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Student Profiles

Ceridwyn (Wynnie) Freeman is a fourth year nurse in the emergency department at Alfred Hospital, Melbourne’s major trauma centre.  Although she now lives in Melbourne Wynnie still calls Hawkes Bay home and the Certificate in Holistic Health Care that she has been doing this year has provided some good chances to catch up with family and friends when she comes back for the seminars.

Wynnie is doing the certificate out of self-interest and says what she has learned this year not only integrates into any sphere of nursing but on a personal level as well.  “Emergency departments are crazy.  No-one wants to be there.  You can make that smooth or rough so you’re really quite fortunate I think to be able to work in that capacity.  It’s a bit of an honour.”

As well as enjoying the pace and variety, Wynnie finds emergency medicine quite problem solving.  “I think there’s a real opportunity in emergency medicine to be thinking clinically and not just task orientated.  It’s more to do with having that critical analysis thinking involved and building rapport with patients quickly.”

Wynnie feels that nursing has always been in her nature and did her training in Wellington before moving to Perth where she completed a two year graduate programme.  Having grown up in the Steiner community she has always been aware of different streams of thought and it was important to her that she came to what she believed from her “own motivations’.  She feels anthroposophical fundamentals “make the world make sense”.  “I wouldn’t say that I swallow it all hook line and sinker for sure but I think that to follow anthroposophy, you’re supposed to always question and it leaves you free to do that.”

She describes the course content as “life learning”.  “It’s life skills to understand the world around you and the people in it more holistically.  It gives you a framework to hang the pictures of what you’re seeing onto.”

Wynnie has enjoyed discovering how to better understand people and herself including how to better utilize her skills or whole self as opposed to a physical self.  She describes herself as feeling “quite alone” in parts of her journey, “but then it makes you really double check that it is something that you want to be doing because you’re not just doing it because other people are doing it.”

When asked to reflect at the end of the final seminar Wynnie thoughtfully comments “that it’s really effortless and so warm.  And kind of a bit of a relief to come into this group of people we now know quite well after three seminars.  To come here and have the tutors, all incredible women, carrying this impulse and just to spend a whole week accepting and knowing that spirituality is in fact part of our life and then ‘let’s work with it’.  How wonderful and supportive it was to step into this group and go ‘yeah that’s right I’m not alone’.”

Wynnie spent around 8-10 hours a week on theory and a couple of hours a week doing treatments on people and describes the work as “self therapy.”  “When we were doing the plant study, it was quite grueling and time-consuming but I think you need that to continue to push.  When I get into the work I love doing it.  The case study was a really cool process to go through.  We had to assess a patient from different understandings and propose a plan of care related to that.  It was a really integrated way of working with what we’d learned in a practical way.  That was really useful.”

Wynnie believes the course is “really cheap for what we get out of it.  These beautiful products that we can use and practice on each other, doctors coming and speaking to us, art, speech therapy, clay work, all this is involved – you’d think it would cost more.”

As for the tutors Wynnie describes them as “really genuine and fantastic”.  “They’d walk over water to help and the feedback is very useful.”

Recommending the course for “people, that have questions that conventional science can’t answer”, Wynnie adds “the stuff might be pretty out there and some of the concepts really left field for a lot of people but when you learn it how we have, it’s kind of common sense as well.”