Lockdown – Kitty Wheater

Staying on Holiday at Home

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. You can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

Staying on Holiday at Home

Scotland has shifted towards re-opening dentists, hairdressers, and cinemas. There are new possibilities for physically-distanced socialising, and staying somewhere overnight. And many of us are thinking: could I…might I…go on holiday?

As in: GO on holiday. Pack a suitcase, get in the car, get on a train. Marshal the hand sanitizer and the DIY masks. Buy too many snacks, and forget rubber bands to tie around the half-eaten ones, so that the bottom of your rucksack fills with peanuts. Take after-sun instead of sunscreen. You know the drill.

After nearly four months in lockdown, you may be desperate to escape the confines of your city or village; your bags are half-packed as you read this. Or you may be horrified at the thought of having to put yourself through all of the above, with an added dose of re-entry anxiety.

Rarely, in our University, have we had more people in need of a holiday, with less energy, clarity, financial means, or choice about it. And so more of us will be tucking the guidebooks out of sight, and staying at home this summer.

Staying on holiday at home – after a time in which you have been not so much working from home, as at your home, in a crisis, trying to work – turns particular features of ‘holiday’ upside down. There is none of that satisfactory change in gear that we used to get by arriving home and putting the work laptop in a dark corner with its notes unfinished, because it’s 7pm and you have a plane to catch. The boundaries are murky, if not gone.

‘Boundaries’ are so useful, because they don’t just mark things as different from each other – they create space in which each can flourish as it is. The work/home boundary is so useful, because by enabling us to put work away, we can attend to what’s important at home in its own right: cats, children, a homemade pizza, a courgette plant. This, in turn, enables us to recover more effectively from depletion at work – which often makes room for curiosity and creativity in our work.

So the boundary between work and holiday protects and nourishes both. But with more of us staying at home this summer, in spaces that have become pervaded by work, we will need to be creative about reclaiming holiday as holiday, and home as home. If, like me, you are staying at home for your break this summer, here is what to expect – and how to find rest, and maybe even some joy, in the midst of it.

1. Holiday Dread

Holiday dread comes in many forms. You dread shutting down your emails, because work, with its structure and connection, has been a life-line. You dread taking time off because it only reminds you of the holiday you had to cancel. You dread having time to spend with and around your family or flatmates, because they need more from you than you are able to give right now. You dread taking a holiday, because you live alone, and the last thing you want is more time with yourself.

This is completely normal. If you have been under stress, and your holiday is impending, the mind triangulates every stressful moment from every holiday you’ve ever taken, and multiplies it by every awkward conversation, or loneliness, in the last month. Then it creates a prediction, based on this lovely subterranean machination, about just how dreadful the next two weeks will be.

Start to spot the mind’s predictions as they pop up in the mind. Notice how they attach themselves to those last bits of work business, as you finish up on a Friday. If you’re really rundown, they will even tag along to your moments of happy anticipation, just to make sure that you don’t forget that you should be worrying.

Be gentle with your mind in this moment; it is your age-old fight or flight system, trying to help. As you put away your computer, and cook yourself meals that aren’t pasta with pesto for the first time in weeks, those thoughts will begin to soften and settle.

2. Holiday Bugs and Blues

If you’ve been ticking along at work, feeling a bit tired or grumpy, but basically doing ok, you may find that the first few days of your holiday are unexpectedly…not as great as that wonderful week you spent in the South of France, with the local red wine, and the market garden tomato salad.

Aches and pains may surface. Day two of your holiday sees you in bed with a migraine. The hayfever you’ve been combatting turns into a cold. (Hopefully not a cough.) And – you may feel lower than you expected. Small irritations explode into big ones, as you worry about the effect of iPads on a generation of small eyes and minds, and dread your inbox on your return to work.

As we start to relax, and the firefights of work and study fade, the new space gives way to what was waiting in the wings. Some of these can wait; others will make themselves urgently felt.

Give them space, gently. Wrap up your migraine in an eye mask and blanket; take your worries to a friend, on a walk. When you feel better, give yourself permission to put the irritation away. Thank goodness, at this time when the kids can’t hug their friends, that there is Peppa Pig – and Sally Rooney on iPlayer.

3. Holiday Frenzy

As I wrote a few weeks back, when you’ve been looking forward to time off, it’s possible to get very excited about all the things you’re going to do. Your glass is not just half-full, it’s a glass of that wonderful red wine from the South of France.

Depending on your individual flavour of frenzy, you could be envisaging two weeks of: self-improvement, catching up on emails, Netflix, intensive home-schooling, or reading six months’ worth of Times Literary Supplements, which are currently sitting in the corner of the hallway still in their plastic wrappers. (No comment.)

We all wind up needing a holiday from our holiday from time to time. This year, of all years, it’s so important that we spend our precious time off doing what nourishes us, and reminds us who we are. There are many lovely things, big and small, in our lives – even amidst uncertainty, and sorrow. We want to be open to them, and allow them to fill up our drained and depleted minds and bodies.

And: we want to be gentle with ourselves. Your body has been sitting still, in a too-small chair, for a long time. Your mind has had to read pixelated faces for many months. Your heart has been troubled, and determined, in equal and often competing measure. This is tiring, and you may only come to understand how deeply so when you pause, and notice.

So be kind to yourselves, on your holidays at home. Allow it to be a holiday. Allow it to be home. Know that it will be messy – and that that’s just fine, and could even be quite fun.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Trouble Sleeping

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy. Open to all, you can subscribe by emailing mindfulness@ed.ac.uk.

‘It’s late and I’m feeling so tired,’ sings Corinne Bailey Rae. ‘Having trouble sleeping…’

It’s a sentiment familiar to many. A King’s College London study finds that two thirds of us have experienced some negative effect on sleep since the pandemic began, with a disproportionate impact on women, young people, and those facing financial difficulties. Intriguingly, though, most of us are sleeping more than we did pre-lockdown. With commuting shelved, and no pub to go to on a Friday night, total sleep time is actually up – it’s just not so restful.

So what might this look like? You may find yourself sleeping in fits and bursts, with long periods of wakefulness in between; waking groggily early in the morning, and watching the clock until it’s time to get up; finding it hard to fall asleep at all. You may have unusually vivid dreams, and remember more of them when you surface. If you have recurring stress dreams, or nightmares, these are probably putting in more of an appearance during your slumbering hours at the moment. They may be specifically about the pandemic, or they may be older stress patterns, flaring up with new potency thanks to the extra layer of lockdown worry-fog.

As we go about our days tired and stiff, the worst part of disturbed sleep is often creeping dread or anxiety about it. Sleep can become a place in our minds that is not restful, a sanctuary to enter at the end of the day, but rather a site of stress and fretfulness. We fear not sleeping – or if we sleep and have nightmares, we fear sleep itself. The other week I came across a passage that captured this cycle perfectly, in The Long Winter, by Laura Ingalls Wilder. An autobiographical children’s book, it depicts a ferocious seven-month winter in the tiny settler town of De Smet, South Dakota, in the 1880s.

Sometimes in the night, half awake and cold, Laura half-dreamed that the roof was scoured thin. Horribly the great blizzard, large as the sky, bent over it and scoured with an enormous invisible cloth, round and round on the paper-thin roof, till a hole wore through and squealing, chuckling, laughing a deep Ha! Ha! The blizzard whirled in. Barely in time to save herself, Laura jumped awake.

Then she did not dare to sleep again. She lay still and small in the dark, and all around her the black darkness of night, that had always been restful and kind to her, was now a horror. She had never been afraid of the dark. “I am not afraid of the dark,” she said to herself over and over, but she felt that the dark would catch her with claws and teeth if it could hear her move or breathe.

It’s a poignant description of how fear can flavour sleep and the wee hours. Unseasonal though The Long Winter might be, there’s reassurance in knowing that trouble sleeping, in the face of trouble, is an age-old experience. The psychological impact of endless howling prairie blizzards, with no end in sight, is not unlike that of being steeped in uncertainty and hard news.

So how might we look after ourselves in the face of sleeping troubles, and soften some of those internal blizzards? Here are some ways of responding, when sleep goes haywire.

1. Find Your Rhythm

Your body has powerful circadian rhythms. It wants to rest, and when it doesn’t, it will find a way to make it happen – as we’ve all discovered at one time or another, falling asleep after lunch. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wisdom out there on sleep hygiene: practical steps to realign the body’s sleep/wake cycle. During a tricky sleep patch, it can feel as if it will take forever to get back on track. But our circadian rhythms thrive on routine. Sleepio, for example, is an effective cognitive behavioural therapy app, that intervenes pragmatically and quickly to reset sleep patterns. But a few simple steps – a time limit on your smartphone in the evening; re-establishing some daily exercise – can also promptly make a difference.

Simple though such moves are, entrenched habits often get in the way. A quick message turns into twenty minutes on Twitter; rain clouds gather, and your walk looks less than inviting. Autopilot is a powerful thing, so outsource the willpower on this. Delete that app, and charge your computer in a different room overnight. None of us can quite be bothered to walk next door, at 3am, in order to scroll through BBC News.

Part of the misery of sleep disruption is that it can feel mysterious. If it has been relatively short-lived, cast your mind back and make a note of what triggered it. Often this is something quite straightforward. It could be that the heat kept you awake, that you missed a walk or online exercise class one day, or that a difficult message last thing at night had you up for hours. Re-establish your usual routines as soon as you can, bookmark any difficulty that requires some attention, and be patient with yourself: you will be a little slow and tired at first, but you will find your rhythm soon.

2. The Tell-Tale Mind

When it feels, as it did for Laura Ingalls, that the dark awaits you with claws and teeth, this is because your stress system is amped up. Thoughts scurry around in the mind, and your body holds itself up away from the bed, poised to fight or flee. As you try ever harder to fall asleep, rest seems more and more elusive, and you worry ever more about what will happen tomorrow.

The mind tells powerful tales about the past and the future. As if its usual fears and worries weren’t enough, many of its stories may be about what will go wrong if you don’t sleep enough, or what has happened to cause your restlessness. We may try to fight our thoughts, angrily batting them away, generating more thoughts about how badly this night is going. Remind yourself that thoughts are not wrong: they are your mind trying to help, but because you are tired and stressed, it is helping in a way that is tired and stressed.

Instead of trying to stop the thoughts, see if it’s possible to label them gently as they come up: ‘here is planning; here is self-criticism; here is prediction.’ Thoughts, you will notice, come and go: they are flickering, not solid. So you might imagine that your thoughts are like a waterfall, and that they can just fall past you as you sit beside them. You may get a little damp, but the thoughts need not drench you; and imagine that your seat beside them is soft, and comfortable.

3. Creature Comfort

When the mind is whizzing with memories, and plans, and what-ifs, the body as it lies here is not the past and future. It’s just the back, and the backs of the legs, and arms and head, against the sheets and pillows. So gently practice bringing your attention into the places where the body is held up: the surface of the skin, the texture of the sheets. When your mind veers off, acknowledge the story it tells, and just come back. You are reminding yourself that you are a body, safe and supported in this moment, in this space – nowhere to go, and nothing to do. Often, people find that a body scan helps provide some structure for this. It’s something you can do with the track a few times, and then just by yourself.

Often, as the mind quietens, sleep comes naturally. But sometimes you may realise that you are physically uncomfortable. You may be too hot or cold; you are hungry or thirsty. Tune in to what you most need, in this moment, and give yourself permission to follow it through. We are creatures, not floating brains.

‘Daytimes were not so bad as the nights,’ Ingalls Wilder wrote. ‘The dark was thinner then and ordinary things were in it.’ And so in daylight hours, when the dark is thinner, give some attention to the ordinary things that may make your sleep more comfortable. A soft blanket, a fresh pillow, a turned mattress; an open window for the smell of summer air; and something lovely to look at, when you open your eyes in the morning.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Skin Hunger

This piece was first posted on For Times Like These: Blogs from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy to help us through COVID19 lockdowns and meltdowns, and to raise our spirits.

‘Skin hunger is the biological need for human touch,’ writes Sirin Kale for Wired. ‘It’s why babies in neonatal intensive care units are placed on their parent’s naked chests. It’s the reason that prisoners in solitary confinement often report craving human contact as ferociously as they desire their liberty.’

It’s also why, three months into lockdown, many of us may feel increasingly tearful, low, or flat. Perhaps you live alone, or you may live in that kind of respectful but distant adult co-habitation, with flatmates or family, where you are physically adjacent but never touch. You may be sharing a house with people you don’t like that much. And even if you are living with people you love, and with whom you are physically affectionate, life may simply be so tough right now that your need for connection and comfort feels ravenous. There is a reason why many of us say, after a long day, ‘can I have a hug?’

Yet if you work for the NHS, live with an NHS worker, or even if someone in your household has just popped out to the shops, it feels as though touch must be curated and planned for. After your shower, after you’ve washed your hands, after you’ve washed the milk cartons in soapy water in the kitchen sink. Did you touch the door handle again when you went to the post? It’s not exactly an auspicious climate for all the casual small comforts of other people’s presence: the hand on the shoulder, or back, or arm.

At this time, when we must be so vigilant about touch, you may spot various signs in mind and body that your system is craving it. Like Alice, a young Londoner in Kale’s article, you may notice after a hug that “You just get that rush of feeling better…like it’s all okay.” You may miss friends or family so much that it actually hurts – which it does. You may be hankering after a former pet, or the dog you used to walk before lockdown (how I miss Ben the collie, and his silky ears).

You may start to notice other ways in which the body is seeking out contact, too. When you skip your daily walk and feel grumpy afterwards, it’s not just that your body is missing its cardiovascular release, your mind its hit of green. “Simply walking around your room stimulates the pressure receptors in your feet,” says Tiffany Field, of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami. When you collapse onto the couch at the end of the day, your body wants to be held up. Every teenager’s default lounging position, remember, is full-length on the floor.

So how might we respond kindly to our need for touch during this time? Here are some things that might help.

1. Reach out to those around you

When mood is slipping, we often start to withdraw. You may notice that you have stopped being affectionate with your family; alternatively you may find, when someone hugs you, that you inexplicably become tearful. Both of these are very normal. See what it’s like to begin to reach out again: a hand on your mum’s arm when she has brought you a cup of tea, a hug from a flatmate you trust. Be gentle with yourself, start small, and see what happens.

Sometimes, reaching out begins with a conversation. You may even notice, if all your interactions are online at the moment, that a friend tells you after a good chat ‘I wish I could give you a hug.’ The mind may well prompt melancholy at this thought – ‘but he can’t!’ And yet: see if it’s possible to pause, and take in your friend’s well-wishing. Notice what happens in the body, and know that that hug will come, in good time.

Meanwhile, if you have a dog as lovely as Ben the collie, stroke the dog. “Having pets is wonderful,’ says Field. “When you pet a dog, you’re also moving your own skin and experiencing pressure stimulation.” Give yourself permission to spend time with your pet, as near or far as suits you both.

2. Feel your feet

You may live alone, or feel so flat and tired that reaching out to those you live with feels like too much effort. Movement that affects the receptors in the soles of the feet can be very grounding, and in turn, energising.

So walk, if you like to walk. There’s some great guidance here on mindful walking from Andy Puddicombe, founder of Headspace. Many of us will want to walk outside at this time of year, but walking inside if you can’t go out, picking a short path that you can traverse up and down, can be surprisingly calming. Notice your feet as you walk: if we are anxious, we may find that we are walking on the balls of the feet, almost bouncing. If we are low, it may be all that we can do to put one foot in front of the other. Allow your feet to sense the ground, holding you up.

Or shut the door, draw the curtains, put on some music, and dance in your socks. Feel the floor underneath your feet. If you’re stuck for knowing what to listen to, try the recommendations at the bottom of this blog, by University Chaplain Harriet Harris. If you’re stuck for knowing how to dance, don’t worry about that, and go with it: the body knows what it needs.

3. Seek out quiet comfort

If you have small children climbing all over you every minute of the day, you may feel ‘touched out’. Likewise, if you are feeling introverted, or that kind of exhausted-on-a-cellular-level that is perilously close to burnout, you may need quieter forms of sensory comfort.

So try your favourite blanket wrapped round you, tucked up on the couch. Gardening, and the soil under your fingers. Lying in the sun in a park for half an hour, feeling the grass beneath you. The weight of a really good hardback in your hands. A fresh pillow-case on your pillow tonight. Fields suggests, ‘‘give yourself a scalp massage, or rub moisturiser into your face.” And don’t under-estimate the power of giving yourself a hug; yes, literally.

You may like to do a body scan for your mindfulness practice this week, especially sensing the contact that the body makes with the floor, the mat, or the bed.

‘Skin hunger’ is a great phrase, because it reminds us that nourishing our senses is a key part of nourishing our minds at the moment. It needn’t take much; sometimes a well-timed walk is all that’s needed to turn a day around. But on the other hand, it could be something to choose ‘skin food’ regularly, little and often, asking yourself what might help – and sometimes being a bit brave, and turning the music up louder, just so you can lie on the floor like a teenager, and really enjoy it.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

Zoom Fatigue: Staying Embodied Online

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

‘Shall we use Skype, Zoom, Teams, or Facetime?’ someone asked me wearily the other day. I was struck both by the dizzying multiplicity of the technologies we currently need for work and life, and by the weariness.

‘Zoom fatigue’ is officially a phenomenon, writes Julia Sklar for National Geographic – and this has come as a surprise to many of us. Yet across the board, students and staff report that online meetings are tiring in a way that in-person meetings are not. Staff describe needing more time to decompress after meetings, while conversations that in person would have been energising seem unexpectedly to drain.

Why is this? As Sklar explains, ‘During an in-person conversation, the brain focuses partly on the words being spoken, but it also derives additional meaning from dozens of non-verbal cues, such as whether someone is facing you or slightly turned away, if they’re fidgeting while you talk, or if they inhale quickly in preparation to interrupt.’

As social beings, this interpretation comes naturally to us and takes place below the level of conscious effort. But ‘a typical video call impairs these ingrained abilities, and requires sustained and intense attention to words instead.’ Online, we can’t see much of a person’s body language; if the lighting is poor, or the image pixelated, we don’t catch the details of their facial expression. In meetings with multiple people, the tiny images on Zoom remove even more of this information, while on Teams, we can only see the last few people to have spoken. We lose the sense of the people in the room, the energy, the mood, the interest.

Meanwhile, that sustained and intense attention to words is tiring, particularly as our attention is also being fragmented by video’s partial visual cues. When this happens, we are essentially multi-tasking, which is known to be psychologically stressful and inefficient. In a long meeting with lots of people, we may find ourselves mentally checking out, or becoming bored. When we ourselves feel unseen, it’s even easier to quietly disappear into some other task. We’ve all been in the meeting where someone’s emails are perfectly reflected in their spectacles.

A Tweet from Gianpiero Petriglieri, professor of management at INSEAD, seems to sum up the human challenge: ‘I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after the video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.’

Posted on April 4^th, nearly 37,000 people have liked Petriglieri’s Tweet so far. It seems many of us are having this experience. So how might we reduce some of that sense of disembodiment and dissonance – that gap between what is, and what seems to be, in which boredom, irritation, dissatisfaction, and fatigue emerge?

1. Remember Your Body

One approach is to check in with the felt sense of your own body throughout an online call. Notice the soles of your feet against the floor, the sensations of your seat on the chair, and the weight and contact of your hands in your lap or on your desk. When you begin doing this, it may feel like a surprise to remember that we have feet, or hands. This shows how disembodied the attention has become while online: pulled into the screen and trying to make out the nuances of facial expression; or pulled to the words, and straining to understand their conceptual content. You may pick up on this if you tune into your own body language: are you tilted or hunched forward on your chair, towards your screen? If apathy has set in, you may be slumped back completely. When you pick up on these, bring your attention back into the felt sense of the body sitting. You may also find it helpful to shift your posture; something to remind yourself that your body is here, sitting and breathing. This helps to close the ‘gap’ between body, sitting at your desk, and mind, in the substance of the call.

Over time, you may find that keeping some of your attention in the felt sense of your body sitting actually allows you to ‘receive’, with less effort, the meaning of the words being spoken in the call. Online you may not be able to tune into the nuances of others’ bodies or faces, but your own body picks up on more than you realise. Staying connected to it will help you process the cognitive and affective information being transmitted at the level of conversation.

2. Take Time to Transition

A second approach is deliberately to take time to settle and ground yourself both before and after an online call. By acknowledging these transitions, they come as less of a surprise to your social nervous system. You might take a three-step breathing space before and after a meeting, to help you consciously clock the content of the mind, and step back into the present moment. For a long call, have a glass of water to hand, and check that you are comfortable and your back is supported in your seat.

3. Move and Stretch

You may have noticed that when you hang up after an online meeting, you yawn, stretch, or sigh; this is your nervous system down-regulating, so follow the wisdom of its cues, and take some time to follow it through. For a short and structured way to go about that, this mindful movement practice is just 9 minutes long. If it’s been a particularly stressful or discombobulating meeting – or you’ve simply been online all day – this half hour of gentle stretching followed by a sitting practice could be just what’s needed to help bring your attention back into the body, and the here and now.

Zoom and its parallels are, in myriad ways, a complete boon at this time – and there’s growing awareness that particularly for those on the autism spectrum, video calls may actually be easier and less anxiety-provoking than large in-person meetings. But it’s also understandable that for many of us, with our social minds as human beings complexly evolved over millennia, the ramped-up use of video conferencing presents some unanticipated challenges. You’re not alone in this, so take time to breathe and move – and if all else fails, there’s Britain’s standard energy-lifting go-to: an old-fashioned cup of tea!

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.

The Tiger Who Came To Tea

This piece was first posted as the Mindfulness Virtual Drop-in from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been struck by how many in our University community are currently guests or hosts. Vulnerable family members have moved in, or we have moved to be with them; friends are in the spare room, caught off guard by travel restrictions or closing borders. With the onset of online studying and meetings, even if there are no literal extra persons in your home, we are visiting each other in unusual ways. We become conscious of the artwork on the wall behind us; small children grumble in the background; and of all our fears right now, our greatest is that we will have to stand up unexpectedly on a call with our manager or tutor, revealing…pyjama bottoms.

As guests and hosts, with end-dates unknown, we are thinking more carefully than ever about how to sustain ourselves and those around us. As I steadily work through the soya milk I took, by special request, when I travelled to be with family in the south, I keep thinking about Judith Kerr’s 1968 illustrated book for children, The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

For those who didn’t grow up with this treasure, Sophie and her mum are sitting having tea when the doorbell rings. It can’t be the milkman or the grocer’s boy, says mum. Indeed not. It is an enormous tiger, in search of his own tea. In he comes to join them. He eats all the sandwiches and all the buns and biscuits on the table, and drinks all the tea and the milk. Then he eats everything in the kitchen, drinks every last pint of dad’s beer, and even drains the taps. Off he goes eventually, sated – but now there is no water left for Sophie’s bath, mum has nothing to cook for supper, and hungry dad’s arrival is impending.

I’m thinking about The Tiger Who Came To Tea partly because the world it conjures up – a world where the milkman and the grocer’s boy come to the house – seems to have reignited afresh, as those with underlying health conditions self-isolate, online supermarket delivery slots remain elusive, and vegetable-box sellers, milk producers, and bakers ramp up their provision.

But I’m also thinking about it because it invokes the physical, social, and psychological guests, hosts, and hungers of this pandemic.

The extra hungry bodies in the house, who may ask politely, and be beloved – in Kerr’s illustrations, Sophie curls up with the tiger, stroking his tail, and playing with his whiskers – but will nonetheless clean you out of house and home. If you are living on the breadline, the clue in that word: the real chance that you will run out of food. The fear that you are the tiger, and that you are burdening others. The sense that there is a tiger at the door, who will take everything you offer and more, draining your very taps, until you have nothing left to give. The sense that however much you try to nourish yourself in this time, it’s not enough, and that nothing can give you what you most need.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ says Sophie’s mum, when the tiger has finally gone; and that can be exactly how we feel.

How might the story end? In The Tiger Who Came To Tea, Sophie’s dad comes home, and Sophie and her mum tell him what happened. They go to a café for supper, and the next morning, Sophie and her mum go shopping. They fill the house up with food again, and Sophie buys a tin of tiger food, too, just in case.

I like this ending for two reasons. I like it first because it begins with people talking to each other about what has happened to them. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Sophie’s mum – and yet she does: the first thing to do is just to talk about it.

The second reason I like this ending is that it’s not just one deed that saves the day. It’s multiple deeds, triaged. First, people gather round. They tell the truth of what is here, and what has happened. Then, together, they attend to what is needed right now: they are hungry, and must eat. Next, they prepare themselves for the hunger that may lie ahead. And finally, they bolster themselves against what made them hungry: not with a gun, or a trap, but by preparing to feed the hungry tiger, should he return – with tiger food, and not their own sandwiches.

It can be difficult to talk about our hungers. We may feel ashamed, or think that nothing can be done. But the response to the pandemic – the hundreds of thousands signing up as NHS volunteers; the flood of Whatsapps and text messages from neighbours, colleagues, friends – has shown us that we are not alone. We can talk to each other about what we need, whether it means turning to the person next to us, picking up the phone, or writing. In so doing, we treat our hungers and fears as honoured guests. We nourish ourselves, so that we are full enough to feed another.

In the spirit of this, for this week’s practice I invite you to try a body scan, by Melanie Fennell. The body scan attends to each part of the body in turn, from the tips of the toes to the top of the head. It listens to everything, and neglects nothing. By gently acknowledging what is here, the body scan creates a wise foundation for observing what is really needed. And then, perhaps, you might like to talk about it – with your family, a friend, or just with yourself, in a diary or on a walk.

May you and your tigers keep safe and well over the next week.

I leave you with a poem, The Guest House, by Rumi.

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

© The University of Edinburgh. No part of this content may be used without prior written permission of the copyright holder.