Burnout can help you access our innate capacity to heal and can become a gateway to embodied wisdom and vitality. To understand the subtle nuances, there are some key concepts and important words that I will reframe and clarify that will support you in understanding the fundamental problems as they persist.
Intelligent Burnout
Growth and transformation are the only things we can count on to be consistent in our life. Very little of our body stays the same; everything cycles and renews, continually. We are creative processes at our core. Yet we like stability and predictability, so we resist change when we sense it coming. We try to keep things just the way they are and hold on to who we have known ourselves to be.
Burnout is a necessary step to awakening to our potential, like a wakeup call alerting us to what is needed to grow into our potential. In fact, burnout is often the result of us missing early signs that change is needed. Because it appears to not be productive enough, we tend to resist and skip the part of the creative cycle that requires us to rest, incubate, even hibernate to transform and grow. Burnout forces us to stop and pay attention when perhaps we’ve been ignoring more subtle signs from our body. Burnout tells you that when what used to work doesn’t anymore, when what used to be easy has become difficult, it is now the time to surrender, let go, and find a new, deeper, and wiser source of energy within. By design, you have this mechanism, like an alarm, that helps you know there is an issue. You wouldn’t blame yourself for not noticing a carbon monoxide leak before the detector did in your home. Similarly, don’t be hard on yourself for missing early signs.
Through this lens, we can see that burnout is very intelligent, even a life saver. Burnout is the way our body stops us from doing more damage to ourselves. It is time to shift perspective and change our relationship to it. Instead of wishing it away, of being annoyed and angry at it, we can love our body’s response and thank it for communicating with us so clearly, letting us know that our attention is needed elsewhere. We can even have gratitude for burnout for having our best interest at heart, for helping us bring our focus back on our growth, transformation, potential, and true fulfillment.
You might not be able to thank your burnout just yet, but over time you will know the value in loving your body’s intelligent responses. When you love your burnout, ironically, your suffering begins to dissipate. Burnout doesn’t happen by happenstance, nor does it happen because you failed, are not strong enough, or are being punished by the universe. It is an ally, here to help you, and it happens for a reason. Identifying this reason will empower you to move through this period in your life (because it is just a period, it won’t always be like this) and find the immense wisdom you forgot you carried.
Reframing Service
The impetus of your desire to serve matters greatly. When you’re doing something because it’s who you really are, that’s internally referenced, or divine service. When you’re doing something because you’re driven by someone else’s needs, that’s externally referenced, or disembodied service. This is dictated by your relationship to self-love, which will ultimately provide a strong indicator of your propensity for burnout.
Your burnout is directly linked to your relationship to love, meaning how love was modeled to you growing up and how you integrated it in your body. Ideally, we have an embodied divine love relationship with ourselves. This means that we love our life fully and completely and that we hold the realization of our soul as a top priority, knowing that when we love ourselves that deeply, not only do we get to experience fulfillment but our impact on others is incredibly powerful. An individual in their full power, overflowing with self-love that comes from deep within, doesn’t burn out anymore. In fact, they have energy to spare, and when they show up in service, the needs of others are met and surpassed.
Your relationship to self-love and your sense of worth inform why and how you serve others. People who are burning out often serve out of habit, on automatic pilot, rarely or never stopping to ask: why am I driven to help others in the way that I do? Is this really who I am? Why do I serve? It is important to ask ourselves these questions, because there is a big difference between serving because you are responding to an external need and serving because you are inspired by the light within you. Both are service, but the first doesn’t come from an authentic and grounded place and sooner or later, it will drain and deplete you.
Ask yourself, am I in service because people need me? Because it’s the right thing to do? Because I don’t want to lose a relationship? Because I don’t want to lose love? Because I am able, and therefore I should? Because I am good? Because I’m great? These reasons are all externally referenced. If you examine them closely, none come from a fire burning inside you, from a desire led by life itself. On their own, and without a strong driver coming from within, these are not enough if you want to move through burnout and into vitality and your full potential.
Chances are that helping others is your life’s calling. You came to earth to help, to care, to teach, to lead, to create, and to inspire. You may have naturally taken on that role from a very young age and would have been able to use your gifts in service to others. But along the way you lost your connection to your true self, to your internal source of energy and wisdom, and service became externally referenced.
Internally referenced service is a gift you offer the world, the gift of your unique light, not something you do in response to something else or because others need you. Service is meant to emerge from within. Your light goes through and up, and you shine your wisdom out in the world. If others are inspired and helped, and their needs are met as a result, fantastic! But you don’t do it for them. You do it for you because it is who you are, at your core. I know this might sound selfish, and we will look at the guilt that comes up when we do make our fulfillment a priority, but when you serve in this way, your impact is more powerful, and your light travels farther. You are energized and excited because you are, in this precise moment, being who you truly are, at your core. When you do it for others, service drains you.
Your job is not to help everyone. Your job is to create the greatest impact by honoring, protecting, and expressing your unique gifts. That’s your only job. You are not responsible for the lives, wellbeing, happiness, or success of others—no one, including your family. You might be wondering if there is an exception if you have children. We will talk more about this in the section about boundaries in chapter 6, but for now, let me just say that yes, children need your love and protection, but they don’t need you to take responsibility for their life. There is difference. They are also led within by light, by wisdom, by love, and if you take responsibility for their life, you take away their ability to claim and own all their power within. Take full responsibility for your life, and the life of others will be honored.
