Spiritual Practice During Times of Pandemic

Three or four weeks ago I had a really hard time practicing stillness meditation, a very difficult time sitting down to read—felt antsy, felt anxious.

And I realized that this is the mental environment. The mental environment of the whole world has changed overnight, and will change in the nights ahead—phenomenal opportunity to learn about the mental environment and to learn about yourself and how you respond to it and how you generate your own waves of fear and concern and how you respond to the waves of fear and concern coming from outside of you.

So this [Coronavirus] pandemic is a wave; it’s a force. And this is an opportunity to get stronger, even though you may not look very strong going through it, right, because when you’re in the gym working out lifting harder and harder weight, you’re not looking good while you do it. You’re just doing it.

So holding yourself together, maintaining a basic practice, not getting swept up into blame and taking sides and subscribing to conspiracies about how this began and who’s behind it and all of this stuff—all of this is the mind, again, becoming ungrounded and unhitched. And we want to stay grounded and connected on the inside.

So practice forgoing all of that, and instead, maintaining yourself through this—maintaining your mental well-being, your physical health. Your stillness practice could be very challenging. But that’s the gift of this challenge. You know, this is a day in the gym—a big one. So we’re lifting new levels of weight. We’re facing new levels of resistance. And that’s an opportunity to grow.

Reed Summers talks about the challenge of spiritual practice during times of stress like the current coronavirus pandemic. He speaks to what we all can relate to – the internal anxiety and fear we experience and how to maintain a foundational spiritual practice.