Covid 19 blog #1 welcome to my world!

An occasional lite blog reflecting on the impact of the virus from a therapeutic setting.

“you know the thing, the thing I want to say about this coronavirus thing? I mean, I don’t have it, but you know what I want to say?” I shifted in my chair. I had seen this client for a while, and was getting used to her style. “What do you want to say about your experience of this?” I asked. “I want to say: welcome to my world! That’s what I want to say! I don’t want belittle anybody’s experience but this is how I feel all the time. I wonder if people might now think about folk like me, anxious and panicky?”

I have been reflecting on this time; it can appear that the country, in fact the whole world is in a state of panic, where our National fight or flight in the UK nervous system has become pulled, attenuated and is now behaving in irrational, compulsive ways.

There is a way out.

Meeting your experience with mindfulness and compassion can help us bring our attention to the facts (how much we have to self-isolate, what distance between each other, and what’s happening inside us right now) and to our attitude, how kind we might be (or not) to ourselves and others around us. How we might grow this.

Not just thinking of ourselves but how our behaviours impacts on others, with empathy, reflecting on those whose experience is always like this, welcoming ourselves to a whole new world!