Just two months after I was blessed with the realization that my life’s work using two hands was a truly valuable effort, a pandemic took the world by storm.
Before my journey, I did not know that it was enough to serve a community with the tools I was born with.
The irony of not being able to do so due to practicing social distancing is mind boggling.
I stand with all my colleagues who depend on touch and close contact for their livelihood.
So what do we do, for the time being, if we can’t earn a wage in the field we have chosen? The only people I can touch now are my immediate family members.
Ironically, this has always been a struggle for me, and it is the mirror I face now.
I have never been able to “detach from the outcome” when it comes to my family and close friends. You can’t detach from that which you are a part of.
I don’t like to treat family and friends because I can’t bear to tangibly “feel” their internal milieu.
“Detachment” allows “the dance” to be possible because the two parties involved “know” that anonymity exists in traveling different paths and therefore, no one can be “hurt” by the knowledge and intimacy of expressing their innermost secrets.
Such is not the case with our closest loved ones.
We do not share internal “secrets” because in doing so we would share our pain, and our instinct is to protect those we hold dear.
I hold guilt and regret that I am unable to touch my family the same way I have touched countless others in my 36 years of practice.
The best I can do for my loved ones is to be present and create a safe place for them to walk their journey.
My best effort goes into “getting out of their way” when I can, providing whatever scaffolding and “netting” possible to catch them when they fall, and “having their back” when there is nothing more to give.
It feels painfully not enough, and my instinct is to jump through every hoop and climb every mountain to avoid their suffering.
This is the year that I come to realize that it is their suffering to bear and their journey to complete.
This year of extreme magnification where anything that once existed is now blindingly apparent from a personal and universal level.
This year where my mirror is not from the table because even the table is a dangerous place to be due to the lack of “social distancing.”
The year of Covid where not only anything is possible, but the unimaginable is occurring daily.
Yes – I know this sounds dramatic – but when else has the underlining of countries and party lines, and political and social views, and family dynamics, been more transparent than now?
This pandemic has stretched every fabric of our universal lives and revealed what already existed in its magnified panorama.
There is literally nothing I could do beyond bear witness and shoulder support through my family’s emotional and physical turmoil and trials during this year.
It is what I have always known but this too has been magnified. We really have no control. Control is an illusion to keep our ego alive and our feeling of safety intact.
We truly have nothing but the present moment to respond to. No “reaction” is meaningful or fruitful.
No amount of preparation or effort or intelligence or fastidiousness can prevent pain and create safety.
It all just has to happen now.
We can only respond to our current emotional, physical, and spiritual health in this moment.
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