So no surprise but I've been going back to Eckhart Tolle's teachings to help counteract the anxious overthinking that the current circumstances are inducing, and they are helping to the extent that I can get out of my frantic busyness. (Ego-driven survival thinking-action machine vs. a glimmer of awareness I should take a step back and disidentify with the mind.) I've got tons of his lecture videos already but I've noticed he's been posting videos addressing the crisis on his youtube channel. I'm just pointing these out in case it might interest or help someone.
These are the last two just posted in the last week or so. Nothing revelatory if you're already familiar with his work and they aren't long enough to go too deep, but they address the situation.
Maybe if other people have got videos or readings or whatever that they find helpful, they could post it here.
This is another one from his channel posted last year, but I find it even better.
Quote:The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a secondary outbreak of fear, anxiety, and social contagion. Dr. Jud Brewer is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and leading researcher into the science of mindfulness, and we dive DEEP into how we can fight anxiety and panic.
Once we get warmed up, we discuss how ancient Buddhist psychology relates to modern ideas around positive and negative reinforcement and addictive behavior, the role of dopamine in etching context-dependent memories, the challenge of social media and smartphone addiction, recognizing addiction to news during the COVID-19 crisis, the phenomenon of “social contagion” in relation to the current pandemic and social media, the nature of primitive limbic fear versus the higher reasoning of the prefrontal cortex (elephant and rider), what happens when worry becomes a habit, the relationship of worry to anxiety, how we can hack our brain with the BBO (Bigger Better Offer) approach with regards to habit and addiction, insights around panic disorder, the nature and utility of changing “reward value”, bringing “curious awareness” online to recognize cravings and their low reward value, addiction and it's relationship to dopamine, the nature of selfless flow states, fMRI data on adept meditators and the quieting of the “default mode network,” psychedelics and the effect on default mode network, the effectiveness of an app-based mindfulness approach on physician anxiety and physician burnout in a recent set of studies, the nature of the psychological benefit of kindness and how the COVID-19 crisis may be a huge opportunity in disguise.
Check out Dr. Brewer's work here: [color=var(--yt-endpoint-visited-color, var(--yt-spec-call-to-action))]https://drjud.com/[/color]
Haven't watched any of the above but here's Peter Fenwick on the process of dying (from a spiritual/metaphysical perspective):
I had noticed that Julia Mossbridge has been publishing a series of videos for these times based on the idea of a "hope intervention", although I haven't yet watched any of them, so I hope that they qualify for this thread as "spiritual counsel", because - as-yet unwatched by me as they are - I am sharing them here:
The ego driven bit spoke to me very deeply. Christians are supposed to walk by faith, not by sight, but it's all too easy to want to have full control of every situation. We can let go a little when we feel there is a safety net but situations like these make me ask myself, "do I really believe that God cares about me or have I just been acting a part for so long?"
The emotion in this case being fear.
This one seems to follow quite nicely from that longer one, as if it was the continuation somehow.