My 'vid Experience

After successfully avoiding the 'vid for 2 years, it got me in the end. 

And holy molly it got me good. 

I found moving through "The Covid Journey" interesting, uncomfortable, strange and very revealing. 

A bit of context: I currently live on my own and my family are 8,158 kms away (yes, I googled the exact distance). This means I was alone for pretty much the whole experience.

After rolling my eyes for months (years?) at numerous IG posts that said Covid was an "upgrade", an "energetic download", a "re-birth"... 

Experiencing it made me lower my head in humility and admit that maybe Covid IS a fierce initiation after all. 

Its medicine confronts us with both, obvious fears and less-evident ones.

It’s the very real ones (such as the fear of pain, the fear of death, and the fear of dying) that got me calling 111 at 2am… which then led me to become friends with a very lovely Irish lady who comforted me, from the other side of the line, at 4am telling me not to worry as my symptoms were normal but she was going to send me a prescription for stronger painkillers (I almost proposed at the end of that call but unfortunately she was already married and with kids).

The interesting bit is that, the illness ripples not only in the physical body, but also in the emotional and psychological ones too. 

The ache that is initially felt in the muscles, seems to grow roots and awaken deeper aches.

As I lied in bed with swollen tonsils that made me wince every time I took a sip of water, and kept me silent for days, I touched an ancient place within me: the tender agony of feeling utterly alone.

I yearned for my family. I longed for a loving presence to hold me and go to the pharmacy to get my prescription (I actually ended up wobbling my way there and almost passed out as I waited for the meds, but we somehow made it back ok).

Being stuck at home and in bed, pinned me into place to fully be with that ache. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, no distractions from the movements of daily life.

It wasn’t pleasant…. And yet, by giving it permission to just be fully, it eventually passed. 

It all passed: the pain, the fever, the loneliness. 

I was confronted to remember my resilience. 
I stretched my capacity to hold myself fully. 
I was able to become intimate with the ache of separation. 
I communed with the paradox of "we're always alone, we're never alone".
I was shown how even the moments that feel like they will last forever, eventually do end.

The journey shifted me in subtle yet important ways, how I relate to life, mortality, pain, impermanence, my body, my humanity, my Self, and others… 

And while the experience is still integrating, it never ceases to amaze me how life in all her ways, shapes and forms, urges us to embody wisdom, not through other people’s experiences, but through our very own lived one.

Who needs to go to an ashram when the lessons are HERE! NOW!

Health is so precious, may we appreciate it while we have it and not only when we’re feverishly lying in bed.