Taking Care through the Coronavirus: Body, Mind, and SOUL
This, the third of a three-part series on resources and thoughts on care of yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually during the COVID19 pandemic, offers one perspective into caring for the SOUL.
For the past week, I have researched and written about how to care for the body and mind during the COVID19 pandemic, from finding free yoga courses, to sewing and cooking classes, animation apps, and fitness trackers in order to keep engaged and healthy. But, do you want to know a secret?
…I’ve actually taken advantage of precious little of these myself. Like — almost none. Why? Perhaps it’s because having twin twelve-year-olds and a kindergartner with wonderfully earnest and dear teachers sending through assignments constantly through new digital platforms has meant I’ve had to quickly mobilize into Crisis School mode, squeezing my work in at the edges — whenever one of my kids hasn’t commandeered my laptop or phone for a Zoom meeting. This has resulted in a daily street fight between me and the expectations of school and of an internal pull to let them play outside and goof around on screens as much as possible. Or maybe the reason I haven’t yet participated in a live chat with my favorite artist or musician is because I am filled with so much distraction right now that my mind and heart are fractured into a thousand pieces and concentrating on anything outside a 20-foot orbit feels like picking up an anvil.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s incredible that so many museums are offering virtual tours, that all of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musicals are being streamed for free, that Dolly Parton will read you a bedtime story (okay, we totally did that one) — but it’s also all overwhelming. And I think caring for the soul might mean taking ourselves off a lot of hooks right now, including what we think we should be doing with this time.
So writing about taking care of the SOUL through the Coronavirus means owning up to the fact that I haven’t taken advantage of much that the newly turned-inside-out world has to offer on the mind or body. And it means extending the same offer to you. There are wonderful ways out there to take care of yourself, enrich yourself, learn more, stay healthy or get healthier, and by all means, please avail yourself of these as a means of coping and thriving. And — not but, but AND — if you are managing more than your own self — perhaps a small business with frightened employees or a family of small children — if you are not in the quarantine camp that’s seeking the next great jigsaw puzzle or way to pass the time, then taking care of your soul might look a lot more like staring out the window and drooling than doing a live meditation with Pema Chodron.
Let’s all give ourselves a little grace, shall we? And in the giving of that grace, we are watering the soul so gently and lovingly. We’ve all lost so much this spring — graduations and plays, birthday parties and spring breaks, income and jobs, our very freedom for a bit, and God forbid, lives of those we love. And that loss hasn’t been a one-off event — the earthquake is still quaking, the uncertainty still hangs like a nausea in the air. Can we agree that if you haven’t picked up that free second language class from Babel because preparing 3 meals in one day and taking out the trash felt Herculean, that this is okay? I think it’s okay. I’m telling myself it’s okay. And in fact, I think it’s more than just all right — I think it’s a careful listening to the soul’s deep call to fold in on itself and grieve.
We cannot walk gently enough with our own selves right now. We cannot overestimate the importance of what it is to grieve, even the subtle grief of losing your sense of well-being and certainty. Or the ability to hug other people, even if temporarily. Caring for the soul very often requires sitting with this emotion, quietly in your heart, as the rest of your strange quarantine life hums around you.
There are meditation apps galore, online church, temple and mosque services, and live streaming talks with sages of all stripes. Please feel free to google them. But now that I’ve outed my inability to take advantage of the cornucopia of digital offerings right now, I thought I’d share how I’m, personally, trying to care for my soul — mostly offline — through these trying times (with the caveat that I am very often not doing it particularly well).
· Friends. I am lucky enough to have an incredible collection of friends, near and far. Several of us check in daily on a group chat. We’ve created a safe space to complain about “crisis school”, share our fears and concerns, ask how to disinfect groceries and generally, look out for each other. Other friends walk by my place, or me theirs, and leave sidewalk chalk messages, and still others send texts or make quick calls, “Are you okay?” “How’s today?” and “Hang in there!” Taken together, this has created a thick weave of social resiliency — I feel stronger and more capable of overcoming stress and shock because I feel actively a part of a network of love and care.
· Downtime. Truly, really, downtime. Like when you sit on the couch, with your phone in your hand, buzzing with all the messages you haven’t had time to respond to, and for at least a few minutes, you just … sit. And stare. This is like cultivating fallow ground. The farmer lets the dirt sit between crops so that it will be more fertile. For me, it’s best if I can take a walk outside (no phone) to let my dirt sit, but often just a few minutes on the couch works wonders.
· Sleep. The much deeper, more serious big sister of downtime, sleep is essential in keeping body and soul together, and keeping spirits lifted. Ideally 8 hours, but anything north of 6 means I am able to start another day full of spiraling news with a sense of perspective that this is temporary, that the odds are very high that we will be well and intact on the other side. It also means I am better able to see the silver linings — the connections, the slow down, the pause this awfulness is affording us. Less than 6–8 hours and it’s the screaming sea serpents from The Princess Bride, shrieking and circling my tiny, little boat. Sleep is pretty much everything.
· Prayer and Meditation. Until the COVID19 pandemic, my prayer and meditation habit was sporadic at best. During the pandemic, it is still sporadic, but only because my time is tighter with kids home around the clock and a husband self-quarantined upstairs for a week, awaiting his test results. The stakes are higher and the preciousness of life is brought into sharper relief, so my prayers are now woven into my days — earnestly delivered while unloading the dishwasher, passing out vitamins, or in the couple minutes at dawn before the house is awake. Sarah Blondin, who’s deeply spiritual podcast, Live Awake has been a powerful balm lately, says that when we are facing despair, uncertainty, fear or pain — the soul-gentling antidote is to make sacred the small things in front of us. The dishes, the laundry, the school work, the walks, the check-in calls, all might be seen and felt as a deeply intimate conversation between your Soul and God. The intention we give these seemingly unimportant tasks is what elevates them and calls out the preciousness of our own lives. Many other spiritual leaders are offering a similar message — go to ground in the granularity of your own life, and find there a balm, a sense of being held and loved beyond measure.
· Feel what you’re Feeling. How can we best show up for our own selves right now, even and especially if, we are caring for others and balancing other pressures? I struggle with this on a near minute by minute basis, but I think it’s in developing a strong and honest plumbline with what we are feeling and needing in any given moment. This is a muscle to be strengthened, to be developed. I’ve tried to flex it before by practicing the HALT technique (asking myself at regular intervals, “Am I hungry? Angry? Lonely? Tired?”), but any centering breathing exercise or even closing my eyes and checking in works just as well. Our lives have radically changed, hopefully only very temporarily, but the effect is still unnerving. Attending to our own spiritual resiliency is very likely more of an inside job, and far more gentle, more quiet, and even more inert than we might at first imagine.
How are you taking care of yourself spiritually during the coronavirus pandemic? Share with us in the comments or on our Facebook page or Instagram feed @amypoehlersmartgirls.
