Our bodies are resisting just as ferociously as our minds are.
Can we embrace their resistance without making it something to "fix"?
I’ve noticed a dramatic shift in the way my body holds + relates to anger and fear over the past few years.
It started with the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, but it became too much to brush off after October 7 in 2023.
On a primal level, my body is reacting to ongoing collapse. It has changed me.
I no longer relate to burnout as something that can be “recovered” from.
I really believe that at least to some degree, what I used to know as “symptoms of burnout” are now just “symptoms of being an alive human in a fundamentally hostile and destructive world”.
I am burnt out, so are you, and it’s here to stay.
I don’t just mean this on an existential-soul level.
I mean that my body is physically experiencing the stress of being alive right now in ways it never has.
I’ll give you a few examples of what I mean here for some context.
Every cycle, there is at least one day during my late-luteal phase where I spend a few hours in debilitating agony. Not just in my womb, but in my cervix too.
Because I’ve devoted a lot of years to menstrual literacy, I know that this means my body isn’t producing enough progesterone. This happens when menstruating bodies are in a state of acute or ongoing stress.
Because I’ve also devoted a lot of years to myth and how they are mapped to our bodies, I know that this means the Dark Mother is SCREAMING.
I’m experiencing pretty intense tenderness in my breasts, for almost my entire luteal phase now.
This is another symptom of stress-induced progesterone deficiency.
These days too, every ovulation is a time of extreme sensory overload for me.
I can physically feel the adrenaline coursing through my body alongside my rising oestrogen and testosterone, and it exhausts me completely.
All of these cyclical symptoms are “new”, in that they’ve only been a semi-constant thing over the past few months to a year.
Before that, they’d only crop up when things were particularly fucking terrible in my personal life.
They are my classic signifiers of “wooooah! You’re burnt out! Time for self-care! Time to reorganise your life a bit!”
They’re fairly constant now. They have been for a while.
I need to say here that I’m experiencing all of this in the context of a BUTTLOAD of privilege.
I am white, able-bodied, and I do a pretty good job of passing as neurotypical when I need to.
I am housed, living with a very domestically active partner (thanks love, I know you’re very much in the minority among the straight-white-menfolk), and my basic survival needs are met.
I’m still burnt out. Or rather, I’m still experiencing the symptoms of being alive right now.
We talk a lot about burnout prevention and recovery in somatic spaces.
We should. It’s important.
But the overarching tone is usually like “when your body is doing x thing, it means that you need to change some stuff in your personal life. You’ll be back to normal when you’ve processed this stress.”
Even in the most loving and affirming spaces, it’s still a very “listen to your body! It’s telling you something is wrong and you need to change it!”
But the thing that needs to change isn’t that my boundaries need to be better, or I need to express myself more clearly, or I need to pay more attention to my body’s needs, or my somatic practice needs to be deeper, or I need to connect more intimately with the land and community around me, or any of that stuff.
I’m all over all that.
(What a privilege that is, by the way.)
The world I live in is becoming less habitable with each passing year, and my body can feel it.
I’m witnessing more senseless and seemingly endless violence than I ever have, and my body can feel it.
I really believe now that we are all burnt out to some degree, and we’re going to stay that way forever.
The world that western colonialism has built is not a safe place for humans. And the ongoing collapse of civilisation as we know it is only making this more true.
I grieve the world we could have had, and the ways our bodies could have experienced it.
This is all sounding a bit doom and gloom, and I really don’t mean it that way.
But I do think our focus needs to shift.
Can we find ways to make space for the symptoms of “burnout” we’re experiencing, and hold them with tenderness?
Can we love our bodies in the many varied ways they’re resisting the violence of our world?
My “baseline” for how my body experiences stress has shifted significantly.
Maybe yours has too.
Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
Maybe it means our bodies are resisting as ferociously as our minds and spirits are.
May we learn to love and embrace our bodies in their resistance. ❤️