Tag: #happiness

You are likely on the cusp of burning out

A new year has come along. Many people are settling back into work in the midst of fog and ice.

It sounds very fantasy novel, but the realities are anything but. A backlog of emails and a return to the feelings of tiredness and stress. It’s like we never went away.

We are a product of the entourage we find ourselves in. And the entourage I am in are feeling an extra level of downtrodden and tired.

If this is how you’re feeling right now, this is your big, fat, blaring warning sign. You are potentially on the cusp of breaking down. In fact, you already might be.

Conviction and walking our ‘right’ path

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash How do we know we’re on the right path? We decide it. I’ve recently realised how much I question myself. I regularly wonder whether what I am doing is correct, and whether I should re-evaluate or choose a different tact. I have gotten so used to using my brain […]

Grounding ourselves in a whirlwind of emotion

For the first time in quite a while, I’ve been waking up feeling lighter and sprightly.

This was in sharp contrast to the last few months: I would often wake up with such a heaviness and anxiety that it was hard to get out of bed, let alone start the day.

These weren’t any quantifiable anxieties either. It was more of a base feeling of heaviness that was clouding my existence. It was extremely debilitating. The ‘logical’ solutions weren’t working.

But a few days ago, something changed quite dramatically.

Where there is discomfort there is growth

Yesterday I had the authentic German experience.
I woke up after an overnight coach in Hamburg. I had a few hours to kill before the train arrived.
Well, it turns out I had longer than that. My train was delayed. At the beginning it said by 30 minutes. No big deal I thought. Until it got delayed again, by 20 minutes. And again. Eventually it came 80 minutes later.
The experience was a testing one for my level of zen.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything

Who knows someone who is so focused on their own goals that they totally forget how they’re showing up in the other parts of their life?

For example, the friend who no longer turns up now that they’re in a relationship. Or the colleague who is so caught up in work that they fail to see that the deadline is not actually life-or-death.

It’s annoying right?

Well, newsflash. This also includes you.

Daring to dream of a crazy, beautiful life

The more I talk to people, the more I’m struck at how every one of us have beautiful dreams for our lives.
Unfortunately, many of us get resigned to the idea that such ideas are simply the tale of fiction. After all, we could never ever achieve something as preposterous as that.
But we were born to dream. It wasn’t a mistake. Nor was it a cruel torturous method to dangle a carrot in front of our faces that we were never destined to reach.

Moving on from the mediocrity of our living

‘Try having some fruit, that will give you some good vitamins’.

During my burnout period, I went basically into total hibernation mode. My eating was repetitive, easy to make food.

But in this one moment of eating an apple, my body suddenly felt a surge of energy. Rather than relying on a sugar boost from a fizzy drink or falling back on an energy drink, I was getting genuine, healthy nutrition.

None of this is exactly mind blowing. We all know eating fruit is generally good for us. Yet when I was stuck in a rut of mediocrity, I lost sight of what is genuinely nourishing.

Re-evaluating the games we play in our lives

I’m not very good at being ‘normal’. I tried it.

In fact, I tried very hard. But the more I tried, the more I ended up seeming like a paid-actor hired into a sample group. I didn’t really fit in, so I learnt what I should say. But then, my rehearsed, polished answers were a little too good to be trusted.

One of the benefits of now having an official autism diagnosis is seeing why the disconnect takes place. When many people recommend certain actions, they don’t often expect you to do it.

Burnout, or a mutiny of the soul?

‘What you might call a burnout, I would call a mutiny of the soul’.

A curious phrase. I had never thought about it that way.

It was what that John Patrick Morgan said to me this week on a phone call as he was doing his gardening.

My recent months of introspection have been far more scientific medical than spiritual. Whilst the last few years was far more about exploring the existential, 2024 has been a lot more about trying to rationalise and diagnose.

Yet, there was a reason I turned to spiritual teachings in the first place. There are limits to the scientific – the rational can only explain so much.