THE COVID MONTHS | BE THE LAKE NOT THE GLASS
1 Lake Mellisani, Kefallonia, Greece
‘the more spacious and larger our fundamental nature, the more bearable the pains in living’
Wayne Mulller
Georgia Giannopoulou reflects on living away from the land of her birth in these months.
Reflecting on this amorphous journey of the pandemic from March 2020 to ‘…to be continued…’, hard to put into a coherent narrative, I want to share some thoughts, feelings, musings and the meanings I keep seeking, losing and finding to keep the hope, to stay resilient.
First was the shock of the unexpected; when we planned our careers, our holidays, our workloads, our finances, our nights out, our catch-ups. We had no idea we would be going back to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, to our basic needs being in question, to uncertainties about our physical, emotional & financial security. To worrying about ourselves and our loved ones’ health and survival and that we couldn’t even count on seeing our family. Like so many European ‘settled’ immigrants, coming to terms with the incomprehensible Brexit has been exacerbated by being deprived of the opportunity to come into contact with my secure base, smell the smells and hear the sounds, walk the paths see the colour of the sky and the feel texture of the soil and hear the loud voices and relate in my mother tongue.
Then we didn’t know we would be glued to a screen like our life depended on it because it really does, in so many ways, it’s our social lifeline, it’s education, it’s livelihood, nothing can destabilise us more than the WIFI being down.
We didn’t know we would become ‘home-educators’; we didn’t know we would be juggling trying to be ‘good enough’ parents and meeting all of our children’s needs in ‘relational poverty’ as Bruce Perry describes it, not how nature intended, whilst at the same time keeping our own sanity and putting food on the table.
As therapists and trainees supporting others in their own wellbeing as a line of work, never has it been more evident that we are indeed wounded healers[1] and that we are truly all ‘different manifestations of a shared life condition’ (Spinelli).
Chiron & Achilles
Then there is the triggering of experiences past, in us and our clients, times when we had no control over our movements, times when relationships were a risk to our survival, times of scarcity, times when we felt muffled and unable to breathe or speak, all brought forward by the now indispensable life support that is social distancing and the face covering.
Then there are our familial and cultural injunctions and our drivers and how they plague us and others around us, our Be Strong, our Don’t Feel, our Don’t Be Close, our Be Perfect becoming a noose around our neck keeping us from seeking out, giving and taking the care we need. Are we even allowed to feel desolate or do we have to choose between that and being ostracised by talking about the ‘unspeakable’ because it mirrors in others around us what nobody wants to know and feel?
Do we also keep the pressure on ourselves to not feel and present constantly ‘professional’, ‘resilient’, ‘grateful’ and proud of ‘how well-we-are-doing-all things-considered’? What is the price of this coping and thriving persona and going without real empathic attunement? Perhaps perpetuating withdrawal and aninternal desert.
Then there are the losses, masses of them piling on top of each other, the big and the small, the tangible and the intangible, the shared and the hidden and those we don’t feel entitled to grieve as there is so much more pain around. Like your children moving school without a goodbye or that you missed your hair appointment by a day after lockdown and now you have to live with your unkempt self a few more months.
The very thing that heals us, our basic need, human relatedness, sitting close with another, physical touch and affection has now become our nemesis, coming to fear connection and prize distance. We become resigned and fearful. With physical distance over time comes emotional distance until there comes a point where we are no longer known and every personal and familial drama stays behind closed doors and hearts. The social media are there to dictate the trend now, is it ‘Coronavirus: Only positive stories please’ or the latest statistics, or the photos from the home-schooling adventures, or the new Jacuzzis or children’s zoom birthday parties with tepees and Disney characters coming for a door visit or how well we are doing keeping up with the rules and still smiling?
In the therapy profession our clients exist in the same space, sailing different boats in the same river, facing the big and the little dramas, the disasters of the world, all still happening alongside and with the undercurrent of the pandemic. We carry around our own scars and our own ongoing attempts to contain and to flexibly manage the latest crisis, the school closures, the family member that has to isolate, the funeral we couldn’t attend, the IT failure, our own despair.
What we are faced with now is no more than the concerns that are givens to our human condition, all brought into a dystopic sharp focus. We share with others this life condition and we are also fundamentally alone. Uncertainty is part of our lived experience and that is a certainty. We need to imbue experience with meaning to make it tolerable.
We can’t wipe the pain and make it all ok for anyone. We can enlarge and strengthen the container, which is our self, our body, our breath, our consciousness, our moment-by-moment awareness. We can embrace our vulnerability, our fallibility, our imperfection and our stumbling fumbling falling and somehow miraculously rising[2]on repeat.
‘The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So, when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of things…stop being a glass. Become the lake.’ Mark Nepo
At every ominous new uncomfortable sensation, I return to my breathing again and again, it’s constant, it’s there, it’s happening now and it’s happening regardless of me, I am being breathed. And trust that life force will prevail in this moment, and then the next. To keep the hope.
References
Practising Existential Therapy: The Relational World, Ernesto Spinelli, 2014, SAGE
Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered , Bruce D Perry / Maia Szalavitz , 2011, WmMorrowPB
The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want By Being Present in the Life You Have, Mark Nepo 2011, Quercus
[1] In Greek mythology, the centaur Chiron was a "Wounded Healer", after being poisoned with an incurable wound by one of Hercules's arrows. For Jung, "a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself... it is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician."
[2] Maya Angelou