What if burnout isn’t a personal failing or even something you can recover from through enough “self-care” and “work-life balance”?
What if burnout isn’t the problem, but rather the symptom - a soul-deep exhaustion from fighting to stay connected and caring in the face of dehumanizing forces?
Which means burnout recovery isn’t supposed to prepare us to go back to what was.
What if, instead, burnout is an invitation to a quiet revolution in your relationship with yourself, other humans, your ancestors, the natural world, and your connection to Spirit?
What if it’s the beginning of a journey to change the empire-driven, world-burning trajectory we humans seem to be on to one of more belonging, more sacred reciprocity and responsible stewardship, and more Aliveness?
What if we could build lives that aren’t killing us slowly, that we don’t need to run away from and we don’t burn out in?
Welcome, friend.
I’m Kate - an old soul and highly sensitive empath. A mystic and seer, after a fashion. A canary-in-the-mine who has often felt like I was built for a different world.
I’ve been both a pilgrim and a runner. I’ve tried to tame myself, tried to numb out my sensitivity. Neither worked. I’ve tried isolating myself and I’ve sacrificed parts of myself in the name of fitting in and “community”.
But every time I’ve tried living counter to my wild, beating heart I’ve burned out. Which has given me a ton of practice finding my way back to aliveness.
And I see now it’s not just having the right “tools” (yoga, meditation, self-awareness, shamanic and energetic healing, etc), it’s living from a more connected, nourishing paradigm.
See, over the years, I’ve come to suspect that where people believe in a conscious, animate world, and practice culture as a way of staying in relationship with it; burnout and disconnect don’t happen in the way they do in our modern times, surrounded by dehumanizing forces.
Now I’m on a quest to weave the spiritual and animist wisdom I’ve learned from more intact lineages in with the ancestral memory in my body, and in ancient European folk traditions I track down; in order to do my part breathing some life back into a way of being which breathes life back into me.
Join me?
I know you’re exhausted and discouraged and maybe at your wit’s end.
You’re trying so damn hard and doing all the right things, only to feel like Sisyphus - work never done, climbing the same hill, ending up in the same situations again and again.
Some days you’re so close to giving up; though you’ve never been a quitter.
Your body is telling you clearly that it’s done with trying to keep up and it’s forcing you in some way to listen.
Your relationships feel heavy with duty, expectation, and ingrained patterns; rather than dynamic with growth, love, and vitality.
You’re looking for some missing piece that your bones know, even if your mind has forgotten.
I get it.
And I still offer: this is where the journey begins.
See your burnout isn’t one more thing to tend to on top of trying to put out all the fires in your life and in the world.
It’s actually the same battle.
And it doesn’t have to be fought by resisting what you don’t want.
It can be fought by saying ‘yes’ to your own precious aliveness.
Why focus on burnout when there are so many battles to fight?
Burnout is a signpost of dehumanization.
Sure, there are dehumanized people, people cut off from their hearts and souls, who don’t appear to be experiencing burnout, don’t get me wrong. But that’s not who I’m speaking to.
I’m speaking to you.
You who yearn for life to be beautiful and have a deeper magic and meaning.
You with the huge, (perhaps overly) generous heart, held wide-open in an outstretched hand. Who just wants to wrap the whole world in a soft-but-fierce love, so no one ever feels alone.
You who feels most comfortable around plants and animals, feeling the elements on your skin.
You who burns and bleeds for a just world, a compassionate world, a world of nourishing goodness for all.
Your sense of being too empty and too full, your creeping numbness and disconnect, those are signs that the parts of the world we humans have built are increasingly dehumanizing and your body and soul are fighting them. Have been fighting them. Will die slowly if you have to keep fighting them… from within them.
So how do we shift from fighting against dehumanization to being alive?
There are two main aspects to using our burnout to fuel our quiet revolution on behalf of more aliveness:
deep rest and soul nourishment
paradigm shifting to build a world we aren’t dehumanized by and won’t burn out in.
Both of these need to happen simultaneously though it’s hard to have the capacity for the second if we aren’t doing enough of the first.
So throughout my offerings, you’ll see them split between those two categories: Rest and Nourish; Build and Shift.
But what’s the map we’re following to build? Or are we just making it up?
There’s increasing evidence that our long-ago, pre-industrial ancestors may not have lived the “short, brutish” lives we automatically assume they did. While it doesn’t serve to glorify their existence, it seems useful to question whether their quality of life was worse than our in all areas, or, perhaps, only some.
It seems they had a very different understanding of their role as humans and their relationship with the world around them. One which was actually quite sophisticated and may have been more sustainable (certainly it has longevity on its side in a way our modern trajectory isn’t projected to have).
In contrast to modern technology which
uses more resources than it gives back,
wants to blast off into an increasingly abstract future,
and disconnects itself from seasonal rhythms and cycles;
our pre-industrial ancestors all seemed to practice animism as a foundational cosmology: the idea that everything is alive and has energy and consciousness. Which means everything is kin.
Their cosmology and cultural practices served to regulate reciprocity while interweaving the spiritual and the mundane, the physical and the intangible; all to root them deeply to belonging and place.
I see them as having left us these maps for living and building culture in a good way:
Foundation:
Rhythm - aligning ourselves with timing and cycles, many of which are not our own
Pillars:
Beauty - experiencing and acting in reverence in the face of the sacred spark of aliveness in all things
Aliveness - participation in the unfolding of Mystery through birth and death, ecstasy and heartbreak, and everything in between
Intimacy - an undefended heart recognizes self in other and other in self; paying attention and offering presence
Discernment - honoring the finite quality of this human experience and the ripples presence makes; finding humility, compassion, power, and freedom within boundaries and limits
While maintaining harmony between:
themselves (their aliveness and humanity);
each other (community);
a conscious, animate natural world (the elements, plants, creatures, seasons, etc);
and the Otherworld (Spirit, ancestors, and mythical or otherworldly beings, etc).
If we build by orienting to these principles, I believe we can find wellness, nourish our aliveness, leave dehumanization in the dust, and create a world of better relationships - a world we don’t burnout from.
We may have to figure out how to apply it to today’s world, but we don’t have to build it from scratch.
If this is resonating with you, wonderful.
I’m glad you’re here.
It will take all of us.
What are some possible next steps?
Sign up for the FREE Starter Kit here. Designed to help you figure out if my work is for you, the Starter Kit also supports an intentional, ceremonial beginning to the journey; assessments to orient you and your patterns in a more animist and ancestral framework; and a mini library of guided meditations and practices to offer some basic tools and skills you might find helpful at this moment in the journey. (this is a first iteration of a starter kit and I sense an update and refinement coming. in the meantime, you’re welcome to share feedback if you’d like. it helps me in the process of refining it and making it most useful to you)
If you’re someone who wants to find out more about me and my background: head here. (this page is currently being reworked behind the scenes, but this has some helpful info)
Otherwise, this overview of the beliefs underpinning my work and the basic types of offers I have might be a good place to start.