Befriending the Inner Child

One of my clients describes this experience she had in grammar school. Being the chubbiest and slowest of the other kids performing wind sprints in Mrs. Wahlberg's P.E. class, my client would often come in last. Already tired and overwhelmed from being beaten, Mrs. Wahlberg would make her run several more wind sprints on her own while been scoffed at by the other kids. To this very day she pulls out her own Mrs. Wahlberg when the tax bill hasn't been paid; the bags from last weekend's vacation haven't been unpacked; and, oh yes, when she has totally forgotten to write a thoughtful response to that person who emailed her last week. As the "to do's" build up, so does the overwhelm.

The anxiety can be so debilitating that it swirls inside of her, almost like a lava lamp. Throughout most of her day, she anxiously wonders to herself, "What have I let slip through the cracks? Am I doing 'the right thing' at this moment? Am I on the right track?" Secretly she wonders, "Will I ever know what 'the right track' is?"

Instead of gathering her wits about her, my client invites Mrs. Wahlberg and the kids in her class to mock her: "You're chubby. You're slow. You're weak. You're lame." All the while, my client mistakenly believes that this will somehow motivate her to get unburied from the mountain of tasks, known and unknown, that await her.

This may sound like someone else's story, but it's actually all of our stories. We've all come to believe in some particular way that we are weak, slow, defective, ugly, unlovable or just plain, "not enough." We've gathered plenty of evidence that validates our insufficiency. When we find ourselves yet again in situations that confirm our flaw, we beat ourselves up.

Here's the kicker. We mistakenly believe that if we're mean or cruel enough, somehow we will slough off our bad habits. Instead, we're practicing being cruel to ourselves, which stimulates the stress hormone, cortisol, into our blood, sending us into a depression that deepens the hole we're already in.

Below the self-loathing and the accompanying longing that we'd just get this part of ourselves handled is a deep and old wound. It's the kind of wounding that can happen in Mrs. Wahlberg's P.E. class; when dad married the bitch that wished I hadn't existed or; as in my case when my brother took his life and nobody knew how to help.

These experiences leave exquisitely tender marks on the mind, body and spirit. To make contact with these imprints can be like putting our hand on a hot stove. They burn. We don't know how to keep these parts of ourselves company; in fact we've spent a lifetime wishing they would just go away.

There comes a point for many of us, however, when we stop running from them, when we stop attempting to beat ourselves into submission. Maybe someone shows up who can help us, or maybe we end up completely overwhelmed and can no longer keep up the facade. However it happens, instead of running from them, we turn around and look. We find a gentle and tolerable way to keep these parts of us company. When we do, we begin to discover that instead of needing to be excised, these parts of ourselves are actually hidden with treasures of insight, compassion and wisdom.

As my client learns to keep this underlying pain company, to welcome it, to have compassion for herself, she's starting to discover that when she's triggered, she can use it as an invitation to come back, come back to the chubby, little girl being abused in Mrs. Wahlberg's class.

"Above all else," she says, "We don't abuse children. Above all else, I don't abuse myself."

Burnout

Several years ago, I completed burned out in my work. I had started to feel a dimming of interest in a work project I’d been involved in.  I'd been co-running a yoga program in San Francisco with a colleague for five years, and I had stopped feeling that magical feeling.  I kept bumping into a kind of been-there-done-that fatigue along with a nagging sense that there was something else out there, something unclear waiting for me.  I'd had these sort of feelings before. I'd been started yoga programs like the one I’d been co-running for more than fifteen years, so aversion was not new hat.   I thought this one would fade like the previous times, but in this case, my frustration persisted.

Sorting Through the Confusion

It's often hard to detect when feeling associated with burnout are just a passing reaction or when it's a message from the deeper interior that change in needed.  We all have periods of time when our jobs or our relationships are just kind of blah.  That's normal.  The notion that we're always supposed to be happy all the time is b.s.  Even the best of job or relationships can go stale on us or just irritate us to the core.  That's normal as long as it doesn’t last forever.  

When that difficulty is prolonged, however, it can be a message that it's time to slow down and reflect on what we're bumping into.  Sometimes it is a message that it is time for a change.  Deciphering burnout can be difficult, though.  It can be immensely helpful to have wise counsel we can trust enough to help us distinguish the wisdom of our inner callings from the voices that deceive us.

I shared the experience with my coach.  I said, "Okay, I'm feeling burned out. I'm starting to wonder if it’s time for me to let this project go.  I want to name this urge, but I don't want to make a decision just yet. I want to use these next two months to see if, in fact, I am done, or I am just a little fatigued or bored."  

Sure enough, after two months, the feelings had passed.  I felt reinvigorated by some responses I'd had to some blog writing I was doing about the intersections of yoga and life coaching and started to see that the project I was in was a great platform for the expression of this cross-breeding.  

Then a friend contacted me and said, "I'd like to partner with you to do some consulting work in corporations.”  I'd really wanted to explore that possibility, but I was too tired to take on another project.  I just could not muster the energy to begin.  My days were too filled with teaching classes and working with my coaching clients that I couldn't possibly give it the attention it deserved.  Not being able to do this left me completely frustrated.  Once again, I began thinking that it was time for a change, but somehow I wasn't quite ready.

 And then I had this experience that absolutely changed me forever…

Letting Go

After an arduous bike ride to the top of Mt. Tamalpais, I stood on a hillock overlooking the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco Bay, The City of San Francisco, and the East Bay.  As I stood there taking in the scenery, I felt a sense of gratitude for the beauty that surrounded me. I started to do a little, improvised gratitude jig, somewhere between a yoga sun salutation and a dance.  

As I did so, I started to hear a clicking noise behind me that kept the rhythm.  And when I turned around, I saw this raven standing only a few feet from me with a seed of sorts in its beak. The clicking was coming from the raven's beak making contact with the seed, and I had this clear sense that the raven was relating to my movements by keeping the rhythm.  

I continued to dance my gratitude dance around the hillock.  Each movement I made to the left, the raven moved to the right.  Each movement I made to the right, the raven moved to the left.  We were in a dance together, and the raven was keeping the rhythm.  At the same time this dance was taking place, I'd had this intuitive sense that the raven had a message for me.  Who knows whether I was making it up or not, but it was a message that moved me:

"It's time to let go, to stop dancing someone else's dance, to dance you're own steps, and to trust them."

For me this was code. I'd spent the last 20 years being faithful to my yoga teacher and the tradition he taught me.  I'd been his student and I’d taught hundreds of people his method. The crow’s message for me was that it was time to let go, to trust a deeper and more personal wisdom, rather than following someone else’s path.  

Gulp.  I'd been a student of and run these sorts of programs for so many years because they had given me access to deep teachings, the security of a teacher, a community, some sense of authority to back up my own teachings, and an identity.  Now, the raven-teacher was giving me the the sage advice, “Let it go!"

My need for change wasn't so much about leaving the program or about being burnt out.  Rather, it was about making room for something more personally truer to enter.  I realized that I had to make space for that to come about.  And for that brief moment, I felt released.  Released from the burden that by leaving, I was betraying my students, my business partner, or the tradition.  It was a visceral experience, this clear sense that not only was it okay to make a change, but I was being called forth to make it.  And while I'd been preparing for this moment for the nine months of back-and-forth, the inner teacher's message had clearly arrived.

Living with Uncertainty

Within a week of this experience, my partner and I met.  I shared my decision, and we both wrote a public announcement about that decision.  By the way, this doing, this action required little to no effort.  The challenge was living with the uncertainty for almost nine months.  One of my teachers used to call this form of waiting, "holding the tension."  Holding the tension is another way of saying, living with uncertainty.  It's called holding the tension because it feels uncomfortable to live between a question, to live in ambiguity.

Each of us has a propensity to try to get ground underneath our feet by wanting certainty or clarity.  That's why we turn to self-help programs, gurus, yoga traditions, techniques, methods, and philosophies.  But if we're following our inner guidance, the messages come in only when we're really ready.  Sometimes we must undergo a trial by fire before the message is clear.  You can't always coax the interior into a "yes or no decision."

But when the message is announced, it comes in declarative tones from what the Quakers call that still small voice within: "Call her."  "Go to New York." "It's time." "Let go!"  And when we disregard these messages because they're inconvenient, we sometimes find ourselves in the throws of depression.

My doubting voices continued to peep up, even after I had made that decision; in fact, the moment I made it, I started to really enjoy teaching, again.  All of the previous feelings of burn out completely vanished.  In fact, some aspects of my teaching, which previously had been driven by a proving energy, altogether diappeared  I no longer had to prove anything to anyone anymore.  And as that went away, I began enjoying the process again.

But I knew at a much deeper place of my being why I was doing this.  This decision was not whimsy.  I had struggled valiantly with it.  I had endured lots of back and forth while continuing to live with uncertainty.  And since that certainty came, I had to be willing to trust it in spite of the fact that I wanted to second-guess my decision. 

If we want real and substantive change, we have to be willing live for sustained periods with the discomfort of ambiguity and doubt.  In fact, one might say that most of life requires us to get accustomed to uncertainty.  The sooner we get that message, the less we'll fall prey to quick fixes and the more our lives will become aligned with our higher calling.

Facing Negativity

Mary was 48 and had spent her whole life driven to make it big in the corporate world. She arrived at my office and said, "I am totally burnt out and am just going through the motions of my life." She wasn't sleeping. Her relationship was suffering. She'd already been to a psychologist, and that work had shown her why she felt stuck. Knowing why hadn't moved anything.

When I asked why she didn't leave the job or change it, she said even the thought felt like torture. Her sense of self rose and fell with her work. She'd spent decades getting to the top, and now that she'd made it she was looking around asking, is this as good as it gets.

She said the money was why she couldn't move. She also knew, when she looked at it, that her family would be fine on less. The money was the cover story.

Underneath it was this. Her mother drank, and was sometimes present and sometimes gone altogether. Mary had built a life of professional accolades so she would never again feel the way she felt as a little girl: scared and destitute. That was the deal. Keep achieving and you never have to feel it.

Most of us carry a version of that sentence. I never want to feel that again. The stories that run our lives are not just about succeeding. They are about not feeling something.

So the work with Mary wasn't reframing her situation. It was meeting the feeling the whole structure was built to avoid. When she turned toward it, it showed up in her body: fluttering in the chest, queasiness in the stomach, a knot in the throat.

Clients ask me, "Why would I want to be with this shit?" Fair question. The answer I keep coming back to is that whatever you refuse to feel gets to run things. The fear of ending up destitute had been making Mary's decisions for forty years. She had never once looked at it directly.

When she met the terror instead of managing it, it loosened. Not gone. Loosened. She stopped being afraid of feeling it, and the job question got simpler. Over the next six months she found her way to work that looked, from the outside, like a demotion. She sleeps. She has dinner with her girlfriend. She is not going through the motions.

Burn Out

When Bob first came to me, he wasn't sleeping. Panic kept him up most of the night. He was taking sedatives to get down and amphetamines to stay sharp through the day, and the cocktail his doctor gave him had stopped working. He was on a mission, money and doing right by the planet both, and he worked like the mission couldn't spare him. He was burning out and moving too fast to see it.

We treat the body like a thing. Most of us live a few inches behind the eyes and experience the body as an appendage hanging below, a slab of meat and bone that carries the head around. And we'd rather it didn't speak. When it does, when something hurts or drags, we reach for the fix: the pill, the drink, the screen, whatever dulls it. I haven't got time for the pain.

The body will carry that for a while. It wants a little rest to repair itself, and because we've trained ourselves past its signals, we override them, and it gives way anyway. First, it's fatigue. You cover the fatigue with coffee, then more coffee, then the coffee makes sleep hard so there's a pill for that, and the pill doesn't rest you, so the morning cup becomes a double. At some point, the body stops negotiating. That's the part we call burnout, and then we're puzzled that we can't work the way we used to.

What Bob found, when he stopped and dropped his attention into what he was feeling, was that the feeling wasn't new. It had been with him since he was a teenager. He was seventeen, his team had won the state championship, and he brought it to his father. His father said, "That's child's play." From then on, Bob had a searing drive to be worthy of the man, and the drive ran straight through his body's limits. The panic at night was the old ache, still asking to be enough.

You can't always translate what the body is saying, and you can't always fix what aches. You can listen. It has been talking the whole time.

Midlife

I was teaching a workshop a while back and realized I was the only one in the room with gray hair. I don't mind the gray. What caught me was quieter than that: I wasn't young anymore, and nobody had mentioned it, including me.

The phrase everyone reaches for is midlife crisis. Crisis isn't what I mostly see. What I see, in myself and in the people I work with, is a question that arrives once the outer life fills in.

Clients come to me who have done everything right. Good marriage, good salary, kids they love, a home they built and keep safe. And some part of them feels trapped in it, and they're ashamed of that part, because on paper there is nothing to complain about.

The question underneath usually takes one of two forms. For the ones who caught the dream: Is this all I get? I thought there would be more. For the ones who didn't, it's an accounting of the nevers. I will never be a millionaire. I will never have children of my own. Either way, midlife is when the carrot we've been chasing finally gets inspected.

The first half of life mostly runs on someone else's map. We build a self that can survive and succeed: in the family, at school, at work. That structure is not a mistake. It got us here. But it's aimed entirely outward, at goals and wins and the next thing, and somewhere in the middle of life, the wins stop reaching whatever they were supposed to reach.

The danger is taking the urges at face value. Quit the job. Leave the marriage. Buy the car. Those are translations, and usually bad ones. The restlessness isn't proof you chose the wrong life. It's the part of you that got left out of all that climbing, asking to be included. An affair won't include it. Neither will a Ferrari.

We have no ritual for this crossing. No myth, no ceremony, nothing that says: this is real, this is what it's for. So people either pull the sheets over their heads and say "I'm forty and I feel old," or they blow life up. I don't have the ritual either. I'm in the room with the question, like everyone else, paying attention.

The Saturn Return: Ages 28 to 31

A 28-year-old client came in feeling overwhelmed. He kept saying things like, "There's not enough time in this life to accomplish what I want." And, "I know I'm meant to be doing more meaningful work, but I'm scared I won't make it up the mountain, or that I'll fail."

Listen to the second one again. He didn't say he had no idea what to build. He said he was scared he wouldn't make it. Under the pressure to be something there's a second clause: or else I'm nothing. He is 28, and he is already keeping score that way.

He is also, textbook, in his Saturn Return.

The Saturn Return is an astrological event. Saturn comes back around to where it sat when you were born, which for most people happens somewhere between 28 and 31. It doesn't land once and move on. It lands, goes retrograde, lands again. It works on you over a couple of years, and the mood of it is serious.

Most of our 20s go to trying on masks. The partier, the professional, the philosopher, the adventurer, the lost one. You pick one up, you put it down. Nobody expects much of it, and there's some freedom in that. The Saturn Return is when the trying-on ends. The pressure arrives: be something. Go back to school. Get married. Have the kid. Or freeze.

The usual advice at this point is to keep the few masks that worked and refine them into a persona you can wear through your thirties. Most of us do that, and some of it helps. What nobody mentions is what happens to a mask that keeps working. It stops coming off at the end of the day. You stop noticing you put it on. Wear it long enough and it isn't a role you picked anymore. It's who you tell people you are.

I call this the performance trap. It runs on a contract that says worth is something you earn, not something you have, and it moves in right at this age, because for a moment there's no settled performance covering the question.

I still think this period is good news. Saturn asks you to build a structure, and a life does need one. The question is what the structure gets built on. My client can build his around the work he wants to do, or around not being nothing, and from the outside those two can look identical for years.

So the work here isn't picking the winning mask. The masks are fine, and you'll need a few. The work is noticing who's under them before the next one gets glued on. At 28 the glue hasn't set. That question is the loosest it will be for a long time.

He's still scared he won't make it up the mountain, and I keep asking him who told him that's the mountain.

I wrote a book about that. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.