Our world is in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s challenging all of us and it’s bringing up many feelings some of which may include: fear, despair, loneliness, introspection, connection, and joy.

Despite each of our unique situations, we’re all responding in different ways. Some people are on the front lines making sure we all stay safe. Others are homeschooling their kids while trying to work from home. There are some small businesses and professionals who have had to close their doors or whose businesses are halted to an almost complete stop. Some people are decluttering their homes, taking online courses, or starting home projects they’d been meaning to do for a long time. Others may be having trouble getting out of their pyjamas or staving off the panic driven thoughts and feelings of how they will pay their bills, take care of their kids, or stay safe inside their own homes.

Whichever scenario feels like yours, I think we are all experiencing moments during this pandemic where we feel unsure, scared, or perhaps out of control.  So what do we do during these moments so that we can make it through, together?

I’d like to start with a grounding exercise entitled, Welcoming Practice.  It’s from a book a read called, Overcoming Trauma through Yoga – Reclaiming Your Body written by David Emerson and Elizabeth Hopper, PhD. I will talk more about it more later in the podcast but it may be a nice way to take a break. And it’s found on page 7.

You may have heard the phrase, “feel your feelings” and that feelings are natural. We don’t choose them but we can choose how to move through them.  The thing is we need to be able to handle our feelings in order to sit in them in order to move through them.  When I work with clients we talk about something called a window of tolerance, a term noted by Dan Siegel and Pat Ogden.

Everyone’s window, or capacity to be with and manage their feelings, is a different size: some emotional windows are smaller than others and they may feel overwhelmed sooner than someone who has a larger window who can tolerate more challenging situations for longer. No capacity is better than another – it just is.

What’s most important is knowing our own capacity so we can manage our own emotions. When we feel out of our window of tolerance, we could have a heightened response to a situation with an increased heart rate, breathing, feeling nauseous or having racing thoughts, or feeling overwhelmed with emotion, or acting impulsively. Or we could be outside of our window with a more shut down or collapsed response like a decrease in our heart rate or breathing, feeling like we can’t think at all, feeling numb or depressed, withdrawing from our people or activities, or feeling extremely sleepy.

Once we know what being out of our window of tolerance looks like for us, it’s important to know that it may change given what is happening in our lives.  With a pandemic, our usual capacity probably looks different now. You could think of it as your capacity to work out when you are sick or after you’ve been injured.  Initially, we take time to give our body a chance to heal and then we work slowly to gain back our strength. The same is with feelings after an adverse life event. How we feel our feelings will look differently for everyone but the common action is to titrate or make that capacity bigger, little by little, by noticing and then taking a break to ground, then repeat until we feel calm again.

Before we feel our feelings, it’s important to know about how to ground ourselves when we notice that we have left our window of tolerance. So if the feelings we are sitting in begin to feel overwhelming, then we know that we can press pause and know how to get back to baseline without feeling like we need to numb out, or injure ourselves or those around us.

When grounding, an option is to shift our focus to our senses…wh