Last year the whole world was hurled into a collective crisis. COVID 19 wouldn’t just affect one person, one family, one community, one province, one country, one continent. It would affect the entire globe. All of humanity.
The illness, the pain, the loss, the grief, the stress, the trauma, the isolation would touch us all. Not a single person would be spared. We would hang together, suspended in mass uncertainty as everything we knew to be real and true shifted beneath our feet and toppled before our eyes.
We would no longer be able to live our lives as we had been living them. We would no longer be able to deny our pain or the pain of those around us.
We would have to stop pretending.
We would have to pivot, reorient, reimagine a different way of doing things. A new way of co-existing. A more compassionate way of relating to our neighbours, teachers, friends, grandparents, parents, siblings, partners, children, selves.
This wasn’t a bad thing.
It would be scary and it would be hard, but the universal devastation would also present an opening. With everything levelled, there would be a chance to start anew, an opportunity to script a fresh narrative about ourselves and the world that’s based on truth and love.
One year ago I saw the opening. I took a chance and am now deep in the process of rewriting the negative stories, (the lies), I’ve been telling myself about myself and the world pre-COVID.
I know I’m not alone.
The global pandemic has been tragic, but it has also brought with it a worldwide occasion to come out of hiding, to go inside ourselves, to become vulnerable. Through our shared suffering, we’ve become stronger, wiser, more empathetic, and in turn, more connected to the deepest, truest, and best version of ourselves.
We can never go back, but neither do we want to because we’ve seen now that the way we were wasn’t how we really wanted to be, wasn’t WHO we really wanted to be. We wanted to be truer, realer, more authentic.
And now we can be.
4. The Neuroscience of “I AM WORTHLESS”
It’s not simply my opinion that SELF judgment is detrimental to the SELF. The deleterious impact of SELF criticism on both our minds and bodies can now be scientifically verified. Discoveries made through neuroscience demonstrate that the way we perceive an external threat such as a dangerous predator is the same way we register an…
3. The Elephant in the Room
Perhaps we shouldn’t go any further without addressing the elephant in the room, or in this case, the SELF on the page. You’ve probably noticed by now that when I refer to the SELF I use capital letters. I made the decision to capitalize the SELF, and also detach it from any sort of possessive…
2. Into the Unknown
When you finally decide to radically alter the way you’ve been relating to your SELF, it’s scary. So scary, in fact, that most people don’t do it, unless they’ve decided that there’s no other way. The misery of your day-to-day relationship to your SELF has to outweigh the terror of the unknown. No one chooses…
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M.E. Picher, PHD 