You Were Never Meant To Burn Out. You Were Meant to Burn With Purpose.

One Conscious Breath: Issue 12

One Conscious Breath: Issue 12

On burnout, being, and the fire that's waiting to be harnessed.

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Before we begin, I invite you to take one conscious breath.

Feel the cool air as it enters your nostrils. Follow it as deeply as it goes into your body.

And then exhale. Slowly, fully, out of your mouth. Elongate the release as much as you can. And as you exhale, feel your shoulders drop. Feel your jaw soften. Feel your feet firmly on the floor.

Now pause.

And simply notice. Without judgment. Without needing anything to be different than it is right now. Just arrive. Here. In your body. In this breath. In this moment.

And when you're ready ~ let's begin.

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Sometimes we've been running, striving, burning so long that we don't quite notice that we are quietly burning out. We begin to feel disconnected where we used to feel alive and passionate. A slow, subtle shift of going through the motions of a life once embodied.

And underneath it all ~ questions no one stops long enough to ask:

At what point will it (or I) ever be enough?

And what is it ~ underneath all of my doing ~ that is actually driving me?

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What if I told you we've been living our lives backwards and upside down? Living from a foundation of doing instead of being. Living to earn our worth instead of embodying it.

"It felt to me that my worth was tied to how well I did in school. What job I held. How much money I made. Rarely was it ever acknowledged that I was worthy just for being. Simply for being born."

If this feels like you, the intensity fueling your drive may be coming from your doing, instead of from your being. And once this shift is made, everything changes.

This isn't a judgment. It's an inquiry.

Our survival strategies oriented us toward attachment and connection with our caregivers and away from the get go. What worked brilliantly when we were little may be keeping us striving to build familiar connections and a life that looks 'right' from the outside. While having to continue to work to earn our worth in relationships and our place in the world. This direction offers us a semblance of safety. Continued familiarity.

But what was safe and familiar then may be keeping us feeling stuck and burning out now. Continuing to run from this place of familiarity, from doing instead of being, without slowing down enough to resource, to realize we have more choice now, eventually takes its toll. And our fire within, instead of burning with purpose, slowly and surely, burns us out.

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But here's the flip: What if it's safe now to live from our being? What would it look like? What would it feel like to be so connected to yourself that you move through your life in accordance, in alignment, with your being? As if you were already enough. And what if you engaged with not only yourself, but with others, your work and the world from this fully resourced place of being? As if you didn't have to earn your right to simply exist.

Imagine doing from your being. Instead of doing in order to survive.

Being → Doing → Having.

Not someday. Not after enough has been proven or earned. Healed or learned.

But now. Simply in this one conscious breath.

I realize this flip is not a small thing. It's a paradigm shift.

Destabilizing. Disarming. Because our entire lives have been built around survival. Around fitting into a world that required our doing in order to have. Required us to earn our worth, prove our lovability.

That was then.

And this is now.

To begin to live from our being means recognizing, perhaps for the first time, that we may not have been living from it. That the life we've been building has been built from the outside in. And this is where compassion is needed. Because this doesn't mean it was wrong. What worked then, may now be burning us out instead of fueling our purpose. We deserve to know and feel the difference.

And in order to begin to flip this paradigm, what's been keeping us disconnected has to be acknowledged and felt. And then released. This doesn't happen to hurt us or stop us. Quite the contrary, it happens to give us access back to our being, back to our core Self. This is the moment where many people turn away. They don't yet know how to release all that was built in service of their survival. And so they run from the very thing that will ultimately set them free.

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The freedom I am pointing toward is not a destination. It's a return. A return to what is, and has always been, our birthright. To feel embodied. To feel safe in our own body. To have genuine choice. To move through our life with flexibility and flow. Fully resourced with purpose and passion. To show up for ourself, first and foremost. And then to continue to show up for others and the world from this more resourced place.

To feel something means to feel everything. Not only the joy and the aliveness. But the pain, the heartbreak, the sorrow too. We don't get one without the other. And so many of us have been blunted to the full range of feeling. Not because we don't want to feel, but because at some point our nervous system sensed feeling as an overwhelming threat and so it moved us away from it. Brilliant when we were small. Constricting when we grow up.

This is why nothing less than courage is needed.

Because the ultimate reward is reconnecting with our being. Reconnecting with what's been patiently awaiting our return. We return to feeling what is actually alive within us. What lights us up. What moves through us when we are fully resourced, fully present in our own bodies.

When our doing flows from this place of being, our life feels like thriving not just surviving. We stop running from our feelings and start using them to fuel us toward our purpose. Our fire doesn't go out. It returns, emboldened. It's now free to be harnessed to run toward something. Something alive rather than depleting.

You were never meant to burn out. You were always meant to burn ~ with purpose. With passion. Fully resourced. From your being.

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A Practice for This Week

Before you move to the next thing today ~ pause.

Feel the cool air enter your nostrils. Elongate your exhale. Drop your shoulders. Feel your feet on the ground.

And ask yourself ~ listening not from your head, but from your body:

What would it look like, feel like, to know I am already enough? Already worthy? Already whole? And I don't have to do a damn thing to prove it.

There's no right or wrong answer. Simply notice what happens within.

Because this noticing ~ this one honest, courageous, present-moment pause ~ is the beginning of the reclamation.

Your being has been here all along.

Patiently. Quietly. Waiting for your return.

One conscious breath at a time.

With love,

Jody