Andy Smith talks about the experience of having Long Covid and fatigue, the collective dreaming process that intersects with illness and our connections and disconnection to the earth that weaves through it.
[six minute read]
I am writing this whilst preparing to teach a five day intensive facilitation training in London in February 2025. It’s called Collective Dreaming: Embodying new patterns for facilitation, relationships, communities and the world. It’s also marks the start of an exciting two year training called Facilitating the Future.
See below for links and more information.
Coming back to my trees
Walking in the woods, the remnants of earlier autumn showers drip down through the leaves and I am reminded of some kind of orchestral music I can’t quite place. It has a cinematic feel.
There is a quiet synergy at play here, a synaesthesia (1), so that as I watch the last of the recent downpour fall though the leaves I hear strings too being pulled by the orchestra, They sound like multiple voices murmuring, while the autumn sun anticipated all morning appears between the remaining breezed leaves and branches. And, as I walk the sun appears and disappears, in a series of climaxes and retreats.
Photo by Andy Smith, wood in October near Teviot Water
My footsteps are mushy and then the earth becomes firmer as the path elevates onto a rise. These mounds, in these woods, can be soft underfoot but with the slight change in elevation, a dryness, a sense of difference emerges. I know this is an old path, made true by the weight of many who have walked it.
This morning, I made a special effort to get out despite my very low energy and the fatigue that Long Covid carries with it. I love the smell of the trees after rain. There is something to do with negative ions that are produced and how our immune systems engage with bacteria activated by the moisture in the air. So, for a number of reasons, walking in the rain does us good. A reminder that we are more open, at our edges, than we think.
The carefully measured nature of my walk brings me in touch with many senses, sounds and music, the feeling of my feet on the earth, the smells and playfulness of the light.
It is not by chance that I am here. I have had Long Covid for a while now and absence of energy and slowness is part of that and I have decided to research this experience when I can. Even though another part of me is deeply frustrated by the exhaustion, I am practicing a meditative movement in a slow meandered sauntering (2).
Photo by Andy Smith, Binning Wood, near Tyninghame, September
But then, surprisingly and unintentionally, I find myself speeding up and I feel I am going too fast. I mean, fast is relative, mind you. If you were watching me you would still see someone walking very slowly. There isn’t any energy in my batteries (one of the experiences of Long covid) and yet I want to be here, in and amongst the trees.
Walking for me or the last 15 years has been tricky anyhow. I have to pay attention to my balance when I walk as I have a neuropathy caused by some heavy chemotherapy. The ‘complete deplete” experience of Long Covid on top of that encourages a very careful attention; making sure I don’t fall or stumble. Such a level of concentration can exhaust me. So today will be a very sort walk for sure.
I worry a little about going too fast, I don’t want my heart rate rising too high or for my breath to be affected (because I know I’ll pay for it later) and so I slow down even further until it seems I am barely moving.
But, why had I unintentionally sped up when it was the last thing I wanted to do? Perhaps, I thought, I had fallen unconsciously into old patterns of how I used to walk. But I wondered also about the ghostly messages or algorithmythical (3) imperatives in our society that are always pushing us – “to get things done”, “to do ourselves some good” or “be useful” – and “improve!, get fit, go faster, not be lazy or aimless, to get there” (wherever that is). All so we can be productive and functional.
Arghh!
Meditating on this I make a decision to slow down even more. As I do so I sense a different connection, a hint of a pause in the sequence of time and i feel more of a belonging to this place I am in. In the same way as the terrain changes from wet to dry as the path weaves though the wood, so also my sense of time changes and linear time appears to disappear. Space is opened up, a clearing in the mind and heart – a creative space. Ideas flow more freely into the space, I make notes, and a new project emerges.
photo by Lucja Nowak
In the following days I find much to love in this slowness, a medative process in me that’s needed by us all, a creative force that helps me write and connect more sentiently in my relationships and in my projects. I’m reminded of the deeper value of stillness, of taking time rather than being taken by time.
’Doing’ feels seriously over valued. Slowness without purpose and sensing without searching, it feels like a new way for me to be in this world. There is a collective need for this experience and way of being and I feel it is not just for me. My experience as a therapist, facilitator and community builder over many years confirms this. So often what seems a very specific individual realisation through dreamwork has collective and relational wisdom needed by many.
There is a saying in Cymraeg (Cymraeg is the Welsh word for Welsh) Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed! It translates as coming back to my trees and means something like returning to the right place or returning to balance. I love that – for me forests have that sense of balance and I feel that balance when I am in them. I’m coming back to my trees.
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Awareness of how all the parts are interacting is key to the Worldwork paradigm and if you are interested in how to utilise the shared wisdom of our dreams, and difficulties to transform projects or help facilitate groups then the upcoming intensive training workshop in February 2025 might be for you. We will explore what is trying to emerge in our lives in our projects as new patterns that are shared with others. This intensive can also be taken as part of a longer two years Facilitation Training: Facilitating Our Future created with CFOR and which is now accepting applications.
Andy Smith (he/him) is a member of Processwork UK faculty. He is also a UKCP registered psychotherapist, supervisor, training supervisor and founding faculty member of the Spanish Processwork training programme. He centres his work on transformational change in communities, organisations and participative democracy, inclusion and diversity. This has resulted in international awards for educational design at both university and grassroots levels, with awards for inclusivity, diversity, changing workplace practice, lifelong learning. A GENE award for global innovation in education was recently given to the Go Deep Project.
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(1) Synaesthesia describes the process of how different sense experiences might couple together.
(2) Saunter – I am using this term, perhaps meaning to be on the earth, to help me remember to be more present in the moment.
(3) Algorithmythical is blend world I made, joining Algorithm (a set of instructions) and Mythical (a set of patterns in a story that may or not be true but none the less can shape us). So algorithmythical means that they are like unconscious instructions we have internalised about how to live in our culture. Algorithmythicals might persist or reoccur even when on another level we try to forbid them or strongly disagree with them.
