In a lecture to nursing students about Spirituality, I asked the following question:
What does the word "Spirituality" mean to you?
Here are a couple of responses I got:
- Belief, culture, support, values
- The human spirit is something you cannot see, touch or hold on to, but we know it exists. Every human body has a spirit, it is energy and it is what makes us unique. Our spirit has needs, we call it our spiritual needs. There are many religions that millions and millions of people belong to, to learn about the spirit and to get in touch with their spirituality. The spirit is unique and needs to be recognised and understood, and we as nurses need to acknowledge that people have different ways of expressing the spirit. People use their faith to nurture their spirits. The spirit is energy and it always was and always will be.
The question I asked was, I believe, at a unistructural level. The student in example one wrote a simple list. The student in example two wrote a fuller, more considered answer, and recognised that nurses need to recognise that we don't all express spirituality in the same way, but there was no comparing or contrasting, e.g. that some people express their spirituality outside of religion.
The direction that I planned to take in the lecture was that considering a person's spirituality is part of holistic nursing care. Also, that spirituality for some may not include a religious faith, but other things like a love of nature, music, art.
The students would have learned more, and reached the objectives of the lecture sooner, if I had used a relational question, e.g.
Explain your understanding of Spirituality, including whether it applies only to religion; and how we can meet a patient's spiritual needs in our nursing care.
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