Episode 21 - Treating the Mind & Spirit During the COVID-19 Crisis

As a spiritual leader, you are on the front lines of the mental and emotional crisis happening right now. This podcast gives you the practical structure of yoga psychology as well as immediately implementable tools to help you (and your clients and community) de-stress, feel more connected, and increase resilience.

Over the last many weeks, it’s likely that you’ve heard we talk a lot about the spiritual and mental effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. Social isolation is in its own way, a challenge for many, many people and the effects of social isolation include increased anxiety, depression, apathy, boredom, and loneliness among other effects these are real and palpable and incredibly stressful for many of us who are practicing social isolation or social distancing.

I wanted to talk to you during this podcast, not just about these very real effects but how we can actually address them as yoga teachers, and spiritual leaders. It turns out we have some great tools in our tool kit that we can utilize right now to alleviate some of these effects of social distancing. The things that I explained this podcast will be very helpful to you as an individual, but also to your students and clients that you reach out to to support them through what is a very difficult time.

It’s a hugely stressful time

Astrology divination spirituality psychology ritual and mystical practices. All ancient and modern. Get ready to up-level your status as a modern mystic within Yoga, we have a couple of different frameworks to look at the psyche, the psyche is the totality of your conscious and unconscious mind and also includes the super consciousness that higher part of us that delivers us inspiration when most needed connecting. All three parts of the psyche is what results in the psycho-spiritual state of yoga, how that all might sound lofty, but it’s all really based in psychology. If you’ve ever taken any basic psychology courses, it’s likely you’ve heard of a guy named Sigmund Freud and his theory of dividing the psyche into these three parts, the ego, the super ego, and when he called the id or what we call the unconscious. Carl Jung another very famous psychologist, did the same thing. And I’m sure you’ve also heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And he had this way of dividing the psyche into understandable bite-sized chunks. Now there are many different reference points for how we understand the psyche how we break it up, how we address it, work with it, from a lot of different perspectives.

So the Kosha or Koshas, and there are five of them is a way to divide the body up into layers, like an onion, so if the chakras are layers that ascend like a set of stairs, the “Kosha are a layer system that looks at the body like an onion From outer to inner.

Before we jump into these five Koshas, I want to give it a little bit of background of why this is so relevant for you as a spiritual leader right now. In my last few podcast as well as if you’ve been joining me on Facebook Live or Instagram Live or inside any of my private groups I’ve been heavily focused on the last few weeks, telling you as a spiritual leader, how important it is for you to step up right now and support your community.

We have a really special role during this critical time. The medical professionals are helping people stay physically healthy. You and I as spiritual professionals, can help people stay spiritually and emotionally healthy. There are real and powerful consequences that are occurring as a result of this pandemic from social distancing. Our social isolation, removing us from our biggest coping mechanisms and time spent with friends, family gatherings, the ability to commute and get together or even just the stress of potentially getting coronavirus. Dealing with the consequences, the stress of all of the lost wages work. It’s a hugely stressful time.