Donna Frost

Philosophical foundations and methodological principles 71 3 Becoming transformed The idea of transformation and becoming transformed brings all the elements of the poem (p. 60 ) together. Human flourishing, and the moral intent to create situations in which persons are enabled to move towards human flourishing, are mentioned above. Such creative processes are ongoing and perpetual so that we are always becoming who we are (Foucault, 1984 , 1986 , 1997 ; Dohmen, 2011 ; van Tongeren, 2013 ). We are a work in progress, as it were. Nietzsche (eg. 1974 ; 1986 ) stresses that we have, ideally, an active role in this process. We are both the creator, of ourselves, and the created: that self which we create in interaction with the world. He challenges us to make ‘becoming who we are’ our life’s work. Dohmen ( 2011 ) emphasizes that the process of becoming is never complete, we are never ‘arrived’. This does not diminish where we are now but does influence what we look for and notice, andwhat we are capable of ‘absorbing’ and understanding at this moment in time. As discussed earlier in the chapter, we build the world and the world builds us, and we influence the world as it influences us. One of the goals of this research was to work in ways that would enable participants to become aware of their creative power within this process, to expand the meanings that were present, available and possible for participants. In the introductory chapter I posited that professional artistry is present in those moments of practice in which what a nurse knows and does comes together with who he or she is in such a way as to produce exemplary practice. In order to study them one needs to understand the nature of such moments and the ways in which we can come to know more about them. The principles described above tell me that these moments are embedded and embodied and that they are also experienced like this to those involved. ‘Embedded’ means that the thing in question, the phenomenon, the beautiful practice moment, is an integral part of the surrounding whole: the practice context but also the rest of the practice of the practitioner. The beautiful moment does not occur in isolation but in integrated connection, even if themoment itself is afterwards not recorded and perhaps seldom spoken of (Frost, 2008 ). ‘Embodied’ means that the phenomenon is expressed in the bodily action; it is present in the doing and in the being of the practitioner and it is experienced bodily, as well as cognitively and emotionally, by the people involved in the interaction. The knowledge involved is therefore largely tacit: the kind of knowledge that we develop, hidden from cognitive awareness, in our everyday ontological processes of coping, and finding meaning and significance in our worlds.