Day at a time, May you be peaceful, 29.4.20.

A Day at a Time – A Daily Blog of Life in Lockdown

I woke up surprisingly late this morning, 7.35 am and felt happy to have enjoyed a long, relaxing sleep full of vivid dreaming. I finished yesterday’s blog over coffee and then moved into practicing Qi Gong. This practice is helping me feel strong on every level. It is a practice for the body and mind and I really feel it is improving my immune system and lung strength which is just what I want right now! What else helps me feel at ease is on the one hand, living as fully as I can right now so that if I die, I won’t regret wasting the last days and on the other, having put my house in order. When I say my house in order, I am referring to my past and my relationships – certainly my physical house is full of dust balls! But the metaphorical one I swept fairly clean last year as I was following the course A Year to Live by Stephen Levine. I spent time reviewing my life as a way of healing rather than berating or judging myself. There is wonderful meditation practice on forgiveness – forgiving others and asking for their forgiveness. It is incredible how powerful this practice is at healing difficult relationships without an actual word being said out loud, without an interaction with the other.

Lockdown can be an opportunity to do these practices, to review our lives and heal areas that need it, both in order to live more fully and if the moment comes of being so ill with Covid-19 that we feel death upon us, to be at peace with it. We’ve already let the people we love know it; we’ve put our affairs in order. I certainly don’t want to be there struggling to breath with my mind torturing me at the same time – should’ve done this, should’ve that!!

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau