This Too Shall Pass – Practicing Mindfulness in the Pandemic
“When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked, all would be lost. But if even oneperson on the boat remained calm and centred, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh
It’s been two weeks since New Zealand’s four-week coronavirus lockdown officially began.
For me personally, it all began with one phone call from my daughter and son about a complete lockdown on the 25th March across the whole of NZ as a nation while I was enjoying teaching my year 3-4 class of students how to make a terrarium as part of our integrated writing and STEAM project.
Life for me as a school teacher here in NZ involved me driving to school every morning, interacting with all my colleagues and students. Now, teaching in the classroom has become an online, virtual experience in the form of emergency remote learning and teaching from my home.
By day, my 40 sq ft apartment became a studio. The place where I relaxed and watched TV become a place for Google Hangout to check in with my lovely students about their learning.
This place that is my haven and where I am used to preparing meals together with my family and reflecting on my day gone by with gratitude has often become a space to produce props for my remote teaching and learning.
My personal life and work life are no longer separate. Some things that have been made all the more prominent by the closing of restaurants, shops, cafes, just to name a few. Supermarkets, which are now one-in, one-out, with staff wearing PPE.
Gratefully, I live with my children, so we have each other’s company. I know a lot of my close friends who live all by themselves and are finding it hard isolating. It’s quite an anxious time and will be taking a toll on people’s health and wellbeing, including teachers and their students.
As a Doctorate student, my main concern is all other students’ wellbeing, including our migrant and refugee students, who like me, are either working on their PGR 9 submission or on other aspects of their research at such difficult times.
I feel like sending deep Metta to all those affected by this coronavirus as we are all interconnected with one another on this planet.
For me personally, being a staunch follower of Nichiren Buddhism and a Soka Gakkai Buddhist by practice, if there’s one thing that depicts the basic insights of buddhism, it’s this coronavirus.
My advice to all my students out there is we can choose to live in fear, worries and confusions or we can choose to stay in the essence of our own personal practice and faith by centering ourselves. We can be the ones to model for our student’s values like compassion, kindness and mindfulness now more than ever.
Turn off the news, meditate, turn on Mozart, walk around your house, listen to ones in your own bubble more deeply and let go of everything!
In my own day to day practice as a Soka Gakkai member and following Nichiren Buddhism, I have a deep appreciation and gratitude for the lineage that supports me in this time of mass uncertainty and fear. I don’t know what is going to happen, and yet what I do with my thoughts, words, and actions can impact everyone around me.
During this time of uncertainty, on my yoga mat, I simply take a deep breath, inhale, exhale, rock my body to the right and left and settle into a steady, unmoving sitting position -with mindfulness! I simply notice that I am not present and I am courageous enough to return to my own breath, in the midst of this spinning world.
As I write from my 14 days of home quarantine in NZ, I’m reflecting on how our current global situation presents an opportunity for all of us as a community to come together in intensive self-exploration. We now have an opportunity to find all those alternative ways to think, feel and act. In doing so, the
first question that comes to my mind is, “Who am I in relation to the current situation?”
This coronavirus is moving. Its nature is to penetrate the boundaries. Most of us in our current lifetime have never experienced such a phenomenon. This movement is unsettling, uncertain and shocking. In contemplating this movement, what do I feel?
Firstly, I need to become aware of my own inner process. During this uncertainty around health, wellbeing and the economic upheaval, am I aware of my own thoughts and my deeper feelings? If this is possible, only then can I stay in a place of vulnerability. Only then can I have a clearer perspective on what’s happening around me. If I don’t move through this layer within myself first, I might project my own fears onto others around me.
In this time of heightened emotions, we must diligently apply our practices which will deepen our own sense of presence and grounding within ourselves. We all need social and physical distancing but also social solidarity.
The simple act of washing hands has become a matter of life and death for us in such difficult times and so paying full attention and being mindful can not only protect us from the coronavirus but bring our meditation practice off the yoga mat to our own daily lives.
If we are going to survive this coronavirus pandemic, we need to convert our own individual suffering and fear into compassion and by doing so we will suffer less. We all might not become enlightened Buddha’s, but we need to remember that you and I are not separate. We all breathe the same air.
As the coronavirus spreads around the world fear and grief are inevitable, but so are compassion, kindness and care. We are all these things!