Because nursing is a way of living caring in the world, the nurse can turn his or her attention to personal patterns of nursing as expressions of caring. As self understanding as caring person accrues, the nurse sometimes realizes that such self-awareness was there all along--it was only waiting to be discovered. Because many nurses were trained to overlook their caring ways instead of attending to them, nurses may now need something similar to, or indeed "sensitivity training" itself, to rediscover and reown the possibilities of self as caring person, possibilities specific to nursing as a profession and a discipline. This redirection of focus away from caring may have been related to several historical social movements. First, of course, is the move toward science, which for nursing meant that for a period of several decades nursing education seemed to reject, either partially or totally, the art of nursing in order to discover a scientific base for practice. Another related process, the technology movement, led nurses to understand care as a series of sequential actions designed to accomplish a specifiable end. In this context, nursing care became synonymous with managing available technologies. Third, there existed in the history of nursing education an era(s) in which nurses were taught to treat symptoms patients expressed, rather than to care for the person. Fourth, maintaining a professional distance was a hallmark of professionalism. Now, and rightly so, the tide has turned. A reawakening of knowing self as caring person becomes paramount so that the profession of nursing returns caring to the immediacy of the nursing situation. With personal awareness and reflection, developed knowledge of caring also arrives through empirical, ethical, and aesthetic modes of knowing. There is a growing body of literature in nursing that both attests to that fact and to the process of how nurses communicate caring in practice (e.g., Riemen, I 986a, 1986b; Knowlden, 1986; Swanson-Kauffman, 1986a, 1986b; Swanson, 1990; Kahn and Steeves, 1988). Given the various perspectives offered by the authors just mentioned, the individual nurse can enhance his or her ethical self-development as a caring person by cultivating the practice of weighing the various meanings of caring now extant in actual practice situations and then by making choices to express caring creatively. In pursuit of this end, aesthetic knowing often subsumes and transcends other forms of knowing and thus may offer the richest mode of knowing caring. Appreciating structure, form, harmony, and complementarity across a range of situated caring expressions enhances knowing self and other as caring persons.