Burnout, Boreout & Co.
Are you easily irritated and wish you weren’t? Fatigue? No joy getting up in the morning? Lost the meaning of life? Feeling overwhelmed? Do you need to spur yourself to get things going? Loss of the ability to get excited? Loss of interest in sex? Afraid your life is falling apart? Fear of losing control? Does your brain resist to work? Do you stare for long periods of time into the distance, feeling nothing? Having no fun anymore? Lost laughter and lightness? Feeling alienated from yourself? Loss of appetite? No feeling for care anymore? Etc.
How many YouTube videos on the subject have you watched already? Are you on medication? Seeing a professional? I really wish for you it helps and that you get out of the dip as soon as possible.
You want to change.
Let me share with you how I see it from an eagle’s perspective: before the burnout started, you wanted to change; change yourself, change your relationship, change your career, change the world, whatever! And then after some success the creation broke down or you were disappointed, because it didn’t make the difference you expected. Then you tried again. And maybe again. And again.
The cause: your self-image.
While investing all your precious energy into what you so wanted to create or make work, you were ignorant of the cause, why all the efforts ended up in vain. In order to change sustainably anything in your life you need to change your self-image, your identity. I suspect, you didn’t consider that. Look, if your self-image in relation to money is poor, and you win a million in the lottery, you will most likely lose that money within a few years. If your self-image in relation to love is that you are not worthy of it, no loving partner ever can fulfill you. If your self-image is ugly and friends care for you to show you how beautiful you can be, you will make yourself ugly again when you are alone at home.
You are on cruise control.
Our self-images are cybernetic; meaning any change you achieve will be changed back to fit again the self-image that hasn’t been touched. Just like a car remains at 100km/h when cruise control is activated. Your self-images are all running since childhood on cruise control. It is the built-in reflex to have your self-images survive. That’s because you identified with your self-images by lack of a conscious education and absence of a conscious society.
Most of our self-images we adopted from what other people told us about ourselves or our own conclusions in times of rejection, stress and fear.
And again, just like a car on cruise control, any change we go for – meaning, deviating from the set definition of the self-image – will be changed back. Our organism is set to function this way, e.g. our brain is set to be sober and calm. If you drink, the organism brings you back to normal. If you get too high on whatever drug or activity, your brain and body will immediately start its work pulling you back to sober and calm. Like it or not. (NB: that’s why eventually the drug addict over doses, because the brain gets smarter and smarter in bringing the addict back, and the addict tries to remain high and needs to up the dose more and more).
How do you stop it?
Naturally, if you followed so far, the question arises how to deactivate the cybernetic relay? Wrong question, because that’s like asking how to keep the blood in your body circulating while shutting down the heart beating.
The question we can ask here is: do we need self-images at all? Is it possible to drop a self-image? Let’s assume yes for the moment. The challenge we would have to face is to move into a state of being that is self-image free, which is identical with: nothingness. You would need to tolerate being nothing. From a philosophical or spiritual perspective that would be the definition of being pure awareness, pure consciousness.
Free from self-image.
Our minds wouldn’t know how to deal with that; there is no reference a mind can use to explain and forecast how that would be: to be nothing (as in: self-images free). Therefore fear prevents most people to go deeper into exploring that possibility of being. And at the same time continuing living a set of self-images that have an unbeatable power to remain as what they have been defined. So the poor remain poor and the rich, rich. And so on and so forth.
The more we see the full picture of who we really are (a set of self-sustaining self-images), the greater our readiness to dare the jump into nothingness. Those with truly open eyes make that jump with an ecstatic roar or laugh, because they have seen that there is noth ing to lose, because there never was anything to lose in the first place; except false ideas about ourselves.
Attack the problem at the root.
In my work, Creative Consciousness, we dive deep into this matter in ‘Master 3’. The challenge and its opportunity requires an experiential approach. My aim today in this blog was to create the awareness, that we inevitably wear ourselves out in trying to change unless we attack the problem at the root. Just like every farmer does, not getting lost in the symptoms but treating the roots.
With love, Marc