Koodam: providing a heart connection during the lockdown

Why did you decide to offer special support during the lockdown?

Niva: In the beginning, the situation pulled our full attention into the four walls of our house, our immediate family, food, sanitation, etc. We went into survival mode. There were rules we had to follow and to accept. For a while, I just took care of my little circle and didn’t have enough energy to take care of the bigger circles.

Elvira: Yes, but as a Koodam person I realised that we also went away from the collective. We got caught up in fears. We had different concerns and our priorities got small, which is exactly the opposite of what was needed. So, having taken care of our children, our families, homes and our immediate needs, we realized there was a wider need that had to be addressed. We felt we had to look into ways that Koodam could offer some kind of support to people in the larger community, especially those who were in quarantine. 

Niva: Some things were clear. We knew we were not going to do deep mediations using Zoom, but if somebody needed a bit of advice or someone needed to be listened to, we could offer personal support by phone or online –  which we were already doing before the pandemic. 

Helen: For those of us, like myself, who had to go through a period of strict quarantine, the experience was particularly acute. My husband and I went into quarantine because my husband had just come back from overseas. It was a very confusing time. We were like, ‘What are we supposed to do? Do we just sit at home?’ But once the COVID-19 Task Force was set up, we could ask all the practical questions like how to get food – and that was very helpful.

Having been in quarantine, I saw first-hand how the connections I had were so valuable and I felt that there must be other people in the community who really needed that as well. That’s when the idea of forming a WhatsApp group came up. We decided to widen the offering to anyone who had a need to have more connection, and not only for the people who were in quarantine. 

Whether it was asking practical questions or allowing people to share something from their day, it was a space to express yourself. The main topics centred around children and family; people with children were sharing a lot of tips. There were practicalities about how to get food in quarantine, questions regarding testing, or when could people go out again, that sort of thing. Then there were people expressing how they were doing. Saying things like, “I had a lousy day yesterday and this is what helped.”  Sometimes it was a simple sharing followed by an empathic response – ”I heard you”, or “I’m here”. It was all about that heart connection. 

Elvira: I initially joined the WhatsApp group to offer my support, but then it became something more. I realised that lending support actually supported me because it helped me to process what I was going through. Later, when I realised that others had the same issues as me, I started reaching out myself for help. For three weeks there was a lot of interaction. Then, the day when the first lockdown got extended the group went really quiet; it just went into silence.  

Helen: It seems that once people who had been in quarantine came out of it they started to adjust and didn’t need that support anymore. For the others, being in lockdown became a kind of normal and people felt they could deal with the situation. 

Elvira: With the extension of the lockdown, the initial state of emergency was over, we had figured out how to take care of our basic needs, learned more or less how to navigate the restricted conditions and were coming to terms with the scale of the pandemic. 

Helen: However, even though people stopped reaching out for support, we continued to receive messages saying thank you for the offer. It seems that the offering itself made a difference. 

Has your experience of the lockdown given you ideas about how things could be different in the future?

Julia: Everything is moving too fast and I feel we are all still shaky. Personally,I feel much more vulnerable because the truth is, I have no idea what the future will be like. I cannot connect to what was, but I have yet to see what I can connect to in the future.

Niva: We have all witnessed how everything stopped and nothing happened, which helps us realize that we can do things differently. 

Helen: There are lots of ideas floating around, people saying, ‘let’s try this, let’s try that’. There seems to be more openness and a general feeling of moving towards something. 

Niva: One of the things that became very clear is that what we need to strengthen community is collaboration. We don’t need separation and distinctions and divisions and partitions.

Elvira: I think that everybody needs to think for themselves about how can they contribute to creating positive change on a community level. What if we stopped complaining and instead shifted into taking responsibility for improving whatever we feel is not working? What if we found other like-minded people and co-created something new?

Julia: It starts with us, it starts with me. I came to Auroville because I don’t want to do things that take me away from my heart. It’s about the alignment, always. 

Elvira: We don’t need to revert to passé structures. Let’s allow ourselves the opportunity to think and imagine and wonder what would happen, if…