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

Spirituality That Includes Darkness

Life is a great mystery. In spite of the fact that people and religions claim to know its meaning or purpose, if we’re honest, each of us cannot help but admit that its meaning or even the reason for life is unknown to us. So much of it appears and can feel like a chaotic mess and can easily be regarded as a random series of failures, successes, joys and sorrows. Each of us both witnesses and experiences tragedy, loss, calamity and heartbreak, occurrences that appear so completely unfair and random that they blow apart our conceptual reality and the belief systems we hold onto as a way to make sense of life. In short, anyone who gets born cannot help but see that life, while filled with wonder and delight, is no cake walk.

So much shit happens, that it could so easily be seen as unfair, unjust, cruel and random. Deceitful people run our governments. Poor and innocents are stolen from. Minorities are incarcerated when they have not even committed the crimes. One of the primary contributors to the darkness we see in the world are, in fact, our corporations. While these entities are filled with individuals who care a great deal about our planet and might have strong moral compasses, corporations, nevertheless, function almost as sociopathic entities whose primary focus is doing whatever it takes—even if it leads to terrible consequences to humans, animals and the environment—to ensure that the stock price continues to soar and that investors profit.  

Each of us is filled with greed, darkness, and yet mostly we refuse to acknowledge this. Most of us fluctuate between denying the darkness inside or becoming so overwhelmed by it, that it makes us want to give up entirely. Our darkness and the darkness we see in the world and our associated suffering can make the very idea of spirit and spirituality a joke. Each of us cannot help but wonder how a God or orderly universe could create so much suffering? What sort of God would sit by as innocent children were caged for the color of their skin? What cruel God could possibly allow individuals to be wracked with illness from contaminated water? What sort of loving God could oversee the environmental decay we find ourselves in today?

Spirituality that denies the darkness is not actually spirituality. Instead, it is a sophisticated form of denial of the darkness. New Age beliefs, like the law of attraction, are a classic form of spiritual denial that forward the shortsighted belief that everything we want can be “attracted” into our lives. All we need to do is repeatedly think about it and “stay positive,” believing we can have what we want. 

What are we to believe, then, when unwanted things happen, like disease? Is it then not our fault? Did we not give enough time to imagining our lean, sexually attractive bodies glowing with light? Or was the light we imagined the wrong color?  Were we not positive enough? Or even worse, did we attract the illness by virtue of our innately negative thought patterns? This belief compels us to brush-off or ignore the obvious abhorrent nature of a situation or a person. 

Our disgust and hate, though, are not merely qualities to be denied. They are, instead, innate capacities that enable us to discriminate true from false, right from wrong, and good from bad.  Anyone with a slightly discriminating eye cannot help but see this denial afoot in all major religions. Just look at Spanish colonization throughout the Americas. Columbus and his followers believed that these lands were one vast kingdom of the devil. 

Their church embraced all their deeds. The rape of children, the violation of the earth, the destruction of all that was beautiful could be condoned by the halo of the faith. Men who had sex as if relieving themselves declared all native women to be whores, and branded the faces of children while the Pope debated whether or not they were human beings. Priests who exhaled disease declared pestilence to be the will of God. In their wake they left death. Three million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within 150 years of Columbus the aboriginal population of 70 million would be reduced to 3.5 million. In the Southern Andes of Bolivia, on a mountain of silver once sacred to the Inca, an average of 75 Indians were to die every day for over 300 years. (1)

While we tend to think that Buddhism is a peaceful religion, just look at the the 2016 Rohingya persecution in Myanmar where Buddhist armed forces have been accused of ethnic cleansing, genocide, gang rapes, and infanticide of this Muslim minority. 

How do we make sense of the suffering we experience and the suffering we see in the world? Is there a world order that includes not just the light but the dark as well? These are the very questions that we must contend with in order to face the question of spirituality with honesty. We cannot cordon off some aspects of life and say, “That just doesn’t fit into our concept of God, so it doesn’t exist.” We have to be brave enough to contend with the whole thing, light and dark, love and fear, greed and generosity. 

The Absence of Meaning

Otherwise, we might as well agree with the skeptics that the whole thing called life is random. For many, this is the only way to make sense of the confusing mess that life can sometimes be. Yet without spirit, without a sense of principles or meaning, we are left with no other choice but to take what we can in this lifetime, to consume, to steal, to rape. After all, if the whole thing is random, if there is no order to this thing called life, what’s the point of upholding values like honor, kindness, charity, or compassion? From the perspective of a world without spirit or meaning, there is no purpose or greater meaning. 

Without that meaning, we are no different than single-celled amoeba, tubes that consume, excrete, procreate and die. Nothing more. We, therefore, might as well consume as much as we can, to take what is ours' and not worry one bit about how that affects those around us. We can say, “Who cares if my choices and actions negatively impact the poor and innocent? Fuck them. I can do what I want.” We see plenty of individuals on the world stage with just that point of view, including our so-called world leaders. 

Intuitive Knowing versus Scientific Knowing

For many a dog-eat-dog worldview is just the way it is, and for them the very concept of spirituality is lost on them, unless, of course, they embrace a spirituality of denial that justifies their cruel behavior. But for many of us, such a worldview denies an intuitive or innate sense that this thing called life is not random. Many of us sense, if only in moments, that there is a kind of logic to life that while at moments is graspable, at other moments is far beyond our capacity to understand. 

In other words, life is a great mystery. What makes it mysterious are its dual qualities of being both coherent or intelligible and, at the same time ineffable or beyond our capacity to grasp. Our cultural drive toward a scientific worldview has forced all that cannot be seen or known into the categories of superstition, untruth, wives tales, or magical thinking. In other words, if we cannot see it in a microscope or science hasn’t identified it yet, it doesn’t exist. In our drive to understand and make sense of the world around us, we cling to only one way of knowing, that which is scientifically verifiable, and deny or suppress other forms of knowing, in particular, our innate knowing or our intuitive sense.

This latter form of perception has been given short shrift. Since the scientific revolution, we have overestimated the value of the intellect, which can only analyze, consider, debate, and understand. In turn, we have completely devalued our bodily sense of truth, our innate sense of grasping and knowing.

This innate quality of knowing was the very essence of our hunter-gather ancestors’ religion. Hunter-gathers still living today in remote parts of the world depend on their external senses along with their inner felt experience as a way of knowing the world around them. In fact, their very survival is predicated on the dual capacities of sensing and feeling. Without it, they run the risk of getting mauled by a cougar or starving to death.

As our ancestors shifted from a hunter-gatherer life to a more agrarian one, they relied less on their ability to sense the world around them for their survival. Instead, they needed to keep track of the amount of grain in their granaries, to understand the seasons, when they would harvest and when they would plant seeds. They needed to forge agreements with other farmers or landholders to share access to water.

Humans shifted from needing to sense the world around them to needing to understand the world around them. The world shifted from something directly known to something conceptualized. This approach to life became even stronger in the industrial revolution and now and especially, in the information age.  Slowly and imperceptibly, humans have lost touch with or even value their direct experience. If we sense the truth of something, we have little trust in it unless our intuitive knowing is backed by science. 

Iterative Meaning Making

In spite of the fact that we place such little value in this intuitive knowing, many of us cannot help sensing a greater meaning or purpose to this thing called “my life.” We innately sense that our lives matter, that our suffering is not just a random mistake, a glitch in our DNA, a lack of serotonin, a random fluke of nature or a broken and prejudice legal system gone awry. These facts of life are undeniable. The world is filled with a lack of justice, and yet many of us, if only momentarily, experience an intuitive understanding of an orderliness in the world and of our lives in which something intuitively makes sense.

That intuition, that sense does not always hold up to scientific scrutiny, nor can we reduce it to a simple formula or story. Mostly what we come up with intuitively are hypotheses, best guesses until more knowledge or experience comes along. In other words, intuitive knowing is iterative. We sense something, interpret it to the best of our ability only to realize that our initial interpretation was partial or incomplete. If we remain honest with ourselves, we stay present with the process of sensing from moment-to-moment because whatever we sensed and interpreted a moment ago has surely already changed. 

In other words, an honest approach to spirituality remains open and flexible. It’s actually a moment-to-moment encounter with life. It’s not fixed nor is it formulaic. It doesn’t deny the intellect or analytical knowing but it also doesn’t deny what we sense in our hearts and guts. It doesn’t leave out the darkness we inevitably confront in ourselves or the darkness we see in the world. It isn’t reductive either. We cannot reduce the great mystery of life to Four Noble Truths or Ten Commandments. While those instructions may be helpful, to rely exclusively on them is to stay stuck in concepts rather than confronting the direct, unmediated experience of life.

Contextualization

Spirituality, then might be thought of as the creative attempt to explore life by making sense of it. It is the innate drive within each of us to make our lives matter and to give them purpose and meaning. After all so much of what we both experience and perceive around us can so easily be passed off as cruel, unjust, and random. Nevertheless, we humans can make meaning of the most demeaning and inhuman experiences; in fact, when faced with such experiences, our ability to survive and thrive depends on this capacity.  However, making sense of it in such a way that either denies the darkness, passes it off simply as a test of survival of the fittest, or whittle it down to a five-easy-step formula is overly simplistic. 

An honest approach to spirituality requires that nothing is left out, the good, the bad and the ugly. At the same time, it necessitates that we stay at the razors edge of knowing such that we believed yesterday is no longer valid today. As Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist and author, Victor Frankl aptly commented about the horrors he saw and experienced in the concentration camps:

We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. (2)

Most importantly spirituality creates an order to our lives. It gives context to the apparent random nature of our experience. The words context comes from the Latin roots con- meaning with or together and -text come from the same root as textile. Context weaves apparently arbitrary interactions and experiences into a greater whole. When we contextualize our experience, we do so in order to create meaning or see patterns in what appears to be random squiggles. 

The act of weaving a greater meaning into apparent accidental nature of of our lives gives them order. At TED2018, psychiatrist Essam Daod tells the story of Omar, a five year old Syrian refugee who arrived on the island of Lesbos on a rubber boat:

Crying, frightened, unable to understand what's happening to him, he was right on the verge of developing a new trauma. I knew right away that this was a golden hour, a short period of time in which I could change his story, I could change the story that he would tell himself for the rest of his life… 

Omar looked at me with scared, tearful eyes and said, "What is this?" as he pointed out to the police helicopter hovering above us.

"It's a helicopter! It's here to photograph you with big cameras, because only the great and the powerful heroes, like you, Omar, can cross the sea."

Omar looked at me, stopped crying and asked me, "I'm a hero?"

Without this reframing, Omar likely would view this moment simply as an overwhelmingly frightening one. By contextualizing it as a “hero’s journey,” Daod is weaving meaning for this small, frightened boy. He’s giving dignity to the indignity he has to endure. 

We are not, as the saying goes, “human beings having spiritual experiences,” but, instead, “spiritual beings having human experiences.”  This perspective juxtaposes our regular, commonplace view of our lives. Instead of seeing them as a series of random mundane experiences interspersed occasionally with transcendence, we see the potential within each experience—even the darkness we face—as opportunities to grow and evolve, to fulfill an unseen potential inherent in each one of us. Sensing and touching this potential is foundational to any true experience of spirituality.

Footnotes

 (1) Davis, Wade. One River. Simon & Schuster. New York. 1996. Print

(2)  Man's Search for Meaning, Frankl, V., Beacon Press, 2006. p. 77.