Finding Peace with your Time: Pandemic Edition
My energy during pandemic seems to be moving in weekly waves. This week was my sit on the couch and do as little as possible week. Last week it was quilting week. The week before was mask-making. And in other weeks it has been yoga practice week, home gym week, energy medicine week, and stare blankly at Facebook week.
In the beginning I had a lot of ideas about what I would spend my time accomplishing or improving while staying home. And I was frustrated and mad at myself when I was wasting time being unproductive. I had a lot of self-judgement around not getting to my yoga mat as often as I “should” and about sitting staring out the window. And of course, I always think I can never do enough to help end the pandemic. (because obviously, I’m also a immunologist, first responder, and respiratory therapist )
But as we’ve been at it longer, I feel myself starting to soften. It’s not that those expectations and dreams disappeared. They didn’t. But the way that I was thinking about how I was using my time changed. As I softened up on myself and started to grow some acceptance for my inability to do it all no matter how I tried, I’ve started to feel a lot better about what I actually am doing during pandemic.
What helped me soften up was remembering that my stress isn’t coming up because of how I’m spending my time. It’s coming up because of how I’m thinking about how I’m spending my time.
So, if you’re stressing about not doing enough to save the world, or improve yourself you might think that the way you’re spending your time is what’s stressing you out. And you might think that if you change what you’re doing with your time, you’ll feel more peaceful.
But the secret is that peace comes when you are ok with what you’re doing - no matter what it is.
Let’s look closer.
It’s hard to feel at Peace with how you’re spending your time
We have cultural stories about how citizens should be spending their time: Being Productive, Helping Others, Working hard to make more money and keep the economy going. And you’ll have familial stories about how to spend your time. The stories could range everywhere from covering your head with blankets, drinking or eating the day away, cleaning the house from top to bottom repeatedly, incessantly watching the news to keep informed and everywhere in between.
It’s hard to go against cultural and familial stories. For most of us, it feels really uncomfortable to choose to do something that goes the things you’ve been told make you a good family member, and good citizen. When you go against your conditioning, like say sit on the couch for 20 minutes, it will probably bring up a lot of self-judgement and criticism. Suddenly you feel like a terrible person just for sitting still. It seems ridiculous to read in print, but your mind will tell you that you’re not doing enough, you should be working harder, or that you could somehow save the world if you’d just not sit down for so long.
When your mind is caught in those kinds of stories, you can’t feel peaceful. With stories like that, you’ll never be able to live up to your own unrealistic expectations and you’ll stay stuck in stress. Then negative mental patterns like judgement, perfectionism, self-criticism, and striving take hold. These things can never bring you peace. They can only bring suffering, and more striving, pushing, and straining.
This pandemic experience is a chance for us to notice and step away from those ways of being that do not bring peace. I see it as a tremendous opportunity to recognize that our patterns of judgment and striving aren’t serving us and a chance to try something different.
Finding Peace through Self-Acceptance and Love.
If you listen to your mind’s stories, any day -when you spend your time in ways that don’t conform to what culture and family tell you are the right ways -is a “bad” day. But imagine if you didn’t have that story telling you how to feel. Without that story it’s possible that you could feel peaceful no matter how you were spending your time.
You start to move towards peace when you practice self-acceptance. Self-acceptance is letting yourself be just as you are in this very moment. So that means accepting that you might not spend your time getting everything checked off your to-do list. Self-acceptance means dropping your criticisms and releasing your self-judgements whenever they arise. And it means letting this moment, be ok, exactly as it is. that includes knowing you may still want things to be different - and accepting that right now life isn’t different. Acceptance doesn’t mean you have like to what you are accepting, it just means you allow it to be as it is.
From acceptance you have the opportunity learn about loving yourself on good days and on “bad” days. Self-Love is a daily work of acceptance, affirmation, and affection turned back to yourself. Self-love means loving even those self-critical, judgmental and striving parts that never let you rest. And it means celebrating those lovely bits of you that honestly make you happy to be who you are.
I know for many of us, our minds have a picturesque, ideal way of living through the pandemic. And then there is the reality of living during the pandemic with all of your unique circumstances. There’s what’s possible for you as real human being having this experience. When the expectations and the experience don’t line up we have the chance to come to peace with our own humanity.