I check the page on my phone whenever I can. At a traffic light, in front of the tv, standing in line at the airport, in the middle of a meeting…I zoom in and out, looking to see if there’s any information I have missed, panning left to right to spot any changes.

No, I am not internet stalking a particular person or place. This isn’t a social media addiction post. I am stalking the coronavirus.

A little over a week ago, I received a live map listing coronavirus cases as they broke out across the globe. Since then I have checked it daily, often compulsively, whenever I feel like corona could be too close for comfort. And I am not alone in my absolutely irrational behavior.

People are wearing face masks without questioning if they are effective. There is a worldwide shortage of disinfectants…and stores are selling out of toilet paper in places like Hong Kong and Australia.

I go down wormholes wondering how the virus got to Iran. Look up what a “wet market” is and listen to podcasts featuring microbiologists. I find out exactly how the virus works in the body (please God, let me never envision honeycomb lesions in lungs or viruses in feces again). It’s easy to get obsessed. In fact, it’s almost satisfying.

I feel like the real virus is the SHEER PANIC that we are experiencing around the world.

We have officially commodified hysteria. Experts are now terming the coronavirus to be an INFODEMIC rather than an epidemic.

The other interesting thing to note is how quick we jump to cancel things. In an overstressed, overstimulated, and arguably, overglobalized world (yes, I just made that word up), it’s like we’re all dying to just. Stay. Home. And maybe it’s a good thing.

Schools are being forced to open up online classrooms. Scores of employees are working remotely. Instead of launching products at huge, wasteful fairs where people fly and ship in products from all over the world, companies such as BMW unveiled their newest all-electric car online.

I am HERE for it - what better way to go green than by using the internet instead of a super polluting IRL platform?

And guess what else? China, one of the countries with the biggest carbon footprint in the world (and now, obviously, the biggest coronavirus rate) is finally cutting down its carbon emissions thanks to their quarantines and shutdowns. (side note: could China’s terribly polluted air and its inhabitants highly susceptible lungs be linked somehow?)

The thing is, coronavirus is NOT that crazy of an epidemic. It comes from a family of viruses. It is perfectly natural that with our growing population rates, that the human race should continuously breed new viruses and illnesses. My friend Basmah pointed out, “the universe is a self-governing system. We are being regulated.”

To be honest, I haven’t done much else to adjust to this novel, and yet, familiar outbreak (we all remember SARS, and there’s also the lesser known but similar MERS). I already work hard on my immune system. I trust people to quarantine themselves if they think they could’ve been exposed to coronavirus. I exercise, get eight hours of sleep (most nights!), take natural supplements when I’m feeling low energy (like echinacea and zinc), and wash my hands before I eat or place them on my eyes, mouth (or any other mucous membranes). If someone is showing symptoms of illness, including myself, I minimize physical contact and/or being in close proximity. Can always do better though - I would love to hear what you do to maintain a high immunity! …and how you keep calm in the face of the CONSTANT stream of worrying information!

I resist stillness. Having a super active mind, I reach meditative states after yoga, or when I do Sufi meditations that combine movement and chanting. I find activities like embroidery and coloring to be meditative. I like to walk and sync my steps mindfully to my breath. Recently, I found excuses not to join a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction class (MBSR), although I understand that part of becoming an effective human being is having a clear, focused mind.

Mai Miles Frandsen, a professional nurse and certified MBSR teacher in Kuwait made a great point about teaching mindfulness to kids: You can’t teach mindfulness to kids if their parents haven’t studied it themselves.

At younger ages, we are so much more vulnerable to the energies that surround us. If you notice, babies often mirror the moods of those who hold them. An overwhelmed parent often translates to a fussy baby. In the spirit of not being overwhelmed by parenting books (or anything, really), here’s a mindful parenting exercise from Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad You Did).

The following exercise is what is called a guided visualization. You will be asked to visualize a scenario in your mind’s eye and the idea is to really explore it to try and find out what’s going on in your hidden depths.

Imagine three rooms. The first one is a reception room, then two doors lead off the reception room into the second room and the third room. Think of this three-roomed house as a metaphor for you as a parent. In your mind’s eye, go to the reception room.

This is where you receive visitors. Here, you have your public face on.

The second room is where you feel most unsure, and perhaps most angry, regretful, ashamed, frustrated, sad or dissatisfied. This is the room of difficulty and vulnerability when it comes to being a parent. Walk into that room and dare to feel what feels like in here.

Have a look around and note what you see without judging yourself. As you spend time in this room and feel what it is like to be in here, notice your breathing. If you are holding your breath or breathing shallowly, breathe normally again. Talk one last look around the room of difficulty and then come back into the reception room, back into the public space. Notice what it feels like to shut the door on the room of difficulty, but know that the difficulty is still there.

Now it’s time to open the door to the third room. This is the room where you feel most positive. In this room everything is going right, you feel a sense of pride in who you are as a parent and you feel the joy you can feel with your child or children, and possibly more pride than you could show in the reception room. Have a look around the positive room and see what it is that is there. Keep looking and notice what you feel in this room. Good.

Now come back into the reception room. As you stand in the reception room, have a good sense what is behind both closed doors.

Remember: we all have these rooms as well as the public face of parenting when other people can see us with our children.

And we all have how we feel about ourselves as parents, things we feel great about and things we feel less than great about. What is so important is not to compare our own private room of difficult feelings to other people’s public face of parenting. Remember: we all need someone accepting to talk to about those two rooms off the reception room. Someone who can hear us with we feel flooded with love and someone who can accept us in the more ambiguous feelings that parenting can bring up.

This exercise can be modified to address all sorts of anxiety, with the second room housing your greatest fears and the third room holding your proudest moments. Hope you find it fruitful!

Speaking to new parents, it becomes apparent that parenting books are rather divisive.

It seems there are two camps: Camp Make-It-Up-As-You-Go-Along and Camp I-Laminated-My-Baby’s-Schedule.

I hear two currently conflicting viewpoints from the two camps. From the former,

“UGH. Parenting books. Parenting apps. They were awful. They made me depressed and made me doubt myself as a mother. They made me doubt my baby and her abilities. They turned her into a statistic and a ‘should be.’ It was draining.”

And, from the latter,

“I LOVED the parenting book I followed. It gave me sanity and structure when everything about having a newborn was super scary. Being regimented about feed and sleep times definitely regulated our routine and hence, my mood and my baby daddy’s.”

Personally, I’m in Camp-I-Don’t-Even-Know-If-I-Want-Kids, and I’m not alone - more about that in another post. That being said, I still think parenting is fascinating, and I love observing personal transformations of all kinds - what changes you more than having a child?

Amongst my camp, we also make fun of new parents, as my friend Lina says, “7:28am, open blinds, 7:29am fart, 7:30am pick up sleeping baby.”

A friend who recently had her second baby (mabrook!) observed that super chill people became much more Type-A as parents…and that some of her more rigid friends learned to relax upon the introduction of kiddy chaos into their lives.

On that basis, we can find the right parenting resource (i.e. book/blog/vlog) for our parenting style…and in some cases, none at all (as another friend says, “I simply watched my mother”). Here are some suggestions from my astoundingly generous online community:

Joana Filipa Weaver ‘We’re going on a bear hunt!’ Best lessons ever!

Ellen Williams Hmmm, for little people happiest baby/ toddler on the block (conveniently also on TV).

Varenka Schwarz Janet Lansbury. She has blogs, podcasts and 2 great books: Elevating childcare and No bad kids, toddler discipline without shame.

Georgette Saliba Experience hehe or messing it up until you get it right one of these days 🙄

Michael A. Frels Read Love and Anger (I read this myself, I found it super relatable…it’s rare to find honesty about how to deal with unruly kiddos).

Gwen Watson Daniel Siegel books - parenting from the inside out is a great one to examine your own childhood and bring awareness to what emotions might get stirred up while navigating the rollercoaster of parenting. He has other great books too on neuroscience behind emotions/ tantrums and one on parenting teens!

Reem Al-Ali Wonder Weeks, Cribsheet, Happiest Baby, and Permission to Parent.

Liane Al Ghusain I've been gifting Itsy Bitsy Yoga and the Yoga Animal/Bug series by Sarah Jane Hinder. I also got Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad You Did) and feel like I’m learning so much about the psychology of parenting…and even about how I was parented!

Nauf Al-Moawad I hated all the what to expect books. How and when things should be happening - so much anxiety!! How to talk so kids will listen was good, but generally I found parenting books too idealistic and structured if that makes sense? Children’s books: Dr Seuss, The Day The Crayons Quit, etc ❤️

Lyn Azad Janet Lansbury, Martha Gerber and Françoise Dolto. “Lorsque l’enfant parait” by Dolto is just great. I’m sure you’ll find it in English.

Ellen Williams We have bringing up bebe, which was good for me because it gave me permission to break with American customs, but the book itself can be seen as a put down. Lots of infant sleep books that are utter nonsense, dr spock and what to expect that are pretty alarmist (all the things that can go wrong). For pregnancy, I read all of Ina May Gaskins work. Super crunchy, but allowed me to tap in to a network of women who don't see birth as an illness, instead something powerful and sacred. Brandon like husband coached child birth, said it made him feel less useless through the process.

Ellen Williams Kids books are an entirely different game. 0-1 i love cloth books because they last. There's a line of indestructible books (one of the authors is Amy pixton) that have survived 5 years at a childcare center and my 3 kiddos. All the classics (I usually gift harold and the purple crayon or the gruffalo year one).

Cassidy Goodwin How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk the survival guide for 2-7 year olds. Everything else I liked about pregnancy were mostly apps. And bringing up Bebe (also called why French kids don’t throw food) is a fun read.

Fadi Tayim “everyone poops”

Caitlin Duffy Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child was what I needed in our darkest days, not just for his speech about sleep but also the ‘overly fussy baby’ solidarity. before Oisin I read Ina and my Hypnobabies manual but that was about it. KellyMom’s website answered so many breastfeeding concerns. Unruffled podcast and the village of neighborhood moms with same age babes in north brooklyn.

Nafen Socar Just our mothers.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the discussion! If you’re reading now and want to chime in, please feel free to comment below xx

…AND TURN INTO GLITTERY, VEGAN UNICORNS

My friend Sara and I nerd out HARD about becoming better people. We egg each other on to manifest our goals and help each other recognize when we’ve made progress. Most our conversations are made up of giggly half-finished sentences:

“Did you finish that Mind Mastery podcast about—”
”Procrastination? No, not yet…”
”—HA! The irony.”
”Shuttup! I’ll get to it. YOU, have to listen to that audiobook Deep Work.”
”I read a summary, it was great.”
”Ughh, but the book is all about NOT taking shortcuts.”

And so on. We agree on how problematic New Year’s resolutions can be. Says Sara,

“My thoughts on New Years resolutions…are that they are not real...Resolutions are an arbitrary line in the sand you draw, ending up as one more way of being hard on yourself. I prefer to set habits one at a time or related habits together in a group.”

The New Year resolution trend is really silly in my opinion. My resolution - meditate more, use my phone less - is already pretty doomed. I find it’s much easier to make a resolution for the week, or the month, and go from there. I were to, say, cut dairy from my diet for a few weeks, it would be much easier to do so on the first day of the week, than on a random Tuesday or amidst the hedonistic haze of the weekend. Another cool way to organically work on goal-setting is to do it with the moon. New moons are a great time to set goals, whilst full moons are an ideal time to look back and take stock. I love getting together with friends when we do this, as it heightens the focus and you can hold each other accountable.

Sara is super hardcore and her life is basically one huge spreadsheet. So, when Sara wants to learn French, she integrates the goal into the following method:

“I made a notecard for every week (see right) and eventually 3 of the 6 habits became real things I do without thinking twice. One of the key habits I have finally started to do on autopilot is acknowledging and writing down 3 new things I am grateful for daily…This has heightened my awareness and made me very aware/sensitive of what I have and how lucky I am to have it.”

Gratitude is a wonderful way to attract more good into your life!

I’d rather celebrate my 2019 victories and shift my mindset for 2020 instead of worry about minutiae and impossible standards! I set big goals and chip away at them.

This year, I received this awesome little workbook called THE YEAR AHEAD and I have to say, I feel pretty freakin’ psyched about what’s to come! I loved drawing cute little pictures of the things I want (stick figure Liane gives inspiring talks. stick figure Liane chills in nature. stick figure Liane is in lo0ve. stick figure Liane sticks you the finger if you’re judging her goals).

If you’d also like to do the workbook, here it is. Enjoy!