COVID-19 Resources

Updated 21 March 2020

Here are some of the resources that I have received in the last few weeks that providers of health and wellness services have sent out to their followers to help deal with the coronavirus threat. I share them here hoping to pass on helpful practices to ease our way through this difficult time. I have not had time to review all of these resources so please use your own discretion to determine if they are helpful for you or not.

First of all, a couple great sources of reliable information about COVID-19 can be found here.

World Health Organization

www.who.int (Current Situation Page)

Ars Technica

www.arstechnica.com

Talking with children about Coronavirus Disease 2019: Messages for parents, school staff, and others working with children

As public conversations around coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) increase, children may worry about themselves, their family, and friends getting ill with COVID-19. Parents, family members, school staff, and other trusted adults can play an important role in helping children make sense of what they hear in a way that is honest, accurate, and minimizes anxiety or fear. CDC has created guidance to help adults have conversations with children about COVID-19 and ways they can avoid getting and spreading the disease.

The Coronavirus Pandemic reported by National Geographic

From the The Science of Well-Being Course offered by Coursera

Dear learners,

I had originally planned to send you a note to let you know that today, March 20, is the International Day of Happiness. But with the now-global spread of COVID-19 deeply affecting all our lives, it doesn’t feel like a day to celebrate. This disease has brought a whole host of medical, economic and political problems — and it’s also given us a ton of uncertainty and anxiety, which are beginning to have an enormous negative impact on our well-being.

And that’s why the content you’re learning about in this course is more important than ever. I encourage you to revisit some of the class lectures and to commit to your rewirement exercises!

I also wanted to share that my podcast, The Happiness Lab, has new episodes devoted to improving your well-being and mental health during the current coronavirus pandemic. Now you can listen to an episode on how to combat social isolation with Dr. Jamil Zaki from Stanford University as well as an episode on how to make rational decisions in a time of anxiety with Dr. Ethan Kross from the University of Michigan. If you don’t want to miss what’s coming up, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Season 2 of The Happiness Lab launches on Monday, April 27. I hope you’ll be inspired to recommend the show to your friends and even write a review on Apple Podcasts. You can sign up for The Happiness Lab newsletter here or join a brand new Happiness Lab Facebook group here.

I wish you all good health, safety, and happiness.

With gratitude,

Dr. Laurie Santos

Dear Sounds True friends,

Our team has spent the past week putting together our hearts and minds to creatively come up with how we can best support you—the Sounds True community—and the world at large as we find our way through this time of great challenge and uncertainty.

Today, on behalf of everyone at the company, I am happy to offer you access to a special Sounds True care package of free digital tools and teachings, "Resilience in Challenging Times."

" Resilience in Challenging Times" gives you:

Free access to daily video sessions sharing practical guidance and empowering insights from our recent online summits
Community connection—"Physical distancing" does not have to mean "social distancing," so we'll be offering opportunities to come together online for group meditations and Facebook Live meetings. Let's gather, learn, and support each other!
Free webinars addressing how to stay strong and centered with some of our most popular authors, including Michael Singer, Caroline Myss, and others

Right now we're witnessing a heightened sense of confusion and stress across our communities. Perhaps you are even feeling a bit shaky or panicked? I think many of us have been feeling that way (or some version of that) over the past couple of weeks. It is our hope that "Resilience in Challenging Times" gives us a resource to productively use this time for growth and spiritual transformation, difficult as that sometimes can be, so we can turn towards our experience, care for ourselves, and become resources of love and sanity for others.

With love on the journey,

Tami Simon

Founder and Publisher, Sounds True

From Tricycle Buddhist Magazine: Practicing in a Pandemic

There is a veritable warehouse of useful information and guided meditations on this web site linked above and in these specific articles linked below.

Anti-Coronavirus Meditation: Paying Attention to Your Hands
By Taylor Plimpton
Spiritual Advice for Fears of Pandemic
By Gesshin Claire Greenwood
Refuge in the Storm
By Radhule Weininger
Calm, Clarity, Compassion
A talk by Jack Kornfield
In the Midst of This Swirling World
By Koshin Paley Ellison
Deepening Our Collective Roots
By Thomas Hubl, in Israel

These five articles from our archive on uncertainty and fear will also be available for free:

What to Do When You Don’t Know What’s Next
By Dawa Tarchin Phillips
There’s so much chaos in the world right now that we have little choice but to wake up to it. Heightened uncertainty is an excellent opportunity for growth.
A Perfect Balance
By Gil Fronsdal and Sayadaw U Pandita
Equanimity, one of the most sublime emotions of Buddhist practice, is the ground for wisdom and freedom and the protector of compassion and love.
When Panic Strikes
By Josh Korda
A centering practice for when trauma is reactivated
What Is True Safety?
By Thanissaro Bhikkhu
From a Buddhist perspective, danger is normal.
Disease Is Inevitable. Compassion Is a Choice.
By Emma Varvaloucas
Amid the coronavirus outbreak, a practitioner visiting China reflects on how panic spreads and what we can do to open our hearts again.

From Health Journeys: Daily Guided Meditations

We’ve begun a new sanity-preservation initiative, Dear People! Clearly there’s an inordinate amount of anxiety and distress going around, coming at us from friends, family, colleagues, patients, students, employees, and even random strangers, not to mention the actual news. It’s impossible not to be affected by it.

So, we just set up a page that offers a different, free, guided meditation each day for anyone who feels they need it. Please use it for yourself and anyone else you think could use a dose. It's for everybody. Share it. Pass it around. Go crazy with it.

The audios will change at noon each day.

And tomorrow we’ll be adding a separate link of meditations just for kids… you know, the kids who are out of school, underfoot, bored, annoyed and annoying, picking up the anxiety in the air…. Those audios will change every day too.

Wishing you the very best during these challenging days.. And we’ll be reaching out a lot more via Youtube and all manner of social media as well.

Stay well.

All best,

Belleruth Naperstek, Health Journeys

From the Mind Body Green Blog:

What The CDC Recommends For Stress & Anxiety During The COVID-19 Outbreak

From Uncommon Knowledge: Stop Touching Your Face

Increase your resistance to disease and boost your wellbeing by breaking the habit of touching your face through a free self-hypnosis audio recording.

Book Recommendation: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

“Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summons to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Free Resources from Hay House Publishing

We’ll get through this together.

As we stand together in this turbulent and unprecedented moment in time, it’s inevitable to feel a new level of stress and anxiety. We’re feeling it, too.

To help you deal with the uncertainty and channel your energy in a positive way, we wanted to be sure you have free access to these valuable tools — curated specifically to help you stay healthy, calm, and empowered.

Explore movies, podcasts, meditations, articles, and eBooks by Louise Hay, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, Suze Orman, and more.

All of these resources are free, so please share them with anyone who could use some additional support through this difficult time.

From TED

As the world faces the coronavirus crisis, TED is committed to being a resource for information, inspiration and hope. We’ve curated talks and interviews to help provide some perspective. Here’s where to start:

TED Fellow Alanna Shaikh shares why COVID-19 is hitting us now — and what we’ll learn from it.
Infectious disease expert Adam Kucharski discusses what the future may hold. (Listen to his full episode on The TED Interview.)
Public health expert David Heymann answers 11 questions about the novel coronavirus.
This playlist draws from our archive of talks on infectious diseases, vaccines and pandemics.
Kids at home? Keep busy with hundreds of free animated lessons from TED-Ed. If you're an educator, learn more about how to create your own TED-Ed lessons. And check out this helpful round-up of TED-Ed lessons about understanding the outbreak of a virus.
Finally, these talks offer simple ways to stay healthy — both physically and emotionally.

And keep your eye on the homepage — we'll continue to share new TED Talks every week day on TED.com.

Wishing you well in trying times,

The TED Team

Before practicing the breathing exercises please watch this Safety Video first - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFSL_...

For more info on the Wim Hof Breathing and its benefits, check out the link below: https://www.wimhofmethod.com/breathin...

This Breathing Bubble is an audiovisual guide that helps you maintain rhythm and pace during your breathing sessions. Simply watch the bubble as it expands and contracts, and follow with your breath. You'll hear Wim breathe alongside you, and entrancing background sounds help tune out your surroundings, allowing you to focus on nothing but your breath.

If you prefer Wim Hof to explain in person - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzCaZ...

From Mental Health Europe:

Coronavirus: 8 ways to look after your mental health

As news about coronavirus (COVID-19) dominate the headlines and public concern is on the rise, Mental Health Europe would like to remind that taking care of your mental health is as important as looking after your physical health. Good mental health and positive wellbeing can help you better cope with the COVID-19 threat and the uncertainty it’s creating.

In this Webinar, I (Scott Kellogg) have explored how Chairwork and the Four Dialogues might be useful as we engage with the challenges of the pandemic. In this 30-minute presentation, I look at strategies for:

1. Giving Expression to the Fears

2. Transforming Fear and Anxiety into a Part or a Mode that Dialogues with Other Modes

3. Challenging the Accuracy of the Fears

4. Engaging with and Healing the Traumatic Origins

5. Using Self-Witnessing as a Way of Creating a New Relationship with Fear

6. Developing the Courage Mode as a Method for Counterbalancing Fear and Increasing Freedom

7. Making a Purposeful and Emotional Commitment to Others as a Way of Developing and Manifesting Courage

For more information on Chairwork, please go to: http://transformationalchairwork.com/

Scott Kellogg

An Antidote to Helplessness and Disorientation: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Our Human Fragility as the Key to Our Survival and Our Sanity

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.

Maria Popova

From The Tapping Solution: Free Coronavirus Stress and Anxiety Collection Available Now!

These Tapping Meditations will help you release your anxiety so you can support your immune system, feel more at peace, and empowered to take any steps necessary to protect yourself. Please take some time to tap and share with others who need it!

Pandemic Care Resources from Tara Brach

Dear Friends ~

During this global crisis we all need pathways to calm, clarity and openheartedness. While it’s natural to feel fear during times of great collective crisis, our challenge is that fear easily takes over our lives. Mindfulness and compassion practices can help us find an inner refuge, and deepen our loving connection with each other. This list of talks and guided meditations will support you through these difficult times.

With loving blessings,

Tara