How the Pandemic Led to an Awakening

Repost from 2021

I’ve made observations in talking with many people during the last year and half and a common theme is profound change in letting go of control, acceptance and ultimately surrender. These are precepts commonly associated with spirituality and are likely the impetus for the awakening so many of us are experiencing. As we all know, this pandemic was a global force that many balked and clamored about before being forced into submission. 

As anyone who’s had a spiritual awakening can tell you, it is often sparked by a breaking down or rock bottom type of experience. Some use the analogy of a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon. I think of a pearl and how it begins when an irritant causes the formation of a luminescent coating. 

Not to diminish the tremendous suffering our human race has faced in the last year and a half, but it’s certainly safe to assume that, at the very least, this pandemic has been an irritant for many people. Eckhart Tolle has described the current global pandemic as a time of chaos and disruption and an invitation to accept the present moment for what it is. Disruption and chaos at the level of expanse we’re experiencing has the ability to break us wide open. It is a cataclysmic change in full effect. 

I know a thing or two about cataclysmic change forcing life into a surrender - surrender which leads to a faith of sorts - it’s a giving up and giving over. An acceptance that we don’t possess control of all things in life - that a force greater than ourselves is more powerful than we are - that if we look to that power for direction we can relax into the knowing that it is in control and we can drop our resistance. We can give up the fight. 

Broadly speaking, we’ve seen the pandemic divide humanity into two categories; those who surrendered to the force that disrupted their lives and those who railed against it - assigning the force to people in positions of power rather than viewing it as the pandemic itself creating disruption and chaos.

Despite this divide, we were all forced indoors - shifting the balance of yin and yang energy for the whole planet. We all know the yin yang symbol but did you know that in ancient China this represented the union of opposites? The opposites represented by masculine and feminine energies. In all of life, masculine and feminine energies are present. These energies are not about gender, but about expansion and contraction. Yin is the feminine life force of receptivity, while yang is the masculine force of action. 

For decades now, much of the globe had been out of alignment as societies all over the world became more action oriented in the rat race and the drive for income and power. To participate in the hustle and bustle we needed to be very much in our masculine energy. Mandatory lock downs and quarantine positioned billions of individuals to shift out of the force of action and into the receptive mode associated with feminine energy. 

For those receptive to embracing this shift, we find our balance is being restored.