You are a beacon of light in a very dark world, darling nurse.

You are caring for people who are suffering. This is truly a noble profession. We have greats like Florence Nightingale and we can only hope to go down in history as a pioneer and a caring problem solver. Even if it’s only among our own patients, we want to know that we made a difference. 

Except…we can’t always achieve this due to the pressures we’re under in modern nursing.

Sadly your ideal image of your nurse self might not be matching your reality. You are experiencing burnout and SAPS (Stress, Anxiety, Pain and Suffering). We don’t have time to sit and connect with our patients and we’re spending our days nursing paperwork and dodging lawsuits. We are short staffed and we are suffering. 

This can often make you feel like a failure in nursing. You’re UNABLE to care for your patients to the level that you would like to. How do I live up to those expectations in these modern circumstances? Am I not resilient enough or not strong enough? These are the painful thoughts that might run through your mind. 

Journalist, Johann Hari shares his insights in a Ted Talk on anxiety stating the following,

“According to the World Health Organization, if you’re depressed or anxious, you’re not weak and you’re not crazy – you’re a human being with unmet needs.”

Yet this concept is not treated with the attention it deserves in the medical world.

He also goes on to say that while western medicine is busy prescribing antidepressants, Cambodian villages are prescribing cows to their people. 

“There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields and one day he stood on a landmine left over from the war with the United States and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial leg and after a while he went back to work in the rice fields but apparently it’s super painful to walk under water when you’ve got an artificial limb and it was pretty traumatic to work in the field where he got blown up, the guy started to cry all day, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression”. 

This was when the Cambodian doctors sat with him, listened to him and prescribed him a cow. 

“They realized that his pain made sense but it was hard for him to see it in the throws of his depression.”

So they came to the conclusion that they needed to help the man stay out of the rice fields and the water. They bought him a cow and told him he could work as a dairy farmer. Within a month the depression was gone. The cow was the antidepressant. 

One of the biggest takeaways from his talk is that drugs alone cannot be the answer to SAPS (Stress, Anxiety, Pain & Suffering).

We need to dig into those unmet needs and loneliness is one of those needs:

We are the loneliest society in human history.

Historically we have been known to work in tribes but we’ve disbanded our tribes and it is making us feel awful. 

We have always been a species that banded together to resolve issues. We’ve always had tribes and we still need them.  

When I think of you, dear nurse, I smile. You are a part of the YogaNurse and YogaNursing Tribe. You are a part of a community that’s working together to create change in the world of nursing but more than that, you’re always welcome to express your suffering and your tribe will listen and support you through it. 

We have hundreds of nurses connecting daily, talking about their unmet needs, finding solutions and finding peace through the YogaNurse model of care and the YogaNursing tribe. 

If you aren’t part of our private facebook groups, you can get started by joining our public facebook page.

Once you begin your YogaNursing journey through our teachings at the YogaNurse Academy, you will have access to our closed facebook group so that you can feel right at home without fearing judgement from your non-nurse peeps. We are your nurse family and we get it. 

We are the loneliest society in the history of humanity. Find out why the YogaNurse tribes believes in the power of prescribing cows for anxiety and depression. pic.twitter.com/Wh6W7K7T2O Click To Tweet

An excellent TED Talk that truly moved me:

Here is the TED talk by journalist, Johann Hari. It is truly worth a watch for all in the medical field. Yoganursing is RETHINKING medicinal approaches to depression and anxiety and YOU are a big part of this movement!

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