After almost two years of pandemic, we all have hopes for a better New Year. Here are some ideas to help you create new beginnings.

For almost two years, people have faced losses and challenges of the pandemic. For some, the disruptions have brought struggles and setbacks. Others have found ways to use the time to plan and improve their lives through goals and resolutions. One upside: many people are learning to let go of worrying about things they can’t control. Instead, they’re focusing on personal goals that are attainable, resulting in more people achieving what they set out to do, a recent survey found.

Goals are great because they give you direction. Maybe you need to lose some weight and increase your level of energy, vitality, and health. Maybe you want to develop some new relationships or strengthen, build, or heal some existing ones. You might want to go back to school or just learn something new.

Try These Ideas to Stay in Touch With Those You Love and Care About Through the Pandemic & Beyond

Social distancing and travel restrictions over the past year have left many people feeling isolated and lonely. One recent survey found 67% of Americans have felt more alone than ever before since the pandemic began.

People have also been coping with increased stress, sadness, worry, and uncertainty. They’ve lost loved ones and jobs to COVID-19, struggled to care for children forced to study from home, and lived in a constant state of vigilance trying to keep themselves and their families well. Almost 4 in 10 Americans say worry and stress in the pandemic has harmed their mental health.

We all hope the pandemic will be over soon, bringing an easing of restrictions and a return to a more normal life. Yet for many people, it may be some time before they’re able to connect with loved ones in the same way they did before.

Fortunately, there are many ways to connect deeply with the people we care about and stay in touch until the time when we can see them in person again. Here are some ideas to try that can help you feel connected and in touch with those you love:

By James Arbib, Tony Seba and Deepak Chopra™ MD

2020, the year of the global pandemic, was in many ways an urgent wake-up call for humanity – demonstrating perhaps more clearly than ever that our conventional models of reality are deeply out of sync with the real world. The confused and incoherent responses to COVID-19 highlight the inadequacy of our collective sense-making and governance systems. But the pandemic might be just the catalyst for a profoundly disruptive and unstable decade. Driven, on one hand, by a convergence of complex global crises, from climate change to economic instability, from food scarcity to mental health as our current world order begins to fall apart; and on the other, by the cascading impacts of disruption to every sector of the economy as a new order emerges. Never has the need to understand the underlying processes of change that drive these extraordinary occurrences been more acute and consequential.

This speaks to a much deeper problem than recognised by conventional analysts – that our underlying models of thought and reality are increasingly out of touch with the interconnected complexity of global systems. If we are to successfully navigate the coming decades of crisis and disruption, then, we require not merely technocratic external solutions applied as a kind of ‘band aid’ to these mounting challenges, but rather a fundamental reset of how we think and see these challenges in the first place.

The metaheuristic of reductionism

At the core of the problem is a reductionist model of the world that has outlived its usefulness. Although reductionism as reflected across society has indeed enabled huge progress such as enabling incredible medical advances, the model is not adequate to the current crises, and now has become our biggest impediment.

Loneliness, isolation, and despair are costing lives; stay connected with others and release emotional baggage to guard against them

Feelings of loneliness can be very hard to deal with. Modern society has had a tendency to isolate us from one another even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but since its arrival feelings of isolation and loneliness have gone off the scale.

Hundreds of millions of people have lost their livelihood due to the shutdowns. The divorce rate has gone up, as has the suicide rate. While we know COVID-19 has caused 2.8 million deaths worldwide, including almost 550,000 in the US, researchers are just beginning to look at the cost of increased loneliness as a result of government lockdowns. These costs are particularly high among the elderly and those who live alone.

“For more than a million residents of nursing homes, the lockdowns themselves have been devastating,” the New York Times reported. “Cut off from family and largely confined to their rooms, many residents lost weight and saw ailments worsen. Some grew increasingly confused. Others sank into depression and despair.”

For more than a year, health officials have told the public to wear masks and stay at least six feet apart to slow the spread of the virus. But wearing masks and being unable to share simple touch also comes with a cost.

When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.

Right now the push to control the latest surges in Covid have focused on three things that have gained around-the-clock publicity: masks, distancing, and vaccines. Relying on them has given people hope in the face of the pandemic. But there are sources of hope, including a new one just added to the mix, that everyone should know about.

These sources of hope are based on an aspect of daily life that is ordinary and at the same time extremely complex and mysterious.  Every day your body goes through a healing cycle. This cycle is the product of billions of years of evolution, setting in place many cycles, clocks, feedback loops, and chemical messaging. But the upshot is a total reset of the mindbody system every day. Anything that has gone out of balance is reset, and all the parts of the system once again mesh as they were designed to.

There's No Handbook For Life

"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only love."

-Mother Teresa

I've Been Thinking...

Something interesting happened to me the other day. Just after I had spent the better part of an hour talking about all the things I missed due to the pandemic, I stumbled upon an article talking about all the good things that people felt had happened to them during this time. It reminded me that perspective is everything.
 

The key is being able to hold the yin and yang. If I were writing a handbook for life (and I’m not), it would include a lot that no one told me about. It would talk about how life demands that you be good—really good—at juggling and balancing the paradoxes of life. You must if you want to be a survivor or a happy warrior.

Just when you think, “OK, I’ve got things figured out,” life throws you on the ground. Just when the country reopens and you think, “OK, maybe things are going to get better," the cases surge and the nation experiences its highest numbers to date. Just when you pick yourself up and dust yourself off from one of life’s curveballs, bam! You find yourself on your knees again, learning yet another life lesson.

Silence & Stillness – The Final Frontier

Take a moment and raise your point of view to the thought that during this pandemic, from a more ‘cosmic standpoint,’ we have actually done everything right! In fact, some would argue, it could not be any other way!

In the same way being in a boat on the surface of the ocean during a great storm, one would never be able to know the stillness that lies beneath the surface of the waves as they bounce you around demanding your full attention for fear of capsizing, for fear of dying! 

Below the waves of this pandemic that have kept our attention bouncing so completely and often in fear-based thinking; there has been taking place a great Stillness, impregnated into every nook and cranny of earth, human activity and all of life Itself!

This Stillness has been yearning to be recognized for eternity and whereas some have made the superficially perilous journey inward to this magnificent place of peace and silence: many more than not have put it off for a time when it would be ‘right’ for them to do so. 

And now, this ‘Stillness,’ this ‘Silence,’ has weaseled its way onto earth, for good. While no one was looking and everyone was busy being distracted by the pandemic, the Spirit of Love, Truth and Peace may just have settled Its way into the collective unconscious of humanity forever, awaiting Its sacred time and moment to subtly, overtly, gradually or explosively shatter the old ways of being and doing while replacing them with sustainable frequencies and forms as the foundational building blocks of the long anticipated New Earth!