We’re living in unprecedented times. Every day brings new challenges and new STUFF… it truly is an extraordinary time in human history. It’s easy to feel like we’re lost. We don’t know what the heck to do with what’s happening all around us because we’ve never been through this before!
Especially if we or someone close to us is ill (or we think they might be…), it can be hard to pull our focus from the negative.
Just a few weeks ago, I got really sick. I had just come back from Chile, and I had all the symptoms… but no one was really talking about Coronavirus at that point. I had all of it — the fever, the bronchial stuff. And because I have asthma, I was especially concerned.
There was a moment there where I literally thought I was going to die. I lost my eyesight and actually fell down in the bathroom. It was scary. I couldn’t do anything, just lie in bed. I had no voice, no energy.
It could have been easy to sink into that, and then compound it with guilt over having to cancel events (and I NEVER cancel events!).
But I remember saying to myself, “I can either bemoan what’s going on for me and get scared, or I can sit in gratitude, yes, even for this.” So in the worst of my illness, I kept saying, “Okay, Spirit, if it’s my turn, just… okay.”
And three times a day for half an hour, I’d just sit there and listen to uplifting music like Deva Premal, Enya, Joni Mitchell, and Stevie Nicks. I would put my hand on my heart and stay super grateful and get really chill. And it helped.
Listen, I’m not saying that Enya can cure COVID (but who really knows, right?!).
What I am saying is that we can find comfort, even when we’re living in uncertainty.
As human beings, we crave certainty. We have a conditioned mindset based on what the press tells us, what culture tells us, what our family tells us. What we see in the outer world — or what we’ve been TOLD to see — becomes our reality, and that’s what we want to return to. The subconscious wants to keep focusing on what is known, and certainty becomes our top priority.
But that’s not what’s happening right now.
Right now, we’re all living in uncertainty! What’s happening now is unknown, and unknowable to us. We don’t have the knowledge or the tools to understand or figure it out.
But even with the uncertainty, it’s still an invitation and an initiation.
Rather than struggling to figure it out, we have an opportunity to choose to be in curiosity instead of in fear.
Resisting what is just creates more fear to present on the big screen of potentiality, and that’s just a waste of time!
Today’s 24 hours doesn’t have to be a projection of disaster. Instead, it can be a projection of love, of compassion, of caring, of forgiveness, of self-care, of even determining what we put into our mouths. Are you choosing to eat a whole box of Oreo cookies, or are you choosing to have some greens? You know what I’m saying… it’s all a choice.
It’s a choice, and we are all response-able right now to make choices, even if they’re micro-choices to care for ourselves by taking lots of naps!
We can choose something other than fear. When we are in fear, we become attached to an experience. We feel like that’s the best way to protect ourselves. The cortisol, the epinephrine… our adrenals go on overdrive because we’re seeking that which is troublesome, that which is a potential threat. We’re looking for fear, and we find it because we’re on patrol for it.
But what if we chose to risk giving up on our fear?
What happens when we give up our fear, and we allow ourselves to become vulnerable — we discover something beautiful, something palpably different, a trusting sense that blends with a new strength and hope and that’s where the real truth arises. Once we’re vulnerable, our surrender becomes a gift, and that kind of vulnerability is not weakness—it’s a beautiful sign of our humanity, our capacity for more, for deeper, for higher and for now and ever. And then when we stop fighting against something, we can be curious, and when we’re curious, we switch from fear to trust. Then we’re ready for meaning, and perhaps even miracles.
That trusting moment is when we give ourselves the gift of saying, “I am going to risk giving up my fear, and instead I’m going to have the courage to trust.”
Can you take the risk of looking at each day as a gift? Can you allow yourself to ask, “What’s great about this?”
Maybe those great things are so tiny — like when I was sick, I could watch Netflix and catch up on the cartoon shows I love so much! (Yes, I love Shaun the Sheep!) They can be that tiny. But to find them, you have to risk giving up on your negativity and fear.
Our Higher Power is there, waiting, and you can give the fear away. We can trust God, Goddess, the Universe. We can say, “Yes, I trust you.” Even when we’re not well, we can say that. In spite of the conditions we’re being given, we can trust that there’s something going on behind all of this. We don’t know what it is, and it’s not our job to find out.
Our job is to stay in trust all day long. Even if you only manage a few minutes at a time, your day will be amazing!
We owe it to ourselves and to each other to keep coming back to trust. We owe it to each other to not put out any more suffering into this world by throwing our fear out because it’s contagious and we need to protect others and ourselves. It’s the Fear Virus — the one that’s worse than the other illness because it takes away our humanity.
When we’re in fear, we don’t act kindly. We don’t act compassionately. We think only about ourselves.
Instead, we have to give up the fear and replace it with trust.
Without the fear, we can be kind.
Without the fear, we can be free.
Without the fear, we can be connected.
Without the fear, we can be light.
Without the fear, we can be love.
