The kind of exhaustion I’m seeing in people all around me requires more than rest, it requires re-alignment. After burning out in 2016, I rested for six months. I didn’t have a job. I ate well. I slept well. I still wasn’t well, though, I was a mess.
I had to find some core part of me that I didn’t know had gone missing. I did find it, and the finding of it changed everything in my life bit by bit.
How do you find such a thing then? According to the Enneagram system, there are three centers of awareness, our heart intelligence, gut instinct, and mental brilliance. Within each is three more flavors of how we connect to that awareness.
You will not need all of them. Trying to do it all at once would be overwhelming, and the whole point of what I’m working with the final 100 days of 2022 is getting out of overwhelm. Find the one that rings your bell and that’s enough for this moment.
We will cover the heart today, then the gut tomorrow, and finally the mind. This is the run-up to the launch of Dragonfly this Thursday the 22nd.
Passageways through the heart
Care
The devotional path of caring for others can connect you to a great sustenance. Think of Mother Theresa, our patron saint of caring for others. You don’t, however, have to volunteer at a homeless shelter or soup kitchen to connect to the nourishing energy of caring for others, you can take pleasure in the small and large acts of service to your kin.
shadow: co-dependence – Which of the acts of service you’re currently performing aren’t true care? You can tell because they create a sort of static electricity of frustration. You might sense a nagging desire for them to be more grateful. In truth, you’re trying to get paid off for your work. It’s a transaction. Even if they say “thanks” it might seem hollow. It’s not actually nourishing you to give in this way.
Your heart knows which acts spring from unconditional love. Those never ask to be “paid for.” Do you resent your pet needing to be fed? Probably not unless it’s someone else’s pet and you have committed to a responsibility that is no longer in alignment.
Exercise: If you already deliver a cup of coffee to your beloved in the morning, see if you can more deeply enjoy that simple act of love. Give your kitty a pet on the head and extra snuggle before you put down the bowl of food. It takes zero extra time to enjoy doing the acts of care you already do.
Truth
Aliveness reverberates through us when we speak a truth that’s true enough to move things within and around us. Think of the by-now famous speech of Greta Thunberg. Think of the first time you said “I love you” to someone you really, really loved enough to be afraid to say it. Think of something you said to your parents that they didn’t want to hear about you but the keeping back of it was choking off your life force.
These truths are self-evident in our bodies. They are powerful enough to build nations. They self-nourishing enough to move the blockages holding us frozen from moving forward as ourselves.
shadow: shallowness – In our InstaTwitBook culture, we get addicted to saying the thing that gets likes. There’s no cheese down that hole, but our addled brains are so desperate for the nourishment of human connection we substitute these for the substance of a significant conversation with someone we love and who loves us.
Exercise: Say something that makes your heart beat fast to someone who makes your heart beat fast. It needs not be some profound thing. It probably won’t be. Find a small sentence that the child in you wants to say to the child in them.
Depth of Emotion
You would think what I just wrote was about the depth of emotion, but this territory has an entirely different flavor. Imagine the salt of the sea, the dark coldness of the bottom of the ocean. We all have this place within ourselves, but some of us never make the trip out due to the fear that we will be swallowed and never come back.
Our substance arises from this place.
shadow: misery – Though these depths are full of nutrition (after all the oceans are filled with yummy fishes and plankton) it is possible to be subsumed by them. It can sound like “why is everyone else’s life so much easier than mine?” or “there must be some secret handbook to life that’s been withheld from me” or “I’ll never belong anywhere.”
If none of these descriptions ring the bell of your experience, skip this exercise. This is an intense one. If you find that you live in the depths I describe, this will bring much fruit for you.
Exercise: Harvest the nutrition of your big bad mood. Turn it into a creative act. All acts of creation are acts of faith. Step into the faith of your own ability to metabolize the nutrition of all these emotions and make a poem, letter, song, drawing, sculpture or any act of making beauty - clean a room, plant a flower, pull a weed, etc. Any small act of curation or creation that refines the space you inhabit will start to turn the tide back on the misery.
If you’d like to have 100 days of support coming back into your aliveness and are a man or non-binary, please do hit reply and say hello. We open the doors this Thursday.