What is going on? My favorite people, my fellow quarantine ease, my shelters in place. What is up? It is Nicole and we are here together.

Again, in the endless day of days, just doing our best to make meaning out of it. And this is my podcast, the Care for Chronic Pain. So welcome. So happy to have you here.

Happy podcast day, if you were listening to this on Friday. And happy any day that you are finding yourself here with us together, finding our way in this crazy journey of our lives.

So where do I want to begin today? First of all, I want to say that I hope you are finding as much joy as possible in your moments.

I was thinking today as I was watching little bit of the news. I just watched a little bit of the news every morning that it's incredibly diverse, the different experiences we are having in this quarantine.

Because if you have young children and you're not working right now, not working out of the house, there's that experience of like being with our kids and being in that frustration and that daily challenge.

And if you're a healthcare provider, you have that incredible stress and that emotional strain of being in the space of the front lines and really being in this.

And if you are someone working from home, you have that transition that you've had to make between, you know, whatever your life used to be and what your life is now.

And whatever Zoom meetings you have to be on and, you know, how it might make you feel better or not to actually get into real close, put shoes on, you know, try to show up as your best self.

So there's that experience. There's people who are living on their own completely on their own who are, you know, getting used to the fact that they don't have that kind of daily physical interaction with people.

So we're all experiencing this so differently.

But what's striking to me is that no matter how we're experiencing this, what we are invited into is such a deeper, more personal experience of our own lives.

And we can live on the surface of our lives, you know, normally when we have so many play dates and drop-offs and work meetings and you have to meet your trainer at the gym or you have to, you know, have this obligation or that or you have to go shopping or, you know, whatever it is, there's just not much of that available to us anymore.

So we're sitting here in this intimate space of our own lives, whatever they are, whatever beauty and pain we have lived in and created all the enormous possibility for joy and dipping into those moments of real connection and all the excruciating pain of being human being.

We're just right here for all of it in a way that I think is very, very amplified right now.

So just welcome to it, you know, I'll tell you for me, I'm, you know, sort of feeling guilty sometimes about how much I'm enjoying it just because I make my days in a different fashion than I did before.

I prioritize wellness in a way I didn't give myself permission to before.

So, you know, I might spend the first half of my day after I get my imperative work done, exercising, meditating, journaling, cooking something I like to eat, you know, this is not, I did not give myself that amount of space before and so I'm enjoying it.

But then there's also a part where it's very unmooring to be in such a space of uncertainty and of course uncertainty is analogous to anxiety for many people.

So, so much going on for all of us. So wherever this meets you, I just want to say hello. Good morning, good evening, good night.

I love you. I'm here with you. We're all doing this together and also how unique, how unique that as a globe, we are legitimately doing something together.

You know, it's just not lost on me that that is an unusual situation and in some ways we should honor that.

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