Empowerment Is Already Within You, It’s Within Your Mind
What makes you powerful has nothing to do with whether you have an advanced degree or not. It doesn’t have anything to do with whether you’re a “super nurse” or not. It doesn’t even have to do with whether you’ve ever made a medication error before!
What makes you powerful is something that you already have, it’s within your heart and it’s within your mind. What makes you powerful is the fact that you have awareness and that you have compassion.
With these two tools, awareness and compassion, you can reclaim your power and tap into a reservoir of strength and energy, serving yourself in a non-selfish way and serving your patients in a selfless way. With this power, you can say no to policies that don’t promote your wellness at work while having compassion for those who you deal with when standing up for yourself.
Power Within, Not Over
The power that you have as a nurse, and as a human being, is a power within, not power over. Many times, we feel that once we’ve gained power over our environment, or our job, or our spouse, or our….whatever, that we’ll become powerful. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While becoming empowered by standing up for ourselves professionally is important, and we need to advocate for ourselves and for our profession, that track is fraught with uncertainty and conditions that we have no control over. You may strike and still not get the results that you’re looking for. You may change jobs, or cities, or spouses, but find that you’re still left feeling disempowered. Why is this?
As long as you’re a victim to the storms that rage within your mind, as long as you’re tossed about by the waves of emotions that arise when the external forces of change and uncertainty are fierce, you’ll never find the power of true and lasting peace.
True power and true peace of mind comes from within you, from within your mind. True power comes from being able to withstand the tumult of external or internal forces, and not be swept from your center. And true power already exists within you, now, and has always been there! True power comes from learning to work with and harness the power of your mind!
Meditation Brings You the Power of Now
Meditation, in its essence, is the state of non-distraction. It’s a state where we’re free from all cares and concerns, yet where we don’t try to push or shove the cares and concerns out of our mind. Attempting to rid our mind of thoughts and all that arises within it would be power over our mind and if you’ve ever tried it, you’ve found that it’s impossible to forcibly still your mind. Instead, we work with our mind and learn to remain in the present, aware of our moment to moment environment, without becoming distracted by all that arises.
Think about this; how would you be as a nurse (or spouse/partner, parent, driver, etc.) if you could remain present, in the moment, aware of all that was going on without being thrown by it; do you think that would make you more powerful? You bet! Would you feel more empowered to deal with whatever was going on, whether that was a patient crisis or a crisis in morale in your work environment? Yes you would!
With Meditation Comes Compassion
The extraordinary thing about learning how to meditate is that as you begin to encounter your mind, and as you begin to see how difficult it can be to remain at peace in the world, you’ll begin to find compassion for others. Meditation and compassion go hand-in-hand. Why is this?
When we begin to meditate, or even if we’ve been doing it for a while, we’ll learn that our mind truly is the creator of our happiness and our suffering. Despite the outer circumstances, how our mind is at any one moment can determine how we experience our reality. This leads us to realize how much we suffer due to the wildness of our mind. With this realization comes the truth that everyone suffers and that others’ suffering is also due to their untrained mind. When we realize this, and when we begin to gain some inner peace and contentment within our mind, then we begin to wish for others what we have gained for ourselves. That is true compassion, wishing others to have what you have, peace of mind.
Meditation is What Brings You the Power Within
Through working with your mind, meditation teaches you to bring your from power within out into your daily life and work. And when you have that kind of power, people notice.
How To Meditate
Maybe you’ve already got a meditation practice. If that’s the case, great! Keep it up. And feel free to use all of the content from this site to support you in your efforts. If you haven’t started to meditate, begin now.
Many people don’t meditate because they believe that they need to do “something special” in order to meditate, maybe you’re one of them. “Doing something” special isn’t the case. All you need is your breath, and a few minutes of time set aside to begin your practice. Here are some tools to get you started:
- Meditation audio for using your breath as the anchor of your attention during meditation.
- Check out the book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind. You can even buy it in a Kindle version! Why buy it? Because I really did write it for you. Because it’s a meditation book written just for nurses. And, because it has EVERYTHING that you need to learn how to meditate and to use your practice at the bedside.
This site has tons of tools for learning how to meditate and be compassionate.
I encourage you to look through the HUNDREDS of articles that I’ve written and especially check out my weekly meditation tips and other useful meditation materials provided for your health and well being. And please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything with me, have any questions or need clarification regarding anything that I’ve written about.
Thanks for visiting and have a mindful day.
I appreciate your post, website thoughts, and all of this.
I am a VERY compassionate, patient-centered, innovative, forward-thinking, intuitive, innovative, compliant, AND advanced-degreed nurse. I meditate daily and practice yoga often. Did I fail to mention…I’ve been forced into resignation in less than 2 years time, from my previous FOUR positions for vague reasons. While I applaud your pep-talk, and do not know which part of the country you work in; where I live there is still a very strong external power and forcefield against nurses. Especially against the more innovated practitioners in non-specific, newer roles, such as I have been taking while obtaining my degree, like clinical navigator, bedside educator, etc. If you “fit in,” the fact if you are a great care-tender, or know your stuff, or have great internal power is pretty much moot. In fact, the more power you display, whether it’s knowledge, independence, that you don’t get irritated or flustered by “snarkiness” or address it, or you do bring up you sense tension and want to know if there’s anyway to settle it (obviously said in a non-confrontational way but calling out that you caught the eye-rolling or attitude, or whatever the choice ill-behavior of the day was).
If they like you they keep you, if you are seen as and out sider, despite your ability to make improvements, save lives, or get along with the patients perfectly fine-it doesn’t matter. Fist impressions are made in about 15 seconds, and rarely changed there after. If the pack doesn’t want you or understand you-your a goner. I think that’s the “powerlessness” that is related to nurses, is that it only takes one or two “momma birds” to determine your ruffling feathers, and it’s time to start to get go to work turning the nest against you.
Exit interviews never involve HR, you can see it in people’s faces when your days are numbered, NO matter how hard you try, the opinion of the matriarch has been set and you’re a marked person, until that “call to the office” day. That’s the powerlessness.
I’m not attempting to rain on your happiness blog, but there are places out there in this country that are not as sour as where I am currently unemployed. I lived in Seattle-it was unionized maybe that had something to do with it, it was a busy facility, to busy for hen-pecking. They were no where near as quick to judge and force-resign you). I apologize for all the feministic references, I’m well-aware there are far more men in nursing these day, and maybe, you all are not as “peck”ed upon because you are men, I don’t know, I practice one mindfulness, also, so I do not want to speculate ;)).
Regardless, I truly enjoyed your positive thoughts, and will continue my meditation and seeking to find my power within. But know that there IS a great deal of external forces (especially here in the non-unionized South) that you are ignoring that may be misleading, and unintentially leading others to believe enhancing spiritual strength is solution to all of their work problems. While it’s a wonderful idea-I am not discrediting it-there are genuine external forces that need not be disregarded.
Appreciating your spreading of positivity, but imploring you to not mislead,
A misfortunate, one-mindfulness meditator.