Prana

My yoga teacher, voice emanating from my computer and a screen full of small boxes, each one occupied by a yogi on his/her mat, talks us through our sequence of postures. Breath is counted in, out, in, out, as the teacher speaks of the freedom and depth and power of “prana.” Which means “breath.” I begin feeling grateful for this calming voice flowing through my screens into my scrambled mind. Then, without warning, my mind is flooded terrible visuals, delivered in an e-mail from a colleague. There is a long careful description of what dying on a respirator actually means, feels like and looks like. The horror of breath failing. Prana leaking out and away. For me, the pandemic routinely delivers this mix of horror, privilege, guilt, respite, concern, identification, and denial: impossible to negotiate.

From the beginning of my/our awareness of COVID-19 even before working remotely, I felt immediately and intuitively, that this huge and expanding experience was activating whatever profound core trauma was unique to each person.

I think of the COVID-19 as an experience of apres-coup, an experience in the present, that opens all the unmetabolized, untranslatable that any of us, all of us, have had to contain, rework and keep at bay, over a lifetime.

In the three months of working remotely, I have been struck by the resonance of early and deep experiences of terror, of helplessness. This idiosyncratic is both particular and generic for each individual. I feel the sudden massive disequilibrium in a patient who has been, for some years, drawing on strength and stability to manage family life, relationships, and a new career. In the chaotic and very unsettled sessions that follow on the pandemic, I am reminded repeatedly of her history of displacement, of removal from an abusive parent. Her only known world was yanked away, disappearing in one confusing interview with a detective and a doctor. She carried that event as a terrible indictment. She had destroyed her home. She