The popular answer to burnout is always some form of self focus.
Protect your energy. Fill your cup. Journal. Go to a retreat.
Leave.
The prescription always includes more of something.
More spa days. More time alone. More hobbies. More friends. More.
The prescription often includes new things.
New people. New products. New actions. New systems. New city.
It sometimes includes bringing back old things.
Old routines. Old connections. Old habits. Old places.
Memories re-written and used like blankets.
As if the cup were the problem and not what we keep pouring into it.
Some of the most powerful times in my life happened when I put a limit on changing anything.
Not austerity as punishment.
Just a wall between me and the plethora of things I do when I don’t want to feel discomfort.
Which is purchase. Scroll. Add to cart. Book something. Phone a friend. Start a hobby. Plan. Execute. Re-invent. Hide. Find a rabbit hole.
Do something that cuts out everyone but yourself or creates a mental exit from your current reality.
The transaction as a way to feel like I did something without doing the one thing that actually matters, which is being in my life as it is today.
Feeling. Embodying. Being. Staying in the room.
Which is inherently uncomfortable and bumpy.
I have made my daily embodiment practices so small, so minute, so un-detailed that they barely qualify as practices.
No elaborate morning routine.
No journaling myself into story.
No 45-minute meditation that I could use as evidence I was doing the work that day.
Just the smallest possible contact with myself, a hundred times a day.
Just noticing. Just the breath that was already happening. Just laying in bed an extra minute until that feeling of drowning passes.
Just being with the feeling I was already having before I reached for the phone or the kayak.
The freedom I found there had nothing to do with selfishness, which has caused me to question almost everything that is spewed out of the self-improvement industry.
It was finding something to trust that isn’t my own obnoxious, self-focused thoughts that saved me.
To me, embodiment, is letting the world be something I’m inside of instead of something I’m managing in my head.
There is a stream.
I keep coming back to this word because nothing else fits. A stream of life where you just aren’t in resistance to things. Where you aren’t bracing. Where the discipline, if you want to call it that, is only the discipline of not adding. Not adding a story. Not adding a fix. Not adding a purchase. Not adding something you need. Not adding a spiritual explanation for why the thing happened.
Saying, “I am really disappointed and sad about it.” Then nothing.
That kind of sentence, said honestly to yourself while you stay in your life, changes something in the body. It stops the resistance.
All resistance is self-created. Feelings come from inside of us, they don’t happen to us.
Resistance is unnecessary. Which is a wild thing to say in a culture full of verbose boundary setting and constant relational negotiation. We actually think something is wrong if there isn’t pushing or pulling to get what we “need”.
What if we don’t “need” anything?
So much of modern self-help ends up becoming a contribution to difficulty. All of our talking and venting and doing is just the thing we layer on top of the thing that is already hard enough.
There is such an ease when you surrender to reality.
When you stop fighting what is for you and what isn’t. When you watch things die and be born without trying to intervene. When you stop defending yourself and start figuring out what it means to be yourself.
None of this requires anything from you.
The stream does not require you to be better. It doesn’t require a new habit. It doesn’t thrive on tons of pricey self care. It doesn’t require more money or more me time or more willpower.
It requires you to stop adding.
You can’t sell this to people. Although I wish I could because it’s all we really need to hear.
It’s the only message that is necessary.
But you cannot convince someone to move forward, no matter how much you care about them. It just doesn’t work like that. If you try to sell your partner or your co-workers or in my case your clients on this kind of orientation the selling itself will create resistance.
The only way we can get them to take it is to go fully into it ourselves and be a living invitation.
They can choose to come or not come.
That is their right and their timing. We do not get to decide when someone else is ready to stop creating resistance.
We barely get to decide it for ourselves.
So the practice got smaller.
The practice became my own life, lived without yelling. Lived without adding. And some people moved closer. And some didn’t.
I cannot convince you of the stream.
I can only be in it. And you can tell. People can always tell. The body knows when it is near someone who isn’t in resistance. It relaxes. It says oh, maybe I don’t have to fight today either.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.