Bringing home a baby in the middle of a worldwide pandemic isn't fun nor easy. While this job might be more complex than what you signed up for, you now have the strength of a parent on your side.
The pandemic has changed how parents keep their children healthy. Follow these steps to keep your little one safe during pandemic surges and through other times, whether you’re worried about COVID-19 or a different virus.
These difficult times bring increased stress, and a natural reaction to stress is anxiety. Far from being simple, anxiety is multi-dimensional, as symbolized in brain structure—the brain itself feels no emotions, because emotions occur in consciousness. You are the product of the evolution of consciousness, and your anxiety has physical, emotional, and rational aspects.
Anxiety passes through each dimension in a sequence. What you need to know is that each dimension can generate fear, and yet in itself, consciousness isn’t fearful. Ancestrally, primitive fear originates in the lower brain, where the fight-or-flight response resides, an inheritance shared by almost all animals. Except in a sudden emergency or moment of alarm, modern humans have minimal need to this inheritance. But modern life generates low-level stress responses that we barely notice but which overload the nervous system, which needs the kind of stress relief few people find the time for.
Mixed in with its devastating negative effects, the COVID pandemic had at least one positive effect: The world felt united as never before. If this feeling of unity continues, huge challenges can be met together. One that touches me personally is the drive to democratize well-being—the gap between haves and have nots is physical, mental, and spiritual, not just economic.
A bit step in the direction of democratized well-being was taken by a unique program that uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to rescue people at high risk for suicide. We’ve become huge, enthusiastic supporters of Piwi, a chatbot that anyone in crisis can have a conversation with (https://www.x2ai.com/piwi). Here’s how this breakthrough intervention works.
It has been shown repeatedly that when someone is having suicidal thoughts, the best way to rescue them is through personal contact, which usually is conducted with another person at the end of the line. But it is also essential to have a follow-up contact to make sure that the intervention has a lasting effect. Piwi accomplishes both goals with very impressive results at a uniquely low cost.
The search for a higher reality has brought out the spiritual yearning of countless people. This was true many centuries ago and is true today. Following your own spiritual path amounts to a mass movement that grows one person at a time. Each seeker defines a personal goal reflecting deep wishes, dreams, and ideals.
But what happens when the path itself has lost its hold on reality? I’ve read scattered stories about the yoga community that links some members, the smallest of minorities, that resist being vaccinated against Covid-19 and buy into conspiracy theories like QAnon. If all it took was common sense to change their minds, they wouldn’t still be clinging to such strange examples of irrationality.
But if you cast your net farther, the same thread runs through the wellness community as well, particularly the anti-vaccination mindset. It’s mistaken and unfair to use a fringe group as the tar that stains everyone else. The yoga and wellness communities consist of people with higher sensitivity to health, self-care, and consciousness than the general public, and that’s the image we should keep in mind.
June is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Month, and recent research on the emotional roots of PTSD, anxiety, and depression indicates that energy healing through The Emotion Code energy healing modality holds promise for relieving symptoms among trauma survivors.
Although PTSD is most commonly associated with combat veterans, any terrifying, traumatic, or life-threatening event that is either experienced or witnessed can result in PTSD. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry found that 30% of COVID-19 survivors experienced PTSD. Other traumas that can lead to PTSD include sexual assault, accidents, physical assault, disaster, or witnessing a death or injury.
PTSD is a common and debilitating ailment resulting in emotional detachment, depression, anxiety, withdrawal from friends and family, and loss of interest in everyday activities. PTSD sufferers may experience extreme emotional or physical reactions such as panic attacks, heart palpitations, nightmares, crying, insomnia, paranoia, nausea, and chills when they are reminded of the traumatic event or events that led to their PTSD. Hyper-vigilance, a state of being constantly fearful and unable to relax is a hallmark of PTSD and the body's response to avoid more pain, danger, or stress.
Stress, anxiety, and depression kill your inner peace, but unfortunately, they are an integral part of human existence. The pandemic has made these issues more rampant than ever, and most people struggle to find mental peace. Relationships are suffering, social isolation is a real challenge, and WFH stress is making things worse. It is hard to live normally when the fear of death and financial uncertainties looms large. But you need not give up hope. Despite the challenges, things can look up if you take the right approach to rediscover mental peace. Here are some tried and tested ideas you must embrace right now.
Rediscovering mental peace is all about restoring balance. Purging negative emotions can do the trick because they are probably overshadowing positive thoughts right now. A session of meditation and deep breathing every morning can give you the best start. It will take only a few minutes to focus on inner peace and positivity, and you will feel happy throughout the day.
Many people are chomping at the bit for society to reopen. However, if you are among those with an autoimmune condition or another disorder and run a high risk of complications from infection, you might have valid fears.
The stress doesn’t benefit your overall health and may put you at risk of a painful flare. What can you do to tame your tension? Here’s how to fight COVID-19 anxiety with yoga as society reopens.
Often, people exacerbate their anxiety by spending too much time on social media or watching the news. While you want to be informed, the chances are that you won’t miss any breaking developments if you silence your phone alerts and turn off CNN.
Yoga offers you the ideal alternative. You can find tons of free videos on YouTube, and you can watch and follow along on the big screen if you have a smart TV or a streaming device. Make a brief workout — you can find those as short as five minutes — an alternative way to unwind from your workday instead of flipping to the latest broadcast.
While the physical pandemic has gained all the headlines, and people are coming out of lockdown with renewed optimism and energy, everyone needs to come out of the psychological pandemic that has gained much less publicity. What makes the emotional costs of this “parallel pandemic” worse is that it potentially affected everyone who was in lockdown.
Research shows that Americans have suffered emotionally during the pandemic, and you didn’t have to catch the virus to feel anxious or depressed. Both have dramatically increased around the world. No one can calculate the potential costs when mental health is so widely affected, but you can be part of the healing.
It’s an invaluable role for meeting an urgent need—needless to say, there aren’t enough professional therapists to fill the need, and there’s always the lingering hesitation even to admit that you or someone close to you is suffering emotionally. Shame and the fear of being seen as “not normal” are powerful inhibitors.
No crisis in recent memory has shown us the urgent need for a new approach to mental health like the Covid pandemic. The post-pandemic future can be a transformation of humanity on a global scale. A new paradigm of mental health offers the possibility of an awakening of the human family.
The past year of pandemic has exacted deep emotional costs in the form of social isolation, anxiety, grief and fear of the unknown. It’s been tough for parents and children, for front-line workers and teachers, for each of us. Yet this very experience may turn out to be the opportunity we so often find in crisis – the emergence of a new mental health culture.
People are talking more openly about their feelings. Empathy has emerged out of distress, because no one has been immune from feeling anxious, depressed, and vulnerable. We know without a shadow of a doubt that we need each other. Self-care is expanding to embrace everyone.
If the pandemic offers a silver lining, it is this.
FADE IN
EXT. OUTDOOR RESTAURANT PATIO - DAY
Our protagonist is found sitting in the outdoor patio of a restaurant near his home, enjoying a beer. It has been more than a month since his second COVID vaccination. He feels liberated. The sun is out. Spring has arrived in the Great Northwest— at least for a day or two.
Two women sit at a nearby table, having a loud discussion that our man can’t help overhearing.
WOMAN #1
My understanding is that these vaccinations can change our DNA. I took them because it was the only way I felt like I would get to see my aging mother and she had taken hers. Now I’m scared to death that my DNA has been altered.
WOMAN #2
I’ve read quite a bit on this and understand that the two vaccines that alter our mRNA are simply sending messages to the DNA. They don’t actually change the DNA. And their impact is relatively short term, stimulating the body to boost its own process.
Feelings of loneliness can be very hard to deal with. Modern society has had a tendency to isolate us from one another even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but since its arrival feelings of isolation and loneliness have gone off the scale.
Hundreds of millions of people have lost their livelihood due to the shutdowns. The divorce rate has gone up, as has the suicide rate. While we know COVID-19 has caused 2.8 million deaths worldwide, including almost 550,000 in the US, researchers are just beginning to look at the cost of increased loneliness as a result of government lockdowns. These costs are particularly high among the elderly and those who live alone.
“For more than a million residents of nursing homes, the lockdowns themselves have been devastating,” the New York Times reported. “Cut off from family and largely confined to their rooms, many residents lost weight and saw ailments worsen. Some grew increasingly confused. Others sank into depression and despair.”
For more than a year, health officials have told the public to wear masks and stay at least six feet apart to slow the spread of the virus. But wearing masks and being unable to share simple touch also comes with a cost.
More than a year into the global pandemic, there’s a lot we still don’t know about COVID-19. But here’s one thing we do know: People who are obese, have hypertension, cardiovascular disease, or diabetes, fare far worse if they become infected. They are much more likely to be hospitalized. And they are far more likely to die. In fact, according to the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 94% of COVID-19 deaths are linked to other “comorbidities.” Only 6% list COVID-19 as the sole cause of death.
Since many of these comorbidities are largely preventable (and often reversible) with a whole foods, plant-based diet, it is not an exaggeration to say that the standard American diet has turbocharged the pandemic.
The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, but in the first year of the pandemic, had 20% of the world’s reported COVID-19 deaths. How could the world’s wealthiest country, with arguably the most advanced (and certainly the most expensive) healthcare system on the planet, have fared so poorly?
The sober reality is that the United States has experienced the most deaths by far of any country in the world from COVID-19. The mortality rate from COVID-19 in the US is about 40% higher than in Europe. Is it a coincidence that the obesity rate in the US is also about 40% higher than in Europe? Or is it a clue to something we urgently need to understand?
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Right now the push to control the latest surges in Covid have focused on three things that have gained around-the-clock publicity: masks, distancing, and vaccines. Relying on them has given people hope in the face of the pandemic. But there are sources of hope, including a new one just added to the mix, that everyone should know about.
These sources of hope are based on an aspect of daily life that is ordinary and at the same time extremely complex and mysterious. Every day your body goes through a healing cycle. This cycle is the product of billions of years of evolution, setting in place many cycles, clocks, feedback loops, and chemical messaging. But the upshot is a total reset of the mindbody system every day. Anything that has gone out of balance is reset, and all the parts of the system once again mesh as they were designed to.
During a global pandemic, civil unrest, job insecurity, elections underway in America, it is safe to say this would not be the best time to be diagnosed with a serious illness. Still, I was. Just for the record, I am okay due to all the good wishes and on-going support of friends, as well as the healthcare workers at Kaiser Permanente. What began for me three months ago as a health challenge, I later named a “health crisis.” Yet, as I went deeper into the self, I realized it is actually a “health opportunity.”
You might be curious to know how I morphed from viewing it as a health challenge, to a health crisis to a health opportunity? Well, it all began with the awareness that I have the power to choose how I respond to life’s unfolding. I believe we become what we think. As scary as that can be at times, the benefits outweigh the concerns. If I can grab those thoughts that truly represent the bigger part of my existence, then I am living my truth. This “health opportunity” reminded me that I have the power within to create what I want and how I envision my life to unfold.
I’m perfecting my yoga these days with a weekly class on Zoom. My professor husband spends hours teaching classes and attending department meetings in front of a screen. And for many people during the Covid-19 crisis, online video chatting has been a lifeline—a way to connect with family and friends.
If there’s one common denominator in the country right now, it’s our new dependence on screens. According to Clockwise, the creator of an online calendar assistant, employees are spending 29 percent more time in online group meetings and 24 percent more time in one-on-one meetings than before the lockdown. And whether you love it or hate it, it’s likely that this trend is not going to go away even after schools and gyms open up and we can travel to see family again.
I personally love it that my favorite yoga teacher now visits me in my living room, even if she’s only on the screen. One of my friends who attended her class reunion online thought it was the best one yet, since every person had a chance to share how they were doing. And one mom wrote that she was thrilled to meet her friends for a Zoom dinner party without having to dress up or hire a babysitter. These are new and creative uses of technology that have changed our lives for the better.
I wasn’t born an optimist.
In fact… quite the opposite.
I was a moody, sullen, often seriously depressed child and young adult.
One night, at age 26, I decided that I was going to find the secret of happiness.
I was at a party in Coconut Grove, Florida, at the waterfront home of a millionaire, surrounded by people seemingly having a great time. I felt like such an outsider amidst the laughing, smiling party-goers. I had never felt so alone.
I wanted to have a great time, I just didn’t know how.
I thought it was something that just “happened” to lucky people.
In that moment, as I stood on the dock overlooking beautiful Biscayne Bay, I promised myself that I would do whatever it took to discover the secret to happiness.
During the next several years I went to therapy, read a lot of books, attended workshops and discovered that most of the time happiness is a choice. Even when really bad stuff is happening!
I found out that I am an HSP – a highly sensitive person and essentially very shy. I had to break through my fear of people and really make an effort to learn how to connect, make small talk, and allow myself to “be seen.”
Identify and let go of emotional baggage from difficult times
Life is full of emotional ups and downs. Sometimes the hardships we experience can be so overwhelming that they leave us stuck with feelings that can hamper our happiness or even harm our health and well-being.
The impact of negative emotions from traumatic and difficult events is a growing concern during the challenging times we now face. One new study, for instance, finds the emotional well-being of most American adults has been “broadly and substantially affected by COVID-19 and the related changes in life and society.”
Emotional distress related to COVID-19 is associated with higher frequency of clinical levels of anxiety, depression, and general life stress, along with lower reported levels of overall happiness, according to the U.S. National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard Medical School.
Prolonged and/or intense negative feelings can have effects long after the events that precipitate them. They can take a toll on emotional, mental, and physical health and compel people to behave in ways that damage their relationships or impact their ability to have healthy, long-lasting bonds.
We are all blessed with access to an infallible source of truth and guidance. If you tune into your feelings – which is the main way the aspect of your your soul that is within you communicates with you – while listening to or reading the news, you can actually feel what is true and right, and what is false and wrong. The problem is that many people have learned not to trust these feelings – to listen to ‘authorities’ rather than to the truth that comes directly from our soul within.
Our soul is way too big to fit into our body, so some of our soul is within and some is all around us. We are within our soul and our soul is within us. The part of our soul that is all around us is also an infallible source of truth and guidance, and it pops the truth and the loving actions into our mind when we are open to learning about the truth, and about what is in our highest good.
When I see news (I don’t watch it but I do scan it), I tune into my gut feelings and I also tune into my higher self, asking about what is true and what isn’t, and what is loving to me, and I can feel and hear what is true and right.
Permission to Grieve is Granted
This pandemic has stirred up many emotions from hope in seeing our healthcare and essential workers on the front line, to despair for the deaths and rising cases, to fear over loss of employment, to anxiety for handling the daily updates and home situation, to an even more prevalent one – grief.
During the pandemic, I wholeheartedly believe and affirm that grief is a natural emotion people are feeling for various reasons and one that is justified. Right now, the grief I am seeing in my therapy patients ranges from disappointment and sadness to frustration and anger. People are disappointed by having to reschedule events like weddings, sad about not being able to see family members, frustrated by losing out on once-in-a lifetime events, and angry from the lack of control and unfairness of it all.
The biggest grief reactions I am witnessing are connected to the loss of major events, particularly funerals because of the inability for family members to give their loved one the proper goodbye they wanted. While you can hold a memorial at a later date, there are no do-overs for a funeral.
During the pandemic, many people are taking extra care to stay well with measures such as wearing masks in public, maintaining physical distance, and washing their hands frequently. This is also a time when we should be thinking about ways to bolster our immune system to help us fight off not only COVID-19 but also all kinds of illness.
Your immune system protects your body from harmful substances, including viruses, bacteria, fungi, and toxins. It is made up of different organs, cells, and proteins that work together.
Without an immune system, you’d likely be sick all the time — if you lived very long!
The immune system consists of two parts: the innate immune system you are born with, and the adaptive immune system the body develops as it is exposed to microbes over time. These two systems are closely related and work together when a germ or other outside substance triggers an immune response.
Your immune system doesn’t protect you perfectly 100% of the time. Most people gets sick once in a while, even if it is just a common cold or stomach bug. But when you think of all the bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens you’re exposed to every day, it’s evident your immune system is working hard 24/7.
Join Panache Desai each weekday morning for support in reconnecting to the wellspring of calm and peace that lives within you and that has the power to counterbalance all of the fear, panic, and uncertainty that currently engulfs the world.
Designed To Move You From Survival and Fear to Safety and Peace. Available Monday - Friday. Meditation begins at 9 AM. Access early to hear Panache's monologue - around 8:30 AM.
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