Care for COVID with Heart

I meet weekly with my dear friend and colleague for over two decades, Kay (now by Zoom) for a deep connection of spirituality and support. We provide great mirrors for each other and this week she helped me remember what I already knew about the heart.

Bombarded with the latest statistics, stories, and best ways to manage our health, time and money during COVID, all this information keeps us in our heads, analyzing, measuring and asking:

• When will this end?
• How much money will I lose?
• Do we have enough equipment for next week or even my next shift?

I almost contributed to your information overload by sending out my Top 10 list for Self-Care! And then I was lovingly reminded that now is the time to focus on everything that resides in our hearts. This includes kindness, joy, faith, connection, compassion, purpose and meaning, and love, for ourselves and others.

The best way to stay resilient is by connecting to our hearts, where we remember what matters most. It’s not about quantity, how much we get done, it’s the quality of what and how we do it. We can do this by asking ourselves a question throughout the day:

Am I in my head or my heart right now?

You can differentiate the two because our heads are fast, impatient, demanding, critical, afraid, resistant, jealous, fearful, judgmental, and focused on producing. Our hearts are deliberate, present, feeling, vulnerable, compassionate, generous, loving, forgiving, and resilient since we grow and learn about ourselves from our open hearts.

When you are feeling overwhelmed, anxious, fearful, maybe even a little crazy, remember that is all coming from our heads. We can reconnect with our heart with this brief practice, called heart coherence:

• Place one or both hands over your heart and take three deep and slow breaths visualizing your heart.
• Think of a person or place you love or appreciate with a fond memory you have. I think of my nephews, Zach and Matt who visited me every summer for a Colorado adventure and the first time we backpacked overnight in Rocky Mountain National Park.
• Feel what you feel right now.

You might feel a little emotional, as I do, and the joy and contentment I experience when I think of them connects me with my heart. Now more than ever, let us all connect with our hearts because we don’t need more information for our resilience, we need more heart.