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Covid-19: Disruption, Anxiety and Growth

Everyone has their stories and experiences of these times of COVID-19. Many are stories of difficulty and hardship. I have a story too, one I’d like to share. Not that I think it’s more interesting or displays more difficulty than others might be experiencing, but because I imagine it is likely relatable to many. To me there is some comfort in the fact that this is a shared experience. That everyone throughout the world is affected to some degree or another.

The early part of the pandemic actually felt stimulating to me at first. Before the pandemic I had been feeling pretty good, but restless and unsatisfied with many aspects of life. The pandemic brought something new, a chance for change, a new way to look upon the world, and I wanted to absorb it and experience it all. I was relishing the novelty and things felt pretty good, until all of a sudden they didn’t.

A few months into the lock downs and “new normal” I suddenly started to feel uneasy, and it quickly turned into experiences of panic. I would wake up in the middle of the night with the feeling that I had to get up and move around. I was having physical symptoms that I imagined felt like a heart attack, although deep down I knew it was anxiety driven panic. I’ve had one other experience that I recall in my life that felt somewhat like this, but severe anxiety hasn’t been a common factor throughout my life. It was very disconcerting, and was affecting my day to day life. I became very irritable at times and it was having a negative affect on our home life.

It made me wonder what had changed – what was causing this? I have worked from home for many years, so that hadn’t changed, but now there were two of us working from home, and our 5 year old was home as well. I found many days overwhelming, trying to balance work and other commitments, and despite having incredible support from family. It had been building up and suddenly I was feeling the effects in a very intense way.

Eventually I decided I needed something to change so I arranged to take a leave of absence from my primary work. They were very accommodating of my needs during discussions in August and by late September I was off work. I found that after making this decision and getting the details finalized a weight was lifted and I felt much less unsettled. Perhaps the pandemic was the final straw I needed to push me to making that change. It’s something I had been feeling needed to happen at an intuitive level for years, but there was never quite enough of a push to go through with it. And then suddenly there was.

I’m now into the fourth month of the leave from that job, and overall I feel much more balanced than I did. There are still difficult days – we all have difficult days – but the overall feel is one of positivity, of moving forward, exploring and living. I’ve tried many new things and reconnected with activities I love. I’m grooming cross-country ski trails a couple times a week, studying different topics of interest, including Reiki, architecture, art and music, and doing more hiking and exploring around the area. Throughout the past year I have continued work through the Distance Energy Club and have found that to be immensely important to me, for how it’s helped me directly and how it’s allowed me to help others, which adds to my feeling of purpose.

At this point I still don’t entirely know what the future holds for me personally for my work/career. I’m focusing on the little things each day, taking small steps and trying to always be thankful for what I have and the opportunities that come to me each and every day. I’ve had some pretty low days this year, but I’ve also had amazing moments of clarity and joy, the likes of which I don’t remember experiencing in years. This, I believe, is the value of disruption – it leads to healing. In other ways healing itself can cause temporary disruption, but they are often inextricably linked.

This past year has had major challenges for most of us, but many times we need to experience something disruptive in order to move forward and achieve growth. We’ve had that in spades and I have a feeling this monumental disruption is leading up to other giant positive changes in our societies around the world. I want to, I have to, believe that is true.

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Nature, the Economy and Dissonant Feelings

There are a lot of people feeling anxious and uneasy these days, and obviously for good reason. There is a lot of uncertainty around this pandemic that we are all a part of. I feel it too, but I think I can honestly say that my over-all level of uneasy feelings hasn’t increased significantly over this time last year. In fact in some ways I feel a bit more at ease.

You see, for some of us we’ve been feeling dissonance for a number of years now. We have recognized that experts have been telling us that we have things that need to be urgently changed in order to ensure our future prosperity and even our survival. And yet, the majority of our world leaders and business leaders have done little to implement the changes that are badly needed to ensure climate change doesn’t render our wold uninhabitable. This difference between what needs to be done and what has been done, and the lack of urgency in the response, has made me feel pretty uneasy over the last few years.

Then along comes a pandemic, and all of a sudden world leaders are united in a common cause, and the majority of people in the world are reacting in a way that is in line with the severity and threat of the problem. They are worried and fighting for a common cause. They are reacting rationally given the situation.

And in many ways things make more sense to me in this situation. Instead of going about our lives pretending (or not believing) there is a problem, we are now united towards a solution. The “enemy” in this case is a virus and not the causes of climate change that need to be addressed, but to me seeing a whole lot of people working toward a common goal and recognizing that things need to be fixed at this moment, is enough to remove that dissonance for now.

This is a rational response to the danger that we are seeing, and that means that in some ways the world makes more sense now than before the pandemic, when the majority of people were just going about their lives without any sort of urgency about the impending climate catastrophe that awaits us if we don’t change our ways.

The other thing that this pandemic has made clear is the relative fragility of our economy vs. the resiliance of our environment. A novel virus outbreak has brought our economy to its knees in a very short amount of time – a matter of months. Meanwhile humans have been assaulting the environment for over a century, causing more and more damage as we go. And yet it still functions somehow and keeps us alive. But the experts tell us we don’t have much more time to fix things before it will be too late.

We need to work with nature, not against it or in spite of it. It is what keeps us alive and it can easily take away that priviledge. Let’s find a solution to keep people from dying from this disease, then when that’s done let’s keep going and save our world. The consequences of not doing that will be much worse than the current pandemic.

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Embrace Massive Change

I shared a message in my email to members of the group on Friday and I wanted to share it here as well, because I think it is important. Here it is:

During today’s session I asked the energy to interact with the virus that has spread throughout the world.  I asked for the message that this virus is bringing to us as the human race. There was just silence for a few minutes, but then I saw an expanding and vast darkness of the sky, of space, the universe.  It was infinite and permanent and I could feel the difference between that and our human lives which are really just blips compared to the history of the universe.  The message seemed to be to take this time to marvel at that which we have limited understanding and be grateful for our small place in it, and our short time that we are here.  Related to this is that nature is fully in charge.  As humans we often think we control things within our domain, but we are shown over and over again that this isn’t the truth.  Nature is in control – providing the air, water, and everything we need to survive.  And when we don’t live within nature’s laws it can take life away through natural disasters, droughts, rising sea levels, and virus outbreaks.  We need to change our ways or seal our fate as humans.

Sorry for the very heavy message today, but I am feeling this so strongly right now that it seems the only important message. There has been so much evidence of the good that people do in the world during difficult times – helping others, banding together and sacrificing for the greater good.  But we need to do more when things don’t feel quite as urgent as well. And now we’ve proven that massive change is possible.

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Monthly Theme for April

As I mentioned by email to members of the group a few days back, I haven’t created a theme this month – it kind of slipped my mind to be honest, and wasn’t top priority given everything that’s been going on. But there’s still time to approach this subject and I would like to put extra emphasis on the health of humans around the world during this time of global crisis.  I have already been adding intention to our sessions for healing related to the COVID-19 virus and I think making it our special theme for this month would be most appropriate. This includes energy for boosting the immune system, especially those on the “front line” who are in contact with strangers on a daily basis, and just importantly, mental health issues in dealing with isolation, worry, and anxiety.

Stay safe, and reach out if you need support.  All of us will need it at one point or another during this time.  Community is more important than ever.

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Additional Supports During the Pandemic

I would like to announce some temporary additional supports within the Distance Energy Club, in light of the current uncertainty around the COVID-19 virus. 

We are experiencing a time of accelerated change, and this can feel unsettling and scary.  But at the same time there is great potential in change.  There is the opportunity to learn about ourselves, to grow and to connect to our fellow humans on a deeper level.

The work that we have been doing in the Distance Energy Club has been supporting this type of realization of potential, and I feel it takes on even greater importance during these challenging times.

To support this and to try to bring healing to all of those who need it during this time the energy club will be, starting today:

  • Donating half of all revenues from the club to organization(s) providing support/relief for COVID-19 related issues
  • Providing membership cost relief to those who are unable to afford to pay the fees to be a part of the group

These measures will be kept in place as long as it seems that they are necessary.  If you have tried out the club before and feel like you’d like to try it again feel free to sign up for the free trial.  For any of you who would like to continue to be a part of the group but can no longer afford the $22 monthly fee, just send me an email and we can make arrangements to reduce or eliminate your payment temporarily. I really want anyone who feels the call to be a part of what we’re doing to be able to access it, especially during this time of accelerated change.

In addition to our work within the energy club here are some other suggestions for keeping your body and mind healthy:

  • Try to get regular (daily) exercise – especially outdoors in nature if it’s possible where you are, while keeping your physical distance from other people of course
  • Eat healthy food, drink enough water, and try to limit your intake of junk food and sugars
  • Try to keep yourself in the moment.  Focus on your breathing, meditate, get into a project.  Any future that we can imagine isn’t real – it’s just one of many potential outcomes, so live in the present as much as possible.
  • Be gentle with yourself and others.  Stressful times will cause many of us to regress a little bit – maybe we’ll take on old unhealthy habits or do things we know aren’t really in our best interest.  We are human and we make mistakes.  Simply recognize these actions as something that you don’t want to repeat and try not to repeat them over again.  And forgive enthusiastically.

Together we will overcome any adversity we encounter.  It has always been that way, and will always be that way.