Saturday Night Live had a funny skit of people gathering at a party post Covid. In the skit, people forgot the names of the people they were talking to and sometimes even wondered if the person they were about to kiss was their cousin.

Sure enough, standing maskless, the conversations with each other stalled out. What to say? “Which shot did you get?” This skit was funny because it’s painfully true. How do people gather together in groups and actually relate with each other, casually, after a year of a pandemic and Zoom? To ask someone, “So, how was your year?” is funny because it is complicated after a year of being isolated at home.

In this blog I would like to offer some tips regarding gathering with others.

I recently completed a training on how to help groups co-regulate their nervous systems as we begin to gather together in person. Here are some simple suggestions:

1.) Don’t just throw people together to awkwardly talk. Play dance music and have people dance it out before being pushed into casual conversations.

2.) Do physical activities as a group. Plan to go hiking, swimming, walking or bike riding together. Throw a frisbee around.

3.) Bring your pets. Gather together with dogs. Our pets are naturally nervous system regulators. Also, people can talk about what the dogs are doing, how their dogs are doing, in general, as an entryway to discussing the year.

4.) No deep dish. It might seem important to dive deep about the last year- but it isn’t necessary. Keep it light if possible. People are tired of discussing Covid.

Remember, as a collective we are moving out of fight, flight, freeze and grief. It is going to take some time. We need patience with one another. Another important point to remember is that everyone experienced the last year differently. Some people enjoyed being alone while others just about lost their minds.

The pandemic was not a one size fits all situation. As we slowly open up, we need to have compassion for all of the various different experiences that happened. Kindness and patience will be key in relating with others.

For a deeper exploration into this phase of the pandemic look to my earlier blog Emerging: 2.0

A friend of mine who lives in Chicago just sent me this text: “If we’ve all been feeling the “blah of languishing” then why aren’t we all feeling much better since things are going relatively better?”

His text was timely because I was in the middle of writing this blog and contemplating this stage of the pandemic and our current emergence from lock down.

The only restaurant that I had been to during last year’s quarantine was an outdoor Mexican restaurant here in LA. This particular restaurant was not open for much of the lock down, but when they opened up last fall I immediately made a reservation. Because they were trying to survive, like the rest of us, the menu was much smaller, the prices had increased, deserts were no longer available, and the wait staff was obviously in full Covid protection gear which gave me a strange sense of dining on another planet. The bulk of the tables were removed to accommodate guests in their social distancing. I was grateful that my favorite restaurant did not close and I was excited to be able to actually get out and order a margarita. I so longed for an experience of “normal” that any one of those changes to the familiar restaurant that I love would have felt irritating to me.

In Los Angeles most people have been vaccinated. So, when I went out to dinner with a friend this time, nearly 8 months later, it felt slightly more “normal” but only in as much as a David Lynch film feels normal. On the surface of things, people were dressed up (not wearing sweatpants), and they were unmasked. I looked at couples and wondered if they were on a first date. I eavesdropped on conversations curious as to what people might be taking about. Were they talking about the last year, vaccinations, David Attenborough’s nature programs on Netflix, depression, UFOs, anxiety, or baby showers? I have only been privy to what people are taking about in my consulting room in the past year. I was dying to hear a casual conversation. What words were coming out of these newly unmasked mouths?

I received one vaccine, Moderna, back in January and had a terrifying and very unusual inflammatory response to the vaccine. For 4 weeks I was sick, felt a sense of depersonalization, had utterly bizarre nightmares and because the vaccine had affected my nervous system and midbrain, there were even a few days that I could not walk. Because I was one of the first people to be vaccinated, my doctor was honest with me when she told me that there simply isn’t enough data explaining the inflammatory response. I was absolutely horrified that everyone would have a reaction like mine. They didn’t. I am grateful that millions of people are being vaccinated without incident.

But the issue that I became acutely aware of was yet another collective split in our psyches: vaccination or no vaccination. I am not an anti-vaccination person and have no opinion on whether someone should take or not take the vaccine. Likewise, I am certainly not an authority of Covid nor of the vaccine. My personal experience with the vaccine, though, made me very aware of issues around the unfortunate politics of “vaccine.” Our collective polarization has been dumbed down to how “good/smart” people are vaccinated and “bad/dumb” people aren’t, or visa versa if you are on the other side of this issue. The bedfellow of betrayal is naivete. Nobody wants to feel or imagine that they could be betrayed by science. We also do not want to be naive. Just as Covid has not been a simple experience, neither has been the vaccine issue. In fact, nothing around Covid is simple. It is downright mercurial.

So, when my friend asked me about why he isn’t feeling better after being fully vaccinated and Covid numbers are going down, I said this to him: It takes time to realize the trauma of the past year. We want things to be “normal” but they aren’t. We so long for things to be “normal” that we might be missing the point of the last year. We, as humanity, have lost an entire year to Covid. There is grief in that fact. We long for saviors and to be “saved.” Has the vaccine become our projected savior? What about those who can’t or won’t be vaccinated? Does this mean that they don’t deserve a savior or a vaccine visa? I think that I am basically a good person, but I didn’t feel that I got a “jab of savior”, in fact, I felt as if I been given quite the opposite.

As a collective we are also moving out of the survival instincts of flight, fight or freeze. We must understand that our emerging road ahead is filled with collective exhaustion as well as collective renewal. Please understand that we are all healing from collective shock, trauma and grief. While fight, flight and freeze is beginning to turn, if you are sensitive, you might be aware of a kind of “fractured energy” that pervades throughout our collective field. Some of this “fractured energy” is manifesting in extreme polarization in many, many issues as well a a general sense of unease even if, on the surface, things appear to be getting better.

Many mothers that I work with tell me that they are secretly longing for lockdown again as their once simpler lives have gotten back on the freeway without an on ramp.

What I also said to my friend is this: There is no normal. We are in a whole new world. My best advice is to take the best of your insights from the past year and apply it to your life today. Write down any profound insights that you had during quarantine- think about how you wanted your life to be different and then apply it now as you emerge.

Friendships, marriages, parenting, work has all changed because everyone has changed. Write about what you are willing to let go of to gain your own sense of power back after this past year. Think of small ways that you can regain a sense of agency or personal power in your own life. Know that this is a fragile time. Things are groundless and old reference points are shifting and dissolving right before our very eyes.

Did you try meditating over quarantine? Baking? Exercising with more frequency? Less social media? More boundaries with work? The ability to say no to things that you aren’t interested in nor have time for? Did you have spiritual experiences? Revelations? Did you face your own shadow? Did you grow weary of politics? Did you become more curious about what creates health and a strong immune system? Did you promise to love to take better care of yourself? Did you grow your own garden? Stop drinking? Become curious as to why you are compulsively looking at porn when you are bored and not feeling alive? Did you decide to no longer push your children? Make room for these changes. Take them with you out into the new world that we are creating together one day at at time. Most importantly, be prepared for many disappointments as things are not normal- meaning things will never be the way that they once were. Allow for the possibility that experiencing disappointment is a way that we are being reminded that we are no longer in acceptance of what is. Disappointment might just be the strange experience of looking backward. Are we willing to face forward in order to experience a new creation of things? That new world is here right now and whether we like it or not we are its architects. Can enough of us be brought up to speed to find brand new solutions to the failures that we experienced in the past year before the clock runs out?

Yesterday I bought tickets to a concert for May 27. I was so excited to go to the Hollywood Bowl since it was closed last year. While putting the date of the show in my calendar, I wondered why the ticket said Friday when May 27 is clearly on a Thursday this year. It is a good thing that I rechecked the date, because if I had shown up on May 27 I would have been the only one there. The show is postponed until May 27, 2022.

Copyright © 2021  Katharine Bainbridge MFT, All rights reserved.

Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted… Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love. -Elizabeth Gilbert

Courage is defined two ways. The first is the ability to do something that frightens you.

The second definition of courage is strength in the face of pain or grief.

I had to put my dog Lhamu down after being her companion for about 15 years.

Lhamu was a rescue and she had issues.

In 2007 I decided to get a dog after I returned from a month long silent retreat. Somehow on that retreat I had come to the interesting conclusion that my life wasn’t complicated enough and that I needed something to take care of. I got my wish with Lhamu. I don’t really know what Lhamu’s back story was. I only know that she was found on the street- she was homeless, matted from head to foot, and she did not trust people.

With a whole lot of care, training and trust on both of our parts, Lhamu became a very sweet therapy dog for many years. So many of my patients looked forward to Lhamu greeting them in the waiting room.

She was loyal, highly anxious and a very, very loving dog.

Last December, before the Covid pandemic, a friend of mine called me to let me know that a litter of Lhasa apso puppies had just been born to a breeder that she knew. My friend, Jen, was going to take a puppy- did I want the brother?

My husband was adamant that he did not wish to have another dog to take care of. I, as his wife, knew that if he saw the puppy that he might just change his mind. Cunning is a necessary trait for the feminine. My cunning worked, and we took little Pepe Le Pew home.

Pepe, as opposed to Lhamu, was in a healthy and safe environment until he was old enough to leave. He was not only with his litter, but also his mother and caring handlers.

Lhamu lived with tension in her body and anxiety. Pepe, on the other hand, is secure, strongly in his body and he is fiercely independent. It felt strange to not have a dog follow me everywhere as Lhamu did. Pepe could take the company of people or leave it. He was cool with his bones and chew toys.

When I had to put Lhamu down it was one the hardest decisions that I have ever had to make. It an act of courage to face atrophy and death, especially in a beloved pet.

I was not present when my brother, Phillip, actually died. He had been in hospice in another state. After visiting him in the hospital and then moving him over to hospice, I felt that, in his own way, he was telling me that he needed me to leave so that he could die; and so I did. Leaving him to die was hard for me. It was also an act kindness, to him, from me. More likely, it was an act of kindness from him to me.

I hear about how beautiful it is to be the room with someone who is dying. This isn’t always true. Lhamu didn’t breath a sweet last sigh, she gurgled- twice. The shot didn’t work and the vet had to inject something into her mouth.

I wasn’t sure if she was dead. I wanted to reverse the whole process. Was it too late to stop her death? If I did, would she be brain dead or worse? Was that worse than death? These are thoughts that humans have around death and dying. It isn’t pretty. I don’t think that it is supposed to be.

Life doesn’t usually end well like a Disney story. It can often carry much of the injustice, horror, confusion and betrayal that is found in Grimm’s fairy tales. I don’t think that we actually grow psychologically or spiritually when things are going easy. This was Lhamu’s gift to me. My life was not easy with her. But, I learned from her how to be patient how to be generous and especially how to be kind. I most definitely learned about love.

If you can take an adversity and loss and find a way to remain kind then you have done something good for yourself.

I recently read a quote from Nick Cave, who tragically lost his son, about grief. He said,

This feeling… of alertness to the inner-spirit of things — this humming — comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things and, indeed, our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates our lives. We become witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present — a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises. These magical moments are the bright jewels of loss to which we cling.

The natural adversities and loss in life can easily make us hard and bitter. That is a choice. But, we can also allow ourselves to be softened by life and learn to flow with the rough edges that are a natural part of experiencing life actually being alive. It is brave to soften and to say YES to everything that is difficult or not going our way. To quote Zorba the Greek, God changes his appearance every second. Blessed is the man who can recognize him in all of his disguises.

Loss teaches us everything, just as love does. Are we willing to let go? Because the truth is that every hello has its goodbye. Every hello is the welcoming of life and every goodbye is way to make continual meaning of what it means to be left behind and yet to stay fully present and living within the natural catastrophe that is life. Life goes up, life goes down, but life goes on. Bravery is getting on the ride and surrendering to the up and the down. We cannot control it. There is very little that we can control. We can be brave enough to make meaning from all of it. Meaning making is our creative alchemical ability. It is our magic. I personally find the god of my understanding dwells within the disaster AND the aftermath as well as the subsequent meaning making about it. My question to you is are you willing to fully open to the paradox of living and loving knowing that those two are not, and will never be, permanent? Are you willing to be brave?

Copyright © 2020  Katharine Bainbridge MFT, All rights reserved.

The greatest thing then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally as opposed to our enemy. -William James

I want to tell you the truth about ’emerging.’

The first dharma book that I read was given to me by a therapist when I was 18 years old. I was a college student at New York University and I was depressed. The book was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. I can remember walking into my next session after reading several chapters of the book and expressing my distress. I asked my therapist WHY she gave me such a depressing book. She simply smiled and said, “Why? Because you are already depressed. Why not understand the truth of the why you are depressed?” She was providing some serious existential homeopathy.

Steven Jenkinson, author and founder of The Orphan Mystery School said something shocking in a recent interview. He said, “When someone is dying, you need to let them know that you miss them.” He is saying that you need to aknowledge that you miss them before they are actually gone. He is saying that once a person is in the process of dying, you are living with death and not the person you once knew. He went on to say that if you didn’t believe him admit, at least, that you are not making love to the dying person any longer. It is no longer the person whom you made love to when they were fully alive. That person is gone and the process of dying has taken their place.

I have felt, in my private practice, that for many years, most of my patients have been expressing the distress, anger, bewilderment and anxiety of a world and culture that has seemed to be in the process of dying. Institutions have failed. The arts are no longer seen as a necessity to sanity for society. I don’t even need to bring up the death of, at least, a ‘seemingly’ stable Government.

Wolfgang Giegerich explains Jung’s understanding of these seriously problematic times in this way, “The unconscious hacks up and hollows out the shapes of our culture and it is the mother of our future.” We shall see what, if any, new forms are created for our future by her. In the meantime, while we have been in the deep quiet, have we been able to listen?

When I have emerged from Buddhist month long silent retreats, I am entering back into a world that is familiar. While the world outside of retreat feels much speedier, it is still familiar. I am now “emerging” from two or more months of quarantine and the world is anything but familiar. It is wholly different.

These changes to our society are shocking. It is like a dying person. These changes will continue to be shocking as death is shocking. Unfortunately, because of social distancing, most of us are also feeling alone in our grief. Even worse, most folks don’t even realize that they are, in fact, actually grieving.

What do we do? Polyvagal Theory was developed by Dr. Stephen Porges back around 1969. Essentially, what Dr. Porges discovered was that we have old brain survival modes such as fight, flight (sympathetic nervous system) and immobilization (dorsal vagus), but we also have a ventral vagal system that has to do with socialization and co-regulation. Most of us have experienced some aspect of the sympathetic nervous system, the dorsal vagus ( have you felt that you have NO energy and just want to sleep?), and anxiety around the disruption to our ventral vagal system. Zoom just doesn’t cut it for anyone. Computers are not connection.

To ’emerge’ from our homes and to see people wearing masks is not normal.

To not be able to touch our friends and family is not normal.

This is my concern: Our nervous systems are hearing daily about an invisible threat that we cannot fight. We, as Dr. Porges discovered, NEED social contact. We NEED touch. We NEED to see faces smiling. We NEED to see others eyes meet our own. We NEED to know that we belong. These social cues provide our nervous system with a sense of safety and wellbeing.

This past week I drove to my weekly acupuncture appointment and I felt terrified on the road as it seemed to me that everyone who was driving a car was in a state of utter dysregulation. What is dysregulation? Emotional responses that are outside of the range of what feels like safety to the nervous system; again, think fight, flight or freeze.

Driving 100 miles per hour or weaving in and out of traffic is not an act of a regulated nervous system. If the traffic is an indication of exactly what is emerging from being in quarantine, then I am deeply concerned for society and our ability to co-regulate as we emerge from, essentially, two months of isolation. I fear explosions of energy.

What I will be discussing, as far as trauma goes, for months to come will be the trauma of experiencing the death of what we have understood to be ‘normal.’

Any loss invites feelings of grief. Maybe some of these feelings have been familiar to you lately: denial (avoidance, confusion, elation, shock, fear), anger (frustration, irritation, anxiety), depression (overwhelmed, helplessness, hostility, wanting to flee), bargaining (struggling to find meaning, reaching out to others, telling one’s story), acceptance (exploring options, new plans moving into place, opening up of the imagination of a possible future), and finally, making new meaning out of the loss.

I will write more blogs in the future about this, but for today I want to talk about ways of feeling connected without touch.

I want you to close your eyes and remember a time of connection. Notice what happens in your body? Think of a moment that you felt safe and whole. Take a moment with this. Notice what is occurring in your body.

Listen to music that helps you to feel connected to a group of like minded people. Usually, this is music that we might have listened to in high school or college when our social network was quite elaborate.

If you have a pet, this is a way of regulating the ventral vagal system. Pets have a funny way of “seeing us.”

Cooking food that you enjoy is another way of feeling connected.

Creativity in any form produces a feeling of connection.

Meditation also produces a sense of connection as does time spent in nature.

If you are feeling very lonely, imagine seeing yourself from a bird’s eye view. Pan out and see your house, your town, your state, your country , and finally the earth itself. Notice your body. When you are ready, come back the same way that you went out. Come back to yourself knowing that you are connected to everyone else who shares this planet and who is also experiencing this loss.

I recently purchased a ukulele. I intend to learn how to play it so that when it is safe to be with others, I can play them a simple song or two. This gives me something to look forward to. In the meantime, I am learning something new and encouraging my body and brain to stretch out a bit.

My husband just told me that he heard an interview on NPR about the Hollywood Bowl. A perennial rite of summer, for those who live in Los Angeles, will be closed for the first time in 98 years. It did not close for World War II, the riots nor the recent fires. The announcer at the end said, “be sure to find something beautiful to look at today.” They then played a recording of The Doors at The Bowl in 1968 where Jim Morrison exclaimed, “LA! Are you here to hear some music?”

You are all my neighbors. I will learn to play my ukulele for you from my own heart to yours, of course, with my mask on.

Copyright © 2020  Katharine Bainbridge MFT, All rights reserved.

“Everyday, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.

I am going to use all of my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.

I am not going to get angry or think badly of others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

-The Dalai Lama

Find the soft spot in your heart. In Buddhism, it is said, that it could be the size of a mustard seed, but as tender and sensitive as a pimple.

Hold that connection to that tender heart of sadness, aka bodhichitta, and contemplate the hope that all beings be well and free from suffering and disease. Imagine a light radiating out from that tender spot, filling the entire world with peace, comfort, connection and well being.

Hold the globe in your heart. 🌍 The ancient teachings of interdependence are becoming clearer than ever. Wish the planet and all sentient beings peace and healing.

Make certain, above all else, that you apply these practices to yourself. 🙏🏻

Bonus Contemplation:

My new puppy, Pepe Le Pew, has been in doggie training boarding school. Let’s learn from Pepe as he stays in his quarantine place. Watch his peaceful equanimity as things are being thrown around him, like a 24 hour news cycle. Marvel at his calm when there is running (for toilet paper) and potential panic. (Apologies for the formatting. Just click on the link below… you don’t have to press the download button, only the link to see Pepe.)

We can learn a lot from our pets right now. Also, when you are able. Please support local small businesses. Thank you Dog Training with Sue Ellen.https://www.facebook.com/pg/littledogchick/about/

Copyright © 2020  Katharine Bainbridge MFT, All rights reserved.