Tag Archive for: pandemic

Tammy in Motorcycle Gear

A Weird and Wonderful NYC Motorcycle Ride

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Tammy in Motorcycle GearLong summer treks out of city congestion balance my need for the open road. I’ve lived on a motorcycle in NYC traffic for 25-years.

How unusual to have open road around me when riding through midtown Manhattan. A summer trek right here on Broadway!

CoronaVirus has completely changed the landscape.

It’s an infectious landscape of silence and sirens. Fear-filled vulnerability has seeped into our soft tissues. The streets are near empty. A world is hiding to stay alive.

This feels weird. I’m used to feeling afraid of the world, even hiding from it at times. But, in this moment, there’s no immediate world to be afraid of. It’s surreal. I actually feel safer riding my motorcycle up Broadway than ever before.

As I continue up Central Park West, I hear sirens. Suddenly, I’m whipped back into the landscape I’m familiar with in NYC—traffic. But this time, I embrace the scene. Instead of people being in my way, I felt in their company.

My body feels like it’s riding into a gathering. My body isn’t fearing or dreading its environment. It’s curious about being together with people—having a shared experience.

This feels wonderful. I want to be in relationship with—in communion with—something real.

This is definitely not how I typically approach a NYC traffic jam!
This is definitely not how we feel approaching each other, masked with eyes down, since hit by this pandemic.

But, I have all my motorcycle gear on. No surgical mask necessary when wearing a full-face helmet!

I rode through familiar neighborhoods that day. Visiting a client’s courtyard who passed away from COVID-19, checking on houses of people out of town, and waving to doormen I used to see regularly. But nothing felt the same.

Usually my gear protects me from the world. On this day, it united me with it.
Usually my fear separates me from the world. On this day, it connected me to it.

How weird and wonderful to separate from my habit to fear. And for a moment, be curios about its impermanence, illusiveness and trickery.

Practice Comfort

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Doubts, about our future, tug at everyone’s nerves. But there is no room for self-doubt when so many of us need to create new avenues of income, and new avenues for connection.

Some of you may feel no purpose to guide you; some of you live with no human, animal or plant that affirms your value.

What were once low-grade self-doubts can become booming self-limiting judgments.

Self-doubt is where your resistance to self-care and personal comfort lie. Care and comfort, however, are day-to-day core conditions that maintain immune strength, emotional resilience and mental clarity.

Care and comfort are not luxuries, they are essentials, when facing the atmosphere that this viral pandemic has commanded––a sudden divorce from belonging in, and unexpected isolation from, the world.

Delight lifts you out of the self-doubt that interferes with self-care and comfort. But it’s very hard to be delighted by what you’re actively judging as limited.

So, we need to learn and practice self-acceptance to realize personal potential.

To delight in self-acceptance is to enjoy: yourself, your body, and your unique way of seeing life. This authentic experience of yourself is what makes you one of a kind and elevates you to realizing the Divine in you. This best-self experience keeps you inspired to develop and share your gifts in the world, even if it must be through a computer screen during these times.

So how do you recognize your best-self?

Start by identifying something you really like about yourself. Like for me, I really like that my hair turned white rather than gray. I can count on this being a feel-good statement about myself no matter what else is happening.

Practice staying in alignment with a feel-good statement of your own. Experience self-acceptance, rather than self-judgment, when thinking about your feel-good statement.

Once you can maintain this vibration of self-acceptance, you can respond mindfully, rather than react angrily when challenged, and be your best-self.

When triggered into self-doubt, rather than succumbing to your habitual tension template, think about that feel-good statement to flip your alignment back to self-acceptance. It may have nothing to do with what’s going on, but it snaps you out of engaging with the trigger’s self-damning attack. It snaps you back into being nice to yourself.

Self-acceptance starts at home with your habits, and in your body-mind awareness. Practice makes comfort!

 

1:1 FaceTime Personal Training Available. Exercise is an immune system builder––your first priority during a viral pandemic! mindthebody@bodylogos.com