Research shows that faith and spirituality contribute to helping patients endure suffering, heal physically and emotionally, give meaning to the experience, and remain resilient. The author shares her personal, medical nightmare and how her spirituality, faith, prayers, and scripture helped her cope with her suffering, overcome adversity, heal, and remain resilient. She shares lessons learned. The paper adds to the author’s narrative from the perspective of a patient to the body of spirituality and healing research. The author presents spiritual medical and nursing care research that supports that a patient’s spirituality, faith, prayer, and the Bible will help the patient to cope when suffering from a variety of medical and health challenges and research about the traits of individuals who overcome adversity and remain resilient.

A pilgrimage invites one to be present in stillness and solitude, meeting the unknown and gazing with new eyes. The experience can be challenging and unsettling as questions and truths are revealed. It is a time of deep contemplation where the pilgrim feels “very much apart from the rest of the world...You are an observer” (Watson, 2006, p. 289). this narrative essay shares the transformation that I experienced when I undertook an intentional walk in honor of a friend. The lessons of the journey are transformative and have deepened my life as a woman and holistic nurse.

With the knowledge of psychoneuroimmunological responses and the stress of nursing students, as caring nurse educators, we have become ethically obligated to revise and re-vision our current nursing educational practices. Nurse educators should be motivated to create innovative caring-science curricular approaches, so that our nurses of the future are in turn supported in creating caring-healing sustainable practices (Watson, 2008). This paper details the outcomes from an RN-BSN program that implemented an integral-caring-holistic-science curriculum design in order to support students on their own healing journey. The program supported nurses in their ability to create caring-healing moments and spaces for patients, implement change in the workplace, and avoid the perils of burn-out related to low stress resilience, which is so common within the nursing profession (Clark, 2010; 2006; 2003).