Stop the glorification of busy
One of the most common issues that clients approach me for one to one work is around being burned out.
This pandemic of perpetual burnout seems to be one of the most prevalent conditions in our culture, and alarmingly normalized - glorified, even - to the point that people don’t bother to address it until they’re teetering on a dangerous edge of a near-total system shutdown.
And then it’s usually addressed from the perspective of getting back to “normal” in order to run oneself ragged all over again.
Underlying the experience of life being one giant, never-ending to-do list, where the actual enjoyment of work and creativity is lost, is the condition of doing from a place of disconnection to Self and life. Or increasingly, playing out some sort of performative connection which ends up silently eating away at and exploiting our sense of Self.
Usually, this can look like trying to fill up every bit of space and time in our day with non-stop doing. The faculty of authentic, embodied discernment - which comes from pausing, centering, grounding - is absent. Our luminous quality of being is lost through the harriedness of incessant mind-based doing, and we end up existing in a (normalized) state of contraction and nervous system dysregulation.
And if like me, you’re self-employed, there’s the pressure from the bro-marketing brigade of having to constantly “keep up” and create a factory line of content and social media posts for fear of being punished by a faceless, tyrannical algorithm which demands nothing less than your complete attention/life force at all times.
Smells like patriarchal exploitation to me: A regime where Joy is brushed away as a frivolity instead of the actual essence of your very Being.
Then comes the sense of helpless panic, anxiety, waking up in the middle of the night worrying about everything we have to do, or haven’t done, and the inflammatory impact that this has on our adrenals, digestive, immune + nervous systems.
Our relationships suffer, there’s a loss of energy and enthusiasm and a swampy sense of malaise.
Why do we do this to ourselves?
From my own experience, and from working with my clients, I believe the foundations lie in the dominant operating systems of unworthiness, fear and scarcity. In general, even if you’re financially well-off, if you’re stuck in this grim pattern, there’s a constant, insatiable sense of something crucial missing.
To get more specific about it, we remain stuck because there’s a deep fear in pressing pause on the mindless doing, a deep fear of meeting your Self and your life face to face, a deep fear of true intimacy with and surrender to Life.
Enter the compulsion to control and avoid Life through relentless, disconnected doing.
Here’s the thing that we have to acknowledge: The problem is not that we don’t have enough time. The the problem is that there’s a fundamental fear of having time “filled up” by no-thing - emptiness, negative space because there’s such an emphasis in our culture to constantly do, do, do. If we’re not doing anything and just being, even for 10 minutes, we’re wasting time and we’re going to fail miserably at the rate race that is Life.
Except: Life is not a rat race.
From this torturous place, our relationship to our creative muse suffers - because there is no space to be truly intimate with them from a place of stillness and no-thing. No space to actually be in relationship with the creativity that wants to flow through us. We are creating from a place of trying to dominate, manipulate and subjugate that numinous creative essence at our core.
And even if you don’t consider yourself “creative” (hogwash, imho) or you don’t work in a creative field, the current of creative intelligence - otherwise known as universal life force, Shakti, chi - which is consciousness in motion, runs through all of us.
Just as the sun shines on all of us, regardless of whether we’re saint or sinner, we are all creative beings.
And that innate creativity, without the trappings of agenda, exploitation and control, needs spaciousness in which to dance and flow through us.
Stopping this insane normalization of burnout is a radical and beautifully subversive act; one which requires us to commit over and over again to intentionally creating spaciousness, in our bodies and psyches. It requires us to tirelessly extend self-compassion to ourselves while we feel, process, integrate or release that which needs our witnessing presence.
And as we do this, we open the door for our innate creativity to flow through, so that we can access and work with - rather than use - a state of flow. So that we can attune to and move with our own rhythm, not the algorithm.
This also happens to be the core of decoloniality work.
Making space in our psyches and bodies is a powerful subversion of the war of fear and terror we’re forced to wage on ourselves (and by extension each other). This is no place for authentic intimacy with the people in our lives and with our own soul/creative muse. By creating space, learning to touch and increasingly dwell in the ground of our Being, the quality of our lives, what we create, and our relationships transform.
The way we meet our lives transforms.
From here, we are organically able to access the flow state and cultivate a trusting connection to our intuition. We stop exploiting our life-force (which is an exploitation of the feminine) and start learning to work in relationship with it. This is where the yang of co-creative doing arises from the yin of being.
And let’s not forget the glorious side-effects of stopping this war on terror on ourselves: We sleep better, we savour life with deep intimacy and enjoy conversations rather than rushing to try and fill in the natural gaps of silence. Our creative and problem solving faculties become sharper, our relationships improve. There’s a greater sense of freedom because we’re not being pushed around by external forces that feed off our fear-based attention, and we have the ability to discern when that’s happening.
We transform our lives from the soul/soil degenerating slash + burn techniques of aggressive GMO monoculture, to organic, thriving, self-sustaining soul/soil regenerating permaculture gardens.
This is a movement - and this is what much of my work is devoted to.