The Pandemic One Year In: How to Process Our Trauma Through All Three Centers of Intelligence
A friend got her first covid vaccine dose a week ago. She shared with me that, upon leaving the vaccination site, she was unexpectedly overcome with tears. For the first time since the pandemic started, she felt real, bone-deep hope that normalcy might be within reach. She remarked to me that the vaccine acted as a catalyst to help release some of the fear and anxiety she’d held in her heart for a year. Since that time, she has breathed a little easier.
For a year, we have all been holding the stress, tension, fear, grief, uncertainty, and trauma of the pandemic in our minds—and hearts and bodies. If we have not acknowledged or processed the stress of the past year, our minds, hearts, and bodies will do what they must to let us know.
When we ignore truths, bury feelings, or fail to process trauma, we can experience blocks in our minds, hearts, and bodies that fundamentally alter how we move through the world. This is a concept that renowned psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explores in his seminal and scientific book, The Body Keeps the Score. van der Kolk began his career working through PTSD with Vietnam War veterans and discovered the countless ways their unprocessed psychological trauma and traumatic stress distorted their perceptions and relationships; disconnected them from their feelings; and manifested in bodily pain, sensitivity, or illness.
van der Kolk’s and many others’ work in the space of trauma and grief reveal how closely intertwined our bodies, hearts, and minds are. When any is blocked, it will send us signals—by way of anxiety, depression, bodily sensations, pains, and so on—to get our attention that we must do a little work on ourselves. This reveals that, like our minds, our hearts and bodies have an innate intelligence as well. All three forms—mind (cognitive ability measured by IQ), heart (emotional intelligence or EQ), and body intelligence (also called “somatic intelligence”)—are always sending us messages and conspiring for us to act on behalf of our mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. The more we can learn to tune into and leverage all three forms of intelligence, the more whole we will be and the more authentic our experiences will be.
In my forthcoming book, Strong Like Water™: How I Found the Courage to Lead with Love in Business and in Life, I detail how three familial deaths in short succession—first of my husband, then of my Dad, and lastly of my Mom—cajoled me out of living primarily from my head. Growing up, my Mom and Dad fought often. From a very young age, I took on the role of my Mom’s protector. This meant I had to shove my feelings down deep so that I could maintain a focus on problem solving and pushing on. It wasn’t until I was an adult, when a paralyzing fear of commitment derailed two engagements, that I realized I needed help from a therapist to learn how to access my feelings and be emotionally available to life.
The work with my therapist ended up coinciding with the relentless grief of so much loss in such short order. The combined effect was finally accepting that relying alone on my cognitive intelligence left me unprepared to move through tragedy—and life in general—healthily and fully present in it. The only way out of this was learning to access all three centers of intelligence inside me—head, heart, and body. My husband, Dad, and Mom’s absences are felt daily. But their losses have not been in vain, as they served to open my heart. They helped me tune into my feelings as often as I tuned into my thoughts.
As challenging as it has been to break my lifelong over-reliance on my intellect and learn to tone my EQ muscle, learning to detect the signals from my body has been even more challenging and mysterious. But if loss and grief have taught me anything, it’s that we rely only on one form of intelligence at our peril.
On the one-year anniversary of my husband’s death, I awoke feeling like I had the flu. I ached from head to toe, felt heavy, and foggy headed. It took my mind a few hours to catch up to what my body was clearly trying to tell me—that it was one year ago from the day Daniel had died. While my mind had been slow to register the significance of the day, my body had kept that score. As did a dear friend, who made an appointment for me that evening for a massage. While I didn’t yet understand what my body was telling me, she did. She helped me begin to learn how to tap into my body’s cues and take steps to help release its pain and grief.
As we make our way through the anniversary of the pandemic, we may feel anxious or unusually depressed, or perhaps there’s a tightness in our chest or other bodily discomforts. These are signals from our minds, hearts, and/or bodies that recognize and remember the one-year mark. However, this might be manifesting for you, listening to these signals will help you release whatever may be trapped inside.
Three intentional steps can help you gain greater access and alignment to all the intelligence that resides within you: head, heart, and body. They are:
Step 1: Awareness
For those of us raised in the Western world, we tend to overly rely on our intellect—our cognitive intelligence. Many of us may not even be familiar with the concept that we have equally vital emotional and somatic intelligence. Yet our lack of awareness of these other two forms of intelligence does not protect us from the emotional fallout or physical health issues that can result when we discount or suppress them. As with troubleshooting most of life’s issues, step 1 is awareness of the problem. The solution is always remembering that we have three essential forms of wisdom at our disposal, and we benefit from tapping into all of them.
Step 2: Access
Having access to all three centers of intelligence ensures we are listening to all the signals coming to us. Depending on which intelligence center is home base for you, you’ll need to stretch to gain greater access to the others. The following tools can help you access or release blockages in each center, keeping in mind that they all interrelate, and work in one area can improve access in another:
Cognitive intelligence: When it comes to cognitive intelligence, the idea is to turn down the volume of the monkey mind and turn up the volume of our non-egoic—or more authentic—thoughts. To this end, therapy, reading self-help or therapeutic books, journaling, and self-reflection and exploration can be highly informative.
2. Emotional intelligence: The extent to which we understand, recognize, and are able to name our feelings and those of others is an indicator of our emotional intelligence. Developing our emotional intelligence requires a willingness and ability to tap into our feelings over our thoughts through loving-kindness meditation, practicing self-compassion, deep-breathing, or whatever can help quiet your mind and open your heart.
3. Somatic intelligence: Most of us spend so much time in our heads, we forget we have bodies. Body scanning, where you sit still and mentally scan every part of your body, is a great first step to getting back into your body. Meditation, yoga, or any form of exercise that gets you in flow are too. And body work, like reiki, acupuncture, rolfing, or massage, can also help release bodily blocks and pains.
It’s not uncommon for people who do yoga to cry at the end of the workout, while in savasana. This is because the movement in yoga serves to release blockages in our bodies. The relief is often expressed in tears—not dissimilar from my friend’s relief in getting her first COVID vaccine, which triggered the release of held pandemic stress. Whatever the release of trauma or grief looks like for you, it is a good sign that you are accessing your innate centers of intelligence and learning to give your mind, heart, and body what they need to feel available and vital.
Step 3: Alignment
As you become more practiced in accessing all three forms of innate intelligence, you will learn how to align each for optimal and authentic insights. You will learn to assess and experience events and people from all three centers of intelligence instead of just one or even two. This might look like interviewing for a job that is great on paper but left you feeling like something just isn’t right. Or it might feel like going on a date with someone attractive and charismatic, after which you got a headache or queasy feeling. In short, alignment is when you are habituated to checking into your non-egoic thoughts, heart feelings, and body sensations and detecting the information each is telling you. From such a place, you will find yourself making different decisions, living more authentically, and treating yourself and everyone with more compassion.
What we just went through as a nation and a world has been deeply distressing, destabilizing, and difficult. Yet, after a year of loss, hope is on the horizon. As we begin to restore bits of normalcy, it is important that you also do the work that will protect you from continuing to hold the pandemic’s traumatic stress in your mind, heart, or body longer than the pandemic itself.
Take care. Tune into all your forms of intelligence. Together, they bring you the ultimate wisdom and guidance available to you.