Also read: Anastasia Commenting On Taylor: "I Was Afraid She Was Going To Kill Herself"
We are amazing!
Pandemic syndrome symptoms plaguing you?
Feeling agitated, driven by fear and urgency, mental fogginess, lack of motivation, unfinished – not yet even begun -- GRIEF healing -- resentment, isolation- threatened by civic unrest and violence and on and on – in the era of the pandemic and Trump?
Consider this ...
Taylor (not her real name), a long-term NH/ZOP Board and community member, was still, three years after, struggling to manage and heal from one of the Northern California wildfires of 2018 that had consumed her home, leaving only a pile of ashes where the marriage and family life she had once worked so diligently to create, were also part of the rubble.
Emotional devastation, hopelessness, despair and suicidal ideation were never far from her mind.
In February, 2020, just weeks before covid-19 pandemic lockdowns was mandated, I, unknowing of what lay ahead, set out to guide Taylor through Part 1/10 of my unpublished Random House Trilogy to help her save her life.
My belief was that if I could teach her to healthfully deal with her intense, survival-driven emotions and acting out behaviors, I thought I could help her turn her life around.
FYI: Thinking clearly about emotions, especially those telated to survival threats, real or imagined, generally feels as life-threatening as emotions can be!
Often they are experienced as terrifying, to be avoided, minimized, denied or repressed. Anything to get away from them.
Learning to " think about these feelings, feel the truth of what you are thinking and manage them effectively was quite the challenge I hoped to help Taylor surmount.
When we began, Taylor could do none of this.
Actually, as a pandemic survivor, you too probably already know about this difficulty yourself, and/or are learnng, more or less effectivly, that living under constant concerns for survival, as people are doing world-wide, can be pretty terrifying for real.
So how do YOU or I manage it?
Especially when the imminent threat is gone but you still feel TERRIFIED, as did Taylor for three, long, harrowimg years.
Almost FROZEN with fear, confusion and anguish!
Now, the NH ZOP Board Members who made up this "Original, Elite Mss Study Group" with Taylor are celebrating and, alongside her, developing skill in this area.
Mastery will still take time.
Imagine how incredibly life changing this has been for all of us!
Especially these past eighteen months!
That's also the story about how we came to title one of our next important initiatives, The Mindful Cult Of GRAD.
It was those feelings: fear, terror, loss, abandonment and rage for starters -- that seemed most apt to derail Tayloe.
And, of course, that same bundle of hard to manage, pandemic-evoked emotions challenges most of us.
Now -- get this -Taylor ASSURES ME - eighteen months after her having completed what I intended to be only a five or six week class/study group that continued for all the eighteen months of the pandemic -- We Won!!
Begun just !! two weeks prior to our initial covid-19 pandemic lockdown March 16 -- the combination of this class and our twice weekly Pandemic Survivors Support Group, NOT ONLY SAVED Taylor's Life-- as I set out to do, but additionally, with her diligence, courage and trust in me, built on our 31 year!! relationship -- I was able to succesfully guide her to put her life on a path of ascending to BE and DO her best possible.
And, to even learn to enjoy life again.
WOW!!
All that during the pandemic as we, along with everyone else is and was fighting to come through severe adversity.
So, as of last Friday --
I am pleased and proud to announce I graduated Compassionate Warrior Woman In Training, My Taylor!!
More to come.
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