When EverythingBurns

This essay was written during the pandemic years of 2020–2022, at a moment when every system of coping I had built over a lifetime was being dismantled at once. I’ve updated it lightly, but left the rawness intact — because the territory it describes is not specific to a pandemic. It is what happens when life refuses to let you outrun it any longer.

In the early months of the pandemic, the writer Charles Eisenstein published an essay called The Coronation. He characterized the coronavirus as an initiatory crowning of human consciousness — an evolutionary leap in how humans relate to life itself. A corona, he noted, is a crown. A novel coronavirus pandemic: a new coronation for all.

I am not going to attempt to match Eisenstein’s reach across geopolitics, religion, and virology. As a psychospiritual healer and Doctor of Chinese Medicine, I want to pick up where he left off and offer what I witnessed — in my patients, in my community, and in myself — as the years of crisis unfolded.

The Coronation essay resonated with me. Like most human beings, I wanted to make sense of what was happening. I loved the idea that the disruption could have something to do with humanity evolving, healing, growing. Could this be the great transformation we had been waiting for?

Then people got sick. Not just from the virus, but from depression, anxiety, and a general despair about life itself. The evolution of human consciousness, if it was happening, did not feel luminous or uplifting. It felt like drowning.

The First Door That Wouldn’t Open

The first of many shattering moments came when non-essential businesses were ordered to close. As an entrepreneur, that decree felt like blasphemy. I make my living by showing up, by working hard, by finding a way through every obstacle life puts in front of me. And now the way through was closed. Every door I tried opened onto another wall.

Shock. Then panic. Spirituality be damned. Human evolution could wait. I had two daughters to feed.

I burst into tears on the phone with my father when he offered to help financially. I didn’t need money at that moment. I needed to know I could get back to work. This was the first time in my adult life that persistence and ingenuity could not find a way through a problem. No door stayed open. No angle worked. The theme that would define the next two years announced itself quietly in that phone call: surrender.

Surrender to life as it is. Not as I wanted it to be, not as I could engineer it to become — but as it actually was.

I resisted with everything I had.

Adaptation

Eventually we were designated essential. We learned to work with masks, with distance, with bleach and fear. I pushed forward. And then, after an hour or two at work, my chest would tighten. A twenty-pound weight settled on my sternum. I couldn’t catch my breath.

Anxiety. Panic attacks. My body was sending a message I didn’t want to receive.

I kept going. Zoom school. Isolation. The relentless forward motion of someone who has built his identity around not stopping. And the heavier the weight became.

Then on May 25th, 2020, George Floyd called out for his mother and died with a knee on his neck. I can’t breathe. He did not die from a virus. He died from racism — from the same patriarchal systems that the pandemic was simultaneously exposing in every other domain of life. The invisible biological virus had revealed another invisible virus. The coronation, it turned out, demanded awareness into every diseased corner of the world, not just the medical one.

“The pandemic did not ask us to throw in the towel or check out. It asked for something far simpler — and far more difficult. It asked us to feel.”

When the Fire Takes Everything

My personal life came undone. Conflict with my family arose for the first time and persisted. My business fell into disarray. My marriage held together by grit while our parenting skills frayed under the pressure of months of isolation. Every arena of life, simultaneously, on fire.

And all the pre-existing strategies — meditation, prayer, loving attention, sessions with healers and therapists — none of it made a dent. I heard the same from friends and patients. Everything was burning and we could only watch as our hearts broke again and again.

I felt powerless. Most of us did.

People died. Some by the virus. Some by their own hand — the suffering too great, the tunnel too dark. Psychosis, severe depression, anxiety that made ordinary living intolerable. Tent cities grew. The stories from my patients became a daily litany of grief I didn’t know how to hold.

The Ocean and Death

I started surfing in Oregon.

If you know Oregon surf, you know this is not a casual decision. Oregon storms generate some of the biggest swells in the Pacific. Open ocean currents are fast, rip currents deadly. The water is frigid and dark. Rogue waves arrive without warning. Old-growth logs the size of long-haul trucks wash through from logging operations upriver. Great White sharks are not hypothetical — I personally know two people who were in the water during attacks off the Oregon coast.

Why would I do this? I wanted to feel something other than grief. I wanted the aliveness I remembered from surfing in my twenties — the particular thrill of being entirely present because the alternative was being held underwater.

I paddled out regularly into eight-to-twelve-foot surf at Otter Rock, north of Newport. For the first hour each session, my heart pounded. Cold waves slapped my face. Thoughts of shark teeth. After an hour, the fear would subside and the joy would come — the same joy I remembered as a younger man. I kept going back.

But I also began to wonder, quietly, whether some part of me wanted to be pulled under. Whether the appeal of the dark water and the massive jaws was not entirely about aliveness.

A few weeks later, exhausted, waves of grief washing over me without a traceable cause, I shared this at a men’s retreat. One man looked me in the eye and said simply: “Luke, why don’t you feel your fatigue right here, right now?”

His sincerity broke through. I let myself yawn, stretch. And then I began to cough. Something was stuck in my lungs. I coughed harder. My breath labored. Fluid — clear, then blood-streaked — erupted from my mouth. As I gasped and purged, the faces of patients I had lost flashed before me. Their pain. My pain. Our collective pain, stuck in my body, finally moving.

The toughest, most enduring parts of my identity drowned in grief that afternoon. My friends said I looked dead. I felt it.

“What remained looked like a pithy, pathetic weakling, I told myself. I did not recognize my own face. And yet something in me knew: this was not loss. This was arrival.”

What Remained

In the aftermath, I felt something I had not felt in years: the location of my own soul. Not a metaphor — a felt sense of the most primal, vital essence of my being, sitting quietly beneath all the striving. Its chalice held grief and fatigue. And yet, relief moved through me as I consciously chose, for the first time in a long time, not to override it.

The grief gave way to a poignant sadness. And then — unexpectedly — the sadness became longing. A deep, clean longing to be united with all that I am. The survivor in me, the motivator, the entrepreneur who carries life on his back — I did not disown them. I honored them as faithful servants who had built something real. But I stopped letting them run the show.

This is what I believe Eisenstein was sensing when he wrote about the coronation. Not an upleveling — an inleveling. Not transcendence outward into celestial realms but a descent inward toward our deepest sensitivity. Toward the place in us that knows, instinctively, the sustainable pace. That recognizes when a boundary is needed. That can feel the difference between what nourishes and what depletes.

The coronation was not asking us to become more. It was asking us to become present to what was already there — beneath the armor, beneath the ambition, beneath the thousand ways we have learned to survive at the expense of actually living.

Feeling as the Practice

I am a healer. My deepest self is compelled to make life whole. And what I know now, having been taken completely apart and put back together differently, is that wholeness does not come from rising above. It comes from going through.

Feeling — our most primal sense — has become a liability in a culture organized around productivity and performance. To feel is to be weak, to be derailed, to lose ground. This is the lie that costs us everything.

When everything is burning, we have two choices. Feel. Or resist feeling. I have tried most of the ways of resistance — food, screens, compulsive busyness, the particular numbness of overwork. None of it holds. The pain is patient. It will wait.

What I have found, on the other side of the resistance, is this: when I allow my soul to feel what is moving through my body, I feel integrated even in the midst of pain. Even when I am sad or angry, a sense of congruence is present. I know what is true. I know what I have to give. The feeling, rather than destroying me, orients me.

This is not passive. It is not resignation. It requires more courage than anything I have ever done in the name of persistence or endurance.

You will not rise like the phoenix from these kinds of fires. When the ashes clear, the truest, most exquisite version of you will remain — quieter than before, less armored, more capable of genuine contact. That is the version we need. Not the one who could outlast anything, but the one who can finally feel everything.

I wonder how your fire is going. How much are you fighting? How much are you resisting? Are you exhausted from the effort of not feeling?

You are more capable of this than you think. Not capable of enduring it — capable of feeling it. There is a difference, and it is the difference that changes everything.

I am finding my way. I hope you are too.

With love — Luke

— Dr. Luke Adler
Author, Born to Heal