What can you do knowing life is changing due to a virus?

I felt compelled to add my voice to this conversation. I have read much about this apparent collapse of how we have been conditioned to “do” things. I am, as you are, being called to question most things. One huge question for me is, “who do I choose to be in this crisis”?

Since I have been a trainer/coach in stress management and emotional self regulation, I have witnessed how our minds and hearts can either heal us or make us so stressed out that we actually create the very thing we don’t want.

Fear is a huge catalyst in activating the sympathetic nervous system, which activates in us the fight/flight/freeze response. We can’t think clearly, we project onto others what we are experiencing inside, we experience everything as a threat. We forget that everyone is experiencing some emotion on the inside that dictates their behavior and their very biology.

Fear comes in many frequencies and textures. My fear maybe different from your fear. I maybe experiencing anxiety, you maybe experiencing depression. I maybe experiencing neediness and you maybe experiencing avoidance. We all have been “programmed” differently.

Once I can sit with my fear, it’s thoughts, emotions and how it is impacting my own body, from a place of witnessing, curiosity and compassion, I am able to sit with yours.

How do I do this? I sit in the heart. I have explained in previous blogs the power of the heart, please go there to look. As I sit in the heart, I begin to breathe, slower than normal, deeper than normal for a minute or two. Then I activate a renewing feeling. You might ask “what feeling would be powerful enough to balance the fear”?

For each of us, we need to find this answer from our own hearts. The basic need of the heart is peace! So, for me I self activate a feeling of peace, calm or ease. I don’t wait for the outer world to do this for me, I Self activate it.

The heart has 40,000 sensory neurites in it, the same as in your brain, it is sensing and feeling all of the time. There is an Intelligence here! We just have not spent enough time in our hearts to truly listen to it. I know I did not for years, I was taught it was thinking that makes it so. Which on one level is true, however to truly have access to the part of the brain that can problem solve, be creative, have empathy or impulse control, I must put my body into a certain state, which we call coherence.

Once this state is induced by my choice to do so, I can ask my own heart for guidance. There is a saying “the mind questions, the heart knows”.

So, as this situation develops around the world, one thing I know to be true is that it is the coherent state, that will help my immune system to stay strong, and my mind more able to come up with “wisdom” for myself.

This virus is truly helping humanity see how very interconnected we are. With enough love and compassion for each other and ourselves we will rise to co-create societies that have this as the ground from which to move.

Fear is a stranger to the ways of Love. Let’s all be in charge of stopping the virus of fear.

If you need support in activating your heart’s intelligence and self regulation, please call.