Holistic Nursing Committee

Holistic Nursing Board Certification

I have been in a committee here at Dartmouth since 1994, and that committee is called the Holistic Nursing Committee. We set up workshops twice a year for nurses from around New England on topics pertinent to integrative care, but really any holistic, complementary-type of approaches that are being practiced. We bring speakers from around the world to present. So I’ve been very involved in that for an extended period of time now.

Nature, Meditation, and Discovery

I am also dedicated to my disciplines of meditation and yoga so that’s something that’s not necessarily for fun, but it really for restoration and spiritual nourishment, so I very much enjoy that. I have been doing that since I was a teenager in high school.

Other things that I enjoy: walking—I have been a walker for a long time; I enjoy hiking very much, but I haven’t done that for a very long time; being with people—my culture is very people-oriented, very relationship-oriented, and I am a social being. And I enjoy discovering new things; there are very few things that prevent me from pursuing them unless they are too esoteric. I love traveling; our family has traveled to a fair amount to other cultures, to other countries. And I love meeting people from other cultures, from different environments, just being in a new country.

Dancing

What I gained as child in the DR was the love for music and dance. As a teenager, I was very much into dancing—that was our form of recreation. There wasn’t a whole lot more to do. There wasn’t music, there wasn’t TV. I remember taking modern dance when I was in the US and I failed miserably because it wasn’t the same structured and defined dancing that I had learned and enjoyed as a child—it had to be free-flowing dance. I love dancing. I can dance to a lot of different forms. And creativity expresses itself in dance as well.

Creativity

The transparency of color-paper design that I’ve created was also another way of expressing my creativity. Creativity in my country in the 50s and 60s was very much squelched by the dictatorship; you weren’t really allowed to have free thought or free expression. People would do this, and I’m sure we have artists and poets from that time, but there was a lot done under closed doors, because it was such an oppressed environment and free expression of the individual was repressed. So I am a product of that culture from the 50s and I know that I when I came to this country and up until not too long ago, I really did not think of myself as a creative person, which is why this frame says so much to me, because until that time 1966, I didn’t have an appreciation for my ability to be creative.