Fire: Transform or Burnout
The element of fire… representing transformation and the liberation of fuel from it’s source. Preceded by space and air, once fire came into play it meant that we could see. There was light, and with that we could perceive, we could act on these insights and choose our direction and pace of travel. When that fire is burning bright, we have a level of guidance, that guidance from within.
On the weekend we had a workshop about burnout. We made a lot of connections between tending a campfire and tending our own internal flames of passion and purpose. You don’t throw a match on a pile of soaking wet wood and expect to have flames as high as your house in 10 seconds, yet we do that to ourselves. We eat processed food and drink too much booze while drinking too little water and spending way more time on our screens than in nature and stay up late and have poor influences around us - and we expect to change the world and have a great time doing it…. where is the intentionality?
In the workshop, we talked about these definitions of burnout, found off of a web browser search:
The reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use of combustion (eg. good carbon burnout occurred).
The failure of an electrical device or component through overheating.
Physical or Mental collapse caused by overwork or stress.
The point of using these definitions, is to bring in the metaphor. We’re talking about fire here, fire burns up, shorts out, and depletes structures when it is not the right amount and properly tended. Burning up fuel and producing heat are the main functions of fire.
So what?
Why are we surprised when we burnout? Maybe the greater question to ponder is, ‘how did we get so far before we burned out?’
We are incredible functional beings, full of potential just waiting to be released. We can do really incredible things and we can go really far, when we are tended to.
Very little of the conversation on the weekend revolved around the “official” definition of burnout, because really, who cares? Does it change anything if you can label yourself as burnt or not? You know that you don’t feel the way you want to, and you know that your being is yearning for some tender love and affection from you. In my own personal story, I searched hard for a definition of burnout thinking if I could find a description that fit I would also find the answer to fix it. That did not really work for me, because to take a million human experiences of operating at less than their optimal, put one word on it as a definition and then what… one answer? Does not compute. Each individual needs their own individual cure, and that is best guided by our own internal wisdom, so we need to cultivate practices to start paying more attention. Pay attention to what lights you up and what dims your light. Pay attention to what gets you to keep going when you hear the whisper from within saying “it’s time to stop and rest now”.
Ya, I said it. Rest. Rest Now.
See when we rest, we give space to process the experiences we have had. Just as after a great meal, we take time to digest and get hungry - the more space we leave the hungrier we are and the more satisfied we feel with a meal. If we allow ourselves the space to process an experience, we go into the next one craving it, ready to take it on, burning bright and purposeful. If we continue to go from experience to experience without the time to process, well, you know how that one goes! Transform the experience into your being or burnout trying!
