My Antidote to Overwhelm and Burnout
This past spring I had an insight about the key ingredient for me to continue creating a sustainable balance between home life and my professional calling.
Earlier this year I began seeing clients professionally, rented an office space, taught a workshop series, and began this public writing project (thanks for being here!)
All good things, all things that I wanted, and also they were all huge acts of expansion for me. They created big feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability as I followed the breadcrumbs deeper into the forest of this new endeavor.
In the past, while being a stay-at-home mom for seven years, I had had a robust tool box for maintaining patience, being empathetic, enduring fatigue, and holding my bladder for unnaturally long periods of time. However, I was low on the skill sets that could address the vulnerability of being seen in my self expression beyond the walls of our home and in something other than my comfy pants.
By May I was feeling off, struggling with my kids, and nothing felt good despite all of the great things happening that I had been so excited to create.
In a flash of insight one day I saw myself represented as an upside down triangle and it dawned on me that my outer efforts and public presence had swollen far beyond the inner resources that were sufficient for me during my time as a stay at home mom.
I realized my inner work was no longer broad enough to hold and contain my external offering.
This imbalance was the source of my wobble and I could see I was about to topple. But, I also could see exactly what I needed to do to regain my footing.
I began tending my inner world and bolstering my tool box with awareness and skills that addressed my feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability. However, this did not look like adding more to my plate with longer, bigger, better practices. It was much more subtle than that.
It looked like me offering myself kind words of appreciation, connecting with the way my feet felt on the floor while I chopped vegetables, honoring my body calling for rest by laying flat on the living room floor for five minutes, or following my breathing while I drove the car.
Expanding my inner resources was a matter of returning to the now, this moment, and being back in my body. I came to rely on these little techniques when I felt the wobble setting back in again.
This practice has deepened and become much more nuanced over the past four months (more on that to come at another time), and that upside down triangle has now grown into me feeling a wide based trapezoid is a better representation of my experience; my inner resources feel more abundant than my external output, which leaves me feeling poised to continue growing from a base that is substantial and stable.
I’m calling this The Ratchet Effect. It is a process where my external growth propels me to expand my awareness and intention in order to broaden the stability of my internal base. This in turn allows for more external growth to happen, continuously ratcheting my capacity ever wider.
It is a toggle between the actions I’m taking to show my true colors, be more engaged in community, and wholeheartedly offer myself to the world while counterbalancing those efforts by fortifying the inner well from which I draw all of my creativity, presence and personal self expression.
Each effort ratchets out the bottom and the top, the inner and the outer, in a balanced measure so I may reach further, with more grace and sustainability, in the infinite dance between the dualities of life.
