Since God Created the Pandemic…
(and Everything Else)
As we weather the storm of Covid-19 and face many unknowns we might pause to ask: “If God is in charge, and life is a classroom, then what are we supposed to learn from this pandemic which applies to life without a pandemic?”
We would like to hear your answers. Please comment BELOW.
Spiritually-oriented Reflections
We spoke with a practitioner of Yogic philosophy who is steeped in meditation and communion with God. She offered the following answers. Maybe some will ring true for you as well.
- We are not being punished for wrong-doing. We are being given time to get our priorities straight.
- Life is an invitation to expand awareness. It’s important to acknowledge: Who is the source of life itself? When we honor that “source” we become happier and wiser.
- Each one of us is responsible for ourselves. Be kind to yourself…and be disciplined at the same time.
- How each person manages themselves will impact the wellbeing of others. (Think: social distancing, self-quarantine, hand-washing, etc)
Let’s Remember
- We are a global community. How governments manage to contain the virus will impact the people of other countries. We need to watch out for each other regardless of race, color of skin, culture or religion.
- We can choose to care for ourselves and others and create a culture of compassion.
- Sharing information openly and transparently will be a service to others—even life-saving. Distorting the truth that comes from reputable scientists can hurt people, even cost them their lives. Anxiety escalates and fantasies flourish in the absence of good information.
- There is no magic pill that can remove this nightmare and return everything (health, economy, etc) to “normal”…It is up to us to create peace within ourselves and within the world.
- We have been given the time and quiet to ask: What do we really want for a world culture? What are we willing to do to create that world culture?
- Communion with God (whatever name you give our Creator) through meditation can bring peace, inspiration, and joy.
- Gratitude and service to others is at the heart of feeling good.
Tweet from Barack Obama
@BarackObama, father, husband, past president, citizen
“We owe a profound debt of gratitude to all our health professionals and everybody who’ll be on the front lines of this pandemic for a long while. They’re giving everything. May we all model our own behavior on their selflessness and sacrifice as we help each other through this.”
Spiritually-oriented Practical Advice
- A psychologist, Lerner says, “Stay connected to friends, neighbors, your adult children, anyone who matters to you. Especially those who induce a sense of calm rather than chaos. People need to hear your voice — and vice versa.”
There is lots of evidence that spiritual practices help soften anxiety and depression, diminish pain and reactivity, and promote peacefulness. Sister Marie Elena Romero, a Capuchin Franciscan nun, offers practical advice on how to manage your days with an ample dose of spiritual practices:
- Time can be used for self-reflection, to ask oneself whether you’ve wronged others and to seek forgiveness, to examine fears or to make a plan of how to help someone else who might be struggling – even if it’s just through a phone call.
- If you are facing boredom in confinement: make a schedule for your day. Include rest, prayer or meditation, as well as work and/or chores.
- Strengthen family bonds and teamwork: Families can cook and clean up together, have a longer time to interact and check in, then play cards or board games, take part in physical activity by walking together, watch a movie or read.
- A family or a person can use the time to learn a new skill, including making crafts, call a friend or contact a person who might be lonely or family members they haven’t contacted in a while, or assess whether they can be of help to the community and plan how to do that.
As the Day Turns to Night
- As the day heads into its last part, pray, giving thanks to God for the day that has passed, asking for a good night’s rest.
- Carve out quiet time before bed, listen to music, or pray or meditate, whatever it takes to get yourself out of the anxiety caused in a time of uncertainty. Take yourself mentally out of the focus on Covid-19, especially if it’s causing anxiety.
- Light a candle and meditate. This is a great time to ask for forgiveness, to look inside the self and cleanse the soul. Here is the time you need but didn’t have before.
- This is your opportunity to learn specific prayers which you were too busy to learn before.
- This can be a time for blessings. But you have to take advantage of it, to see the good side of it, and then it can be a blessed time, a time to ask for mercy, to give thanks, to think about others, to reflect.
- If nothing else, just ask God for mercy. In the Christian world it’s Lent, we’re in a time of reflection. Ask God for those things that only the Divine can provide us.
Do you have practical advice to share? Please COMMENT BELOW.
If you liked this article, check out these online courses at IMHU:
- Nurturing Resilience in Kids and Teens
- Best Meditations for Wellbeing
- The New Psychiatry: Moving Beyond Psychiatric Medication
And be sure to check out our full roster of courses at IMHU
From Amanda
What I am learning during these unpredictable times is how different all of our realities seem to be depending on where we live, our health, and our personal circumstances. This has led me to become increasingly more compassionate to others as well as more self-compassionate to my self.
I find it important to honor our personal experiences as well as those of others. We all find clarity and awaken at different times. There is no right, wrong or better way to do and thing. The time to be still, to be profoundly present with ourselves, others, and Mother Earth is N.O.W. Thank you for creating this forum for connecting.
From Siobhán
I suggest people move from “just getting through this” to “what kind of world do I want to create post-COVID19?” We all get a vibrational vote of the future we’d like to live into during “The Great Pause.” Ask: Who do I want to be during this time? The voice of reason, the island of calm, the beacon of light? Say often, I can hardly wait to see the good that’s coming from this situation?
The Global Reset– I was thinking of it that way even before seeing the graphic here!– can be a huge opportunity if we play our cards right. Whatever happens, it’s clear that we couldn’t keep going the way we were. We hadn’t been able to stop and fundamentally change our world systems. Now that we’ve been forced to pause, perhaps we can.
All the suggestions on this page are worthwhile.
Best wishes to all who read this!
I’ve realised I created everything in my reality. I understand this now.the chaos in my mind at one stage created this unbeknownst to myself what I had focused on and believed.Now im more peaceful I can see my life view either consciously or unconsciously. I’m learning now to restart and refocus my attention to what I love and recognise that the beauty I had been looking for was already here but because of the chatter in my mind I couldn’t see it again. I’m more aware of my thoughts and catch myself changing them alot over the last week. This is for us to recognise how powerful we really are and everything can change in the blink of an eye. How peaceful life is when we believe things outside us have calmed down. But how peaceful life is when inside us has calmed down. Persist in peaceful, positive loving thinking and imagining and our whole world will be recreated to the beautiful one it really is and always will be. Thanks Emma.?
I don’t believe that God created this pandemic but rather our choices created it.
As we live in a cause and effect world with freewill, it because clearer and clearer that people’s choices need to be made more consciously.
Quote:
We have been given the time and quiet to ask: What do we really want for a world culture? What are we willing to do to create that world culture?
Communion with God (whatever name you give our Creator) through meditation can bring peace, inspiration, and joy.
Gratitude and service to others is at the heart of feeling good.
I totally agree.
It IS a time for us who are searching, thinking beyond the square, learning, to ask these valid questions.
I have had immense experiences in my Life, which have involved immense Learnings…this has included FORTY YEARS in which I had no choice but to succumb to the hideous ramifications of being carted off in Police Divisional Vans to a variety of psychiatric hospitals as an involuntary patient. Since 1979. In Melbourne, Australia.
I have found my way through…. to the point that I now know that I was MISDIAGNOSED as a MANIC-DEPRESSIVE in 1979. It was, in fact, a SPIRITUAL EMERGENCY: recently recognised, as an authentic alternative, through the research of Dr Stanislav Grof.
I am now free of horrid psychotropic pharmaceuticals… you can imagine how much I would have spent on them, compulsorily, in 40 years!!!
At my heaviest, I weighed 105 kilograms.
Thankfully, I am now back to my original weight, prior to my “mental illness”.
I am hugely involved in spirituality. I have studied Comparative Religion, Anthropology, travelled widely, and happen to be born in one of the most sacred spots in the world…Matara Ceylon/Sri Lanka (one of those horrid THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES!)
I am extremely active in the Anglican Parish of Mt Dandenong,.. St Michael and All Angels church, where I live… a very close-knit, loving parish family.
My one tenet in Life is that given to us by Jesus Christ Himself: ” LOVE ONE ANOTHER, AS i HAVE LOVED YOU.”
If everyone observes that wonderful concept, our Planet will be a much richer place!
Back to those questions: Once the restrictions of this pandemic have ceased, however long it takes, we have a new opportunity… to take a good look at ourselves… eliminate greed, hate, violence, emphasis on materialism, etc… and reestablish this beautiful planet as a healed, more accepting, humble place… allowing Mother Nature to Replenish and Restore.
One can’t help remembering the collapses of society dating back to Biblical times: Sodom and Gomorrah, Tower of Babel, Armageddon, and questioning whether contemporary society might be travelling down the same path!!!
Seeing with Your Heart hosted a community video call titled “Integrating Pandemic Panic, the Call of the Earth, and Your Life Path.” We had 100 people on the call. The main exercise was a collective constellation in which we used 13 blinded representatives. Blinded means we created 13 elements to represent and assigned them each a number. The representatives only knew the number, not what it meant. One of the representations was for Great All-Knowing Spirit.
The remaining 87 participants represented themselves. As part of the Constellation, we took initial reports from the 13 blinded reps, then had everyone step back, first into the ancestral lineage and then into the archetypal/symbolic/spiritual realm beyond human scale.
This is a summary of the report from Great All-Knowing Spirit after everyone stepped back. (The representation blinded. All she knew was that she represented #13). She was very emotional and reported through her tears.
“I feel responsible for everything, for everything I walked through. For everything that happens repeatedly in this cycle of humanity. All the violence. All the destruction. What I need…the healing movement is…exposure, reparation, atonement, forgiveness. There is a reason these things happens, they have to happen, but I’m not heartless to it. I’m heartbroken.”
We came here to learn 2 lessons, unconditional love and no judgement. Life is a classroom and with only 2 lessons in mind, God threw in FREEWILL to make it more challenging. . We know that all outcomes are perfect – positive or less than positive. We know that our life must be balanced. We know it is not wise to become attached to material good. Yes, we can be the proud caretaker of our own fortunes, wether large or small, however as soon as possessions represent power, we need to go back to the classroom. The world now, has a large number of people that are so self obsessed, want the unreal lifestyle of the rich and famous and have walked over many in their path to earn another trophy, God is sending us all back to the classroom to start again.
What has become more beautiful than ever, is the communication with neighbours, strangers and long lost friends. Have you noticed the birds are more friendly, their sounds can be heard, nature is allowing us time to appreciate her beauty. Our hearts are been drawn to help those we can. Sharing has become the number one item on the menu.
If it takes a virus to change the world, then bring it on!
SOCIAL INSULATION
I wrote this after a Reiki session Friday the 13th when I had just heard the schools closed so the children could learn “social distancing.” Let’s teach them thoughtfulness and mindfulness as well as we engage in Social Networking.
A good thing to insulate ourselves from the fear of the unknown. Time to let our bodies and souls regenerate the electrical impulse that we are. Gathering our energy inward rather than outward can be a wonderful renewal of resources. Slowing down, letting go of expectations and planning. Stopping to run from one activity to another is healing on many levels of our conscious awareness. Taking time to feel part of the wholeness. Recognize that each of us is one small part of the WHOLE world wide web. This is most needed and important right now. What a wonderful ONENESS when we honor the higher self in each of us. Love to all!
May we all surround ourselves with the rainbow light that is Security, Creativity, Power, LOVE, clear communication and vision with a sense of connection!
Listen to a 12 minute meditation designed to build your immune system: http://www.suzannrobins.com/free-tools/