Originally published on Levona.org, March 15, 2020
Sitting here in my room and looking out the window, I’m toying with one of my favorite questions: What can I learn from this?
With entire countries behind closed doors, no live music and no birthday parties, everyone glued to their screen, people talking about disease and death and apocalyptic forecasts…
Of course this will pass. Of course. But I want to ask: Why is it happening?
And what can we learn?
Carolyn Myss talks about the reasons why pandemics happen, and how a country or even a generation can “manifest” their innermost struggles into a disease. In her book “Anatomy of the Spirit”, she offers her explanations for how a disease like polio could come and physically paralyze a world that was already crippled in spirit by the Great Depression; and how HIV, a disorder that renders its victims helpless in the face of any outside threat, ran rampant in parts of society where people were already so used to being victimized (like gay men in the West, and poverty-stricken neighborhoods in countries like Africa).
The Coronavirus is a respiratory disease, and the people who are most prone to it are people who already have difficulties in their lungs or their hearts. The lungs and the heart are closely linked in the body, and they share the very same energies. What happens in that same part of our bodies on a spiritual level? Connection, compassion, love, forgiveness… all the things that hearts are made for.
Where are we with these things in the world today? How connected are we to our hearts? And our lungs?
One of the things that fascinates me is to look for the mottos, the “catch phrases” of our generation, and of a particular moment in time. What do we say to ourselves so often? That we need to slow down, and BREATHE. And here we are, forced to do just that.
And what about our heart connections? What is the catch phrase of the Coronavirus, that is now all over the papers and the internet? SOCIAL DISTANCING. Decades of separation from each other, and from our own hearts, and here we are manifesting our culture in a physical way: We are all now isolated, physically. Glued, as we say, to our screens as the best connection we have to our outside world. But isn’t this exactly where we’ve been living already, for so long?
And so…. What now?
To be perfectly honest, I really don’t know what needs to happen on the physical plane. But I know what I’m feeling: I feel lonely. I feel isolated. And I want to reach out to my friends, and see that they are ok. And that’s what I’m going to do.
Wishing everyone a safe journey through this dark time. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. We just have to want to find it.
Photo by Drew Rae, Pexels