What a day. What a week. What a month.
The coronavirus pandemic is exhausting on so many levels. Nerves are fraying, and it’s only the beginning.
We are desperate for someone to fix this situation and return us to the lives we were living a few short weeks ago.
That is the dream.
That is not the reality.
The reality is that this pandemic is not going away any time soon. Our lives are changing. They will likely never be the same. This is very, very scary.
But I came across this article — That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief — in The Harvard Business Review of all places, and it has been incredibly helpful in helping me process what is happening.
It features a Q&A with David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief. He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss.
This is Kessler’s response when he’s asked if what we’re feeling is grief:
Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.
Kessler is spot on. Not since 9/11 have we felt this type of collective grief. It feels foreign, scary, uncomfortable, and it makes us feel vulnerable.
But in the way of the #Woo, Kessler provides us with concrete ways we can deal with this grief and its resulting anxiety by using meditation and mindfulness techniques.
Come into the present, he says.
Let go of what you can’t control, he says.
Stock up on compassion, he says.
And he tells us to name what we’re feeling.
There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, “I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,” or “I cried last night.” When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through.
I am in love with those last two sentences, which I bolded.
If mindfulness, meditation, and exploring The Land of the Woo have taught me anything, it’s that burying our feelings and pretending they don’t exist is futile. It’s only through naming our emotions and giving them space that we can take back our power and learn to live with emotions rather than being defined by them.
“It’s absurd to think we shouldn’t feel grief right now,” Kessler says. “Let yourself feel the grief and keep going.”
That is advice I intend to follow as I head into another week of sheltering in place. If you have the time and the energy, I invite you to read the full article.