This article explores the hidden struggles individuals face when practicing mindfulness in the wake of COVID-19. 'Post-COVID' symptoms, often overlooked, can manifest as a range of physical, emotional, cognitive, and attentional challenges, hindering the focus and clarity essential for mindfulness.
COVID has been a massive global trauma, with effects that persist both psychologically and medically. This is the third (of four) posts on the surprising, poorly appreciated presence of cryptic suffering under the pram cover, the umbrella term of'Post-COVID.' For more than a few of us, our bawling New Year's bambino has been accompanied by a confusing mix of physical, emotional, cognitive, and attentional symptoms that defy easy explanation.
In the first two posts, we identified and validated its most common aspects and worked through the prevailing, developing understanding(s) of how a long-resolved viral infection can supercharge our immune systems to overdo its job. In nursing a few more words (sorry) out of this topic, let's look at how these weird, sometimes even disabling phenomena can interfere with a functioningamid the goo. I'll fall back on a metaphoric see-saw* familiar to meditators: the spectrum of distracting stuff that interrupts the smooth sailing of the mind in sitting practice. Let's think about monkeys and mud.Primary physical inputs caused by the post-COVID symptoms themselves, such as joint pain, heart palpitations, variable fatigue from the recent night's sketchy sleep, and mood changes that often includeand depressive effects. Especially intrusive are cognitive struggles; sticking with a sequence of intended targets for observation, or even just one, getting scrambled in returning to the attentional plan when the inevitable losses of Then there is the secondary impact—usually, our judgmental reactions to our minds in struggle. Harshly judging a tough day on the cushion is already a challenge of meditating. Our reactions to the primary stuff listed above can spin up just more upset—irritability at the moment, anxiety and dread-casting of incipientat that unmasked dope on the plane who coughed all over his seatmates through a flight three years ago. (But enough about me.) It can be hard to sit calmly through all that, trying to coax the monkeys back into the jungle, or their cubicles. It can be, um, bananas.On the opposite end of the attentional struggle is not a mind simmering with simians, but instead mud, sludge, and pea soup. Again, meditators know this'tuning-out' as an inevitable experience in many sittings. Rather than an intensity of mental phenomena, there's a slowing or even shutting down of attention. Here, the gross fatigue of post-COVID states piles on calm lucidity tipping easily into sluggishness. The cognitive'fog' makes it hard to rouse attention to even notice the state, let alone act to try to regroup, settle, and re-attend. The usual palliatives to the mud require a bit of physical and attentional juice that's just not available. As with the monkey mind, reactivity to the struggle present at the jungle gym may also be in play over in the mud puddle. In the case of tune-out, it may even seem like a no-go to even continue. Bye-bye playground; meditation turns into nap time. Which, of course, may be the best thing to do, to be pragmatic. What do we do about these post-viral spoilsports of mindfulness? We'll cover that in part IV. A spoiler alert, consider it a mindful lesson in radical acceptance of the (difficult) moment.
POST-COVID MINDFULNESS HEALTH WELL-BEING MENTAL HEALTH
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