Contributor – Patty Bartzak, DNP, RN, TCRN, CMSRN, CNRN
Please join us on Monday, February 5, 2024 from 4:30 to 6:00 PM Eastern for the Society of Rogerian Scholars’ Dialogues on Unitary Science. The purpose of our Dialogues is to learn and deepen our understanding of the Science of Unitary Human Beings.
The dialogue will focus on Integrality: The Heart of Rogerian Nursing Science, led by Dr. Violet Malinski, RN, PhD.
Join Zoom Meeting – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85398056098
Mark your calendar for the next dialogue: April 1, 2024 4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Dr. Malinski has shared this reflection in advance of the dialogue:
This is a shortened, revised version of a talk I gave at one of the recent SRS conferences. I offer it as a starting point for sharing ideas in our next SRS Dialogue on Monday, February 5, 2024, 4:30 – 6:00.
I’ll be sharing 3 experiences to illustrate the ideas I’m presenting here, illustrations of ways of experiencing integrality. As I do, I’d like to encourage you to reflect on what I would call your own experiences of integrality, which some of you might choose to share here so we can have a real dialogue. First, however, I want to say a few words about the principle of integrality, defined by Rogers (1992) as “Continuous mutual human field and environmental field process” (p. 31). What exactly does “continuous mutual human field and environmental field process” mean, how can it be experienced and therefore known and understood in a way that makes those words resonate through personally experiencing this mutual process and thus the awe-inspiring reality that is Rogerian nursing science? I’m well aware it is tricky to give more attention to one thing in Rogerian nursing science, as we’re talking about a unitary science, but I like to think of it as an infinite star-studded sky with one star shining just a little more brightly, or perhaps an intricately interwoven tapestry with one thread glistening just a little more brightly throughout to infinity.
First, a little ancient history. I have notes and tapes from sitting in Martha Rogers’ course, then called the Science of Man, in 1976 when I entered the doctoral program at NYU. I still enjoy listening to the tapes; they carry many happy memories as I loved my time at the NYU of Martha Rogers. When she presented the principles of homeodynamics in class she started with two, helicy and resonancy, saying that the earlier principles that appeared in the 1970 book of reciprocy, mutual, and synchrony, simultaneous, were subsumed within helicy, so they were no longer needed as distinct principles. At that time, she said helicy was about the nature and “direction” of change while resonancy was about the modality of change, propagated by waves. It wasn’t until a couple weeks later that she presented what she was then calling the principle of complementarity, complementarity meaning “to complete,” although she knew that wasn’t yet the right word or the right definition, as she was still using “mutual, simultaneous interaction” along with the idea that human and environment are integral. She said she really didn’t need this third principle, as it was inherent in helicy, because the change process described in helicy was of taking place in what was then this “mutual, simultaneous interaction” of person and environment, but she provided it for the sake of clarity. By 1982 she had realized that integrality was the name for this principle, and continuous mutual process captured what she was talking about.
In 1980 physicist David Bohm’s groundbreaking work, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, came out. Early in his career he was associated with Einstein, later in his career with Krishnamurti. At some point Bohm visited NYU, so along with many others, faculty, students, and alumni from different divisions, I got to hear him speak. Implicate and explicate, enfolded and unfolded, with the implicate order as the universe of unbroken wholeness, the enfolded true reality whose flowing movement unfolds what so many of us typically consider the “true reality,” the everyday world of objects, events, and people. Rogerians drew the parallel to Rogerian nursing science with, for example, the physical body “unfolding” as a manifestation of the underlying energy field, the true reality. I began to think of integrality as the heart of this reality, where everything could be experienced as unfolding within the mutual humanenvironment process, with humanenvironment as one word to make clear that human and environment are unitary. Rather than “enfolded” in helicy. I now understood that it’s in the postulates, where everything starts with Rogerian nursing science, the postulates of openness, energy fields, pandimensionality, and pattern. You can’t have openness without energy fields, and vice versa, you can’t have energy without pattern, and vice versa, and you can’t have pandimensionality without openness and energy and pattern, it’s all integral, and to me that’s integrality.
In the graduate theory courses I taught over the years, when many students thought Rogerian nursing science was a bunch of baloney, both because the language was so difficult to understand and because it did not fit their daily experiences of the world, I’d often ask them to explore their “everyday experiences” to consider if perhaps there were ones they could see as representing this worldview and nursing science. Common ones to which many could relate included experiences of thinking of a friend, deciding to call (probably now it would be text) that friend, only to have the phone ring and find that their friend is calling them. Another was the sense that someone needed them or was in trouble, only to find that a loved one had been in an accident and was taken to the hospital, or the sense that someone they loved was no longer in this life, and then finding that, indeed, this person had transitioned. Such experiences have no boundaries, the friend or person they loved could live in a different country, even across the world. I began to call these “experiences of integrality” that unfolded the whole of Rogerian nursing science all at once. All elements of Rogerian nursing science expressed within mutual humanenvironment field process, again with human and environment as one word.
Now the three experiences I want to share while asking you to think about your own experiences that you might like to share here, as well. First, I was working at home on the computer, my husband was at work. I distinctly heard him call my name, so I thought he had come home early. I went downstairs, room to room, no Lou, no Lou’s car in the driveway. I called him at work to see what was happening. He said thank God you called, this was before cell phones, their phone system was malfunctioning, they could receive incoming calls but not make outgoing calls. They were working under a tight deadline on a grant proposal, and he had realized that he left something at home he needed, but he didn’t want to take the time away from the writing process to drive back for it. He kept thinking of me and wishing I’d call so he could ask me to bring it to him, which I did.
The second experience took place while I attended a conference in AZ, a conference co-sponsored by the then American Indian Alaska Native Nurses Association. That organization had been started by 2 friends whom I met when they came East from Oklahoma to attend graduate school, one Kaw & Potawatomie, the other Osage. My responsibility was to shadow a Commanche medicine man, picking him up & returning him to the airport, making sure he had what he needed for presentations, that the rooms were set up as he wanted, making sure he had time to eat & rest & not be kept too long by people wanting to ask him questions. The huge benefit to me was the time I got to spend with him. We talked a lot and about all kinds of things, including Rogerian nursing science, which he had no trouble understanding.
The conference was drawing to a close, we were sitting and talking over coffee, and I was trying to formulate a question “in my mind” that I wasn’t even sure I should be asking him and that had no relationship to anything we were discussing or had discussed. At one point he just looked at me and said, “Yes, I would do that for you,” before I even got a word out.
The third experience was related to me by someone I know well. I’ll call him Roberto, his wife Sylvia, and his mother Petra. The 3 were extremely close, even living in 2 separate units in one townhouse. Sylvia went into the hospital for a routine procedure but did not come out for nearly a year. She passed in and out of coma, was maintained on a ventilator, physically declining no matter what the healthcare team did for her. Roberto was told time and again that it was time to let her go. He would return home after visiting her and collapse into his mother’s arms, and Petra would tell him that they needed to keep praying for a healing miracle, imaging Sylvia as healthy and home again, and this is what they received. Sylvia came out of the coma, and I’ll skip over months of therapy to her return home with ongoing therapy. Petra transitioned during this time, and about a year later Sylvia was well enough so that she, Roberto, and 2 friends could take a trip to Italy. She was adamant that she did not want the walker and could manage with the cane alone, the cane that had belonged to Petra. Everything went well until somehow, somewhere along the way, the cane was lost. Sylvia could only walk with support, especially over the cobblestones.
They were visited the Coliseum and upon leaving saw numerous cafes clustered around the building. They selected one randomly, choosing to sit in the back rather than the front. A man walked back to join his friends saying, “Look what I found,” and Roberto jumped up to reclaim Petra’s cane, no problem as there was a sticker with her name and address pasted on it. “Thanks Mom.”
Again, my understanding of these experiences is grounded in the science of unitary human beings. Energy flows unbounded, so there is total openness, no boundaries, not confined by time or space. There is no from…to, although people may think that way at times or even most of the time. Again we have Rogers’ postulates of energy field, openness, pandimensionality, and pattern. Without them there would be no experience of integrality, and vice versa. Pandimensional awareness means experiencing and perceiving a reality that is different from what most people consider “typical everyday reality.”
There is no “in my mind”; it is all in the flowing energy that Rogers described as infinite and in continuous motion, so we have experiences characterized by lower and higher frequency wave patterns, the principle of resonancy. This is also how we experience the diversity of patterning, unique to each of us, and it is ever-changing, which is captured in the principle of helicy and the manifestations of change. The principles of homeodynamics suggest that the mutual pattern of the humanenvironmental field process changes continuously, innovatively, and unpredictably, flowing in both lower and higher frequencies. Diversity accelerates with higher frequency phenomena and vice versa.
It’s important to remember that Rogers saw pandimensionality “as a way of perceiving reality” (1992, p. 31), noting that we do not move into pandimensionality, it just is, but how we perceive reality differs and can differ greatly among individuals. With pandimensional awareness of integrality, with increasing diversity, we experience a different reality.
I’ll illustrate with a little vignette that Martha liked to use. She was at a “theory” conference in Canada (she put theory in quotes), where one of the participants, a nurse, approached her to tell her a story she thought Martha would appreciate. She was on the plane en route to the conference, sitting in an aisle seat, and discovered that the woman in the window seat was also a nurse and on her way to this same conference. In the middle was a young woman who pushed her seat back, saying she wanted to nap. The two nurses talked about, as Martha said, “all those exciting things like 4D (now pandimensionality) and energy fields, you know, all the real goodies.” The young woman in the middle pushed her seat up abruptly and asked, “What planet are you from?”
Rogers also reminded us that, although we cannot start, stop, or manipulate the change process, we can and do participate in change in the ways that pattern manifests for each of us although, she pointed out, we do not always do so wisely. Still, we are actively participating in the continuous process of change. This is the basis of Elizabeth Barrett’s theory of power as knowing participation in change. Each of the 3 experiences related here also illustrate knowing participation in change. We were all knowingly participating in the patterning process, exercising choice with awareness and demonstrating freedom and involvement in creating change. Awareness, choices, and creative actualization of potentials involve the process and nature of change described in resonancy and helicy. Awareness of integrality is a unitive, integral awareness that informs the way people live their lives. It is seen in the choices they make, the creative involvement they manifest, and the freedom they envision and experience.
John Phillips has given us the language of energyspirit, postulating that “the universe came into existence as unitary energyspirit,” and as human beings are manifestations of the universe’s pattern, we are also energyspirit (Phillips, 2019, p. 211). He sees energyspirit as consistent with Rogers’ view of energy field (p. 211), human as energyspirit in mutual process with the energyspirit of the environment. Phillips identified a phenomenon that he calls integral presence, which he defined as “a perceiving-experiencing of the integrality of humans and the environment, an integral presence that is relative and infinite” (2017, p. 224). How about your own experiences of integrality, of integral presence as energyspirit?
Let’s dialogue.
Sincerely,