Ep. 27 Dealing With Exhaustion
It’s a lot. It can be too much sometimes. We have to ruthlessly filter and discern and say no, even to good and beautiful things if we are to find, know, and live the beauty and flow of our own souls.
Intro
Hello friends. Thank you for tuning into the Falling Into Soul Podcast. I’m your host McCall Erickson. It’s an honor to be in this space with you sharing my experience and nuanced understanding of the alchemical processes that awaken and keep the soul well in an ever-changing and challenging world. If you value keeping it real on the spiritual path, you are in the right place. And if you know someone who values keeping it real, consider sharing this podcast with them.
This is Episode 27 Dealing With Exhaustion
This episode is in response to a couple things. First, I’ve had a few people recently ask me questions along the same line. The question, in my own words, is this, is it okay to take a break from alchemy and the inner healing work? This shit is SO exhausting and you’re telling me there is no end to alchemy? It just goes on and on? There’s always something more to heal and transmute? REALLY!?
Secondly, in the midst of the conversations surrounding those questions, I came across this quote that our beloved poet David Whyte posted on IG. It’s from his book Crossing the Unknown Sea and he is quoting Brother David in conversation who says
“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness”
To be honest, when I first read it, I could see the truth in it, but I had some issues with it. I thought, hello! Soul work IS the most exhausting thing I have ever done and YES I have done it WHOLEHEARTEDLY and it’s still been exhausting. So how can you say the antidote to exhaustion is to just put your whole heart into it?
I didn’t want it to be another one of those spiritual bypassy messages about how if you follow your heart, you’ll have all the energy you could ever ask for, you’ll be filled with bliss and endless vitality. If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. Blah blah blah. Because honestly, I’ve given my whole heart to things before and been utterly exhausted from it. I’m just not sure it’s possible to live a full human soulful life and avoid the messy parts of burnout and exhaustion that happen from time to time.
So I wrangled a bit with that quote. I wanted to write it off, but there was something deeper in those words that I couldn’t fully dismiss, some paradox and complexity, which you might know by now I love more than anything. So I dug deeper. “The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” Honestly, I don’t know exactly what Brother David meant by saying that because I can’t have a conversation with him about it, but I’ll share in this episode the deeper meaning I uncovered from sitting with it for a while.
First of all, exhaustion. The last thing I want to do is make anyone feel bad or wrong for experiencing exhaustion. The alchemist in me feels it so imperative to honor how REAL exhaustion can be on the path. How real it is in this world that pulls for our attention at every turn and angle. I’ve gone through major times of exhaustion and burnout, not to mention chronic fatigue (which I’ve been lucky enough to recover from). Grief is exhausting. Loss is exhausting. Putting food on the table and paying the rent, just getting out of bed and surviving sometimes is exhausting. I can’t just pretend that if you put your heart into everything you do, you’ll never be exhausted and everything will work in your favor. It’s a little more complex than that.
So, with full acknowledgment that exhaustion is real and not always controllable or avoidable, that it’s not an individual failing in a society that actually capitalizes on and benefits from our exhaustion. I want to talk about ways we can deal with and mitigate unnecessary exhaustion on the path of alchemy and soul.
My lived experience is this: out of anything I could do in this life, the truest alchemy and soul work takes the most energy and strength of heart and therefore is the most likely to be exhausting, especially if I don’t have the energy allocated to do what I really need to do. This is why it is SO imperative that we learn our own energy systems, our capacities and limits, our need for rest and fuel, and to discern and distill what is and isn’t ours to do.
If I could give you any one thing from this episode, it would be this: there’s a difference (subtle and huge) between being exhausted from doing something you are whole heart and soul aligned with and being drained by things that are only siphoning your time and energy without doing much for the soul of you. Those two exhaustions are very different.
Learning the difference between being exhausted by my wholehearted efforts and being drained by efforts that don’t fully align with my soul has helped me avoid huge and unnecessary burnouts.
So let’s explore a few causes of exhaustion and what we can do to mitigate them
- CAUSE FOR EXHAUSTION #1: Piecing ourselves out and giving ourselves away to too many half-hearted endeavors. How can you give yourself wholeheartedly to the most important things if you are giving yourself half-heartedly to too many other things? So many of us come from cultures and families that condition us to meet the demands and give ourselves to everyone and everything around us first. Especially as natural born lovers and highly sensitive empaths, our energy and love and life-force is usually spoken for before we even get a chance to think or speak for ourselves. We are rewarded for being the well that everyone draws from, being of service, being helpful and useful and needed, being energetically amazing. Caring about EVERYTHING and EVERYONE, fighting for every cause that needs attention. But you know what? this comes at a cost. It comes at the expense of not knowing and living the deeper call of your own soul. I can’t think of a bigger cost than that! Even the most beautiful endeavors can be a distraction if the soul has other plans. The heart breaks itself on all its favorite things to align with something deeper, unknown, and more true.
It’s easy to say no to people and things we don’t dearly love. The more difficult challenge is saying no to good and beautiful things. As Rumi says “A thousand half loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.”
- In order to avoid being exhausted by piecing ourselves out in a million different directions which means being exhausted from not really honoring the call of the soul means we have to forsake many half loves and come home to ourselves. Because it’s become so habitual for many of us to give pieces of ourselves away around every turn, we have to learn to turn back toward ourselves. We have to learn to be aware of our own nervous systems, our own energy systems, our own physical body and feelings before we are aware of those around us. This requires a total 180 turn for most of us codependent empaths because we’ve learned to tune into everything and everyone else before ourselves. Unless we turn inward and commit to knowing and hearing our intuition first as a default stance, we can’t hear or know the call of the soul. In a world in need, not EVERY poison is ours to swallow and transmute. Not everything is ours to hold and carry and do. Those of us alchemists and empaths who have a huge capacity for feeling and transmuting pain are apt to taking too much of it on sometimes. Just because the poison is there does not mean it’s yours to take. Just because someone hands you something does not mean it’s yours to carry. It was a HUGE turning point for me when I realized I was transmuting things for people I loved because I could. Because it was easy for me. And honestly because I felt I was better at it. I felt they couldn’t do it without me. That is the arrogance of a codependent rescuer right there. Without me, they will crumble and fall! They are too weak to transmute or carry this on their own. I have to help or they’ll never make it. It took me a while to realize how arrogant, distrustful, and disrespectful that was. That to love someone, to truly love is to trust them to work their own magic, transmute their own pain, walk their own path, fall into their own souls.So we give back so many things that aren’t ours to carry, transmute etc. We learn to say no. We have to learn to say no to just about everything else so we can really say yes to our own souls. Forsake the half loves to take one whole heart home.
- Another thing that has helped me here is to realize and accept my limitations. Limits can be such a wonderful way to realize where we are actually called to work and serve. If you look at the world and everything around you, there are so many things that need help and attention, so many good and worthy causes. It can be overwhelming, paralyzing, and feel insurmountable. Because as a whole and approaching it on our own, it is insurmountable. And the truth is, we cannot save the world. We cannot fight all good and worthy causes. We cannot even fight some of the causes. You can only do what your soul calls you to do, which you are uniquely equipped for. The calling that keeps calling through all other calling. Do you know it, hear it, feel it?
- The soul is equipped to do something unique in this lifetime. Doing that work feels small and big at the same time. It takes courage and humility. It comes with the realization that we will not fix or change everything in this life. But through alchemy we can shift ourselves and those around us irrevocably. Transforming the suffering in our own hearts is how we transform the heart of the world. Most people want to skip this part, which is why there is so much untransformed suffering in the world. The truest work starts close in. But this is what alchemists know–the greatest gift is that WE are the alchemy lab, a microcosm of the macrocosm and we have the chance to affect change in our own energy systems and bodies FIRST. From an alchemcial standpoint, this is why we incarnate, to have an actual lab to do the work in. The human heart. The human body. It’s the gate the key the gift the wound the way. The best chance we have of transforming anything in the world.
- CAUSE FOR EXHAUSTION #2: Giving ourselves to relationships or endeavors or dreams that aren’t really giving back to us. (this is a big one and a great way to identify where the true call of our soul is and isn’t) This is a tricky thing for the codependent to recognize. Because we get a quick fix from being needed. We let our unconditional love trump the human need for conditions. We give ourselves without reservation to whom and what we love and believe in. But that doesn’t mean we are being deeply held and valued by that person or endeavor in return. In order to avoid unnecessary exhaustion by giving ourselves to relationships and endeavors that aren’t deeply holding us in return, we have to engage in deeper inquiry. What do we need in order to have a more equal exchange? Can the energy exchange be rebalanced or is it something we need to walk away from? Sometimes in order to balance the energy exchange we have to go through the vulnerable process of identifying and communicating our actual needs (which is quite possibly the most challenging thing for the codependent to do!) I'm not talking about ego demands, but deep soul needs. We have to identify our soul needs and be willing to receive where those needs are actually being met, not where we wish they were being met. Soul alignment is all about learning to show up for what is showing up for us. It’s a bit of a paradigm shift in a culture that tells us it’s all up to us and we must go forth boldly creating anything we think we want. But it’s not just about what we want. It’s also about what wants us in return. We learn to tune into and show up for who and what wants us. Equal exchange. I talked about this theme more in Episode 4.
- CAUSE FOR EXHAUSTION #3: Expecting the outer results to match the internal efforts. The inner work and alchemy has taught me that the amount of effort taken to shift something internally does not scale externally. It’s not in proportion. It will always feel like it takes way more inner work than what we have to show for it externally. If we want it to match, we’re always going to feel like we’re coming up short. We have to adjust our expectations of these proportions and learn to recognize the outer results for what they are. This is VITAL. The ego is most likely not going to get what it wants out of all this. But the soul will get what it needs IF we learn to identify what that true need is and recognize it when and how it arrives. This goes along with what I talked about in Episode 25 on learning to separate the essence or the energy from the form. Learning to see the subtle in the gross. Learning to recognize the form (or in this case external results for the inner effort) for what it is, how it arrives. It might not be as huge as you feel it should be, but when you learn to see the spirit and energy actually coming into form, it is a marvelous alignment and we can truly draw deep sustenance from those alignments.
Let’s talk about REST as a way to manage exhaustion and fuel the creativity and soul work.
To me, rest isn't just about recovering the physical body and energy. It's about untangling the compulsive mind drive and activating the soul, dropping into the deep well that moves beyond words and reason. It’s making room for the imaginal, numinous, creative forces to rise and guide us.
For me, a sure sign that I need to rest or “give it a rest” is when I’m feeling jammed up or blocked. Most likely because I’m just pushing flow. Sometimes I'll sit down to work on a project and I just get so blocked or tired, like I have no energy to put into it. Most likely because I'm trying to force or plow through something that isn't ready. Trying to plow through something is a sure way to be exhausted, a sure way to drain energy. a
To me rest is often simply the choice to stop forcing things, stop trying to get myself to do what I don’t yet have the organic energy to do. Allowing myself to drop into the actual flow of process. When it's time to do something, the organic energy is there.
Rest comes in a lot of forms for me… lying down, taking a nap, going outside, staring at the sky or a flower or experiencing some sentient pleasure. It could mean time, space. Space to zone out. It could mean turning down the outer volume and turning up the inner volume. Rest is anything that helps me drop the need to produce at all costs and puts me more in touch with flow, especially when I’m feeling exhausted from trying to force flow.
In the REST space we learn to hear and follow the pull of the soul. I love this poem I want to share from my friend Jenna Whitman's book Softly
if you’re tired and you rest
and you’re still tired
it’s your soul that needs care
the only way to rejuvenate a tired soul
is to listen
you must be still and quiet
and listen
then gather up every scrap of courage
to follow your soul’s advice
Do you have the courage to follow your soul’s advice? More importantly, to make space to listen to and hear your soul’s advice.
Lastly, I want to address what happens when we find ourselves in positions of having to do things we don’t feel particularly excited about? Like soul alignment keeps pulling or pointing us toward them but it feels like a defeat or something painful or rather unexciting. It’s not always about getting to do the things you passionately dream of doing or that your immediate self wants to do. Sometimes the unexpected twists and demands life and the soul override those dreams and throw us into situations we can’t escape. Then, if that's the case, the only real choice is to show up for what life is bringing that youcannot escape. And the question becomes “is this something I can bring my wholeheartedness to?” or do I just not want to bring my heart to it out of defiance, because I wish something else was happening in my life?
… “is this something I can bring my wholeheartedness to? or do I just to hold my heart back from it out of defiance, because I wish something else was happening?"
Example: waiting tables is not what I wanted to do post college to pay the bills, but I kept being soul pulled to it because it is what helped me pay the rent and put food on the table while I explored my creativity and went through dark nights of the soul and did a ton of healing. I thought I was “above” being a waitress, surely, I was called to greater work than this? But that attitude is probably exactly why my soul held me to it until I could see it as no worse or better than any other work. I learned to bring my heart to it. I started paying attention to people. Looking people in the eyes. Taking their orders and serving their drinks with the same creative love and energy with which I would write a song or tend to my flower garden or mentor a music student. I learned to bring my heart to things that I was called to do but didn’t necessarily want to do from an ego standpoint. Although I was usually exhausted at the end of every waitressing shift, I stopped being drained. I found life and love and stories and creativity and sustenance in all of it.
Anything we bring heart to, we will inevitably transform and be transformed by. This is the great dance, the relational space, the magic of alchemy. If you can’t escape it, if you can’t get rid of it, if it’s something life is asking of you that you can’t not do, the only honest choice is to bring your heart to it and let the magic happen.
Thank you for spending time with me here today. A reminder…If you would like to listen to the audiobook of The Second Half of the Mountain: A Guide to Personal Alchemy after Awakening, there’s a direct link in the show notes that will give you a special podcast-listener’s discount. Yes you can get the book on audible, itunes, and many other audiobook platforms, and I want you to do what works best for you, but if you want to give the most compensation to me as the creator, consider getting it from the link in the show notes or on my website. It’s a great way to show your support for my work.
Thanks again for all your listening hearts and ears through this year. Your support, donations, messages mean so much to me. It really helps to know you’re out there, you’re listening, and you care. Until next time, be well in soul.