Coronavirus Fear: A response

What does one do with all of the collective fear right now? It is an interesting thing to step back and observe. Yet if I'm honest, I'm not sitting back and watching as much as I'm experiencing a collective panic alongside everyone else. I have responded by making jokes, laughing, and rolling my eyes.  I could become irritated, put my head in the sand, and pretend none of it's happening. Except at four am, in that dark space before dawn, when I cannot run from myself anymore, when my eyes open against my own will and when I'm really honest with myself, I am absolutely affected by this Collective Fear. One cannot be breathing without sensing and feeling the panic. Initially I tried to keep myself separate from it, telling myself stories that everyone was overreacting and the media was fueling and profiting off of people’s fear. However, after several weeks of trying to have thick guards and strong walls, to consciously turn off all news and disengage from any social media (so really walling myself off entirely from all news), it has seeped in.  Emails and notifications from the school, cancelled events and phone calls from concerned friends have forced me into the ring, so to speak.  I have to face this enemy that I have wanted to pretend doesn’t exist.

I didn’t want this fight with Fear.  I wanted to peacefully go on doing what I do, living my life and not be impacted by the hard realities of pandemics, toilet paper shortages, and cancelled events for which I  was really excited.  I am reluctantly in the ring. So as I engage this, I begin to become more honest about why I choose to live “unaffected” by the suffering around me until it is in my face.  The fabric of that which I trust begins to feel tested. I say I trust in God and I say I believe that I'm being strongly supported and held. I teach this to my clients and I teach this to my children.  It's how I have tried to live my life; we have abundance, do not live in scarcity.  But when it feels like those around me are preparing for the apocalypse, everything they know and love potentially going away, life forever being altered against our wills, the creeping dread of the unknown appears and I have to do something with it. All of a sudden, it’s not about the annoyances and shortages, it’s about what I most deeply love and hold dear evaporating; facing the chilling fear that I otherwise keep at bay when life is going on as planned.

All of us need to ask ourselves what we're doing with this. How is it that we are living now? The mass hoarding of things like toilet paper, hand sanitizer and rubbing alcohol is symbolic of how we are trusting in ourselves for our own fate and our own future. I am aware that we do not feel connected with our neighbors or in our neighborhoods. When the woman in front of me purchases the last 20 containers of Clorox wipes at the grocery store, the message I take home is that people are out for themselves. People are stockpiling, self protecting, imagining being quarantined, and it's creating fear. The threat of not being able to be in community with others, to not be able to share and break bread or go to places we've always gone, begins to wear at our nerves and usher in fear in a profound way. We stop thinking collectively and begin thinking about protecting and guarding our own, to the detriment of the whole. So my challenge for myself when I start to feel grippy and clingy, or judgy of said woman, is to open my hands in generosity and open heartedness. Hoarding and making sure I have enough for myself is a wake-up call for me to become curious abut my own attachments to safety comfort and security.

We have forgotten that there is enough and so we have forgotten how to share. Polarities and fear are dividing walls that have kept us from loving and connecting and being radically generous and open with one another.  The sorting, as Brene Brown, has called it creates an “us and them” so that we can go without our consciences pricked as we maintain the fear-based attitude of “taking care of our own”.  The ways in which we have not welcomed our neighbors in the name of protecting our turf has made us unwelcoming and less capable of seeing that when we give away, we receive so much more.  Have I lost the very real truth that in fact, it is better to give, than to receive.

I recently read that neuroscience has shown brain scans that reflect that one cannot hold gratitude and fear at the same time.  It is neurologically impossible for both of those experiences to co-exist in the brain together.  I believe this is my personal anti-dote to fear.  Gratitude. I can’t be grippy and feel gratitude at the same time because I am aware it is all a gift.  In the Yoga community we have the experience of practicing the present moment and looking always for opportunity to bring this discipline “off the mat” into our daily lives.  What a rich opportunity we have been handed by this pandemic.  I intend no disrespect to the families who have lost loved ones or who are currently suffering with this virus.  To you, may you be filled and held by those who have the capacity to give and to serve and carry this burden alongside you now.  But to those of us, who are relatively healthy but find ourselves paralyzed and gripped by the potentiality or anticipatory traumatic response, I call us up, beginning with myself.  What will we do with this opportunity to practice radical trust in a God, a universe, that strongly supports us and is always working for our wholeness and healing.

With gratitude,

Jayne