Being Present During the Lockdown
by Brigitte Champetier de Ribes. May 2020, during home lockdown.
The Outbreak of the Pandemic
Our life has suddenly been suspended, some working for everyone, others locked at home, teleworking or not working, social life frozen, the city is empty, the world paralyzed.
Thirty, forty days or more without mobility and without freedom. Weeks of withdrawal in company with our closest ones, of loneliness, helplessness and defencelessness.
In this general climate of confusion and absolute uncertainty, each of us has held the helm doing our best within our possibilities. The families have enjoyed being together. These have been days of deepening in the relationships, of surprising coexistence. A few days of necessary rest. A retreat which has been a gift.
And yet, we have had very hard times that made us doubt ourselves and our connection with the greater service that life is asking of us now.
It’s been enough weeks to lose our benchmarks. From the shelter of our homes we are watching how our previous society, from just two months ago, is put in parentheses.
Hoping that after the lockdown everything will go back to the way it used to be.
But life does not go back, what has been lived is irreversible. We will realize with time.
Deep changes take time to manifest but nothing stops them.
We are now fully on the descent into darkness of a totally unpredictable situation. We are at the beginning of chaos.
Never like today had the radical uncertainty of life become so tangible.
It’s our turn to give ourselves with open eyes and hearts, to allow for the birth of a new stage of our world.
The Good Solution is Always Collective
There is no individual solution. Every good solution for one person is so because it is good for all her communities of destiny.
The collective began with a person who joined another and will heal thanks to each one’s individual attitude.
The individual is at the service of the collective, and the collective destiny experiences evolutionary leaps according to the thoughts, emotions and actions of each individual.
The Void that Fills Us
We are energy, the sub-particles that make us up are more emptiness than matter. The creative void. Emptiness crossed by the loving conscience that thinks everything, and when it thinks it, it creates it.
Its permanent gaze of love transforms it into what It creates.
It moves everything with the same love.
All oriented towards more love, creating more love.
Love inhabits the emptiness that fills us.
By opening up to our cells we find love and the joy of living. We find the presence of the void and its strength.
At home. The test of the home.
All locked in our houses. What does it mean for our unconscious to be only at home? What changes will it allow at the collective level?
The house represents for some the place to relax from social and work obligations, and for others it is the opposite, it is where to attend to the maintenance of the home and the family, buy, clean, wash, iron, etc.
The house represents the center of our life, our home in our image, from where we expand outwards and towards the others.
The house represents protection, security. She is a great mother and for those who have not taken their autonomy, the current house will always be the blurred memory of the home of her childhood.
At home: The return of the past
The bed house
In the Latin culture, being at home means being in pyjamas, that is, in bed clothes; we only get dressed to go out into the street. For what? For whom?
Does it give strength and joy to your partner or your children to see you in bed clothes during the day? Does it give you energy? Does it lift your spirits?
Return to the oral and anal phase
In our developed society, being locked down at home has given rise to forgotten habits: millions of families, in a first phase, have revolved around the kitchen; flour and yeast have been wiped out in supermarkets. A few weeks later, with the extra weight asking for a truce from the biscuits, a new discipline is established: tidying up closets. Half the planet putting order in their wardrobes, extraordinary! “As it is outside, so is inside”. We have collectively prepared ourselves to put order in our lives, to begin to be congruent, and all at the same time.
The invasion of the difficult emotions
The house is the metaphor of the mother, it gives us shelter, it connects us with emotions, with tenderness, the lacking, the endearing, loneliness, the aesthetic, the dark, the invisible, the sacred. Simultaneously, it takes away our strength since our energy develops at work, outside the home. An energy that grows in the need to fulfil a function, in our responsibilities as members of the collective, in projects at the service of others.
Staying at home for a long time, without any alternative or external contact, takes away our adult resources at times and, suddenly, we find ourselves invaded by the unresolved anguish of that past child of our distant childhood and the unsolved conflicts of recent years . Past traumas return, family history becomes present.
Feeling prey to “negative” emotions again, we also become aware of the presence of immense morphic fields of desolation and grief. We perceive the harshness of the lives of millions of people. Thanks to these fields we are connected to all of them.
For many, after remarkable days of self-discipline, meditation, gymnastics, music, culture, we are suddenly taken over by afflictions and torments that we thought were forgotten. And we find ourselves vulnerable, hypersensitive and defenceless
The obligatory path
Going through that stage is absolutely necessary in the current situation. From it will emerge our ability to resurface as new persons. If we have managed to spend all these weeks without descending into hell, we can congratulate ourselves on our self-discipline or our luck, but we will not be able to participate in the rebirth of humanity.
We have needed to fall into the pit, lose our footing, let go of the previous securities to open ourselves to another stage. Getting ready for something new.
Humbly, from our darkness and vulnerability, we surrender to that here and now which is disconcerting for it is unrecognizable.
We say thanks for all of the above, which allows us to be what we are today, in service. In the service of liberating the pain of the past, in the service of a leap in the evolution of human beings.
The Blow of Life
For many the shock has been the brutal disappearance of the economic security that allowed them to ensure the future of their families and employees. Many have lost their jobs, others fear for their companies.
Several have lost a relative, suddenly, unable to accompany them in their last days, with an immense feeling of guilt for not having been present when they were most needed.
Many worry about their health and their life.
Facing an unthinkable mourning
The world has changed, the security that we had achieved has been blown up.
As it happens when we are faced with any death, the first reaction is to deny the existence of that change. The next thing is to feel prisoners of fear, of paralysis or anguish, or to find someone to blame, to get angry with life, with everything and with everyone.
We are flooded by pain, fear and anguish. The past has disappeared. We are facing a huge farewell imposed by a world drama. We are torn and in immensely lonely. We feel abandoned by God and life itself.
We feel helpless, betrayed, without resources. The old wounds have reappeared in despair.
The ancient past adds to our dread. At the same time, we are victims of the resonance fields of anguish, fed by the fright and misunderstanding of half the humanity, which finds itself at risk of being swallowed up by bankruptcy or physical or social death.
Anguish and despair take away our strength and vision. However, they are necessary steps to bid farewell to the securities that no longer exist.
Denial gives way to anger. Anger, criticism, the search for guilty ones, show us that our internal energy has grown again. We are no longer helpless, desperate, desolate victims. We have energy to start acting, though with this bitterness our energy is totally unproductive. It prevents us from focusing on our present and the adequate action.
When we are already determined to act, to assent, to modify our lives, our inner adult can take command. Determined to face the new present, dedicated to taking action.
We continue with all our responsibilities. We are determined to assume them, whatever the new conditions.
Cosmic fear or anger give way to the adult for whom there are no problems, only new ways of acting. We then experience that we are guided.
The creative void guides us if we allow it space in our life.
Locked alone
The conditions in which we are living the quarantine remind our unconscious of those same moments in which, as children, we experienced the great wounds of our lives.
An event becomes a trauma when it is experienced alone, without sharing, and it happens in an inconceivable way, without prior notice and the person was not ready to go through it.
Locked up home alone, the conditions of the old trauma have quietly come back and their return calls forth memories that get us down.
We thought we had overcome that anguish, that we were already on a path of growth enough not to suffer it again. We have organised ourselves with discipline and profound joy, in order to offer our greatest energy, our sincere purification, to the world.
And yet we are again sunk in anguish, helplessness and silence.
A great test, a long purification: solitude and silence as obligated companions.
Our guide accompanies us in the search for new resources, but there are times when our poor humanity does not resist so much isolation.
The strength of others, visible and invisible, will lift us up again. We are all connected.
Slowly, we will return to the connection with our mission.
Humble and much greater, more compassionate and understanding, very prepared to help.
The Field Knows
It Was Preparing Us
We look at our past. Nothing made us foresee this catastrophe. However, we realize that we were gathering strength, know-how and understandings that are now essential. The field knows. The field knew. It was preparing us.
What to do?
We know that everything is going towards something better for everyone. Even though it may not be on our scale, it may be another generation who will see the fruits of this great global disaster.
It is not about erasing the past and starting from scratch. But about opening ourselves to all our resources in order to adapt them to new circumstances.
For some, current conditions only represent a new incentive, an extension of their scope of action, adapting to new ways of acting and working.
For others, life is asking them to start all over again. To look at the new needs, to realize of what they can offer, letting go of habits and taking the risk of including something new.
For some more, it’s about letting ourselves flow with the new. It is not about making new decisions, with the anguish of knowing what might be the most opportune decision, but about surrendering to what is there, abiding by the new conditions and acting with the present. From this active surrender, appropriate actions will necessarily be born at the service of the emergence of a new order.
Difficulties and the creative void
Responses of rejection, rebellion, criticism, judgement and complaint cover up the rejection to take on a new action. These reactions feed the negative and dramatic aspect of the new situation.
Difficulties are part of the language of the creative void.
They show us a new direction.
They encourage us to let go and adapt to something new, to take on new responsibilities, to let go of previous goals or expectations, opening ourselves to the field of all possibilities.
Constellations and the quantum show us that repeating the past means walking into failure.
On the contrary, our guide, at the service of our hologram, encourages us to dare and let go of control of our future, to accept that everything is necessary, that each one does what he knows how to do and each one is where he needs to be. All fulfilling the same service.
Serving with a New Vision
We do not know at which point of the curve we are. Have we reached the bottom? It is not up to us to make predictions, the only thing that life and our hologram ask of us is that we surrender to the present.
Unconditionally.
We look at how our ancestors suffered protecting the lives of their families and what they ask of us now: that their sacrifices have not been in vain. Life offers us the way to heal their inheritance by doing “that” for what they gave their lives: to live the life they passed on to us, with gratitude and love.
See today’s pain
To be present, in the here and now, is to become aware of today’s pain.
It is, above all, seeing the dead, their families torn apart and full of guilt.
And also, it is to realize that for the majority of the world’s population, this confinement in unhealthy places means one more torment in their subjugated life: populations overcrowded due to poverty, fields of millions of migrants, with the loss of the right to work or begging, without food supplies, with their basic needs severed, with tensions that are released by venting with scapegoats, generally women and children of both sexes.
It is necessary to see this with pain. To surrender. To honor their destinies and to thank them for being who they are.
I feel the pain and cry inside, out of love for all of them.
At the same time I am present in myself and I feel my cells, their incessant life, their antenna oriented towards more life and the presence of all my ancestors in each one of them. Every one of my cells smiles at me.
I smile at them.
They allow me to collect myself on the deceased of the present moment.
New Insights
We are beginning to become aware of the dimension of the global change that is coming. Now, for most of us, what matters is to forget our plans and face something different, for new rules and new needs of those around us.
We are living in our flesh the birth of new insights. One of them is the need to work, another is the need for adult freedom.
At the service of something new
All of humanity is falling into chaos. We belong. Individual attitudes are the ones that transform the collective destiny, creating congruence and resonance with those who vibrate at the same frequencies.
Today the Covid19 asks us for this transformative attitude. The constellations of the pandemic show it again and again: the Coronavirus urges us to release the dead of the past, to go through the pain as adults, to stop imitating others, to live the present, our present, in service .
We return to our center. Everything is necessary as it is. I surrender to my destiny. To what corresponds to me. In my center, in the void of my cells, in the silence of my body, I encounter myself again, I encounter another ineffable dimension, the totality, again. Like everyone else, today taken all at once at the service of collective destiny, I surrender at the service of a new quantum leap in the evolution of humanity.
We can only surrender to the greatness of this moment in our life and to the mission that each one of us is having to live in this planetary movement.