Caring in Nursing: Tips to Staying Compassionate

Caring in nursing or being compassionate is almost natural in every nurse. As a member of the medical profession, you are expected to be compassionate every minute of the day. Often, the baggage carried with you becomes too heavy to bear and it begins to eat away at your compassionate heart which results to compassion fatigue for nurses.

Here are ways to maintain compassion as you move through your days in a compassionate career.

Be Mindful

■Identify the issues to be healed


■Find the courage to address them head-on


■Work to change what you can


■Accept what you cannot change


■Seek opportunities to eliminate or alleviate the consequences to your heart and spirit


■Embrace the opportunity to move forward – renewed, refreshed and revitalized


■Avoid continually looking back – it serves no useful purpose

Be in Balance

Concentrating on the negative produces more negativity. The mind, heart and spirit generate the energy source and if your energy source is constantly producing negativity, then that is what will fill your spirit. More than likely, you will experience compassion fatigue, illness, lack of interest in life, nursing burnout and general depression. It’s comparable to wearing a 10 pound weight around your neck. It will cause your shoulders to slump, your back to hurt and your feet to be in agony. Remove the weight!

On the other hand, it is unwise to sweep issues under the rug, so to speak, thinking unaddressed issues will go away, heal themselves or that you can avoid confrontation with others, or even with your own spirit.

The goal is to achieve a balance between constantly resurrecting the old hurts and moving on. Make friends with the past – it is something that was. Then say goodbye to annoying co-workeers in your nursing unit, which no longer serves you (because you are now mindful and in balance!), and make friends with the here and now.

Be Compassionate

Although you might be good at showing nursing care or compassion toward others, it is usually difficult to show compassion toward yourself. Most likely, you are very good at beating yourself up, or blaming the influence of others from your past (and even the present) for the grief, anger, and fear that you carry. If you really think about it, you are probably very comfortable carrying that grief, anger and fear. It’s an old, familiar friend. It will take courage to shed that skin. Be compassionate toward yourself and forgive yourself for having accepted that negativity.

Ultimately, it is only YOU – the sacred spirit that you are – who is responsible for what gets filtered into your system and absorbed into your cells.

It will require a conscious effort on your part to create the mindfulness, balance and compassion necessary to leave the past behind and move on.

There is to be no weeping for the past

No longing for the future

This is how it is

Right now

Live it

Breathe it

Accept it

Dance with it

Make it a part

Of your precious being.

- Seekers and Dreamers