The role of wellbeing in the development sector. How taking care of yourself and your team can impact the communities you work in. 

A blog by Romana Shaikh, Design Lead and Psychotherapist at BecauseYOU on the wellbeing journey with 35 Covid Warriors from Dream a Dream in 2021. 

Warriors in Covid times

Here was a team that was spending day and night caring for their communities, for each other, and for their families. They showed up every day no matter how exhausted or grief-stricken they were. Their minds & bodies were receiving new shocks each day – the family that lost the sole breadwinner, the child that lost both parents, the oxygen that reached minutes too late, the medicine that was made too expensive. The school founder not knowing how to pay his staff, the school teacher worried about the children with no internet and devices.

Here was a team that knew how to empower children to respond to life’s adversities, they knew how to hold space for young people, they knew the most important thing was to listen. They knew this was a crisis, a shock that was unfolding in unpredictable ways and they knew that with everything they needed to do to show up for young people, what was most important was to pause.

But how do you pause? 

When the world around you is spinning, every day is unpredictable, the grief and anxiety is rising – how do you take the time to take care of yourself? And why?

When the leadership team at Dream a Dream realized that the second wave was taking a toll on their team of Covid warriors – 35 facilitators who had become an emergency relief team – they acknowledged that they needed help to pause, process and take care of themselves. A crucial first step in supporting our mental health and often the most difficult step to take, Pavithra reached out to Daniel & myself at Dream a Dream and said, ‘There’s too much going on. We don’t know how to support our young people with all this trauma.’ She shared how she had put in all the support structures possible but the impact on her own mental health and her teams needed something more.

In this context, doing less, taking a break, saying no was not an option for the team. So our team at BecauseYOU asked ourselves what does it mean to create space on the inside? Knowing that the pandemic was going to be the context for an unpredictable amount of time, this was not the time to be processing the experience but of creating a sense of spaciousness & supporting the body to find its way to regulation. Our intention was to hold space for the team and offer them practices that could be integrated into their daily lives. While holding space for young people, how might this team also hold space for themselves?

The journey of holding space for ourselves and others

We planned a 6 month journey to support the Covid Warriors. Our team brought together extensive experience with various modalities from somatic therapy and mindfulness practices to arts based therapy, and movement techniques – integrated into a deliberate, step by step virtual program. The first few sessions were the hardest – to get to know each other in a therapeutic relationship takes time and here we were 3 strangers, asking the team to pause, to stretch their bodies, to colour, when their hearts and bodies and minds were overwhelmed with all the stories they were carrying. But the team showed up. 

Every Monday morning, whether they were traveling or just waking up, whether they were exhausted from a sleepless night or just not able to sit still from all the stress in their body. The team showed up – for themselves and each other. They practiced ways to listen and hold space for themselves, they created space for okayness and joy, they shared stories and observed the sensations in their body. 

Slowly, mindfully, with love, we created space to pause together. And in that pause, the moments of laughter, the request for one’s space, the acknowledging of the pain in the body, the raw expressions of our inner world in colors, the shared grief that we saw and held together – these are the moments that tapped into the spaciousness within and created the resilience to show up.

The power of community

As we traveled the stormy, dark, overwhelming days of the second wave of Covid, I realized the most important lesson about what it means to pause. It’s not an event of a single person but a practice of a community. You can’t predict what will happen when you authentically pause. And we couldn’t have predicted the sudden shift in energy in the group, the sensing of sensations shifting in the body and the relief that the body is relaxed, the power of simply dancing with one’s niece, the spontaneous song that wanted to be sung, that week without a panic attack, that feeling of being held by mother earth and everything else being okay. But we can be sure that when we pause, we show up more intentionally for young people.

If you’re interested in creating a unique therapeutic program for your organization (especially teams that are facing trauma in tough communities), reach out to Daniel Lobo, the Founder and CEO of BecauseYOU at daniel@becauseyou.in. Be Ruthless with your Self-Care, it changes the world.