Living From the Quiet Center in a Pandemic
The bombing of the Twin Towers took place while I was living in New York City. My studio apartment was about a mile away from the World Trade Center. For a few weeks after this tragedy, the entire southern tip of Manhattan from Union Square down to Battery Park was completely closed off to all vehicles except those that were part of essential services. The usual 24-7 buzz of Manhattan was gone and in its place was quiet; it was incredibly eerie. In Union Square, hundreds of people set up an impromptu shrine to those who perished and thousands of people visited and placed candles, flowers, and mementos. I took comfort in my community of friends and I continued to practice yoga. At YogaZone, the studio in Manhattan that I attended, each class was intended to help prepare both the body and the mind for meditation. Towards the end of class, the teacher led the students in a guided meditation to help all of us quiet our minds. More often than not, even in those troubled days and weeks after 9-11, I left class with a sense of calm.
For years after that, my favorite t-shirt was a plain ivory-colored one that I had bought at YogaZone. It had two words on the front: “Seek stillness.” Both Hindu and Buddhist traditions teach that the experience of enduring calm is our natural state. A decade after 9-11, when I started reading A Course in Miracles, I recognized the same fundamental wisdom. The Course teaches that we each have at the core of our being a quiet center. Whatever chaos we experience in the world, our lives, and even in our minds, none of it is a reflection of the true nature of our being, which is peace.
Yet there will always be this place of rest to which you can return. And you will be more aware of this quiet center of the storm than all its raging activity. This quiet center in which you do nothing, will remain with you, giving you rest in the midst of every busy doing on which you are sent. (T-18.VII.8:1-3)
The temptation that the coronavirus pandemic gives us is to deny this truth, to believe that it is patently false. While the tragedy of 9-11 touched people all over the world, the vast majority of the world’s inhabitants were not directly harmed. The present-day pandemic is another story. The virus has truly spread worldwide. It is no exaggeration to say that every single person is at risk of being infected and that even with the best medical care, people will die. How could I possibly “…see peace instead of this” (Workbook Lesson 34)? Living in the world and hearing terrible news daily, the idea of being peaceful no matter what is happening seems preposterous.
Many of us in the United States are familiar with the words Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in the midst of the Great Depression, that, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” A Course in Miracles teaches us that the power of our thoughts is far, far greater than most of us realize. Fearful thoughts cloud over the peace that resides in each of us. They keep us mindless and perpetuate themselves, with one worry leading to another and then another still. What the Course also teaches is that we have the power to choose the way we look at a given situation. This power to choose is itself greater than any situation out there in the world.
When the world amps up in crisis and we have seemingly all the reasons in the world to forget our limitless power to choose our perspective, we can, nonetheless, “choose again.” This is what the mind training program of A Course in Miracles is about. Instead of residing in a state of mind in which we feel vulnerable, small, and defenseless, we have the opportunity to recognize that we can be at peace. Taking this perspective—indeed recognizing in the midst of whatever is going on that there is another perspective—takes practice. In truth, the choice to see peace is one that we could make in an instant, because what each of us is at our core is peace. But we have a great deal of resistance to this truth, and so we have to learn again and again to recognize the choice that we have about how we look at the events in our lives and those out there in the world.
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.