred over wounds were a big part of what made me good at what I do in the first place.

Hopefully these two opposed experiences will resolve into making me a more skilled and more compassionate nurse, rather than someone who runs away screaming from psych, because no matter what exact road I take, I want to help my future patients by integrating care of the body and mind. I've been trying to consciously get back to my roots lately, returning to herbalism. And approach to herbalism of helping the whole person return themselves to balance, both internally and with the world around them, rather than a set of knowledge about plants to be used like western allopathic medications, except "natural".

So I read this wonderful account about hawthorn, and when I got home at the end of a long day, I took all the jars of tinctures and dried herbs out of the bin I'd stored them in, and got busy reorganizing them, which started out looking something like this:

Thankfully, I subsequently got it a lot more organized, and pretty quickly identified the tincture that had leaked a bit as elderberry (which is a pretty easy one). With the herbs sorted and a few empty tincture bottles refilled, I took 2 ml of hawthorn berry tincture.

Immediately, I felt an emotional/spiritual tightness around my heart lift, and all these feelings that have been just sitting there, endlessly being analyzed but not being allowed to do what feelings are for - being felt all the way through, from beginning to end - get gently on their way.

Now to put some mugwort under my pillow and take a bath scented with an essential oil or two and actually relax, for a change.