The social distancing and stay-at-home recommendations surrounding the coronavirus and the illness it causes, COVID-19, have been especially difficult on people who are extroverts. That can be particularly true in Eureka Springs with its social events, parades, and historic downtown of bars, restaurants, art galleries and shops.
If you are going a little stir crazy, you aren’t alone. You might benefit from some advice from Melissa Clare, co-founder of the Heart of Many Ways, a spiritual center that houses multiple traditions of faith.
Clare recommends:
- Do what brings you joy. Cultivate love and beauty.
- Pray and meditate. Singing a favorite prayer while washing your hands can trigger realizations.
- Listen to uplifting music.
- Watch favorite movies, especially ones with humor and happy endings.
- Concentrate on what you do have instead of what you are missing.
“We have been given some time alone and can consider this as precious time that allows us to catch up with whatever we need to do at home,” Clare said. “Feel love for all those we are not at liberty to spend time with. Appreciate the richness we’ve had as well as this unique moment in time, which may be showing us a new way to be.
“I want to immerse myself in beauty because I know my soul thrives on that. And when things are really challenging, we need to be able to balance out what seems like a steady diet of traumatic news. The balance to the news is to find what inspires us. Step outside, walk in a garden, enjoy feeding the birds, and curl up with a good book and a cat. This is a good time to catch up with stuff you’ve been putting off doing, like reorganizing and cleaning out the file systems.
“Contemplate how we might re-negotiate our way of life moving forward. Do we really have to return to the same industrialization that led to the levels of pollution that are currently dissipating?
“Be aware that parts of the world used to be very polluted. The air pollution has decreased in a big way, especially in China. In Venice, the water has started to clear up and dolphins are making their way back into Italian ports. It is helpful for me to tune into nature and think about seeing what is going on from the perspective of the planet.
“We are in a crisis with the pandemic, and the other crisis behind that is climate change,” she said. “Perhaps we are a little less tuned in because we are hearing about nothing except the coronavirus right now. Some of the problem with the large amount of pollution is human greed. I know a lot of people are feeling very insecure about their finances, but this is a time we could be looking at how we want to move to the future with less focus on industrialization.
She also recommends joining with other groups online working on these issues.
“Consider that perhaps we are beings of light who have donned physical bodies in order to experience life at this dimension,” she said. “Perhaps we have forgotten where we came from. Identify with being a being of light.”