How COVID Led to LOVE

It all started when hope ended. I’d been holding on to the idea that I was sick from the seasons changing. That it was just a coincidence I’d been exposed to someone who had it. When the first test came back negative, that helped me hang on. Until I couldn’t any longer. 

At 3AM, three nights into my self-quarantine, the second test result came back via email. I just happened to be awake, laying there sleepless, so I saw right away. It was POSITIVE. They were positive. Now, I was positive. I had it. I had COVID. 

My mind jumped instantly to who I might have given it to. To one in particular. A little boy who had just turned one. Guilt came on and tried to take hold. He was at risk. I put a child at risk. I delivered this risk straight to him. 

Was he ok?! Would he be ok?! What had I done?! 

I’d seen him last the day before I’d found out about my exposure, the day before I’d been tested. I’d played with him. I’d fed him. I’d carried him. I’d cuddled him. How could he possibly not have it?!?! He must have it. 

The guilt exploded within and ran straight through every ounce of my being.

Then, I stopped it. I chose to stop it. I knew I had to stop it.

I had it. I’d already exposed him. What could I do for him now? Right now. Right this second. 

Absolutely nothing.

Then, it dawned on me. I was sick. Me. Right this second. And I needed my energy — for me. I needed this moment — for myself. To process that I had it. That I was infected with what I’d avoided getting for over a year. I needed my compassion — for myself. First.

I would worry about him in the morning. I would tell his mother in the morning. I would deal with the consequences of that if there were any — and the guilt told me that there would be — in the morning.

Right in that moment, and for however many sleepless hours lay ahead until the morning, I needed to focus on myself and what I was going through. 

With all of my compassion focused on me — I felt deeply how much I had never given that to myself before. True compassion. Not self-pity. There was no victimhood in it. Just pure compassion. Being sick with COVID sucks, it does, and I deserved my compassion. I spoke those words to myself, and I gave it to myself. Compassion. A lot of it.

I lay there and wrapped myself up in my own energy. My own compassion. You could say, I gave myself a really big energetic hug of compassion. Just laid there, feeling that hug of gentle compassion for a really long while. And it felt SO GOOD. Better than I could have ever imagined it would. 

And as I lay there, I realized, I’d given this out freely. To everyone. But had never really given it to myself before.

Which led me to realize, that’s why I had never received a lot of it from others. I’d noticed it across my spiritual journey. How other healers and spiritual friends had seemed to always jump to ‘the lesson’ or ‘the energy that needed to be cleared’ below whatever I was telling them was happening. How everyone seemed to skip right past the fact that whatever it was I was telling them was also really tough to live through. I didn’t want their pity. I agreed with them. I wanted to see the lesson, to clear what needed to be cleared, but I always felt, it would be nice to have a dose of compassion come into the conversation as well.

This moment with COVID made me realize…

How could anyone have given me what I’d never deemed I should give to myself? That I had always jumped to give out in excess but had never directed inward. Vibrationally, they couldn’t. I wasn’t an energetic match for compassion to be felt for me, to come to me. I wasn’t emitting that frequency.

Stage One of How COVID Led To LOVE:

It softened me up by bringing me to the place where I could have COMPASSION for myself.

Taking the time to feel it directed towards me — my own compassion — did just that. It softened me. I could feel, as I felt it for me, the defenses coming down. The ones I’d built up that said I was tough. That I could handle anything while seeing it from the higher perspective and learning the lesson from whatever ‘it’ was. Improving myself through every experience, despite however difficult it was to experience. That I didn’t need any help while going through it. Which wasn’t true. 

What’s true is that I deserved to feel compassion for what I was experiencing. For Y-E-A-R-S. Even though I hadn’t. Because I thought it was the same as self-pity and victimhood. But those are totally different energies. 

I felt how having COVID in a city I had just moved back to, where I wasn’t in contact with anyone who really knew me, WAS tough, and I didn’t deserve to have it, no matter what I was meant to learn from it. 

With that, I went further. And I moved on to the next stage. First, I did deserve compassion for having it, and second, it wasn’t my fault that I had contracted it. I wasn’t to blame. Not for having it and not if I’d given it to that child. I didn’t do either on purpose. I was innocent.

Sure, I’d taken a risk by moving back to the city during the tail-end of a pandemic, but I wasn’t taking any major risks. I wore a mask everywhere. Sanitized and washed my hands frequently whenever out. And I wasn’t out partying. So far, I’d only come into close contact with the one person who’d passed it on to me. Other than that child (really, the whole family) that I was worried about.

So that guilt that wanted to rampage through me?

Could shove it. 

Instead, I decided it was time to cut myself some slack. 

On multiple levels.

I would not blame myself for having it. What I would do, is what I could feel I HAD to do. I would surrender to having it, so I could focus on recovering from it. That level of slack started right away. The next one took a few more days. Want to know what this compassion AND slack led to, even before more slack came in?

Others met me where I now was energetically, in real-time, when I woke up the next morning.

First, the mom of the boy I might have infected. 

She didn’t blame me. Not one bit. Not only that, her response came back full of compassion for me, first, before anything. I read what she said – “I’m so sorry this is happening to you!” – in total shock.

Can you believe it?!?! I couldn’t. Even though it’s what I would have done, what I would have felt for anyone (other than me, before then). I just couldn’t fathom how she could have so much compassion for me when her own child might be at risk. Put at risk by me. So I told her. Her response? “It could have happened to any of us.”

I really needed that. To hear that. To NOT be blamed. And I knew, this was the main reason this was happening. So I could hear that. Experience that. Feel that. That feeling of not being blamed. 

I thought about it after. Which came when? Like with the chicken and the egg. Did her compassion and blamelessness come because I gave them to myself first? Or did I need to hear it from her, to then feel it even more? 

I landed on both. It had to come from within first. Then, once it did, she could say it to me, and I could hear it from her. Because I was now a vibrational match for it. Then, hearing it helped that feeling of compassion and innocence deepen within me.

What does that have to do with love?

You have to believe you deserve it before you can receive it. Feeling like you’re at fault for what’s bad that happens works against that. Every time. Big time. It keeps you vibrating in the energy of being 'undeserving’ of it, along with everything else. 

That’s what this did for me.

Stage Two of How COVID Led To LOVE:

It lifted the energy of self-blame that was keeping me from feeling, on a deeper level, that I deserved love.  

Now, we gotta fast-forward a few days since I initially made a mistake. I was trying too hard to be ok. To be productive. To use my time ‘wisely’. To continue to help others heal while I was healing at the same time. 

Then one morning, I felt it. Deep within. A message sent from a wiser plane. Early on the 6th day of self-quarantine, it rose to tell me I wasn’t taking this opportunity that COVID was offering me. I was about to totally miss out on the chance being given to me.

The chance to do nothing. To focus on me. To dedicate my time to me. To make MY SELF-CARE my priority. To be considerate of me.

Does it bear repeating that this is yet another thing I hadn’t felt much in my life? Actually, even just parted ways with a friend over it. Quick story within a story to paint a picture. I’d recently made a new friend. One I really enjoyed. We shared a lot about ourselves with each other. I say that to say, it wasn’t superficial. 

So when he said something that wasn’t taking me or my feelings into consideration, I opened up and was honest. Told him I understood where he was coming from, and I could have been clearer about what I wanted, but that I would have liked for my feelings to have been considered.

Want to know what happened?

Nothing. Crickets. No response. He chose to cut me out of his life. 

Now, I learned a long time ago that rejection is the universe’s form of protection, and I won’t go into detail about how this was that. I fully understood immediately why this was in my highest good. That the friendship shouldn’t move forward. That it wasn’t meant to.

But in context of what COVID was teaching me, related to slack, it paints a good picture.

Time and time again across this life, people cut me out instead of cutting me some slack. I could never understand why. But in this moment, laying there with COVID, I saw it clearly. I had never cut myself any slack over the years. Had never really been considerate of myself and my needs. Ever.

This was my opportunity to do that. And I was not going to let it pass me by. 

So I started by stopping. What exactly? 

I stopped lying to myself. I wasn’t ok. I was absolutely exhausted. Here’s the funny thing about that. The second I stopped lying, I FELT IT. The bone-aching exhaustion I was feeling. The one I hadn’t been allowing myself to feel before. 

Based on that truth, I then asked myself, “What do you need most right now?” 

The answer was clear. I needed to rest. To shut off. To not write another newsletter or another post, and to NOT lead the group healing I had on the books for that day. So I rescheduled it to a few days out, and I told myself I’d push it again if that’s what I needed.

Here’s what that led to.

Total surrender. To COVID. To having it. To what I was experiencing. To what I needed. My focus was fully, and finally, totally on me. First and foremost.

Want to know what that led to?

A dissolving of the battle line that was within me. Between my inner-masculine and my inner-feminine. A division that goes way back. Led by a dysfunctional pattern that drove me to work myself into the ground for what I loved doing and whomever I loved, time and time again. To drain myself dry. A pattern my inner-man was trying to protect us from repeating by keeping what I love at bay. 

Stage Three of How COVID Led To LOVE:

When the CARE AND CONSIDERATION it drove me to have for myself led to a deeper union within me. 

Then? That focus on my care and the consideration for myself? Was matched. Twice over. Then a third time for good measure.

A friend on the other side of the country saw my post rescheduling the healing. She reached out that day and kept reaching out every day. To check in on me. She didn’t stop there. She doubled down and sent me a witchy care package. Full of immuno-boosting drops, a diffuser, and essential oil. 

The care didn’t stop there. 

My sister showed up. We’d had a tough year between us and things hadn’t been easy. In the past year, she’d really pulled back her energy from me, and to be fair, me from her. But none of that mattered now. I needed her, and she felt it, which led her to text me every day, to ask me how I was doing that day. And she went even further by sending me a humidifier. The day my lungs got hit really hard and it scared me. That wasn’t lost upon me. If you don’t already know, we hold a lot of old suppressed pain and heartache in our hearts and lungs. So it was poignant and powerful that she was helping me heal mine.

Same day as that an old friend in the same city I was now in, one I hadn’t spoken to in a long time, texted to check on me. Off that same post. Which led to a long thread, an exchange between us that I didn’t know I really needed. Not the conversation necessarily, but the connection. One that was full of consideration for me and how I was doing.

The universe wasn’t pulling any punches in driving this lesson home. Which one exactly? The overarching lesson for me, and for everyone. The one that says — As Within, So Without. To drive that home, there was a fourth that came into the mix. A fourth friend. One who got COVID the same day as me. And neither of us knew it.

We were supposed to see each other the day after we both unknowingly contracted it, after having not seen each other for a couple of years. But we didn’t. Transportation broke down and kept that from happening. If it had? Even if I hadn’t of gotten COVID from that other person, I would have gotten it from her. Or she, me. We were both fated to get it. At the exact same time.

Here’s the kicker. She was blaming herself, just like I had started to blame myself back in the beginning. Want to hear something even wilder? She was around a one-year-old too. It was obvious. We were both synchronisitically dealing with similar lessons. 

So I told her what I had learned so far about being blameless, to help her not feel any either. That helped her. Then, she told me how this was the second time she’d gotten it. And how the first time, early on in the pandemic, she didn’t take the time she needed to heal herself, so it lingered for a long while. Her story fed my decision to focus on my self-care, on how vital that was for me for the long haul. So I helped her with #2, and she helped me with #3, but really, she was… 

Stage Four of How COVID Led To LOVE:

By reminding me of the beauty of being ‘in it’ with someone.

She got it. Fully. Everything I was feeling. She felt it all too. Not just empathically. But first-hand. For herself. We talked it over, blow-by-blow. We were two people who completely understood what the other was going through. How we were feeling so dejected about getting it so late in the game. A week before the vaccines were made available to our age group. How it was like salt in the wounds seeing so many maskless people out vacationing all over social media. How we knew there were valuable lessons in this but it was still exhausting to experience.

And I saw something I knew but hadn’t felt in a while. How beautiful, not just beautiful, how VITAL it is to have someone who understands you in your life. A partner to go through it with you.

I’d had them before on my healing journey. Friends who were experiencing similar lessons, healing the same wounding. Those connections, at those times, were priceless. They made everything easier. I still had to feel what was hard to feel and clear what was heavy, but having someone to talk to who got it because they were also experiencing it, made it ALL SO MUCH EASIER to live through.

I wanted that again. And I got it. Through her in that moment. But I knew, as she and I chatted over what each of us understood, that this was all in preparation for what’s coming next. 

Before I go there, I need to finish off with…

The Fifth and Final Stage of How COVID Led To LOVE:

Through the love I gave my 3D body.

This one is tied to self-care but there’s a nuance to it. It also has to do with being grounded in the body. Something I had a hard time with before, in this life. A body I subconsciously wanted to escape because of the heaviness of this 3D world and all the past lives that were still impacting it. But that’s a whole other story. A whole lot of other stories, actually.

Bringing this lesson fully into the 3D in this life, I have to be honest, I’ve never really taken care of my body. I worked it way too hard for nearly two decades. Worked all hours of the day and night. While doing that, one time, I gave myself pneumonia which caused temporary asthma. Want to know what I did? Kept working. Another time, I spent a few months nearly passing out every few hours, every workday. Had a battery of tests done. Finally, the doc said, you need to get a new career because this one isn’t healthy. Want to know what I did? Kept working.

And I stress ate. Self-soothed myself 25-lbs heavier than I am today. Only, I never looked all that big because I worked out as much as I ate. Pounded the treadmill and elliptical to try to take the pounds off. Which just turned them into muscle. Made my body as hard and tough as I thought I was.

So yeah, my body never got much love from me. 

Until that moment. All the rest I was giving it felt L U X U R I O U S. Sure, I was sick, but I felt like I was on a long and relaxing holiday. 

Then, when those immuno-boosters were delivered? WOAH.

As I was dropping them into some water, preparing to take them, I FELT my body respond. The gratitude was off the charts. From it to me for the care I was giving it. 

And I felt deeply how much this was an act of contrition — and forgiveness — between us. For all the years of hard labor. Of ignoring its needs. Of taking advantage of it. Of my lack of consideration for it, for me. 

We needed me to show up for us in this way, at this time. To prove that I would. That I cared about it — about myself — enough to take care of us. I needed to show it that I loved us more than I loved anything. That I loved myself enough to do right by it, by me. And only then would it know. It didn’t have to protect us from me by blocking what I love to do for a living.

There’s a twist to this. Related to the body. The more I took care of mine, the more I loved it, the more grounded within it I became? I could feel that a big fight to not be in it was over.

With that done and dusted, we could finally become fully intertwined. Body and Spirit. And if you don’t already know, I’ll tell you, you have to be grounded to manifest what you’re dreaming of, what you love, on this Earth.

There you have it. 

How COVID Led To LOVE. By leading me to LOVE MYSELF.

Want to see how much? It shows up and shines through here.

But it doesn’t stop there. It never stops there. That’s just where it starts. Remember that one BIG lesson?

As Within, So Without. 

You have to love yourself first. To hold that vibration and emit that frequency. Then, others — especially the one you’re meant to partner with — can meet you where you are, to love you as much as you love yourself.

— — —

If you want to see and heal what’s hidden within, I’ve created tools that help you do that. Through 70+ HEART Alchemē Kits or The CORE reBUILD Program, you can clear out what’s weighed you down for way too long.

With, In & For LOVE…