Autoethnographic Journey to Discover the Heart and Art of My Nursing Practice

<p>This thesis presents an autoethnographic study of the concept of 'compassionate listening' within my general and palliative care practice. I examined my care for people in critical life course moments to gain insight into the process of listening with compassion. This insight evolved through a process of layered reflection using a series of texts, particularly stories that captured critical moments in working with people who were facing crisis situations or who were dying. Writing and reflecting on these stories enabled me identify how I engaged with patients and their loved ones. I was able to explore how compassionate listening could be used to ascertain their needs, particularly when they were unable or unsure how to proceed. Compassion implies the capacity to acknowledge another human's suffering or predicament. Compassionate listening is a form of active listening that begins with the intention to be present for the person. It brings humanness, patience, an acknowledgement of one's own vulnerability and a willingness to interact with a person in a meaningful way that could alleviate some of their suffering. During this special encounter both nurse and patient reach an embodied knowing. In studying this aspect of caring I chose stories from my practice that were written over a number of years in different locations. I reflected again on these stories to gain deeper insight and asked colleagues to read some of the texts and give me feedback on my practice. Their comments were a valuable part of this layered reflective process. This thesis presents eight stories and a series of reflections on those stories and colleague's comments, which enabled me to explore compassionate listening as it evolved in my practice. This study contributes to an understanding of how the ability to develop refined awareness of meaningful interactions with people can enhance wellbeing for both the patient and nurse.</p>

Autoethnographic Journey to Discover the Heart and Art of My Nursing Practice

<p>This thesis presents an autoethnographic study of the concept of 'compassionate listening' within my general and palliative care practice. I examined my care for people in critical life course moments to gain insight into the process of listening with compassion. This insight evolved through a process of layered reflection using a series of texts, particularly stories that captured critical moments in working with people who were facing crisis situations or who were dying. Writing and reflecting on these stories enabled me identify how I engaged with patients and their loved ones. I was able to explore how compassionate listening could be used to ascertain their needs, particularly when they were unable or unsure how to proceed. Compassion implies the capacity to acknowledge another human's suffering or predicament. Compassionate listening is a form of active listening that begins with the intention to be present for the person. It brings humanness, patience, an acknowledgement of one's own vulnerability and a willingness to interact with a person in a meaningful way that could alleviate some of their suffering. During this special encounter both nurse and patient reach an embodied knowing. In studying this aspect of caring I chose stories from my practice that were written over a number of years in different locations. I reflected again on these stories to gain deeper insight and asked colleagues to read some of the texts and give me feedback on my practice. Their comments were a valuable part of this layered reflective process. This thesis presents eight stories and a series of reflections on those stories and colleague's comments, which enabled me to explore compassionate listening as it evolved in my practice. This study contributes to an understanding of how the ability to develop refined awareness of meaningful interactions with people can enhance wellbeing for both the patient and nurse.</p>

Dancesong

Dancesong is a reflective article that explores the author’s somatic and dance practice in times of isolation in a pandemic: walking, dancing and writing in sites in proximity to her home. On the edge of wild and urban landscapes as well as the inner landscape of fragility, she takes her feet walking as a way of opening up attention and exploring the intimacy of embodied ways of inquiry. Mud, sea, soil and flora become the terrain where these somatic and poetic reflections occur. In a collaboration with creation, the invitation is to respond to the moment through tiny dances and inhabiting the fullness of what it means to be present. As an arts-based researcher, this article is written in poetic and visceral language, honouring the relationship between language emerging from the breath and syntax of flesh and blood, bone and ligaments. Poetic language and poetry are central to responding to creation and being recreated as a way of articulating. Peppered through this short piece is poetry, images and videos of movement practices that evoke a call and response in creation. The reader is invited to open to the wisdom of embodied knowing and be recreated through their own somatic practices.

Thinking in sound

Debussy’s music is discussed in terms of its logic of sensation (Deleuze) and the ways of being it affords, rather than for any discursive logic of propositions. Composers think in and through sounds; they do not transpose other things into sound. Saariaho’s ‘grammar of dreams’ signals a concern with a different kind of musical logic – what Adorno called a ‘musique informelle’. ‘Jeux de vagues’, the central movement of Debussy’s La mer, provides a key focus, though music by Dutilleux and Saariaho is also explored to demonstrate the allusive logic of this musical repertoire. The chapter examines how this music constitutes ‘a new epistemology’ (Dufourt), an embodied knowing of the world inscribed in the details of musical works.

Shapeshifting the Scottish Borders: A Geopoetic Dance of Place

In this paper, I unite dance theory and practice and geopoetics in order to reflect on edges, peripheries and borders in a geographic region, the Scottish Borders, where the dominant cultural narrative is and has historically been based on rivalry. I draw here on the writing of the Scottish poet-philosopher Kenneth White, the practices of specific dancers and choreographers and on relational accounts of place and more-than-human perspectives. Rather than ‘sense of place’, my interest is in sensing place and thinking through sites. Threaded throughout are descriptions of perception practices exploring woodland, stone and riverways, which take the reader into the more experiential realm of embodied knowing. These passages are an invitation to be present with more-than-human others, to be in contact with the vitality of materials and to allow for being shaped, rather than being the shaping force. The intention is to bring different bodies of knowledge into contact as a way of revealing other vocabularies within place, which suggest alternative cultural narratives and help create the conditions for place—making a more collaborative, ethical and less anthropocentric endeavour, open to the influence and organising principles of the more-than-human.