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 personal Facebook and Instagram 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 much better 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 planet, I have experienced unsettling, and uncomfortable long-hauling symptoms - including in my nervous system, brain, lungs, and heart. It’s been a roller coaster of ‘roving’ sensations, each one a new unwanted guest to host for who knows how long.
As an FYI, the latest data suggests that 1 in 3 people who get Covid will become a long-hauler (80% of those who get a severe case and 30% of those who have a more mild version to start) - and especially those in the 18-35 year old demographic.
I’ve been conserving my energy to focus on family life, adaptation, and recovery - and the truth is, being part of medical history unfolding has been and is anxiety-provoking: I’ve chosen to significantly reduce my media consumption to an effort to protect my mind amidst uncertainty and to nourish my optimism.
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 nonetheless tipped me into reckoning with vulnerability and mortality.
During a pandemic, I perceive that most of us have health on our minds to a heightened degree.
I thought I would write a little about my past three months and what I’m learning during this season of illness or stress.
Especially if you’re working with some difficulties in your life right now (illness or otherwise), I hope my words may provide care, validation, or support to you in some way.
Surrendering to Reality:
I have experienced long-hauling as full of constant adaptation, with no predictable ‘new normal’ to work with - and, at age 44, having been privileged with relatively good health all my life, I’ve found it challenging:
it’s hard to experience physical limitations
losing a sense of control over my body has evoked fear, grief and anxiety in me
Back in the spring, I wrote about the power of “Saying Yes” to reality, of accepting this pandemic and letting go of the old normal.
But, at that time, I thought I was fully through my Covid run and the collective pandemic experience - while all-consuming in its pull of my attention and impact on my life - still somehow felt a touch abstract.
In spite of empathy for Italy and NYC and other regions we witnessed back then as overwhelmed by Covid, I was still at some distance from grappling with the visceral realities of illness and death.
Now that I am and have been long-hauling, 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 the value of “Saying Yes” back in the spring, I didn’t anticipate what I would soon be required / invited to say yes to.
That practice feels harder from where I am now then when I first wrote those words.
Perhaps you can relate.
Over these past three months, rather than saying ‘yes’ to this experience, I’ve found myself saying ‘no’ in many moments:
“No, I don’t want this pain and discomfort!”
“No, I don’t want to be in liminal terrain, feeling an ambiguous sense of loss and a potent blend of anxiety and grief, wondering what of this experience is temporary and what may have long term impact.”
Or I’ll get hooked in the past and fall into regret and a sense of victimhood: “No! I wish I had never attended that conference!”
So, much of the time, I haven’t been able to cultivate enough space within myself to say a wholehearted yes to this experience, staying present, creatively hopeful, and surrendering gracefully to Reality as it is.
However, I keep working at it… because when I get stuck in “NO!” then I suffer more.
When I can’t get out of ‘no,’ then on top of the actual symptoms, I then also suffer the pain of (futile) resistance and the mental stories and emotions that exacerbate my struggles.
It’s not that I suppress my “No’s” but, rather, I aspire to let them pass through me like waves - with as much compassion for the accompanying feelings as possible - so, that I can find greater peace, stability, and refuge on the shore of “Yes.“
I have found solace, wisdom, 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 highly recommend you listen to O’Donohue read his whole poem aloud - it’s poignant and beautiful.
So, especially as new symptoms arise and uncertainty persists, it’s been an ongoing practice for me to - over and over - open myself to the possibility of surrender and to stretch and expand, to say “Yes” to reality as it is.
The tricky dance is, I do this while also attempting to stay connected to my sense of agency to influence the future I yearn for.
In addition to practicing “Saying Yes,” I’ve also had to learn more deeply about the importance of rest, which I believe is crucial for all us, especially in this time of collective stress and challenge.
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 further stimulate rather than calm our overtaxed nervous systems.
Our food and consumption patterns have been industrialized to the point where we chronically disrespect plants, animals, fields, forests, oceans, and lakes - not honoring fallow times or life cycles, to the detriment of many life forms and the intricate tapestry of the planet’s ‘support systems.’
Many people are naming - to a new level, it seems - how White Supremacy has driven and continues to drive a level of productivity that is out of balance and harmful to humanity and our planet.
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 those 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 mean, I typically really enjoy setting goals and intentions and working towards their realization.
But this long-hauling experience 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 build up momentum for various projects and then seem to 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 that they are more attuned to their bodies than we are. When they are sick or wounded and conditions are supportive, they instinctively rest deeply - often even taking a break from eating and letting their body sleep or be 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 sit or lie down, too - 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, with no threats to handle, 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.
(You can read more about this, in much greater depth in a book I’m finding timely and helpful, called, “Mind Over Medicine” by Lissa Rankin, M.D.).
So, in this time, I’ve been exploring what relaxes and soothes both 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 watching “This is Us” on 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 bumpy patches - to help buoy me up in a time when we’re more physically isolated from one another.
Starting a gratitude journal where I choose to see the good and also jot down insights has been really helpful (turns out, the science is real: practicing gratitude has notably reduced my anxiety).
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 bar of expectations - because it’s amazing how I chronically overestimate what I can do in a day!
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.’
The obvious reality is that we are mammals which need basic biological and social needs met to truly thrive - and our needs are often organic and spontaneous.
In dominant modern conditions, many of us seem to often push ourselves, get disconnected from our bodies’ cues and needs, overriding messages and symptoms letting us know that we need rest.
Through a mechanistic lens, we expect total constancy and radical predictability in our performance - and when we pay greater attention to our biological needs and rhythms, we’ll often realize the pressure our hyper-focus on productivity puts on our bodies, contributing 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, strategic plans or machines, your schedule revolves around bodies - their sleeping habits; diaper changes or bathroom breaks; endless nursing, meals, and snacks; myriad fluids and 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 may likewise revolve around basic biological needs: perhaps rehabilitation efforts, maybe medical appointments, and symptom-response, care, or alleviation.
In a season of illness, everything changes and reorients around new circumstances and needs.
One of my friends parented one of her children through a cancer journey and she sometimes described the disease as a ‘third 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 or ignoring our bodies’ needs.
Have you noticed times when you’re pushing hard to reach some goal and start to sacrifice your wellbeing: compromising your sleep, skipping meals or having less time to prepare healthy food, 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?
I notice the latter when I’m feeling attached to getting some blessedly discrete, tangible task accomplished (even just something simple, like putting away the dishes). Amidst all the endless reproductive labour of parenting, I can long for that dopamine hit of just completing something for the love of god, and I can get frustrated with my kids and snap at them when I want to tend to that one more detail, experiencing their needs as ‘getting in my way.’
I’m not suggesting that productivity is ‘bad’ - it’s just that I think many of us are so caught up in the cultural norms whereby we’re pursuing goals at the expense of adequate rest and physical wellbeing - and often our relationships, to boot.
I’d argue that our culture values productivity over caregiving (to ourselves, each other and our natural world) and and I’m making a plea that we consider shifting our orientation - and noting that illness prompts us to pay deeper attention when it comes to these themes.
In this time of long-hauling, I’m remembering and re-learning the crucial value of rest, of slowing down, and of honoring rather than deriding embodied limits and constraints.
When illness, crisis or high levels of stress are present and we try to maintain 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 bars of expectation, that we simply can’t do what we normally can or 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.
And 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 this year, it’s time to redefine my understanding of flourishing, looking more deeply into my recent experiences.
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 season of my life, 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 and the gifts and transformation that it brought, as difficult and painful as it has been - and is - in moments. 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 (or someone you love), I can’t recommend Kristen and her services highly enough.
This has been an extremely challenging time for me.
Many of my clients and loved ones are also going through difficulties right now: some related to ill health or death; others relationship or career crises. All of us are affected to varying degrees by this pandemic and also 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 life is really, really hard sometimes.
My clients are always co-learners with me, and many of them over the years have worked with me when they’re right in the muck of their lives, going through seasons of pain, loss, stress or reinvention - which never tend to be that comfortable when you’re in them!
Many live with physical or mental health challenges, work consciously with greater liberation from past trauma, or face challenging choices - and we always have to work with what we’ve got, though our dreams and imagination 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.
(Quick side note: some of my friends are actually thriving right now. They’ve got privilege and/or conditions that are clicking into place and some are finding new preferences, opportunities and joys in these times. If that’s you, too - I hope you can savour and appreciate your good fortune. Please don’t feel guilt or shame for your wellbeing in a time when you know many are struggling. This is life, always all having our ups and downs… and, if anything, please use your conditions to help lift up the collective, offer your capacity and presence to support the whole).
However you’re doing…
What’s Your Invitation Right Now?
What’s most important to you at this time?
What are you learning about yourself and life in this historic moment?
Whatever’s significant for you right now, here are some little ideas I wanted to offer in case they help:
Possible Supports:
In a time where many of us don’t have extra bandwidth, building anchors into your days and weeks - creating standing rhythms, habits and practices - 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 you to deeper healing or greater wholeness?
What conscious productivity and 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 that it’s so -and please be deeply kind to yourself
I’m sending huge care your way.
P.S. If you’re navigating a season of challenge or perhaps disruptive illness and you think I might be able to support you, please set up a free 60-minute consult with me. I empathize with how deeply disorienting and unravelling these seasons of our lives 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.