Navigating a Season of Illness & Stress
I’ve been quiet for a while.
For much of the summer and early fall, I stopped blogging, creating videos, emailing my newsletter, even sharing much on my social media accounts.
It’s mostly because, for the past three months, I’ve been ‘Covid long-hauling.’
After experiencing my onset of symptoms back in March - one week after attending an international conference - and feeling improved in the spring, I started feeling unwell again in July. I haven’t had one full day since then when I have felt like ‘my old self:’ high energy or symptom-free.
Rather, like millions around the globe, I’ve experienced unsettling symptoms - in my nervous system, brain, lungs, and heart. It’s been a roller coaster of ‘roving’ discomforts, each one an unwanted guest for who knows how long.
I’ve been conserving my energy to focus on family life, adaptation, and recovery and chosen to significantly reduce my media consumption to decrease my anxiety in this uncertain chapter.
Now, to keep perspective, my health is stable, I’m privileged to be home, I’m well supported by my GP - and yet this experience has tipped me into reckoning with vulnerability and mortality.
I thought I would write about my past three months and what I’m learning during this season of illness.
If you’re experiencing acute difficulty in your life right now, I hope my words will help.
Surrendering to Reality:
Long-Covid demands constant adaptation, with no predictable ‘new normal’ to work with. At age 44, having been privileged with relatively good health all my life, I’ve found it challenging to:
experience physical limitations
lose a sense of control over and safety within my body
experience the accompanying fear, grief and anxiety
Back in the spring, I wrote about the power of “Saying Yes” to reality, and saying yes to accepting this pandemic and letting go of the old normal. But, at that time, I thought I was fully through my Covid bug.
In spite of empathy for Italy and NYC and other regions slammed by Covid19, I was at some distance from grappling with the visceral realities of pandemic illness and death. Now that I’m experiencing chronic illbeing, I feel humbled and reminded just how difficult it can be to accept pain and suffering - especially when it’s personal: in our bodies, our loved ones, our lives.
When I wrote about “Saying Yes,” back in the spring, I didn’t anticipate what I would soon encounter and be invited to ‘say yes’ to. That practice feels harder from where I am now.
In fact, over these past three months, I’ve found myself saying many internal no’s:
“No! I don’t want this pain!”
“No! I don’t want ambiguous loss, anxiety, grief and not-knowing.”
“No! I wish I had never attended that conference!”
So, in many moments, I felt unable to find the space in me to offer a wholehearted or graceful yes to illness.
However, I keep working at it… because when I get stuck in “no” then I suffer more. I aspire to let my resistance and no’s pass through me like waves, so that I can find sooner find refuge on the shore of “Yes.“
I have found solace and encouragement from the late Celtic priest and author, John O’Donohue, in his poem, For a Friend on the Arrival of Illness, from his book, To Bless the Space Between Us:
“May you find in yourself
A courageous hospitality
Toward what is difficult,
Painful, and unknown.
May you learn to use this illness
As a lantern to illuminate
The new qualities that will emerge in you.”
I recommend you listen to O’Donohue read his whole poem aloud - it’s poignant and beautiful.
In addition to practicing “Saying Yes,” I’ve also learned more deeply about the importance of rest.
A Time for Rest:
The dominant culture highly values productivity - you can see this in our education systems, workplace cultures, phones and ‘fit-bits,’ habits, language, and priorities.
I think many people don’t get enough rest: not enough sleep, not enough quiet time, not enough ‘non-doing’ - and many of our leisure activities stimulate rather than calm our nervous systems.
Our food and consumption patterns have been industrialized to the point where we chronically disrespect waters and lands - not honoring fallow times or life cycles, to the detriment of many life forms and the intricate tapestry of the planet’s support systems.
For me personally, as a high-energy, Type-A gal I’m used to getting a lot done in a day. I love my to-do lists and checking off tasks. Heck, one of my past coaches, Lianne Kim, previously interviewed me on her podcast, celebrating my ability to take and achieve, “Massive, Rapid Action!” I really enjoy setting goals and intentions and working towards their realization.
But illness has thrown me a curveball: I can no longer predict my energy levels or wellbeing with accuracy, so, it’s harder to calibrate my expectations with my capacity.
Each time this year that I planned to launch my podcast, All Things Change, I got sick. When feeling healthy and energized, I would have momentum for various projects and then inevitably get knocked off course.
So, I’ve learned to predict for unpredictability - for now, anyway.
I keep taking goals off my to-do list, aiming to do less and rest more.
I believe that animals can teach us a lot about rest, in their attunment to their bodies. When they are sick or wounded, they instinctively rest deeply - often even fasting and sleeping or being still for great lengths of time.
I’m learning how much the human body needs rest, especially when we’re coping with ill health, injury or high levels of stress (chronic or acute).
Reparative rest requires more than just the ability to get prone: to turn on the body’s capacity for optimal healing, we need to fully relax.
Only when the nervous system perceives that conditions are safe will it switch out of the sympathetic ‘stress-response-mode’ and into the parasympathetic ‘at-ease-mode,’ the state in which it can best help the body repair injury and prevent or fight illness. (Read more, in “Mind Over Medicine” by Lissa Rankin, M.D.).
I’ve been exploring what relaxes my body and mind (since the two are interconnected and not really separate), in an effort to support my nervous system and healing. Everything from warm baths to extra family hugs to setting up a puzzle table to meditation and Netflix is helping me get through a difficult chapter.
I’m just now realizing that I need to reach out to friends more often - right in the middle of those tearful or raw patches - to help buoy me up in a time when we’re more physically isolated from one another.
I have also found that starting a gratitude journal where I choose to see the good has been helpful to reduce anxiety and boost a relaxed and present state. Writing about challenging aspects of this experience has also unburdened me and nourished my wellbeing.
I sleep a minimum of eight hours; prioritize time to unwind (as possible while parenting two young children with little/no childcare!); and I continually lower my expectations.
I’ve also been reflecting on how productivity is associated with a mechanistic worldview - where we treat ourselves more like ‘doing machines’ than ‘human beings.’ We are mammals with basic biological and social needs - and our needs are often organic and spontaneous. Yet in dominant modern conditions, many of us push ourselves, get disconnected from our bodies and override cues that signal that we need rest.
Through a mechanistic lens, we expect total constancy in our performance. When we pay closer attention to our biological needs, we may realize the pressure we exert on our bodies and how our incessant productivity contributes to depletion and illness.
If you’ve ever cared for a baby, young child or elder, you know experientially the contrast of living in mechanistic and biologically-oriented ways.
That is, if instead of working with spreadsheets, plans or machines, your schedule revolves around bodies - their sleeping habits; diaper changes or bathroom breaks; nursing, meals, and snacks; emotional needs - you know that your time is no longer your own.
During intense caregiving seasons, it’s not so easy to set productive goals and then simply and confidently reverse-engineer linear action plans. You can bet (accurately!) that your loved one is going to require your attention in ways you easily can’t control or predict, ways that almost certainly will get in the way of your tidy goals and aspirational timelines.
Likewise, when you or someone who love is sick, suddenly your schedule will revolve around basic biological needs: rehabilitation efforts, medical appointments, or symptom-response or alleviation.
In a season of illness, everything changes and reorients around new circumstances.
One of my friends parented one of her children through a cancer journey and she sometimes described the disease as the ‘extra child’ in their family.
I think framing illness as a child in need of care is apt: tending to healing requires so much time, attention and focus that it often IS equivalent to a whole additional person!
This particular metaphor also reminds me that I can choose to stop resenting the illness and to adopt a stance of care and respect for it - even though it’s often difficult to make that shift.
In any case, if we minimize the reality of ill health and attempt to push on with our ‘usual’ productivity, we’ll often do so at the expense of neglecting ourselves - and the restorative conditions we need for healing.
Have you noticed times when you’re pushing hard to reach some goal and you sacrifice your wellbeing: compromising sleep, skipping meals, maybe even ignoring cues to go to the bathroom?
Or how sometimes you’re so wedded to productivity that your loved ones suffer for it?
Our culture values productivity over caregiving (to ourselves, each other and the natural world) and and I’m making a plea that we shift our collective orientation.
Illness invites us to confront these themes and pay deeper attention to what we value and what drives us.
When illness or crisis are alive and we try to maintain familiar patterns as though nothing has changed and attempt to achieve our usual daily benchmarks, we’ll often soon enough realize that it’s not a choice: we humbly accept that we must shift our expectations, that we simply can’t do what we previously could.
While I have experienced some bewilderment, loss and grief in surrendering to new limits, I have also glimpsed a little thread of a grace in learning to respect my body in new ways, including to give over to the need for rest with greater intentionality and commitment.
During this pandemic, most of us are juggling additional stressors while simultaneously losing access to many of our usual replenishing activities or in-person relationships and communities.
It’s a really tough double-whammy.
If this is your experience, I encourage you to commit to your rest and relaxation needs as deeply as you can - and to nourish your feelings of well-being and security as much as possible.
We’re designed for oscillation between exertion and rest/replenishment/repair, so listen to your own rhythms and needs - maybe your conditions are such that you actually are primed for creative bursts of productivity right now. But in this collective historic time, I think many of us are taxed and deserve to prioritize rest.
If you haven’t read the article that went viral on depleting our ‘surge capacity’ in a time of chronic stress, I recommend it - especially if you’re feeling overstretched or struggling at the moment.
Finally, I’ve been reflecting on how long-hauling during a pandemic has created a very different year than I anticipated - and how I can work with that process of significant reorientation.
I hope this last section might help you reflect on your own process of reconciling with 2020 as it is.
Redefining What it Means to Flourish:
For 2020, I chose the word ‘flourish’ to express my yearnings for the year ahead - writing down the definition for good measure: “to grow in a healthy and vigorous way in a favourable environment.”
In this spirit, I eagerly anticipated new projects like launching my podcast, offering my Level Up online course again - and perhaps even starting a book!
Bahahahahaha!
My 2020 reality - jam-packed full of parenting, Covid, let alone bearing witness to all the collective suffering - seems like a slap in the face to my declaration: an absurd, ironic cosmic joke.
Many months have felt like the complete opposite of flourishing: more like a test of endurance, resilience, and attempts to make the best of challenging, unfavourable circumstances.
Over and over, like so many of us, I have turned pages in my day timer and taken note of events I anticipated that won’t happen or aren’t happening.
So, in looking at all the goals that aren’t coming to fruition as I’d planned and hoped, it’s easy to conclude that I’m not flourishing and that my task is simply to accept this year for what it is.
Yet, when I dig a little deeper, I wonder if I might be flourishing more than I realize.
When I chose that word, upon reflection, I think I was - on an egoic level - envisioning and hoping for comfort and accomplishment: achieving goals with lots of completion and celebration along the way.
Yet, illness feels like an opportunity for my soul to grow, to open to a deeper kind of flourishing, one that paradoxically and directly contradicts the pursuit of mastery and control.
Many myths, fairytales and religious frameworks understand the power of ‘descent journeys’ - of travelling through dark or underground terrain - and perceive the value and even gifts available to be found in our suffering, our losses, our crises: in exactly the journeys we never would have chosen.
I’m examining if, rather than discarding the word “flourish” as no longer meaningful, it’s time to look more deeply and redefine my understanding of flourishing.
For example:
Instead of prioritizing my career, I’m deepening bonds with my family
Instead of productivity and an orientation to the future, I’m cultivating presence in the now
Instead of creating, I’m learning more about letting go
Instead of flourishing in external ways, I’m doing so internally: working with my body, emotional reactivity, habits of mind, spiritual strength and even healing layers of old trauma
These aren’t the lessons I wanted, but they are the ones available to me.
Further, as much as I’m through the initial shock of long-hauling, I think I’m still in the descent, in the not-knowing, in the muck of this life season, so I can’t even quite fully appreciate the flourishing that IS happening - and the emergence that may yet arise for me ahead.
Perhaps I will look back in gratitude at the year that didn’t happen and not only accept but embrace the year that did - with the gifts and transformation it brought, as difficult as it has been. That feels like a stretch right now… but I believe it’s possible.
At one point late this summer, I reached out to a friend and asked her to make me an Ancestor Doll to help me honor this difficult experience, to provide me a symbolic object that might offer me some comfort or guidance. I love the spirit of grandmothers in the beautiful creation she gifted me:
Black Swallowtail Ancestor Doll - a talisman of support created for me by the wonderful and wise Kristen Roderick of Spirit Moving. If you want a customized Ancestor Doll to honor a chapter or challenge in your life, I recommend Kristen and her services.
I have had an extremely challenging while.
Many of my clients and loved ones are also going through immense difficulties: some related to ill health or death and loss; others impacted by relationship or career crises. All of us are affected to varying degrees by this pandemic and stressful economic and political conditions.
I’ve never tried to be a coach who denies personal and collective/structural suffering or insists on positivity at all times. Buddhism has been a significant influence on my life and I respect how that philosophical approach to meaning and life acknowledges the fundamental existence of suffering.
Life is wonderful - and also really, really hard sometimes.
My clients are always co-learners with me. Over the years, many have worked with me as they navigate those experiences that can be understood as ‘sacred descent’ rites of passage, amidst pain, loss, stress or reinvention - which never tend to be that comfortable while you’re travelling them!
Many live with physical or mental health challenges, work consciously to liberate themselves from echoces of past traumas, or face difficult choices. We always have to work with what we’ve got and start where we are, even as our dreams may buoy us and illumine new courage and pathways forward.
I’m grateful to draw on the wisdom and example of many in my life at this time - clients, friends and family.
If you’re relating to this post, I’d love to leave you with some tips and resources.
Possible Supports:
Consider building anchors into your days and weeks: standing rhythms, rituals and practices that can help reduce your decision-making fatigue and surge depletion
A gratitude or writing journal, to help reduce anxiety | depression and to amplify the good
Like O’Donohue’s poem invites, are you willing to use a time of illness - or any significant stress - to open yourself to deeper healing or greater wholeness?
What conscious goals nourish you right now, perhaps even provide crucial structure in a time of uncertainty - and where can you rein in your expectations or build more ‘buffer’ and rest into your life?
If it’s a difficult time, validate your struggles and rein in any self-judgment. Please be deeply kind to yourself. Comfort and soothe your your animal body as much as possible and go gently.
I’m sending huge care your way.
P.S. If you’re navigating challenge such as disruptive illness and would appreciate guidance, accompaniment and support, please set up a free 60-minute consult with me. I empathize with how disorienting and unravelling these life seasons can be, and I’d be honored to walk with you for a time. XO, Nicola
Nicola Holmes is a Life Coach who helps people turn their potent questions, dream and longings into inspired action. With warmth and wisdom, she’ll guide you to untangle constraints and cultivate courage to create a more aligned and joyful life. She has a BASc in Human Development, an MEd in Adult Learning and spent two decades working in the non-profit sector. Along with coaching for the past 14 years, she’s mama to two young spirited kids and dedicated to Buddhism. Having experienced long Covid and a move over the past two years, she brings deep empathy to others who are exploring how they’ve changed and who they’re becoming in turbulent times. Check out Nicola @nicolaholmescoach or join the email party for inspiration and resources to fuel the changes you want.