How are you? These times are proving to be a little testing.
TO ALL MY WONDERFUL STUDENTS,
How are you? These times are proving to be a little testing.
I have been going back and forth as to whether to run our classes next week but I woke up this morning with some clarity. Maybe it was the good, even energy of the Autumn Equinox. Today the earth’s axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the sun and the duration of night and day are almost equal. This balance, this evenness, this measure is something we work on and try to find in ourselves with our yoga practice. With that in mind I will run the classes next week as planned and the following 2 weeks of the holidays and keep the classes running at the RSL for as long as possible. There is plenty of space there for us to keep our distance and if we keep good hygiene and just come to a class and not linger the risks are very low.
There will be even stricter protocols in place in terms of hygiene as out lined below and classes numbers will be capped.
As we all know there are many different views as to how to handle this unprecedented crisis and some of you may not feel comfortable coming to class, this will be a very personal decision and we all have different circumstances and experiences that we bring to this and all decisions will be respected. I am more than happy to refund the classes. I am also looking into the possibility of running live classes via Zoom.
I have a sister in Switzerland as some of you know who is now in lockdown for 6 weeks at a minimum. I expect this to happen here so we might as well start preparing for it and although it will be nothing like a face to face class where I can check in with everyone’s energy, read the room and teach accordingly it will just serve as a bit of a distraction from being at home, be a reminder that doing some practise is worth it and an opportunity for those who are doing the practice to ask any questions.
NEW STUDIO CORONA VIRUS PROTOCOL
PLEASE READ
Do not touch any door handles as you enter, the door will be open.
Shoes off at the door as usual
Put your bag in the 2nd room that is more spacious so as to have less contact with your class mates, wait for room to be clear before placing your belongings on a shelf.
Proceed immediately to the kitchen to wash your hands, waiting for the person before you to finish before you proceed.
Bring your own blanket, if you do not have one use one of the studio blankets that will be spaced around the classroom and take it home for the duration of this madness and bring to class each time.
Obviously don’t come to class if unwell or if a family member is unwell.
We won’t be using the eye pillows but feel free to bring your own.
Use the toilet in the other room. Please take your shoes.
I won’t be adjusting people and avoid hugging and kissing each other! (so sad)
I will be mopping the floor before each class and wiping down all handles and common areas.
LET’S STAY CONNECTED
WhatsApp group
I would also like to get a WhatsApp yoga group going as many of you don’t use social media or might be sensibly trying to avoid it in these troubled times and it is a way I can connect with you, give you yoga tips and challenges, you can ask questions, to let you know when the zoom classes are running and to generally keep our spirits up. By staying connected we will also be able to help each other out with practical things like ‘does anyone have any toilet paper’! Jokes aside, apart from the menial practicalities of all this, it would also be wise to be able to keep a check on anyone who make get sick and need a helping hand. One way to counteract all the fear we may feel in times like these is to focus on helping others that are less fortunate than ourselves.
LASTLY
I have copied and pasted below Dr Robert Svoboda’s thoughtful words he posted on his Insta this week as I found them very helpful! Let’s all try to not let the terror short circuit our brains and be in a state of aimless reaction, instead take a moment to pause and give the mind time to act purposefully.
Keep well my lovelies, keep in touch, be kind to yourselves and those around you and keep smiling.
As COVID-19 (now officially known as SARS-CoV-2) continues to spread around the world, governments and medical professionals are struggling to identify just how extensive that spread will actually be and the least intrusive and most efficient ways to limit that spread. Watchful attentiveness and avoidance of crowds, coupled with repeated hand washing and restrictions on touching MEN (mouth, eyes, nose), are for now the best preventative actions, in addition to strategic purchases of items that you know that you will personally require for the next couple of weeks. In this climate of uncertainty however many people are freaking out, and acting in ways that will ultimately benefit neither them nor their loved ones, in particular buying up everything they can.
Being a recent evolutionary development the human mind has not yet fully matured, and so when confronted with a crisis many minds lose the ability to think clearly. By ‘mind’ I mean the mental function known in Sanskrit as manas, which coordinates the perceptions that we obtain from our senses into a meaningful narrative that buddhi, our internal faculty of discernment, can use to inform manas how to respond to that narrative. Terror shorts circuits this process, leading people to react rather to act purposefully.
And so we are witnessing aggressive panic buying, much of which seems unusually irrational, such as the ongoing global run on toilet paper. A good deal of this is being driven by herd behaviour, or “emotional contagion”. We all tend to “mirror” one another, at least in part thanks to the “mirror neurons” that appear in several brain regions, and being hyper-social animals we are all, consciously or less consciously, aligned with our closest peeps. We are so similar to our friends in how we perceive and respond to the world around us that these similarities can be used to predict not only who our friends are but also how close we are to them socially.
Such potential for alignments makes it easy for us to align with the emotional states of others, which means that we can “catch” emotions from even casual interactions if the general level of unrest in a population in sufficiently high. Fear and anxiety are particularly “infectious,” and can lead to stampedes: when a few in a crowd perceive what they believe to be a threat their sudden fear and ensuing flight may convince those around them of the need to flee as well, and soon the entire mob has been induced to run, often without direction or purpose.
This is bad enough in a localized throng (a word that earlier meant “to press or crush”), but thanks to round-the-clock news bulletins and social media postings that magnify the speed at which “emotional contagion” can spread through a population, COVID-19 has spurred wide swaths of the world’s population to shift into panic mode. It is a truth about humanity that we each have a need to feel competent, to feel in control of our lives, and to act in accordance with those in society that we are close to. Now that most people self-identify as consumers, they consume when stressed, and panic buying can be understood thus: you see other people buying, and you buy; you see photos of empty shelves, and you (wanting to feel and seem to be competent consume) don’t want to be left out.
In a time like now, with a potential lethal menace heading toward each of us and with great uncertainty about how to address that peril, fear makes that threat loom so sinister that a worldwide stampede has begun, focused on purchases particularly of items in large packages (like toilet paper) whose very size suggests to the subconscious a “large” response to the danger.
Even if you are yourself able to resist panic purchases, you will still feel the threat, which you will need to address in some way that is meaningful to you, that is appropriate to the hazard, and that will reduce instead of promote fear contagion. One good way to begin is to give a name to what you are feeling, as doing so temporarily takes you out of that state, whatever it might be.
Once you are examining your situation with increased objectivity, remember that a common cognitive bias is to overemphasizing events that are recent and very vivid. In other words, try to create a more balanced perspective from which to view the situation. Gratitude for what you already have is a great way to begin. In addition, we can all be extremely grateful to Nature that She has decided to slap our wayward species back into wakefulness with a malady whose death rate seems to be stabilizing at about 4%, not the nearly 10% of the first SARS, nor the 35% of MERS. Both these are also coronaviruses, and both like COVID-19 originally originated in animals before they shifted to humans. Thank you Providence!
Since manas always wants to try to think its way out of situations, let it think, but not an in uncontrolled, “OMG what will happen next???” fashion. Find reliable sources of information, become as clear as you can on diagnosis and prognosis, and when you run out of things to think about but still can’t stop thinking, remember that manas comes from the Sanskrit root man, “to think”. The Sanskrit suffix tra means “instrument of” of “protector of”, which makes man + tra = mantra “the instrument of thinking” or “the protector of thought”.
Focus therefore on your mantra, or a mantra, on one of the many names of the Supreme Being. Rely on internal rather than external factors to taking back control in a world that is increasingly out of control. When you do this in concert with others who are striving to do the right thing, you have a satsanga, and in the words of a Sanskrit saying, “what can satsanga not do for humans?”
How long COVID-19 will afflict us and how badly we don’t yet know. What we should all remember is that we should not make a bad situation worse by running about aimlessly like headless chickens.
Om namah sivaya!
Dr Robert Svoboda
