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.

Burn Out & The Mind-Body Connection

Western science and philosophy have artificially divided the mind and body as if they were two distinct domains. We have almost altogether denied the mind’s influence on the body and vice versa. Think heart attacks, stress-related illnesses. This reductionism didn’t always exist for humans.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied heavily on their senses. They did so to sense where their next meal could be found, where dangers lurked and to identify healing plants. Then ten thousand years ago, human lives shifted dramatically. They began cultivating grains such as wheat and rice. As their lifestyle changed, so did their awareness. In agrarian societies, humans had to become more predictive of the seasons. They had to get more cunning about how they managed their land and resources. The sensitive bodily awareness needed when they were hunter-gatherers weakened and was replaced by a sort of mental deliberation.

While the senses, feeling, and intuition all have their roles to play for the agricultural person, the primary function through which this kind of management is achieved is the thinking function— conceptualizing what needs to be controlled, making plans, convincing others to align themselves with projects, evaluating what worked and didn’t work, keeping track of assets, and so on. You can’t really grow crops in a sustainable way without a lot of thinking and planning. (1)

The distinction between mind and body has become increasingly exaggerated since the industrial revolution. Human body's were regarded as cogs in a big machine supervised by the all-knowing minds of the managers and bosses. And now in the information age, the mind and body are even more divided. We have become like "brains on a stick" trying to take in evermore information. The body is increasingly becoming an obstruction to our addiction to knowing.

We don't want to feel anything. If we do, we need to find a remedy for it. Advertisements promote this mindset with slogans for pain-relieving pills like, "I haven't got time for the pain." So we mask any discomfort we feel with pills, alcohol, pornography, binge-watching series or whatever it is that will dull the pain we feel inside.

Not only can the body not hurt, but it also must look pretty or fit, depending on our gender orientation. We then starve ourselves or over-exercise to fit some external images we believe we need to achieve. When we don't, we seek out plastic surgeons. We have come to regard the body as an object that needs to fit into some abstract form. When it does not, we wage war on it and as a result, on ourselves.  

How the Body Speaks To Us

This long term war takes a toll on our lives. The more we objectify the body, the more disconnected we feel from ourselves. As we ignore and stop heeding its messages, we can’t help but sense a dullness, a malaise alternating with a vague and sometimes overwhelming sense of anxiety. The more we ignore what we feel, the more the body will try to break through, to scream at us to let us know that it won’t be ignored.

Burnout is on the rise. The corporations we work for hold us to dehumanizing metrics. In the same way that we treat our bodies as objects, the corporations we work for treat us like objects. Their hunger from profitability demands we perform at a pace that is beyond our capacity.

When I began working with Bob, he was experiencing panic that kept him up throughout the night. He was on a mission, not only to be financially successful but to do good things for our environment, and he worked tirelessly to achieve his goals and aspirations. He’d been using sedatives to get to bed and amphetamines to keep himself focused throughout the day. Like many hard-driving, young professionals these days, Bob was on his way to burning out. His doctor prescribed a cocktail that initially worked, but by the time he had reached out to work with me, it had stopped working.

The body can withstand this demand for only so long. It demands a modicum of rest to repair itself, but because we’ve learned to ignore its signals, it eventually gives way. We may initially sense fatigue. We might mask that fatigue with caffeine. One cup of coffee in the morning gives way to another cup around the 3 PM dip and maybe another cup of coffee before coming home so that we can stay present enough with the kids.

The added caffeine so late in the day makes it hard to fall asleep, so we start taking a sleeping pill. And because the sleeping pill only sedates us, we don’t wake up feeling rested. So the first cup of coffee is replaced by the double-shot of espresso. And because the body gets habituated to stimulants, that double-shot will have to give way to something stronger. The same is true of that sleeping pill.

At some point, the body cannot sustain what we are demanding of it, so it gives way. We might experience one or more of the following symptoms associated with burnout: worthlessness, helplessness, exhaustion, irritability, pessimism, apathy, frustration, disillusionment, difficulty focusing, sleeplessness, abdominal pain, etc. And then we wonder why we aren’t as effective as we used to be.

It’s because we have created a false expectation of what the body “should be able to sustain.” We should be able to make poor food choices, to barely exercise, to give ourselves no time for rest and repair, to not need time for solitude or reflection. We should dictate what our body feels and not the other way around.

How We Listen to the Body

Even though we may not always be able to decipher everything it says or remedy what ails us, we can learn to listen to it. It's speaking to us all the time. To create the "mind-body connection," we have to tune in, to bring a curious and open quality of awareness to what we feel.For most of us, that means descending from our head downward to the rest of our bodies.

Many of us identify ourselves as this entity somewhere behind the eyes, and we have this appendage down below us called “my body.” The body is just a thing, a slab of meat and bones, not who we are. As I said above, that’s a natural response to living in and working in a time in history where our cognition is highly valued over our manual dexterity. For most of us, that means dropping our attention downward to include the rest of our bodies. If we are honest with ourselves, most of us identify as this entity that resides somewhere behind the eyes, and we have this appendage down below us.

If we let ourselves feel what's happening in our bodies, we can sense a plethora of information in the form of feelings and sensations: tingling in the fingers, rumblings in the gut, pressure in the chest, coldness in the toes, a thrum of excitement throughout the body. By attuning to these felt experiences, we begin to intuit or sense another quality of knowing than the one we are used to.

When we hangout only in our heads, we listen only to the surface layer of the mind, its wants and desires, its reactions and frustrations. By hanging out at this layer of the mind, we only see the surface layer of things. It’s like seeing broken reflections on the surface of choppy water. We see all sorts of problems and confusions, but we don’t understand or can’t make sense of how apparently disparate frustrating phenomena fit into a cohesive whole. When we hang out in our heads, we only see problems needing to be fixed. From this point of view, the challenges we see appear like a great chaotic mess. When we sense from the body, we access a deeper layer of knowing. Going back to the case study above:

I taught Bob how to contact and find language for his inner feelings by dropping down into the body. By doing so, he could access a kind of knowledge associated with the struggles he was feeling about the stress and anxiety keeping him up at night. It wasn't a pleasant experience for him, but what fascinated him was that the feelings he was contacting had been with him since he was a teenager. 

When he was seventeen years old, he had reached out to his father to share a happy moment. The high school basketball team he'd captained had become state champions. Instead of his father rejoicing in his son's success, Bob's dad shot back, "That's 'child's play." His father's put down made him feel that his accomplishment was not good enough to win his father's respect, something he deeply longed for.

From that point on, Bob felt a searing almost maniacal drive to be worthy of his dad's admiration. The pain of never being enough in his father's eyes compelled him to seek achievements where he overrode his body's limits. For him to find a new relationship with his work and sleep, he would have to learn to heal his need for his father's approval. 

If we can penetrate through the apparent reality to a sensual, more direct way of knowing, we can begin to weave together a more cohesive grasp of what’s taking place. We can then make choices that heal and support our well-being.

Why What We Feel Matters So Much

In 1997 neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux discovered that all data entering the brain from outside had two neural pathways, an upper and a lower pathway. The lower pathway was shorter and more primitive than the upper pathway. In other words, it took less time for data entering the lower pathway than the upper one. That data first went to less evolved structures in the brain, structures that mount fight-or-flight reactions. By the time those brain structures kicked into gear, the data would enter structures with higher cognitive functioning. These structures enable us to orchestrate tailored responses based on our goals. 

What makes LeDoux’s discoveries significant is that we feel or sense things before we even comprehend them. Feelings precede thoughts. That’s why we reflexively jump first and then afterward distinguish whether what we are avoiding is a snake or a stick. In spite of the fact that this is the case, culturally speaking we have given preeminence to our thinking nature and have disregarded our feeling or sensing nature. 

Corporations, generally speaking, don’t hold feelings in high regard, and yet feelings are what motivate us. It’s not thoughts or concepts that cause us to move mountains. It’s feelings like exhilaration, inspiration, excitement, and interest that motivate us. Even feelings like regret, guilt and fear can be great motivators. The problem with these latter feelings is that they’re fuel is short-lived compared to the former. We can only run on fear for so long. Eventually, we fatigue. Nevertheless, the more our culture glorifies higher thinking centers of the head and either disregards or condemns the feeling experience’re going to have to learn how to motivate the heart and gut in addition to the head.

What the Body Knows

In some ways, the notion of the heart and gut are metaphors. We all connect the heart to poetic ideas of love and connection and the gut to instinct. Biologically speaking, these are not merely artistic notions. More than a simple pump for blood, the heart is a brain unto itself. It has somewhere between 40,000 and 120,000 neurons. The heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. Like the brain, the heart is neuroplastic; it can grow and change. It continues to create new neuronal connections as our emotional and empathetic capacities continue to expand.

We now have scientific evidence that the anatomical heart sends us emotional and intuitive signals to help govern our lives. It does so through several different hormones, the primary one being oxytocin—the hormone associated with labor and maternal bonding, and is also involved in relational bonding, emotion, passion and values. The heart produces equal amounts of this hormone as the brain itself.

Our gut is known as the second brain. It consists of more than 500 million neurons, about the same amount as in a cat's brain. Our bowel produces over 95% of our total serotonin, the neurotransmitter that regulates our feelings of happiness. The gut is quite distinct from the thinking mind in that it speaks in declarative tones via sensations. It says things like, "Yuck," "Yum," "Ow!" "Mmm," "No way!" "Yes!" and "No!" Unlike the thinking mind, the mind in our gut doesn't second-guess. It merely calls out what it senses.

Complementary medicine advocate Deepak Chopra used to tell the story of an interview he had with the late co-founder of Sony Corporation, Masaru Ibuka, who liked to "swallow" a deal before he signed it. If Ibuka had a vital choice to make, he would do his due diligence: consult with key people, review market data and research sales reports. But he didn't stop there.  

He’d have his assistant prepare a Japanese tea ceremony, which is actually a type of meditation. Once the tea was prepared, he’d hold a “yes” or “no” question” in his mind. He would then take a sip of tea and listen, carefully observing how his body responded to how the tea felt in the stomach. If it felt good, he interpreted that as a “yes;” if it didn’t, it was a “no.” 

“I trust my gut and I know how it works,” he said. “My mind is not that smart, but my body is.” 

As a culture, we have attempted to disconnect the mind and the body, but they are intricately connected. If the body’s subtle power is tapped, it can become a sensitive antenna for tuning in, whether into others to motivate and inward as a way to generate creative breakthroughs. The body has the potential to be a master teacher. If we listen, not only can we learn to be healthier, more vital, more balanced, but also wiser, more compassionate and more relatable.

Centered Body Centered Mind

One way we can strengthen the mind-body connection is to bring attention to the way we stand. By standing erectly, we stimulate hormones, such as testosterone, that give us a sense of confidence. This confidence is conveyed throughout all of our interactions and helps us feel more aligned in our head, heart and gut.

Plenty of us, however, stand with our heads jutted forward. This posture puts our heads in a primary position and, at the same time, closes the heart's wisdom, putting us out of touch with our ability to connect and to be connectable. Some of us stand weakly. Metaphorically speaking, we don't know what we stand for. We're unwilling to stand up for what's important. Many of us stand in an unbalanced way. We either stand too far forward or we stand too far back. By standing back, we are seen and, in fact, experience ourselves as timid or holding back in some way.

As mentioned earlier, many of us believe that the center of our gravity lies somewhere behind the eyes when, in fact, biomechanically speaking, the center of our gravity is about two to three inches below the navel. Yogis and martial artists have known this fact for thousands of years. They cultivate balanced and centered postures and movements, not for the sole purpose of being able to either defend themselves, throw their opponents or twist into acrobatic positions. They recognize that by cultivating equipoise in their bodies that it translates into mental, interpersonal and spiritual equipoise. Through practices that strengthen the mind-body connection, the body becomes the metaphor for how the practitioner thinks and acts in the world. All subsequent actions in the world are influenced by focusing on harmonious centering in the body. When through years of practice, equipoise becomes our natural state, we can easily sense what decisions will throw us off center, how an interaction needs to go in order to achieve our goals and when not to insert ourselves because to do so would needlessly sap our energy.

An embodied approach to life is intuitive rather than proscribed. The truth of the matter is that there are not enough tips and tricks that can get any of us through the crises and catastrophes we face. All prescriptions tend to come up short, and when they do or when they eventually fail us, we tend to revert to what we know. But if we cultivate our mind-body connection, if we learn to listen and sense when we are off-center, we can equally sense what will bring us back to our center. The expert is not outside of ourselves, it is with us always, if only we will tune in.

Partner Exercise

1. Have your partner stand behind you. 

2. Stand with your feet hips width apart. 

3. Ask your partner to gently push you forward two separate times. 

   • In the first time, place your attention behind your eyes, keeping all your awareness in your head. 

   • On the second time, place you awareness 2-3 inches below your navel. 

4. Notice how your stability shifted as your awareness moved from your head to your biomechanical center. 

Footnote:

(1) Ray, Reginald. Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body. Sounds True. Boulder, CO. 2008