Deborah Klesel, Ph.D, is a critical care nurse and assistant professor at the University of St. Thomas-Houston’s Peavy School of Nursing. She is dedicating her spare time to compiling research on healing through prayer for the Contemplative Network. Klesel hopes to leverage the findings in the future to create nursing curriculum on how to use and teach prayerful healing to benefit patients and their loved ones.

Klesel said, “The current research data I’m working on matches my interest in guiding students through nursing school using a paradigm shift that employs intentional devotion and goodness during bedside care.”

What is the Contemplative Network?

Klesel’s raw research data comes from the Contemplative Network (CN), a network of Christian contemplative communities. CN is a chapter of the national Contemplative Outreach organization, founded in 1986 under the spiritual leadership of Trappist Monk Abbot Thomas Keating. Current co-coordinators for the nonprofit chapter are Dr. Bob Hesse and Kim Kehoe. CN’s ministries are threefold: teaching centering prayer and related prayer, interfaith collaboration, and scientific research. The group’s vision is to recognize “the spiritual significance of silent prayer in healing the whole being’s oneness: mind, body, soul, heart, energy.”

“It’s the Contemplative Network’s research in raw form, and I’m translating it to how it can be applied to chronic conditions like Parkinson’s, grief, depression and fear,” Klesel said.

She recounted the data obtained from patients who had near-death experiences. “CN measured their brain activity as they remembered the experience and compared it to the activity of someone doing centering prayer and observed that the brain activity was the same. So, this research could direct a path for centering prayer to be done by others for people in hospice to lessen the fear of death and transcend the fear of transition.”

Klesel’s Previous Research Indicates Her Ongoing Interest

Prayer and healing are themes in Klesel’s work and education. For example, her Ph.D thesis was about breast cancer survivorship and indicated that the level of spiritual engagement predicted longevity in these patients.

Involving PSON and Its Nursing Students

“We’re in the process of involving our PSON nursing students in a program we want to take to an area shelter for women,” Klesel shared. “We plan to help women there with their PTSD. We also plan to teach centering prayer to the VA’s chaplain services. And we want our student nurses helping with work on patients who deal with profound grief.”

As work with the CN research progresses, Klesel looks to the future and cites PSON’s unique mission and vision to have nurses be co-creators of a healing relationship with the patient.

“We want our student nurses to be involved intimately in the healing relationship,” she said. “It’s an art and a science. We want them to know all about the mind-body-spiritual connection where there is no fear.”