I wrote this meandering blog post on the coronavirus to explain how & why I decided to create the Intuition and Healing at-home Summer Series that I will launch on June 2nd. I am turning 30 in June, and this offering is my way of celebrating. If you would like to skip over my musings and skip straight to the course registration, visit my page’s store. Throughout the summer course you will have plenty of opportunity to hear from me personally about what 2020 has been like for me, and how I am using some of my intuitive practices to cope.
(There are some opportunities to pay in installments, and also to save by purchasing only the curriculum without the live sessions, so please do not be discouraged if financially you are going through a hard time. I also want to say that I am a firm believer that doing your work on your own can be noble and important, and that regardless of how much $$ you have or don’t have, the right teachers and guides will come to you.) Now, about those musings--here we go.
I went into 2020 fired up with plans and ambition. 2020 would be the year that I turned 30, and it would be the year that I finished a graduate program and launched myself forward into something new. I was so chocked full of plans that five weeks into the year I found myself exhausted and miserable. I wanted it to be the year that I saved up enough for a down payment on a house, and the year that I met a marriageable partner, and the year that my professional career went from “eh?” to wildly successful.
On March 1st I took a trip to Mexico with a dear friend to celebrate my graduation, vowing to chill out and to find joy in the everyday. While I was on the beach at Puerto Angel I worked on the draft of a memoir, and I emailed friends about my plans to celebrate my 30th birthday by hosting a three-day certification course for Reiki levels 1 & 2. On March 10th I flew back into the U.S. with a great suntan, a big relaxed smile on my face, and in my suitcase a few bottles of mezcal. Three months into the year I finally felt equipped to live out my best 2020.
Then--you know what I am about to say, right?--I came back to the U.S. through a layover in the Houston airport where I watched masses of masked people rush towards their planes nervously, and then drove back to a Colorado where restaurants, coffee shops, and schools were closing down by the day. I hosted a book club at my house the following evening on March 11th, but felt nervous about it. A few days later the government of Mexico closed its border to the U.S, and I started to realize that all bets for 2020 were off.
Just as happened to so many others, I saw all of my plans and visions for 2020 evaporate. Yoga classes? Over. Reiki training? Nope. Spain trip with my brother? Definitely no. Dating? Probably not. I am privileged enough to have a stable job, one that I love, and one that can easily be done from home--but my work, which involves working with college students, and planning large community events, has taken a completely different course. I take immunosuppressant medications for a chronic health condition, placing me within a category of people whose risk factor doctors and researchers are at a loss about it. As the medical community scrambles to build a body of evidence on coronavirus outcomes, we sit at home, confused, feeling healthy(ish), but worried. Some of us are afraid to take our immunosuppressant medications, or have stopped doing so already, either out of fear, or because of added financial stress.
“These strange times.” Have you noticed how many of us are using this phrase right now, as if some kind of agreement has been made that “strange times” is the most accurate term to describe the cascading, ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as they bleed into every aspect of our lives, changing us maybe forever? “These strange times” does make sense to describe what we are collectively going through. Coronavirus came upon us without much warning, and the length of its centerstage moment has proven itself to be indeterminate in measure. We are isolating, but with a heightened sense of our interconnectedness across the globe. We may have trouble imagining what tomorrow or next week will look like, and yet find ourselves lost in visions (or nightmares!) about the future that our human race is headed towards. Most of us cannot help but keep referring to the time when “life will return to some kind of normal,” but many of us also find ourselves predicting that there will “never be a return to normal,” or that “if normal was the way to describe how we were living before, then we don’t ever want normal back”.
It seems wrong for us to admit that we enjoy anything about this time while we know that so many others are suffering, but that does not change the fact that, for many of us, it is the truth that in the pandemic we have found comfort, meaning, and even beauty. We do not want to go back to rushing through our days caffeinated, hurried, and half-awake. We do not want to go back to an economy fed on blood sacrifice, rotting from its copper pillars, and yet stubbornly rooted in the axiom of endless, exponential growth. We do not want to go back to no maternity leave and no sick leave and, while we clock-in and clock-out, entrusting our children to be raised, and taught, and loved by other people. We do not want to go back to no rest, little play, and to joy that only occurs on borrowed time. Let’s be honest: the dystopian narratives about zombie apocalypses, pandemics, and humans evolving into psychic werewolves that have overrun popular media have become fantasies for a lot of us, no matter how nightmarish they are. I read more sci-fi now than ever because speculative fiction feels urgently relevant. Some of us have gotten to the end of our rope and would take any ticket out of “normal”.
As someone who lives with a chronic illness, “these strange times” have also felt a lot to me like deja vu. I am used to always heading towards some date on the horizon of my life when I hope that my symptoms will be easier to manage. I am also used to balancing that hope with a terrible, deeper fear that my disease will spiral out of control and ruin my life. I am used to having to take every-day precautions at best are inconveniences, and at worst annoy the hell out of me. Most of all what is familiar to me is this sense of my body lashing back at me and putting me in my place whenever anything gets out of balance. Losing out on a good night’s sleep, or neglecting to drink water, or eating a piece of sugary birthday cake, can be enough to give me chills, aches, fatigue, and a mild fever for days. I have a growing list of things that I try to remember not to do (drink beer even if it’s just one; assume that other people understand what chronic pain feels like; push past my pain limit during exercise until I end up having to sleep for days), and a also a growing list of things that I have to do (meditate; take magnesium; cry when I’m grieving; dedicate time to relaxing at home). My body is a teacher; and the method of instruction, my illness. As the years go on my body seems to have become stricter with me. I am still learning. What exactly is the lesson??? Sometimes it feels like the lesson is, well, everything.
I learn to be humble. I learn to not crave more than I need. I practice feeling pain without blocking it out, and without insisting on the existence of a future world in which my pain will no longer exist. I stop imagining that my life will someday get easier. I pay attention to other people’s suffering instead of letting it scare or bewilder me. I stop coming up with fixes for other pain because I know what it feels like to accept that there may never be an end, or an answer. I listen to my body every day. I learn over and over again to find my meaning and my stamina by being there for others, but without giving so much that I burn my own candle out. I am not saying that I deserve my illness, or that it exists because I need to learn these things, but I cannot deny the truth that, through all my pain and grief, I am learning.
When I am overwhelmed with fear about my degenerative illness one of the tactics that I use to re-center is to imagine myself looking back upon my life from the perspective of me as the grandmother that I might someday be. I would be proud of myself for enduring what I’ve endured, and even more so if I got through it and kept loving, kept finding joy. I would evaluate my life based not on how long I had managed to stay fit, active, and beautiful, but on the community that I had helped to build, on what I had given to others, and on how much happiness I had granted myself. Looking to the realities of what oppressed peoples around the globe are going through, I find myself starting to see that even daring to hope for something like marriage and children, or something like safety, leisure, and happiness—is an enormous privilege.
So I am used to living with uncertainty. Sometimes I imagine a future for myself in which I am hiking and rock climbing until my 60’s, living out my dreams, and enjoying all the best that life has to offer. Other times I imagine being confined to a bed or a wheelchair struggling with that ‘list of things NOT-to-do to avoid flare-ups’ having taken away from me almost everything.
Who knows what is going to happen next? We can look to scientists for projections, but none of us see the future--even when models predict future outcomes that we are inclined to believe, we have so much trouble imagining what it could be like to live those outcomes out.
Here is what I was not used to about living through a pandemic: spending so much time at home and ENJOYING it. For years, ever since I was diagnosed with my condition, (and within a few months of that was treated for thyroid cancer,) I hated spending time at home. Sure, while I was recovering from surgery and radiation, I spent a lot of time at home. That was when I developed my yoga practice, and I took up singing again, and I taught myself how to cook. For a while, in the name of healing my body, I gave up everything and anything that might be holding me back. The list of do-nots included sugar, men, bread, alcohol, hiking, running, meat, eggs, chocolate, chili peppers, New York City, and late nights dancing. I let it all go without a second thought. That was when I had my first realization of how important it would be for me to accept the limitations of my illness--if all I did was rage, and cry, and resist, I would make myself sick, spend my life miserable, and burn myself into the ground--but, hey, there are some things we have to learn over, over, and over again.
I spent most of my 20’s terrified of being at home or relaxing. Slowing down reminded me of being sick. I often ignored what my body was trying to teach me for as long as I could, waiting for the symptoms of illness to literally pull me to a halt, instead of being kind enough to listen. I went into 2020 burning and raging, obsessed with personal goals and work projects, ready to hit the gym & search for love & work for long hours. It turns out that I have relished these hours at home more than anything, especially those hours when I was doing nothing or very little, even when I knew I was losing income. I became unafraid of missing out on experiences, or of wasting time. I relaxed enough to enjoy dinner with my roommates, and to have a slow chat over tea with them in the morning. I stopped waiting for a date, or an invitation for one, to give me the permission to feel desired and beautiful, and I stopped waiting for the perfect job to come around to assign me the perfect project of dreams: I just did my f$%#ing work, everyday; the work that makes my heart shine.
I am not as upset anymore about being sick because if the whole world is sick right now, then I am just part of the club. We are all in this together. I am also less afraid of losing function and becoming sicker. I want to succumb to the wave of mysterious, slow-to-learn, body wisdom that crashes and sprays and rocks me, and to go wherever that wave is pulling me, no matter how deep I have to go. I think that we are all part of that wave—that my suffering is connecting to yours, and both of ours to a larger shift that we are ALL experiencing on this earth.
Is the pandemic here to teach us lessons, and to kick us back into something that looks like balance with ourselves, and with the earth?
I do not feel comfortable saying that, but one thing I do assert is that ALL of our feelings during and about the pandemic are valid—the grief, the anger, the fear, the hope, the relief, the dread, the confusion, and the joy—and that, if we take the time to examine all the tangled messes that we find ourselves in, and all the driftwood and the sea glass and the creatures turning up (beauties and truths rediscovered. or unknown to us before), then I think we can use this time as an opportunity to drop deeper into wisdom than we would have imagined we were ready for.
Here I am, inching towards the halfway point of 2020, still at home, and with no regrets about how I am going to mark turning 30. The last few months have eliminated a lot of clutter and noise from my life, and have given me an opportunity to rest more deeply into what feels like my true self. If I spend the day with a couple of cherished friends outside in the wilderness, or on a trail (trails are open here, thanks to respect for social distancing), then I will have everything I want. As for Reiki training, it is possible that I could have pushed myself to offer a three-day online certification course for Reiki Levels 1 and 2, but I am happy that I decided not to do that because what I am giving you instead feels more realistic and sustainable for me, and it also feels more real.
I will be sharing a lot with you that is informed by the full breadth of my training in various disciplines and modalities over the last 10 years, as well as plenty that comes from my lived experience creating a life of joy and meaning while I work through illness, chronic pain, trauma, and grief.
I love the fact that this will be available to anyone, anywhere, which might be an opportunity to connect with some faraway friends, and some new connections. Thanks for reading! Check out the information on my Intuition and Healing at-home Summer Series.