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- Meditation
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- Burnout
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- Burnout Meditation 04
Session 4/10
Transcript
Hi. Welcome to day four. The experience of burnout can be described as standing in a burning sun with no sign of relief. No matter where you turn your face, the light and heat continue to shine unbearably bright, unnervingly heart. What can you do? your only option is to look for shade, some relief.
The metaphorical shade we talked about can be both physical and emotional. But one thing is certain things are out of balance, and something needs to change.
So what do we talk about when we talk about burnout? Burnout has no specific cause. You can’t just advise someone to avoid this or that to avoid burnout. An experience that is perfectly normal for one person can leave another completely burned out. Just like things that are perfectly normal one day can result in you feeling overwhelmed the other. This is normal. Because burnout is not an isolated feeling of stress or anxiety. It’s a combination of multiple factors in your life. And most often, the culprit is a sense of imbalance.
Here when we talk about balance, we aren’t just talking about balance in a certain area of your life. We are talking about that innate quality, where you feel grounded and centered, and nothing is out of balance. This could mean balancing work and relationships. Or it could mean finding balance within where your emotions as well as your reaction to these emotions are balanced. It takes time to learn to balance, but it’s possible to learn it so you aren’t easily overwhelmed. And when you are, you know how to come back to a place of feeling grounded, and centered.
Now we talked about awareness and recognizing emotions before. It is one of the components of balance. The ability to see our thoughts and emotions allows us to recognize when they’re running off to a place where we are likely to feel overwhelmed or out of balance.
Awareness allows us to put a stop to them and prevents us from getting overwhelmed. This comes with practice and familiarizing the mind with the exercise, you can focus on your breath, or simply visualize. The aim is to achieve balance. And as soon as you recognize your thoughts wandering, you bring the attention back to the present. When we do this many, many, many times, we start to recognize the thought early on early enough so that we prevent our mind and thoughts from being out of balance.
So that’s really what we’re doing with this exercise, we will just start in the usual way with the eyes open or closed, whichever feels right for you. And when you’re ready, just take a nice, deep breath. Remember to exhale, just as long as you inhale. And as you become aware of your breathing patterns. Remind yourself to have the intention to be aware throughout the day today. To find those moments in the day, when you can remind yourself of this feeling of balance. And in reminding yourself, all you’re doing is tapping back into that innate quality of balance. It’s always there, ready for you to tap into. It’s like the sun and the sky. ever present, whether you see it or not.
Now just bringing the attention back to the body as you start to notice the rising and falling sensation of the breath in the body, resting the mind in that place. noticing how each breath is just slightly different from the last.
We refer to the feeling of burnout as the burning sun. But the thing about the sun is that it is a necessity. And it only burns when you aren’t prepared to deal with the heat. In the right conditions, it’s warm and welcoming. With that thought, visualize a steady flow of warm, gentle light from the top of the head, towards your feet, just sunlight flowing down into the body, bringing with it a peaceful sense of balance. Remind yourself of those qualities of the sunlight through a warm, bright, gentle, soothing light that gives life and as you feel the sunlight warming your body, just imagine any tension melting away as it flows down through the body. Starting at the head, it continues to flow down past the neck towards the hands and tips of the fingers into the chest and lower abdomen. The warmth continues to flow down through the pelvis into the hips, for legs, and all the way down to the toes. The light fills the body, Enriching it with a feeling of spaciousness, clarity, and balance. As you continue to feel the warmth, allow the mind to do what ever it wants to do.
And now just bringing the attention back to the body, start to feel the weight of gravity again, feel the contact between the body and the chair or the body and the floor. start to notice the sounds again, as you bring the mind back in the space around you returning home. just maintain the position taking the time and appreciate how it feels to have a greater sense of balance. What it’s like to take that time out for yourself during the day, remind yourself of the innate quality of balance and rest in the space where things are balanced. The more often you go to that place, and the more time you spend in that place, the greater the sense of balance there will be in life.
”The aim is to achieve balance. And as soon as you recognize your thoughts wandering, you bring the attention back to the present.