Just recently I listened to an interview with Christine Runyan, a clinical psychologist who’s been exploring what is happening to our nervous system in the Covid pandemic we have all been experiencing though in different ways. She focused on the lack of connection that masks and social distancing, etc. have imposed and how this impacts us in a particular way since we normally come together in order to address conflict. It struck me that addressing this Covid dilemma and the uncertainty surrounding our world after Covid must surely be a critical part of our ‘new American We’.
Before we explore this challenge, I think it will help to first get in touch with two aspects of our response to Covid and indeed to any perceived threat.
A Mindfulness Exercise
Position yourself comfortably, relaxed but alert – your back straight, hands in your lap, eyes closed or ‘softened’.
Take three deep breaths, in through your nose and out through your mouth…. Then breathe normally. Where you feel tension in your body, breathe into that place and breathe out the tension. Do this for a few moments.
Now try to let go of the thoughts that are running around in your head by paying attention to your breath as you breathe in and out, deliberately. See if you can find a gentle rhythm.
Now, see if you can bring to mind an experience of trauma.
Notice how your sympathetic nervous system kicks in: glucose for energy, increased heart rate, immune system boost; all intended to prepare you for fight or flight. Notice these changes in your body and stay with them for a few moments. This is our body’s response to trauma.
Now notice how your parasympathetic system emerges: your brain tells you the threat has passed; your heart rate slows; you feel relief… Notice the changes in your body that this causes and stay with these for a few moments.
Continue with our Mindfulness Meditation by giving yourself permission to be present in this place. When you find yourself distracted – as you will – simply return to your breath. I will keep the time for a few minutes (if you’d like to extend this part of the reflection, simply pause the recording and come back when you’re ready).
Now gently return to this moment, to your body and when you are ready open your eyes. Feel the connection – presence, awareness, calm, trust – that surrounds you.
When we are integrated in our lives, this system is in balance in what is called the ‘optimal zone of arousal.’ As you can imagine there is a window of tolerance for such experience of arousal and calm. Understandably, this window shrinks when prior traumas are triggered but also when the same trauma is repeated over and over. Today, both of these are in play, for in this year of Covid, the trauma never went away. And to add to the impact, the virus trauma was added to by the sometimes related traumas of partisan and violent politics, racism, and climate change. So the impact just kept going.
And now? A year has passed, the vaccination has come, winter is over: all signs of hope, right? And yet we hear so much talk of uncertainty which manifests in many ways, including apathy, dissociation, and acting out in various ways. This may be because the energy of the many arousals that we have become used to has numbed us. Or perhaps, the protective stance of the sympathetic system is simply watchful, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There is also the rumination cycle that is part of all trauma: did I mess up? could I have done this better? what if ….?? etc. The Buddhist tradition speaks of the two arrows of a trauma: one is the actual event or experience which is bad enough; the second is this ‘rumination cycle’ that can be even more challenging than the first because it never seems to let go. It is well understood that a trauma actually resides in the body, at a cellular level, waiting, as it were, to be triggered again and again. As the poet William Stafford describes it:
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
From “A Ritual TO Read to each other”
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of
childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
by William stafford
But the Covid trauma also has its own unique and distinctive aspects. For, in normal circumstances, a fundamental response to trauma is connection: we reach out to others to comfort and be comforted. This connection transcends differences that would otherwise keep us apart: like politics or race or religion. For example, the recent weather crisis in Texas brought people together across their normal divides. The reason is that when we are in trauma we experience ourselves as essentially one and connected, and it is this realization that allows our nervous system to calm down. This connection, moreover, is physical: in other words it is visceral, body-based, and chemical. The connection releases oxytocin which is a hormone and a neurotransmitter that is involved in childbirth and breast-feeding. It is also associated with empathy, trust, and relationship-building. It is sometimes referred to as the “love hormone,” because levels of oxytocin increase when we hug. In other words, oxytocin is released when we connect and the oxytocin then, in turn, impels us to connect further in a kind of deepening of the healing process.
The distinct and unique – and also troublesome – aspect of the Covid trauma is that the opposite is required of us in order to heal: distancing, masks, lockdowns, and quarantine. Our nervous system gives – or more accurately is given – conflicting messages: don’t connect, stay away, even though your natural impulse is to do the opposite. It is this that constitutes the tragedy of the Covid trauma which manifests in painfully undermining ways that are both individual and collective: you suffer and die without family and loved ones. This understandably adds to the responses of frustration, irritability and erratic behavior we witness everywhere. Even the reactions to the vaccination – the rejection and refusal of an obvious solution – are a form of acting out.
And so, our inability to connect has now become a result as well as a cause of our situation. For, don’t we use isolation in our prison system to punish and hurt people. Thus, our medicine is also therefore both cause and effect of further trauma.
All of which has created a pan-trauma and a constant PTSD that triggers old wounds and generates increasing aggression, myopia, inflexibility, and – most important – a massive loss of empathy. We are in fact suffering a collective trauma: as a species, as members of the earth community. So if we are to heal and get beyond this Covid trauma, we will have to start here. By this I mean we have to recognize – and name – what is happening: we have to frame the experience and see our various responses as valid, including the frustration and apathy and all the other unexpected and confusing experiences that come in their wake.
A particularly dangerous effect of the rumination cycles of self-blaming and depression is the loss of self-compassion. And without self-compassion we will not get through this. We know this about healing others – that compassion is what allows and enables healing to happen – but often forget it when it comes to ourselves. Instead, we add to our own burdens with messages, both subtle and not so subtle of blame and even punishment.
We also have to let go of medical perspectives as the only way to look at this because they tend to be pathological in their diagnosis. Often, in fact, they actually add to the effects, including breakdown on the physical side because of what is known as allostatic overload, which is when our bodies lose the ability to recover. Nor do short term solutions serve us, whether these are drugs or alcohol or Netflix, or even worrying, which can be its own form of drug.
Healing in this strange – and increasingly unpredictable – world begins with naming and allowing: it means ‘metabolizing’ the reality that there is no control. This has always been the case of course – that we control essentially nothing about the unfolding of our lives – but in a culture of control we have developed the illusion that we do control things to an art form. However, one of the main points that Christine Runyan made in the interview was that we have to do more than think about this; we really have to embody it. This is an aspect that Mindfulness-Dialogue practice can help with. In other words, we have to make space for, be present to, breathe in and out this reality. In this place we will rediscover our true self; and in this place too we will find that ‘cool unlying life comes rushing in…and passion [makes] our bodies taut with power..’
This new energy, of our authentic – ancient – self, will reignite our brain and affirm for our nervous system that everything is ok. We can then reinforce this sense of self by breathing deliberately; particularly by exhaling slowly in a way that does, in fact, activate the parasympathetic system which calms and returns us to balance. Dr. Runyan emphasizes the body aspect of this healing process by suggesting that we use our senses – smells that soothe, music that centers – to send messages of comfort and support to our threatened nervous systems. Let me paraphrase a short body practice that highlights the simplicity and easy accessibility of what we might call ‘body self-compassion’:
So, once again position yourself comfortably, relaxed but alert – your back straight, hands in your lap, eyes closed or ‘softened’ and take three deep breaths, in through your nose and slowly out through your mouth….
Now place your feet deliberately and firmly on the ground/floor:
Press down: first with your heels then with the balls of your feet
Feel yourself in the seat
Hold this for a few moments and allow this message that you are grounded, on the earth to rise up through you.
And gently return to the present moment when you are ready
I think the main point perhaps that Dr. Runyan makes is that we have more power than we realize: the power of our own bodies that are doing their best to take care of us. So, the most important thing we can do in this confusing time of Covid is to learn to relate again to our body by paying attention to how it responds to the things it encounters. If we have learned anything during this Covid time – and I believe we have learned at both individual and collective levels – it is to trust our bodies: to let our body teach us. For, while technology has given us so much in these past months, it has also revealed that it doesn’t know what to do. So we would be foolish to entrust too much of ourselves to it. Most of all, our kids have to learn to see this and to discover how to reclaim their souls by taking back their bodies.
Indeed, perhaps another – bigger – learning is that we are not bifurcated creatures of bodies with a soul nor are we spiritual beings having a body experience. We are – body and soul – an expression of life and need to relate to life in an integral way. As I noted at the beginning, when we are integrated in our lives, our nervous system is in balance in what is called the ‘optimal zone of arousal.’ We could add that when we are integrated in our lives, we know how to relate to everything, from one another to viruses.
Maybe this is the biggest lesson of Covid: that we – our ‘new We’ – is one with life and with all its forms, and that this reality is the foundation of a healthy and happy human life at both individual and collective levels. This, in fact, is the real meaning behind the ancient axiom – the Golden Rule of every tradition – that we need to love our neighbor (everything in other words) as ourself.
In terms of how we should proceed after the learnings of this Covid time, let me offer a piece by Rilke that reflects on the heart of this reflection which I might describe as discovering (a continuous, perhaps eternal process) our real or true self and what this means for how we need to live. It’s called Moving Forward:
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
From “Moving Forward”
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
BY RM Rilke