COVID is an invitation to stand together

COVID is experienced as a threatening disease and its effects are asking a lot from many of us. A lot of people do not get very ill, some will get severely ill, while others are a bit ill but suffer from long-term symptoms. You simply don’t know in advance what COVID will do once you’re infected.

The best response we have to COVID are our immune system and our connectedness.

Our immune system is the system we need to rely on for protection. Maybe you believe your own and the collective immune system is best served by taking the vaccine. And maybe you believe your own and the collective immune system is best served by not taking the vaccine.

What you believe is in itself a working ingredient for a healthy system or body ^[1].

In all the information that comes to us and that is available, it is impossible to know for sure what is true. That what gives you truth, is true to you.

The problem with these different beliefs and truths is that they cause deep fragmentation in society.

Before COVID entered our lives, there already was a lot of fragmentation, on other big issues that we face as human beings. COVID triggers this fragmentation and makes it more concrete, more visible and tangible.

This fragmentation now even affects the best of families, friendships and close working relationships. And that is painful.

It is especially painful because we know deep in our hearts that connectedness is what contributes to life, to healing, to feeling safe and secure, and to feeling you belong, exactly as we are.

When you acknowledge that this fragmentation is always there, we can come together.

In all this, we want to stand for and contribute to connectedness. And we are willing to hold the container for fragmentation, for the different beliefs and truths, without entering into discussions. We cannot do that on our own. So when you join our workshops, meetings, sessions, training days, please know: we ask of you to hold both your own truth and beliefs and make the container with us to enable everybody to connect.

Another thing we have learned in all these years of systemic work is that safety is an illusion. One can never be a 100% safe. We can however contribute to create a setting with each other that allows us to feel safe to participate.

We live in a democracy in which we have outsourced the task of making rules and procedures for the good of the population to the government. At the BHI, we work within the framework of the applicable government regulations.

At this moment, this is how we are able to respond to COVID, to the government regulations, to fragmentation, to uncertainty.

Bibi Schreuder and Barbara Hoogenboom

August 23^rd, 2021

^[1] Book You are the placebo – Joe Dispenza