Anthony Rella PLLC has made a donation toward the Intersectional Healers Covid-19 Fund.

From the fundraising site:

This fund is aimed at helping mental health practitioners, energy workers, and bodyworkers in King County who have been financially impacted by cancellations and forced to close or dramatically shift their businesses due to COVID-19. Priority will be given to healers from communities that have been historically and systemically economically disadvantaged—specifically BIPOC healers, queer, transgender & nonbinary healers, and disabled healers. We hope to be able to help anyone who meets the simple criteria (practices a healing art, lives/works in King County and has completed the application below) as long as we have the funds to do so, though this is dependent on funding levels and number of applications we receive. It is our hope to keep this fundraising going for as long as we can, in order to assist all applicants. 

This has been a difficult time for all of us, and while my practice has also taken hits and I’ve been required to make difficult choices, I have also been supported and protected from some of the worst impacts.

These times make clear that the success of those who have wealth and security in this country come at the expense of the wellness, stability, and vitality of people of color, poor people, Indigenous people, queer people, trans people, disabled people, women, and nonbinary people. While the government appears to be declaring war on marginalized people, if you are in a position where you have some security, some wealth, please join me in supporting this fund.

I was honored to be a guest on the Last Born in the Wilderness podcast where we had a rich discussion about the COVID19 pandemic, shame, privilege, masculinity, and synchronicity. The podcast is available through this link.

In the early days of the COVID19 pandemic, I could not understand why this was such a big deal. The early reports suggested the fatality and impact was not much less significant than the flu, but nevertheless parts of China had gone onto lockdown. Having lived through several media-hyped disease risks that ended up being effectively contained, I could not see why this would be any different.

Except it was clear something was different. The urgency with which it kept being reported, and the early predictions of how China’s shutdown could affect the supply chain, kept communicating an underlying and confusing menace that the information did not help me understand. When Governor Inslee began canceling all events larger than 250 people, I realized, “Even if I don’t understand this, I have to deal with it.”

Reading the reports of Italy’s overwhelmed hospital systems finally helped me understand the risk of its unique infectiousness and the secondary consequences of a system overwhelmed by new cases. Anticipating that soon Washington would entirely be on lockdown, I decided to end my Men* Making Connections group and transition entirely to telehealth. This was a difficult, painful decision, and immediately after making it I knew it was the right one.

Transitioning to telehealth has had its challenges, and you may have seen the many articles of why Zoom meetings are so draining. I’m not entirely convinced we can look at the experience of being drained separate from the collective anxiety and disease of the moment we’re experiencing. Though the early days of telehealth felt draining to me, I took a vacation and recommitted to my spiritual practice, and I began to rediscover my footing as a therapist.

The reason I created my Men* Making Connections group was because I highly value the experience of being in a room together, sharing our feelings and truths. There is something about that connection that is different than what we get through screens. When I was a kid and the Internet was new, I discovered my social awkwardness in daily life didn’t hinder me from making friends on the Internet, many of whom thought I was mature and older than my years.

In part, that was due to Internet communications being entirely text-based at the time. With time to reflect and respond in my own time, I could craft a persona. When it came time to spontaneous conversations with people who could see and hear me, I froze.

So the idea of canceling my in-person social connections group so we could practice social distancing was painful, and at the time I couldn’t even imagining transitioning that to a video experience.

Nevertheless, after two months of full-time telehealth from my home office, I’ve come to feel it has a great deal to offer as a way of doing mental health counseling. The limitations, of course, are that it demands more of clients to do what is needed to adjust their circumstances in ways that were easy with having my own office—creating a space outside their daily lives where they could be fully themselves, having a safe space where they won’t be overheard by others and can express their full truth.

All that being said, the work of listening, understanding, and helping clients to sense into their bodies, listen to themselves, dialogue with their parts is doable.

From the beginning, once I left the office I wondered whether I should keep it. No one can predict the future with accuracy, but historical pandemic cycles suggest a second wave happening in the fall and winter after outbreak. And while other states are reopening, I do not understand why. There does not yet appear to be any effective treatment, vaccination, or prevention of the virus outside of social distancing. (That is disingenuous. I believe I understand why there has been a push for reopening, and I do not agree with it. I support investing in the safety net and support of people who are currently unemployed so they can weather this storm, rather than forcing them to choose between losing unemployment or risking infection by going back to work.)

When I imagine doing therapy with someone while wearing masks, I know that is possible, but it hurts my heart. It creates its own barriers. I would rather do telehealth, where we can see and hear each other, we can connect, and we can mitigate the disease risks of being in the same room for an hour breathing the same air—not to mention all the contacts we would encounter in the process of coming to the office.

My telehealth office remains in north Seattle, and I am considering the opportunities of meeting clients who want in-person connections for socially distanced walks or meetings in the park. At the same time, I am excited by the possibility of working with clients who may be great matches but live in other parts of Seattle, or even Washington state.

My hope is that, first of all, I am overreacting and all this will go away by this summer. That hope seems unlikely. My more pragmatic hope is that by this time next year we’ll be better positioned and I can start looking for office space in north Seattle again. But I cannot predict the future, I can only look at what’s in front of me and make the decisions that seem the best with what I know.

I am so thankful for the clients who have been with me through this process, and I have space and desire for more clients.

All this said, these are the choices I made, and my reasons. My colleagues may be making different choices based on their own assessments of the very real risks of exposure against the very real mental health risks of too much isolation and disconnection. Not every person can do telehealth, and so I honor those who are willing to show up to their offices for those clients.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing down my hurts and disappointments, my losses. Since the pandemic began, all the plans I’d made, all the things I’d finally given myself permission to get excited about, to invest money and energy in, to do what I wanted have been canceled.

In the face of worldwide suffering, the restriction of our movement, death and illness, and the flagrant steps toward authoritarian capitalism, my personal losses are a drop in the bucket. Nothing for you to concern yourself about.

Yet it is my bucket, my drop, and the effort of making my losses small while trying to hold my heart open and brave and caring for others was causing me to be heavy and brittle.

In my life I have frequently asked the question that I am frequently asked as a therapist. There are many versions of this question, but they all boil down to, why should I feel my pain? Why would I want to suffer? Why wouldn’t I do what I could to feel good all the time?

The answers are myriad and there is no answer. I’ve thought about it morally, ethically, spiritually, but when I set aside everything the one thing that seems to be true is: that’s just how we work. What we don’t feel stays locked inside of us, taking up space like malware running in the background of a laptop, invisible except for its effects—slowing down your functioning, causing weird bugs, occasionally throwing up nasty pop-ups that say shit you don’t want to be seeing in your day to day life.

Feelings need to be felt, and being whelmed in our feelings is not the same as feeling them. Being witnessed with loving care is what helps our feelings move, and if we can borrow or pay for the loving witness of others, we can, and we can also learn to bear loving witness ourselves.

Grief and disappointment are not separate from care, joy, and enthusiasm. All of these feelings are emotions of engagement with this life. Letting things matter to us. Taking risks. Opening our hearts. Asking for what we really want and need, and then getting it. Or not getting it. Or getting it in a way we didn’t want or expect. Or getting it in a way that kind of fucks up the whole enjoyment of it.

Should I turn myself away from my sorrow, grief, and disappointment of not getting, then it remains in me. The space and energy I would have for fresh caring and new daring remains occupied. These feelings begin to become stagnant, shifting into cynicism, pessimism, despair, and irritability. Life no longer seems worth the effort of caring.

A friend recently reminded me of the Greek word acedia, which was once considered in Christian theology one of the “eight bad thoughts” that later coalesced into what we call the “seven deadly sins.” Acedia is a state of not-caring that leads us to want to forsake our work, our spiritual practices, our heartfelt engagement in the world. Writer Kathleen Norris describes it as “not being able to care, and being so not able to care that you don’t care that you don’t care.”

When we don’t grieve, we don’t let ourselves be disappointed, don’t witness the feelings and let them move, break down, compost, then we have no room for caring. Indeed we begin to feel resentment toward the world for being so harsh and indifferent to our caring. And we participate in our own defeatedness and acedia.

Last night I put my written slips of disappointment and grief into a little cauldron and burnt it. As the smoke curled and all those losses burnt away, I felt softness entering my heart again. I felt gratitude at a heart capable of caring, growing, and taking risks in a world that is so strange and unpredictable, where passionate connection can sour into cold distance and longing calls us forward into new journeys toward delight and despair.

Our feelings are not facts, not the objective and entire truth, and yet each wishes to be heard and acknowledged as we move on our journey.

Honor your disappointments and griefs. Share them with loving witnesses, if you can. And then lay them in the stone circle and, with love, set them ablaze. Their ash is the ground of hope.

Now that we are going through personal and collective uncertainty, it feels like an important time to take time—if we have it—to reconnect with our selves and the foundations of our being. To shed what is unhelpful and remember what matters to us so we can recommit to our own aliveness and collective liberation. Even in times of crisis, liberation is possible.

Join me in six weeks of working through the material from my book, Circling the Star, in supportive community. Sliding scale and solidarity slots are available.

This will be an online course for psychospiritual healing and integration, and not a therapeutic group, and not billable by insurance.

To see course information and register, click on this link.

In times of crisis, we’re likely to experience some regression. Young parts of us that seek out some authority to blame, some authority to hide behind, someone bigger and more powerful who can be responsible for dealing with this beautiful and at times terrifying world.

Those who step into authority, as parents, religious leaders, politicians, healers, and more may have sensed the strangeness of realizing that projection falls upon you. That you, a human being yourself, as fallible and seeking of safety as anyone else, have been targeted as the one who is supposed to know what’s going on. The right next thing to do to keep people safe. The right way to be in the world to be whole.

And, if you have that authority, you likely do have something to offer. An insight, a process, a plan that will lead everyone through the door from distress to desire. From crisis to normalcy. From illness to haleness.

Yet when we’re on the side receiving that projection, we might feel pressured to behave as though we know more than we do. To be the authority and show no doubt. And sometimes it helps, but often it becomes a barrier to the qualities that made us an authority in the first place, what we needed to practice to accrue that power and insight.

Perhaps the world needs less certainty and more courage. As a therapist, my best offering is my curiosity and a process that helps the client to heal and know themself and discover both the door and what’s on the other side of the door. I may have an idea of what I think is through the door, or I have my biases of what I think should be, but in those moments I am the least curious and the least helpful. What I offer best is the capacity to be in the not-knowing with others, but not to be crushed or overwhelmed by the not-knowing but to let it enliven us. To be excited by the not-knowing, the risk, the opportunity for transformation and the possibility that the other side of the door will be even better, although different and not free of problems.

In times like these, I feel we are all sitting in a great unknowing. There is a giant door through which we are passing, collectively, ready or not. No one knows for sure what’s on the other side. We can practice all of our tools, all of our good skills, stick to our goals, but some of us are feeling a sense of pause even in that. What if this goal I’ve been following is no longer relevant when I move through the door? What if all my work toward being recognized at my job falls to the wayside as the industry collapses? What if my grievances with my friends become buried beneath so much reality? What if all of this fear was for nothing? What if some day I wish I’d had far more fear?

Together we sit in our questions and unknowing, with all its terror and numbness and crankiness and unexpected moments of levity, peace and joy. And even with crisis and pain there is the possibility of richness, of seeing how all our lives we’ve worn a way of seeing that was never fully true. We’ve been ruled by a wounding that’s no longer relevant. We’ve been controlled by fears that simply do not matter. Even in this pain there is the opportunity to set aside all that we’ve been told to like about ourselves, want for ourselves, fear so we can protect ourselves, and discover the truth of who we are.

And if we know that truth, this door could strip away all that no longer serves that truth. We can sacrifice what was burdensome and unnecessary in the flames of aliveness. We can allow the waste and the garbage to be stripped down and pass through, fierce and sharp and ready to make a new world where the old once stood.

To pass through the door is to die. Our bodies may live and our consciousness may persist, but something in the way we’ve lived must die. Something we believed about ourselves and the world must die. Our illusions of separation. Our illusions of control. Our illusions of independence.

And each of us carries our own piece of that death. Instead of worrying about the death of the world, let us tend to our own. Let us keep our bodies alive, and grieve, and care for each other, and let ourselves be changed so that the soul has more room to breathe and adapt to what is beyond the door.

One of my topics of interest as a therapist has been reading research into the impacts of chronic loneliness on people. We are truly social animals that thrive—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually—in connection with others. When we feel safe, understood, loved and loving, valued, and have regular physical contact with other humans.

In a recent tarot reading, more prescient than I’d imagined, I drew for the Spirit of this Age the card The Hermit. It is the work thrust upon us, horrifying and rife with potential. To be asked, and in some cases ordered, to let go of the trips and events we looked forward to experiencing. To avoid our big community events, the workplaces where we regularly play out our lives among colleagues, to minimize social contact. To spend time with ourselves and the people with whom we cohabitate.

Much is being said about the demands of this moment to practice mutual aid. And with that is relearning how to be alone. 

Loneliness is a social hunger, according to John Cacioppo, who researched it extensively. When we go too long without social connection, that loneliness begins to affect our system in ways that resemble trauma—more anxiety, escalated mistrust, difficulty regulating and calming ourselves, increased sensitivity to real or perceived rejection.

Social connection and touch—consensual touch, whether it is hugging, hand holding, arm around the shoulder, massage, cuddling, or sexual touch—help to soothe us, promotes calming hormones that decrease the effects of stress on the body, and helps us to release natural opioids that ease experiences of pain. Our sense of meaning emerges in part from our relationships to others—how we are useful, how we are helpful, how we are influential.

Here’s a few interesting things. Loneliness is fed by mutuality in relationship. If your primary social contacts are people you pay or people who engage with you as a role instead of a person, that meets other needs but not social hunger. Also, loneliness differs from solitude in that the latter is chosen. When we feel we are alone and it’s not our choice, that becomes very painful.

As we practice being alone to decrease the spread of illness and stem the flood of patients to an overwhelmed and underfunded medical system, we might try some things.

Remind yourself that this solitude is a choice you are making to care for yourself and your community, and that can make a different choice. Each choice you could make offers its own personal and collective risk, but allow yourself to have the choice, and to consider your options and risks, and decide.

We each have different appetites for socialization, both our levels of hunger and ease of satiety. Some of us get lonely easily and need a lot of social connection, while for others simply getting a cup of coffee is more than enough contact. Don’t judge your level of need and consider ways to diversify social contact as you can. Call friends and family. Schedule video chats or text chats. Think of someone you’d like to get to know and reach out to them. We already have a great icebreaker. “Wow, this is a weird time. How are you holding up?”

At this time, where I live, all public interaction is not banned, mostly large groups. You may make some agreements with individuals you know to meet and connect in the ways that will serve you, knowing you’re sharing risk but also that if one of you gets sick you can give the other advance warning.

But with trying to make time to connect, and all the ways we distract ourselves, we may still reach moments where we feel trapped, isolated, and empty. There are times when we may choose to engage in numbing, soothing, checking out, or freaking out, and I do not fault anyone for that. We may also use this time to practice being companion to ourselves.

Meditation is one beautiful practice, and I offer a few guided ones that may be of help.

Journaling is another, whether using pen and paper, a computer, or narrating your thoughts into a recorder. You might simply journal about whatever is on your mind, then listen to it later. Or you might consider telling yourself your life story, writing about the moments that stick out to you, what was interesting about them, what they meant to you, how that meaning affected your later decisions.

For those who are interested in tarot and other kinds of divination, those are great frameworks for self-reflection. You could simply ask yourself a question, draw a card or stone, and then journal about what you think this tells you about your question.

Think about how your life has been lately, prior to pandemic. What have you enjoyed about it? What do you wish was different? What fears do you have about doing things differently? What are the risks? Given that we are a time in which extraordinary things that were once said to be impossible are now occurring, consider how you might use the malleability of the moment to change your life when the crisis passes. Do you like working from home and not commuting? What if you just… kept doing it? What do you imagine that would be like?

What is scariest and most beautiful is the potential for deep intimacy with yourself, to be exquisitely present to your full experience and be able to be with it without trying to fix it, suppress it, push it away, agree with it, or argue with it. A part of you feels bored, and you are there with it. A part of you feels restless, and you are there with it. A part of you says the world is falling apart, and you are there with it. Breathing. Feeling the contact of your body with the ground. Feeling how you are more than this thought and feeling.

If you are a spiritual person, you might take time to pray or engage in a longer practice. Deep practice helps us to have more space with our experience, which offers a buffer to the destabilizing effects of loneliness.

And if you can’t take it anymore, go for a walk. Be outside for a while, not necessarily interacting with folks but feeling the sun and air, spending time among trees and blooming flowers. Find a quiet place to sit and simply stay for as long as you can, still, watching what happens around you when you are quiet and still. Let yourself be enraptured by nature. I find this profoundly calming.

This time appears to be calling us to practice solitude and mutual aid, both aloneness and community-mindedness. I cannot think of a call to action that would better say “this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”

Billions of us walk through the world carrying something incomprehensibly precious and tender, a heart radiating with the potential of loving sweetness, courage, strength, and inspiration. These hearts, which have never existed before and will never exist again, made of the earth, nurtured by the age and society in which we live, hold the candle of our souls.

And it is as though each of us knows that this candle within is the most precious and vulnerable part of us. Those of us who live daily with the physical, spiritual, and emotional violence of the world have learned to guard it well at the cost of letting the light shine forth. Those of us who have had gentler, safer lives tend to react as though each little jostle and confrontation threatens to blow it out, and may be too precious and fearful of seeing how resilient the candle could be.

Imagine billions of us walking through the world guarding our precious candles, eyeing each other to see if this is a person with whom we could share our light, or from whom we must shield our light. Imagine that when our hearts get jostled and we fear the harm to our candles that we bark our fears out to the person who accidentally bumped us. When we are so focused on protecting those exquisitely sensitive lights it can be hard to differentiate an intentional threat from an accident. And at times that distinction doesn’t matter—they need to back off whatever their intention.

Your light is more resilient and more profound than you can imagine. Far from being vulnerable to extinguishment, it may transform every shock and jostle into more energy, more aliveness. And still we must walk with it as though it is precious and worthy of care and attention. We must sit with the possibility that it is no one else’s responsibility to tend our light because they have their own that requires its own exquisite care.

And yet it is possible that if we each tended our own hearts, letting them grow strong, fierce, and bright, that their flames could draw to us those who would love us better, who could reflect back the beauty of our hearts.

We may be waiting for a time when it’s safe to let out the light of our hearts. A future in which there is enough freedom, enough kindness, enough resources to make it safe. We may dream of finding a bonfire burning around which gathers our true community, those with whom it is safe to finally be ourselves.

And when we walk in the world, among billions of hearts nurturing their private flames, it seems such a transformation is impossible, or so big and far in the future. We walk in towns and cities built upon decades to centuries of growth, contraction, upheaval.

Such deep change is possible, whether it is in one person’s life, a community, or a world. But it requires long term, diligent, patient effort with no guarantee of success. Such a transformation is its own tender flame that requires care and attention.

It is an illusion to imagine the work is ours alone, that only our hearts can ignite the necessary fires. Larger forces work their will. Thoughts we believed were ours alone appear in the mouths and words of strangers. In truth there are thousands of fires burning, illuminating the truth we feel, and when we reveal our own light, we feed those flames in ways we cannot imagine.

The strangest trick of it is, we need to tend our own hearts. When I tend your heart and do your work, it is for nothing. When I tend my heart and do my work, miracles unfold.

When the malice or inconsideration of others is too painful, it is right to guard your heart with firmness and kindness. When your heat feels too sore and tender, it is appropriate to withdraw and tend the hurt. Grief is necessary, but neither cynicism nor despair is practical. Rest, then return to your work.