While coronavirus is declining or under control in many countries, it’s spreading faster than ever in other countries. Doctors and nurses are overwhelmed and exhausted, hospitals are running short on ICU space and supplies, and stress levels are high.
Many of us have a hard time wearing face masks or find ourselves in situations that make it difficult to maintain social distancing. It’s understandably challenging when precautions are inconvenient and a lockdown affects jobs and families. Still, it would be helpful for our wholeness if we could find it in our hearts to practice safety precautions to help prevent others’ being infected.
Shelter-at-home restrictions and limited social gatherings exacerbate loneliness, anxiety and depression. A lift in your spirit and resilience can occur with the practice of radiating love and compassion for a minute or so throughout the day (each time we think of it).
Doing this for a week can help significantly. Also, many of you have already experienced the lift that comes from the practice of doing something kind for another.
Research shows that really putting out love and compassionate care benefits not only your health, but also the health of others. In 23 published studies on distance healing, 57% showed statistically significant positive psychological and biological changes associated with improved health, including lowered blood pressure, reduced stress and anxiety, an increased immune response, enhanced hormonal balance and the promotion of positive mood states.
Here are a few other effective actions we can take to care for each other and ourselves.
- Before watching the news, take a few minutes to breathe in the feeling of mental and emotional balance to strengthen your composure and stability. Doing this can especially reduce stress from over emotionally identifying with the challenges and fears that people are experiencing. There’s a difference between feeling balanced care and compassion and feeling extreme emotional reactivity, which has been proven to cause health problems, acute anxiety and loss of resilience. However, it’s smart to back off watching the news for a few days if you’re already overstressed. This will help rebalance your mental and emotional system and restore your resilience. It’s also helpful to find somewhere to walk in nature. Even if you have ongoing worry, nature can provide renewing benefits.
- Try to have more conversations about something other than your current stressors. Research has shown that rehashing stressful situations in conversation increases neurochemicals that drain your mental and emotional vitality and create incoherence in your discerning process. Sure, it’s hard to not talk about some of these issues. However, with your heart’s intention, you can reduce replaying these looping stress patterns by being more mindful in your conversations. Every effort helps, especially when stress levels are high.
Many people are reporting that this next exercise helps them more than anything else.
- Wherever you go, radiate love and care to people and your environment – home, workplace, stores, social gatherings, outdoors, etc. Doing this as often as you can for a week or more strengthens your resilience and stability while helping you rise above or prevent some of the stressors that block clear thinking for higher choices. It takes a little practice to remember to radiate love and care, but it’s definitely worth the time spent. Set up phone or written reminders. Sometimes you won’t feel your heart as much – that’s normal, as heart energy modulates from time to time. Do the exercise anyway to help anchor it into your memory, which is important. This is one of our highest recommendations for reducing stress, improving well-being and staying emotionally grounded.
More and more people are waking up to the power of love and care as the solution to our personal and societal challenges. Love is a transformational intelligence that raises our vibration for drawing in new solutions we haven’t thought of yet and provides multiple benefits. The need for love has been philosophized about for eons, and now is the time for us to bring it to the street, practice more love and kindness in our interactions and reap the practical and proven benefits.
Taking Care of Yourself and Each Other:
A Heart Meditation
- Take a minute or two to breathe in the feeling of genuine appreciation for someone or something you care about. This helps to activate heart feelings, which increases the effectiveness of this heart meditation.
- Feel your heart connecting with others across the planet who are sending love and care to help reduce the collective stress and raise the heart vibration of humanity.
- While radiating love and care, see people increasingly treating each other with more compassion, kindness and cooperation and taking safety precautions for themselves and others.
- Now let’s send sincere appreciation, love and compassion to frontline workers, caregivers and all those helping others through this pandemic. Also, send compassionate care and heart warmth to the thousands of people who have lost loved ones during these times.
- Close by sending compassionate care to people suffering from the pandemic and the many other societal and global challenges. Ask your heart to direct some of your heart energy to any of the challenges or issues that you care about and that are close to your heart.
It is the deeper connection with our own heart and with the hearts of others that will help draw in intuitive solutions for personal and societal challenges.
*Note: This heart meditation, also called a Care Focus, was originally published by the HeartMath Institute for the Global Coherence Initiative August 2020 Synchronized Care Focus.
