What one woman learned from long Covid

Suzanne Cunningham is a Reiki healer woith whom I connected when she sent me an email about a message she’d picked up from a deceased man. That story is in the October 5 post.   We didn’t know much of anything about Reiki and had never had a Reiki healer on the podcast, so we invited her to come on the podcast. Her episode will be released  on October 9. During our emails exchanges, she said that she had long Covid.  We hear a lot about this but I asked Suzanne to explain what it has been like for her.

FROM SUZANNE:

I ended up getting Covid in the middle of May. I felt grateful I had received the vaccine because I always questioned if I would survive it. At 62,with Hashimotos and crazy inflammation, I wasn’t as cavalier as I might have been back in my younger years. I’m not afraid of dying but I am afraid of dying without doing what I’ve tasked myself with doing. I think we each have a list and mine only had about half of it checked off.

The weird part was that as I felt Covid moving through my body, I became aware that with it, at least for me, were the emotions I had carried through the pandemic and the emotions of those who didn’t survive moving through me as well.

Regret, sadness, shock, panic, grief, surrender all swam through my energy system as I began the Covid journey. On the third night I felt Covid go into my heart like you feel a cold go into  your nose or a cough settle into your lungs. I just knew it was there although I wasn’t sure what that would mean. I wasn’t ever afraid, but actually relieved to get it over.
As I recovered I did Reiki and the self healing I knew I needed. It helped and I could feel the illness recede.

A month and a half later I found myself laboring, trying to get through each day and really not feeling like myself. I called my husband one afternoon to tell him I was driving myself to the emergency room. He said go home he would be there in 10 minutes and off we went to the hospital which is about 2 minutes from our house.

My blood pressure was sky high and my pulse rate was very low but no signs of a heart attack or blood clot so I gratefully headed home. For the next few weeks I saw our family doctor, rested and tried to figure out the message in the illness.

It didn’t take long before I realized my heart was overcome with grief. I thought back to my fevered knowing that other people’s sadness and pain had come to lay in my body while I was sick. I immediately recognized that the only way to get through it was exactly that, feel the feelings, hold abiding love, forgive myself and all of us for the reactions and judgements we were holding towards ourselves and each other. “There but for the grace of God” was my mindset.

How often had I been wrong, miscalculated and hurt myself and others, misjudged a situation and made irrevocable choices? The questions kept coming and I continued to use Reiki and my commitments to myself, my loved ones and my beloved human family.
We may not ever know the true story, what really happened, how we were visited by a pandemic in a world that feels above such connections to nature.

I focused and continue to focus on what I do know, that holding each other in the light is essential, that seeing the best in each other serves us all, that feeling the love each person deserves to receive is following the truth we all know we should be practicing. The Golden Rule is simple, profound, dignified, hopeful and, if we allow it to, it will bring us home and heal our hearts.

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