Episode 8
How to Get Out of a Rut: Let's Talk About Burnout
the fully nourished podcast | Episode 08Listen on Apple
Listen on Spotify
Listen on Youtube
Listen on Amazon Music
Listen on Google Podcasts
Transcript
Welcome back to the Fully Nourished podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Ash, Functional Nutritionist and Integrative Health Coach, coming to you with a scientific and spiritual exploration of what it looks like to awaken our feminine radiance by becoming deeply and fully nourished in a world that wants to dull us down. You ready?
As a reminder, everything in this podcast is for education and inspiration only and is not intended as medical advice. Please talk to the appropriate professional when necessary, and please use common sense before making any changes to your diet and lifestyle.
Yay, we are back from our hiatus! Thank you so much for being patient and sticking with me. I just had to take a little step back and get a few things organized on the back end just to make my podcast flow a little bit easier. I also really wanted to dive deeper into your feedback and your comments over the past couple of months, to really listen to what you have to say and what questions you have. Because I want the last six episodes of the season to be packed with the information that you want and packed with the things that are going to help guide you. I don't know if you realize this, and I have to say this, is that this is a community effort. I learn as much from you, ladies, as you learn from me. I know, a lot of us just say that you learned so much from me. And I appreciate that. I'm so just honored to be able to do that for you. But I want you to know that this is a community effort. I couldn't do it without you.
So many times your feedback and the way that you see the world and your observations about your own physiology has helped me really put puzzle pieces together so that I can teach in the way that I do. I am just so incredibly appreciative of you. I am every day, I'm just really humbled by our community because it just is so incredible. It's so supportive. I have to also say, I have to shout out a woman named Jennifer, she came up to me at the local farmers market a couple weeks back, and it was just so lovely to be able to meet a podcast listener face to face. So if you're listening, Jennifer, so lovely to meet you.
I am always surprised. It's kind of this constant pinch-me type of feeling that people want to listen to what I have to say. It's really humbling. But as I've taken in your feedback and taken your comments, and really see what questions you're asking, it has been so helpful to get some direction for these last couple episodes. In today's episode we're gonna dive into burnout. And not just, you know, I think we all know what burnout is. It's not, that's not a mystery. But talking about it on a deeper level. I think a lot of people right now talk about it on a surface level. I think it is really worth digging into. This was actually a request from our private Fully Nourished community students. We do a live q&a every Thursday in the private, fully nourished community. And if you're a Fully Nourished student, and you don't come to the live q&a, where are you at?!
It's a really fun time because we as a community kind of dive into certain topics together. And it's interesting to see, because a lot of times we're always on similar pages, like somebody asked about gut issues. It's like there's three or four gut questions going on. And so it's kind of like that live is talking about the gut. But this past week, we got into this really interesting discussion about burnout. I've seen this question actually come up multiple times, and it goes deeper than burnout, just that physical feeling of like, I'm so overwhelmed. My adrenals are fatigued, my metabolism is slow. It's more of this feeling of I've been stuck in a fight or flight mode survival mode for so long. I think as a community, we have really done a good job exploring the physiological and hormonal reasons behind this for a while. If you're a longtime Jessica Ash follower, you know, for years, we've been talking about the physiological state of being stuck in survival, running off of adrenaline and cortisol, and what that does to the metabolism and how it impacts blood sugar. But there has been this big missing piece of, in my opinion, talking about the nature of feminine physiology. And so that's why we're moving in that direction as a community because it's kind of the missing piece that we need to really discuss. A lot of women have said they've been experiencing this and I've seen this happen now so many times. And this is something I've also had personal experience with when we're stuck in this achievement state for so long, this kind of masculine energy for so long. And to be honest, a lot of us have been stuck in our masculine energy from a very young age and we'll get into why that is in a moment.
But all our lives, many of us are just trying to be good girls, right? We just try to be good girls and women, trying to do what's right. And because of what we're being taught, we believe that being a good girl means achieving and succeeding. So most of us are absolutely pushing our body beyond its limits, beyond its means, to the limit every single day, for many years, no matter what it is that we're doing. Whether we're being a mother, you know, a stay at home mom, or we're working in some type of career that we love, or it's education, we have been kind of trained to go balls to the wall. And as someone who is a very balls to the wall type gal, I can completely resonate with that. But as we begin to understand our own nature, and explore our physiology, and understand that maybe some of our patterns and behaviors are not really working for us anymore, something happens and like a switch flips in a way. And so many of us when we're stuck, I kind of look at it as a pendulum swinging back and forth, right? For so many of us, we're stuck in that kind of hustle, push, force, just achieve, achieve succeed, go go go go go state for so long, that when we start to nourish nature, there's a physical aspect of this, where when we start to make our body feel safe and abundant, we get out of that survival place, using food and using nutrition, something in our physiology starts to switch. And we go from being in a state of survival to a different state.
But for a lot of us, and I see this a lot, I think that's kind of a part of the healing process. Sometimes the pendulum has to swing directly in the opposite direction before it finds some balance in between. For a lot of us, we experienced the kind of state where after being so motivated for so long, and so driven for so long, it's like all of a sudden, that flip switches. And we almost get to this place where there's like a, how would I describe it, I guess I would say a “gentle numbness,” where it's not like we can't feel - like I think some people might mistake it for depression. But it's more of just this, I can't muster up the energy to care anymore. Like all I want to do is rest. And this in part, I think, is if we've spent so much time in our masculine energy, that go go go achievement-style energy, that really action-based energy, when we step out of that it can feel really uncomfortable and almost foreign to us. Sometimes we can mistake it for being lazy. And sometimes we can mistake it for being unmotivated. But I see it as something even a little bit more profound than that.
So I have been through something like this a few times in my life. But on a more recent level, I went through it in the past few years. I loved one of your comments, you referred to it as my “hermit chapter.” A lot of you noticed that I stepped away on social media - I had to take a really big step back. In 2020 and 2021 I was really making it my goal to be present on social media and to create content that was really helping women understand their physiology. But what happened is, at the beginning, I was one of the only ones talking about the body and hormones in this way. And we saw a lot of people flood the industry, and copy, just straight up mimic, straight up copy the information that I was sharing. Now, the downside of that was that they didn't have the experience or the research to back up what they were saying because they were just parroting or they were just mimicking. They didn't actually understand the nuance behind what they were talking about. They didn't really understand the ins and outs or the whys behind what they were saying; they were just making these statements as if they were fact and sharing this information in a way that was almost like I would say borderline militant.
And so I think all my hard work and what I was trying to accomplish, I started to see it become something that it wasn't ever supposed to. It became its own type of diet, its own type of restriction, its own type of black and white thinking. And because so many people were kind of following my lead and trying to, you know, mimic and parrot me. I was creating and anytime I would create something new, immediately within like two days it would be copied because a lot of creators in the space were just copycats and so they didn't have anything new to bring to the table. They were waiting for me to bring something new to the table. I'm gonna be honest, I just got so burnt out. It was so discouraging to work so hard, do a bunch of research. hours and hours and hours, and then put it out there. And then like, you know, within five days, many different people were talking about the same thing, and they hadn't done any of the research or taken any of the time. After it happened, you know, a dozen times, it became pretty clear that it's, it wasn't a coincidence.
But I am so grateful that started happening, because what it really spurred me to do is, I was in so many parts still very much stuck in a very masculine energy. I had so much understanding of female physiology and I was so passionate about the physical aspects of physiological change that comes from nourishment, that I was missing a big piece of it. It's like you kind of keep hitting a wall and hitting a wall and hitting a wall. And so when you feel like you're hitting a wall over and over again, it can be really frustrating. And a lot of us what we do, and this can apply to anything, right? For me, it was creative. And for me, it was in my career, I just kept feeling like I was out of alignment, like everything that I was doing at that point didn't feel quite right anymore, it was like trying to put on a shoe that didn't fit, just didn't feel quite right, what I was teaching anymore.
Of course, it didn't mean that what I was teaching wasn't true, it just felt like there was more to the story. And at the same time, the pro-metabolic space that I was in or now it's called the pro-metabolic space, was changing so rapidly and was just becoming more and more stressful. And I was noticing that people were becoming more and more stressed. But I was also becoming more and more stressed, because it was just this very weird information mudhole where everyone's just trying to create more and more and more and more and more information. And if they don't have any information to create, or to pull from, they just try to take the information that they already have, and make it even more complicated or talk about it even more. I really just started to take a step back and just watch and observe the health and wellness industry as a whole, but especially our little community and what was happening within our community.
I didn't necessarily know what the next step was. But physically, I was going through something that I needed to listen to, and it was more emotional. I'm a big believer that nourishment acts almost as a gateway to get us into a deeper place. You know, I have been eating to nourish my body and really heal myself on a cellular level now for many, many years. I think at that point, my body was ready to take me deeper. I think my body had been trying to do that for a while. But I wasn't really listening. And so it forced me to listen. And so I got to this place of burnout, where I was burned out physically, emotionally, and creatively. I just couldn't bring myself to go on the way that I had been going on for all this time. I was forced to take a step back from just everything in my life and really focus in and at this time, I had really started doing a lot of emotional work. I started working with a hypnotherapist, and I was doing a lot of emotional freedom technique tapping, just trying to reconnect with my body because I had become so disassociated. For a while there I was trying to force something that felt just so out of alignment that wasn't working.
You know, it's excruciating for us as women to do something day after day after day after day that feels so out of alignment and that feels so forced. That's just not our nature. And so when we get to that point, I have realized now that it's really okay to just take a step back and listen. But at the time, I just didn't recognize that was what was happening. I just thought, “Oh, more adrenal cocktails and I just need to limit my stress and manage my stress.” And you hear that all the time in the wellness community, right? It's just like, manage your stress, manage your stress. But I have recognized now as I've gone through this burnout, and I've recognized as I've kind of come through what one of you lovingly called my “hermit chapter,” which I've just I just absolutely love. It's a perfect description for what I went through. You know, as I went through my hermit chapter, I really got real with who I was.
I started to recognize how powerful becoming burned out can be because what it does is it strips away everything that you used to identify yourself as, everything that you kind of connected to your identity, all your accomplishments, all your achievements, everything that you kind of used to give yourself value in your own head. And because you physically can't do those things anymore, it strips those away. I'll be honest, when you really make a conscious effort to step out of that masculine drive, and kind of strip that part of yourself away, because so many of you have asked the question, you know, I think the episodes thus far have really been resonating with you, you've loved all the concepts you have loved, what we've been talking about. And it really has struck a deep, deep chord.
The Question Everyone is Asking
But the natural and normal next question that so many of you have is, well, all of this sounds great, but what do I do to actually step into my feminine energy? Like, do I just start wearing more dresses and like, dance around? Like, what do I do? And it's only natural to think that way. I think I probably thought that way a lot. And especially because there's a lot of people out there right now talking about divine femininity. And you know, lots of the trad wife movement is really picking up and people are starting to talk about gender roles a lot more. So it can be really confusing, because so many women are still stuck in their masculine energy, and they see femininity as something they need to do and something they need to accomplish and that in and of itself is masculine.
What I'm here to show you, and what I have learned, is that your feminine nature, who you are, the very essence of you, is who you are, that is your nature can never be taken away from you, it can never be stripped from you, it is who you are, at your deepest core level, it is part of the you, that is deeper the core of you the essence of you, and no one and nothing can take that away from you. However, there are many things that can kind of disconnect us from that, and get us out of alignment from that. And that is really where the work is. It's stripping away all of the lies and the beliefs that we have about ourselves, it is stripping away the programming that we have been exposed to since birth, which we'll talk about in a second. And it's about recognizing and starting to practice awareness on what feels right and what feels wrong, what forces us to become disconnected, and what allows us to reconnect. So many of us for so long have been trained to disconnect from our body. It's about the cerebral outlook, you know, what does everything look like? Think it through logically and analytically. And we're kind of trained to not listen to our bodies. And that can happen on a physical level, right? Like we're trained to not listen to our appetites, to, you know, maybe, you know, as young kids not listened to when we need to have a bowel movement, or when we need to go to the bathroom, we're told to hold it and wait. There's so many things on a subliminal level that we're kind of trained to not listen to our own needs or to forsake our own needs, in exchange for something else is more important.
But then on a more emotional level and spiritual level, there's something bigger going on that is often distracting us from connecting with what we really, really want. And so we kind of come up with these layers of stories. You know, we have belief systems about ourselves, the things that our parents have taught us, the adults in our lives have taught us, what they've shown us. We have, obviously the media, the movies, and the TV shows and everything that we grew up watching and listening to - that makes its impact on what we're supposed to think and believe about ourselves. And we get to this point where we're living a life that doesn't feel right at all, it feels so wrong, and we're so unhappy. And yet, we don't know why. So we're physically hurting. We're emotionally and spiritually hurting. And instead of getting real with ourselves, or being able to even be aware of what's going on, we start to say, “oh, what supplement will help me with this stress or this anxiety that I have? Or this depression that I have? I guess it's just physical or I need to just go to therapy and talk through my problems.”
There's something deeper, there's something bigger to the story. And so as an answer to many women's questions, which is, what is the next step? Well, the next step is really just awareness and starting to pay more attention, starting to remember that your body often knows before your mind ever will. I see the body as almost a tool for the feminine spirit where it is there to guide us and direct us and give us wisdom or at least kind of tickle our brains to tap into our wisdom. The body really does invite us and give us opportunities regularly to go deeper. And if we would like to take it up on its offer, it can guide us and direct us in the direction that we need to go.
So this discussion that we had, during our live q&a, in the Fully Nourished community, we were really talking about this phenomenon that happens, where when you are stuck in a masculine energetic state for so long, which physiologically looks like a state of survival, right? We have to pump out adrenaline, we have to pump out more testosterone, we are expending energy that is unnatural to us, we are kind of trying to muster up and stay in an energetic state, which requires a lot of energy expenditure, because it's just not our nature. It's not our natural state. And so it requires us to utilize adrenaline, right? It requires us to utilize testosterone and our adrenal androgens like DHEA, it requires us to muster up a hormonal state that is not really natural to our body, but our body is capable of doing it. It's just we know as a community that nothing comes without consequence. Right? And it's never a question of “can we do something,” because women's bodies, you know, the body in general, both women's bodies and men's bodies, are quite capable of doing just about anything. The body is extremely adaptable, it really just responds to the environment it's given and the emotional state it’s given and the nutrition it’s given, and it will adapt accordingly. So the question is never can we accomplish these things? Or can we be in our masculine energy? Because of course we can, but it comes at a cost. And so from so many of us, once we recognize where we've been stuck in the survival state for so long, we've kind of - I see it almost as a pendulum, right? Where it's swinging back and forth. One side of the pendulum is like go, go, go, go, go. Always accomplishing something always succeeding, always having to do something kind of like a busy body, which that's not really the definition of busy body, but kind of like you can never stop, you can never rest, you're always doing something, and you find your value in accomplishment. You feel worthless or useless if you are not constantly accomplishing something, or constantly succeeding at something. And then the other side of the pendulum is like this, maybe a more extreme version of a feminine state, where it's like, just rest and relaxation, and you're not trying to achieve something constantly, you're not striving constantly for the next goal, you've gone from a place in a state of action to a place of just being and allowing yourself to just be an almost in a, in a sense, just existing and glorifying and basking in just your existence as a person, your ability to exist.
And so when women find themselves in burnout, I think oftentimes, they are unfamiliar with a state of rest, especially if there's somebody that has been striving for so, so long. And so a state of rest can feel extremely uncomfortable and almost foreign in a way. It can feel almost terrifying when you lose your masculine drive, especially if you've been somebody who has lived within a masculine energy state for so long. I'm a big believer, and I think a lot of women are being trained at a young age to live in a constant state of masculine energy. You know, a friend were talking about this the other day where I feel like, maybe I'm old, but in an effort to stay off of social media, and just scroll and scroll, and scroll, and scroll and scroll, I found a newfound love for Reddit. Like I find myself just reading these random Reddit threads that have nothing to do with me. I seriously don't even know why I end up on some of these Reddit threads. But it's just so fascinating. And me and my good friend were talking about how it almost feels like voyeurism where you're just looking from the outside in on these conversations and these comments, and just these experiences and phenomenons that people are having.
The Fantasy of Having it All
And we were talking about one of the Reddit threads that she was reading and it was a discussion about young children and how they're doing in school and it kind of came down to this idea of the difference between boys and girls right now and how their education is going, and how you know, as young girls, we're being kind of told that you can do anything. You can be everything you want. Anything you want is at your fingertips. Whereas young boys are almost being told that you just need to be strong, and you need to just suck it up. There's a big difference between how girls and boys at a young age are being encouraged, and how it's changing their life path, and how it's changing their motivation. And so here we have young girls, which from a young age, we're being told that we can do anything and everything and anything is at our fingertips, right? And oftentimes, accomplishment and success and having a career and having it all is, I really think that statement of “having it all,” is always being portrayed as like the ultimate fantasy.
So here we are, as young girls being told, like, you need to be self-sufficient, you need to be financially secure, you need to be this, you need to be this, you need to be this, you need to do this, you need to do this. And as women, a lot of us are wired to, in a way, chase security and stability. And so as young girls, if we are being kind of trained that that is what's going to give us the safety and stability that we need, we're going to go after it, right, like we have the capabilities to go after just about anything that we want to. But what we're not being taught is the physiological and spiritual costs of those things. We're not being taught to sit back and ask ourselves, what is really important to us? What do we actually genuinely want? We're being told what to want, we're being shown what to want, by movies, by media, by TV shows, by our teachers, we're being told what to want. And we're not actually being allowed to choose what we want. Deep down, if we want something different, if we want something that maybe the world doesn't think is successful, or the world doesn't think is an accomplishment, then we're put down for it, right? You couldn't possibly want to stay at home and take care of your children, you couldn't possibly not care about becoming the most successful person in your career, could you? Like, that's really all you want in your life?
I think for so many of us, we've had that subliminal messaging for so long. Plus, many of us were raised by women who were a part of the first feminist movement, right? Like our mothers, and our grandmothers were really the first women that were kind of starting to step out on their own. And so I think for a lot of us, our mothers grew up with just different messaging that they kind of regurgitated onto us and they weren't emotionally connected to their femininity. We never saw what that looked like, or a lot of us didn’t. And I'm not speaking for all of us. But so many of us grew up with mothers that were just telling us to, you know, be successful, be financially independent. Never, ever rely on a man. Never rely on someone else for your security or your stability. And that was kind of the lesson there. There were no lessons beyond that.
The Next Step
Then on top of it for so many of us, there's this pressure to succeed. I mean, why do we think now that more women are becoming physicians than men? And why do we think that women are now kind of succeeding more in the workplace than even men are? And to answer so many of your questions, what is the next step? Well, the next step is really just awareness, start becoming more aware of what our body is feeling and what our body is telling us not just physically, not just on a symptom level, which I think us as a community have realized now, right? We're tracking our temps and pulses are tracking our metabolic markers, we're looking at our bowel movements, and the health of our hair and the health of our skin and our mental clarity. As a wellness community, so many of us are caught up so much in the physical, the nutrition, the supplements, and yet we are almost in this desperate frenzy to try to fix our hormonal issues. And so many of us are finding ourselves not able to fix them with the lifestyle changes and not understanding what's going on.
But on a deeper level, we're still stuck in a physiological state that is unnatural to us. And it is not our nature, so it costs so much energy to stay in that state. And so the answer to that is really just first awareness, start recognizing where we're stuck in this very masculine energy and how does it feel to us not really attaching any stories to it - just asking ourselves how we're feeling what is not feeling right. What things are feeling completely out of alignment for us, what is our gut saying to us? Are we listening to our gut instincts on a regular basis? Or are we continuously ignoring our bodies, and making decisions with just our brain and just our logical analytical side.
And as we start to understand our nature on a deeper level, which just comes with time and observation and awareness, and as we start to do what we can to nourish ourselves and nurture ourselves, really over time, nourishment does act as a gateway, to allow us to go deeper. And as we nourish and as we start to heal cellularly, as our body starts to have the energy to finally, almost mobilize and rewrite patterns, to process the things that we've stored in our tissues for so long, whether that be physical things like heavy metals, and micro plastics, and PCBs, and silicones, and estrogens, and things like that, or it'd be more emotional like processing our experiences, the things that have happened to us that have shaped us as a person, our childhood, whatever it might be. As our body has more energy, and it gets out of a survival state, your cells begin to shift and the things that your body stored away for so long, because it didn't have the energy to work through those things. Well, now it does.
So what starts to come up is a sometimes years long process as your nourishment and you nurturing yourself and nourishing yourself on a deeper cellular level is an invitation for the body, right? It's a choice that you're making, at first, to intentionally start to give your body what it has been asking for and crying out for all of its life. Once you do that, once that starts, unfortunately, I mean, I guess we can stop. But it almost is a gateway, and it is going to start taking us higher, we are going to start peeling back layers of ourself and being forced to in a way, I don't want to say force, that's kind of the wrong the wrong way to look at it, but more, our body is going to invite us and give us an opportunity to go deeper. And that is only if we would like to write we can ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, keep dealing with the symptoms, keep dealing with a life that feels like it's not quite right for us. But our body really is there to pull our soul who we really are right the core of us, the part of us that exists apart from our body, because our body and who we are, are actually different, right? This body that I'm in will one day, return to the dust, and I will continue on. I am eternal, who I am, the core of me, my higher self, however you want to call it, who I am without all of the human things that kind of hold me back, my human nature that holds me back will one day return to dust. And I will continue on. So to me, that's what my soul is.
And so I believe that this body, my physical vehicle to pursue my purpose, whatever that is, throughout my lifetime, is here to pull my soul, pull the core of me in the direction that it needs to go. I need to learn some lessons. Some things I have to transform. I have to go through certain transitions so I can step into who I am made to be. And so part of the journey of reclaiming our feminine - that's really what it is - it's not stepping into our feminine energy is not my favorite term. The best way to look at it is reclaiming the nature that is already ours.
The Pendulum Swing
When we lose that masculine drive, the accomplishment, the achievement, the striving that is so sometimes ingrained into our identity as our value, when that is stripped away from us and we realize that that has not been serving us, that there has been real physiological life consequences to being in that state, a lot of times, we're going to swing to the complete opposite end of the pendulum. We're going to swing all the way the other way. I think this is nature's way of encouraging balance. At some point we will find a balance kind of in between where there is a balance in feminine and masculine energy. All of us have a little bit of masculine energy because there are times and places where we need to step into the masculine energy to get something done to protect ourselves. There is a time and a place for it. But once you become aware of that, then you start to understand the cost of staying there physiologically and spiritually. The cost of staying there is often too great.
So once we recognize that, once we come to that realization, once we start to do the physical aspects of nourishing ourselves and getting us out of that survival state, once we swing to the other side of the pendulum, it can feel very much like a rut, or like a depression or like a burnout. I have been there and I was there for oh, I mean, I feel like there was not a definitive time that I got there. But I feel like I was already approaching that place in 2020. And once I really succumbed to it, it took me about a year or two, to start feeling any change. You know, once I got to that place, I fought it for a long time, expended a lot of energy, trying to fight that place, trying to force it, trying to say no, no, no, no, no, fight it, kicking and screaming and step back in that masculine energy. But it's like, once you gain awareness, you can't go back. Once you get to a place physically, you get to a place of nourishment, and you get out of the survival state, you can't go back. As much as you maybe want to sometimes, as much as you maybe find, you still try to identify with your accomplishments and your achievements, and you want to continue to succeed and achieve in that way, it no longer feels right, it just feels so wrong.
Healing Isn’t Linear
For a while there, I felt incredibly out of control. Because what was comfortable to me at one point, what I knew like the back of my hand, my achievement, and my drive, and my motivation, that was something I could rely on. But I was no longer willing to pay the physiological and spiritual costs of it anymore. And so I found myself in a conundrum where I was being called to step into my feminine energy and reclaim it, but it felt so uncomfortable. It just felt foreign to me that there's no other way to say it. And so I think this is where that “healing isn't linear” kind of cliche phrase comes in, where there's like, ups and downs to healing. And yes, there's definitely on a physical level, I've talked about that before on Instagram, you know, the healing waves, why does it always feel like we go through these waves, where we go through these really hard times, and then just when we're about to catch our breath, another wave comes and crashes down on top of us. And physically on a physical level, those waves come sometimes at first, when our body begins to work on itself on a deeper level. Sometimes when stuff and junk starts to move out of our system, it kind of puts stress on our detoxification systems. We start to almost feel our symptoms more than we did before. Because what was very, very deep within ourselves hidden away, is now kind of brought to light. And so now we're almost experiencing it on a deeper level as it moves through our bloodstream and gets out of us.
So, on an emotional and spiritual level, I think, if our feminine energy is so neglected, and so locked away for so long, once we give it permission to rise, part of the body reestablishing balance is swinging into a kind of an extreme form of that energy. And I've seen this happen so many times within women as they begin to nourish themselves. They're like, “Why do I just feel like I lack complete motivation? It's almost like I'm feeling numb or depressed, but not in a way that is scary, almost like it's just like a disconnection, where I've expended so much energy, and I'm just tired, like, I'm just kind of weary, and I can't really muster up the energy to really care about your problems anymore, or like care about any of this junk anymore that I used to really care about.” And that can feel really, really scary and terrifying. I promise you that I have been there. And what I've learned from it is that, first of all, if I wouldn't have fought it for so long, I probably would have gotten through it much quicker. But that place in and of itself is a place to rest in. The transitional period is a place - I got that from one of my students, and I found that really powerful. Sometimes we look at a journey, like we're trying to end up in a certain place. And so when we're going through a hard time to get to that place, we're just kind of in a rush to get through, like get me through this so I can end up at the destination I'm trying to end up at.
But the journey or the place that you're at is a place too and even if it feels really uncomfortable or feels like a funk, like I am just in a funk and I cannot get out of this funk. I'm in a rut and I cannot get out of this rut, no amount of forcing yourself no amount of beating yourself up about it, no amount of shame and guilt and anger and rage that you can throw at yourself is gonna push you out of that rut. So, sometimes we have to just remain in a place for a little while and remind ourselves over and over, it is temporary, and acknowledge that if our body has been in a place of expenditure, and going beyond its limits for so long, doesn't it make sense that our body would maybe want to pull back and be in this like extreme state of rest for a while? That’s how I almost look at it.
As you know, the feminine experience is really this kind of state of seasons, right? We go through these ebbs and flows where we pull back and pull inward and kind of utilize energy and collect energy and just kind of sit there and ruminate and save our energy. And then all of a sudden, it just kind of unleashes, and we go through these states of like, you know, we've built this up for so long that it's time, now the time is right, the time is divinely perfect to unleash that energy. Birth is a perfect physical example of how the feminine experience is. For nine months, which feels sometimes like an eternity, it's almost a whole year, we're just sitting there, collecting energy, building, building, building, building, building, building, building. And then when every little puzzle piece moves into place, everything - the lungs are completely developed, the child is ready, the hips are starting to change, the ligaments are starting to change - all these moving parts, all these energy flows are coming together into alignment, and then boom, the cervix opens up, and you unleash life. And then you have the energy to nurture and nourish that life into existence. That is a perfect representation on a physical level of how the feminine experience is, there is a time to pull back to rest, to surrender, to let go and trust the process. And then there is a time that you don't have to force, you don't actually have to take action at all, when the energy has accumulated and all the divine pieces have fallen into place, you will unleash and it will be completely out of your control. All you have to do is surrender to the process.
The State of Surrender
And I use the word surrender, because surrender is an action. I don't think that surrender is a weak thing to do. In fact, surrendering is sometimes the hardest thing we must do. The state of surrender and the state of trust are active states. I think some of us have lost that because we let the world and we let society kind of define words for us. You know, society defines softness as weakness. I look at those guys, there's this park close by to us where a lot of dog trainers will go out and they will put on those full big, Michelin man body suits that are like these big puffy pillow suits to protect them from the dog. And I think of that as softness, right, where it's like, we're so soft, that instead of having to expend all this energy building up these walls around us, which a lot of us do, our nature is to be so soft, that it just kind of bounces right off of us. We have this softness that just kind of allows us to move through life in such a way that adds beauty and love and truth and goodness and brings kind of divinity, like heaven on earth in a way, to the sometimes harsh realities that life brings.
And we are strong, we are fierce, right? But that doesn't necessarily mean that we have to be hard to be strong. That is to me the softness that we must learn. And so bringing it back to burnout and this kind of state of deep, almost soul-level burnout. I think a lot of women have been in a physically burned out state for a long time. I can look back now and see like so many of my autoimmune disease symptoms and my HPA Axis dysfunction as we like to call it, you know, thyroid and metabolic issues and adrenal issues and stress issues and blood sugar issues, they can really all kind of go back to this emotional state, where so many of us forget that our bodies are way more than just the physical. And we can't control or really manipulate how our body responds to our habits. Like we can take steps. But at the end of the day, if our body's not responding to those steps, there's something that we're missing. And so, so many of us are finding ourselves in this state of burnout, and yet we believe that it's solely physical, but there's something so much deeper going on.
And if you are somebody that has been nourishing for a while, and you're wondering, “Why have I kind of swung into this place where I lack motivation, I feel like I am seeing a lot of changes and benefits. But the place that I'm in mentally and emotionally and spiritually just feels a little bit foreign to me, what's wrong with me?” I just encourage you to change your perspective. There is a transition that needs to take place in this microwave society, in this world where we think that health comes in 90 days or, you know, 10 day detoxes, and, you know, 30-day boot camps. And we think that health and healing is this thing that just comes to us in a short period of time, we can put a timeframe on it, and an expectation on it.
But if you want something deeper and newer, I’m a big believer that your body is here to guide you out of something, or to something, or to somewhere, there are transitional places, where we must learn the lessons that we need to learn to do something greater, sometimes our body has to turn inward, in order to be able to expand outward. And unfortunately, just like birth, or just like the pregnancy process, you can't want to put a timeframe on the moment. You're going to move out of that transitional period, that temporary place. But the temporary place is there for a purpose. And it is to teach us the action of surrender, the action of trust, and it is there to allow us to become soft again, to tune into our softness, and to tune into our fierceness.
My mentor, Heather, came up with this term “fierce benevolence.” And I love that it's like all I think about when I think about femininity is there is a fierce benevolence that comes with femininity, right? We're looking out for the good of all that is around us. And we are meant to have the energy to do that. But to do that requires immense amounts of not only self control and self awareness and self containment and accountability and responsibility. But it also requires just that surrender and trust. And if we don't have that, and we've never learned that we've never seen that it can be really challenging to get there. And it can take some time. So if we've swung into that place where we feel like we don't care about anything, or we went from caring about every little thing to the point where it made us go physiologically and close to emotional insanity, when we step into that place where we are now a little bit disconnected from that, it's an opportunity to say “no more,” it's an opportunity to protect ourselves and reestablish the boundaries that we need to establish. It is a time and a place for us to work through everything that we need to work through in its due time. We don't need to actively, you know, try to fix ourselves, we just need to allow our body the space and time to process what it needs to process. And if we were finding our identity, and many of the things that we were attached to, when we were stuck in a masculine energy state, when we no longer feel attached to those things. There's a kind of a stripping away of the identity of who we really are, what am I here for, what do I want? What is my body telling me?
It's a time to reconnect with your body on a deep, deep level, when your body feels like it's “failing” you or you're not quite understanding it, instead of feeling betrayed by it, you have been gifted the opportunity to no longer find your identity in your body. Your body is a tool to help you establish your identity, but it is not your identity. And so when you feel like you're out of control, and you can't control your body anymore, which you never really could in the first place but you darn well tried, right? We darn well try. It can feel absolutely out of control. But the positive side of that is that it allows us to finally finally see ourselves clear. And as I've gone through my funk and allowed myself to be in my funk. You know, at first it took me a long time to just accept it and soften into it and surrender to it. And one of my mentors said, You know, imagine it as if you are just kind of laying down in a life raft. And there are times where you just need to lay down in that life raft, and just float along the river in the stream, and the trust and the surrender comes to, you're really reconnecting to the Divine, you're connecting to your higher power, you're connecting to God. And you are now saying, I trust you, I don't have to do this on my own any more. And that is an active state. Trust and surrender are active states of being, but they require us to rest. And so every time it became hard for me when I was in my funk, or my raft, or what I like to now call my transition, or like you have told me my Hermit chapter, every time I felt just out of control and stressed and it just felt like I couldn't stick in that place anymore. Like when am I going to get out of this funk, and feel motivated again, and feel like I want to create again and feel like I am a real person again, in a way, I would just imagine myself lying back in that life raft, and just floating along a stream in a place of surrender, and trust and peace, and peace.
And what I have learned as I have come out of that place, and just like going into that place, it's kind of a kicking and screaming, kicking and screaming, to finally be able to relax and trust. And I didn't do it perfectly. There were times throughout that period where I did not want to surrender, I did not want to trust, I wanted to force it, I wanted to get back to my life, you know, “get back to my life.” But I finally got to a place where I just accepted it, and I just allowed it to happen. And acceptance is a beautiful thing. Because it allows you to really finally just get to a place of peace. What I learned during that time, I think the lesson I need to learn, I needed to learn a lot of things about myself. But the one thing that I really, really learned was that if I am not operating from a place of peace, where one of my friends says to, she calls it the “inner vortex of well being,” if I do not operate from a place of peace or well being, I will never feel satisfied or fulfilled, ever, nothing will ever feel like enough if I am not operating from that place. And I will always be stressed, overwhelmed in a state of fight or flight if I believe that everything relies on me, that every single thing is on my shoulders. And there's nobody else looking out for my well-being, or my greater good. And that in it of itself is the fundamental thing - to be in a feminine state, to be in a place of surrender and trust requires the belief that there is something greater than us, and that it doesn't all rely on our shoulders, that we are taken care of.
For me, no matter how scary or rocky some of the places felt, while I was in my rut, if we want to call it that, no matter how scary it felt, or how out of control I felt or how certain things felt, I survived. I learned the lesson that if I just trust and if I just surrender, everything is going to be okay, everything is going to be okay and I am going to be taken care of. And just as it took me time to get in, it has taken me time to get out. And I'm not still completely out. But there was a point where that state no longer felt good. There was a point where instead of feeling the discomfort, I've now found a place of comfort and peace in rest. AI was sick of it. I was sick of it. I was done. And that was where that kind of fierce mother part of myself needed to like kick myself out of the nest and say okay, this is now time, like the energy you have, you have the energy, you took the rest that you needed, you did everything that you needed to do, you learned the lessons you needed to learn. And then towards the end of that place, I just started to get so restless and I needed to do something with all that I had learned. And that was the time for it to unleash.
So when I started the podcast, I didn't really feel quite ready. But I had been starting to change my mental state, my emotional state had just been starting to change naturally and honestly my physical state before I didn't have to really change anything. I just started to want to eat differently and was a little bit more intuitive. I wanted to work out more, all the things that I previously needed to force and succeed at and be motivated for now we're just things that were naturally what I was wanting to do. I was craving and desiring and it no longer felt like this big long to do list, it just felt like things that I wanted to naturally do. And it feels so good once we get out of that state. And it becomes comfortable to us as hard as it is to be in that transitional period. Once we become comfortable in our feminine energy, it feels completely foreign to be in our masculine energy. And every time we're there, we know, “Oh, my gosh, this is coming at a cost, I can feel it in my body. And when I'm done with this, I need to get out of it, I need to take the steps to get out of it.” And that is the lesson that I needed to learn.
So, I encourage you to be free in your funk and to not force yourself out of your rut and to see your rut and your burnout for what they are, they can be something deeper going on. And if you feel like you just keep trying to force yourself out of the place that you're in, and it's not happening, it's not working, instead of beating yourself up about it, is it possible that you need to change your perspective a little bit? I hope that sharing my experience and kind of my thoughts on burnout - I know this episode was kind of all over the place - is helpful to you. I just want to know that it's okay to be human. And I know that the pressure that social media brings and the kind of energy of society right now it just feels like you can never catch a break. I learned that the body sometimes forces a break. And it forces you to get real with the patterns and behaviors that weren't serving you before. And until you learn your lessons, you're never going to get out of it until you accept it and you let go and you surrender and you trust and you ease into that softness and you let that wall come down. That's when things will change.
I promise you that this is temporary, and that it will change and you will find a motivation again, but it will be different. It will not be the type of motivation that hurts you anymore. It will not be a place that requires you to disassociate because it's so uncomfortable and so outside of your nature. I really hope that today's episode on the lessons we can learn in burnout really resonated with you. In next week's episode, we're going to dive a lot deeper into the physiological meaning behind nurturance and how important it is for nurture, and why we as a generation of women are starving for nurture.
Episode Links
Connect with Jessica:
Have Sunday tea with me! Sign-up for my Sunday newsletter where I share what’s on my brain from the nutritional to spiritual: https://www.jessicaashwellness.com/email-subscribe.
Join the Fully Nourished community! Follow me @jessicaashwellness on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jessicaashwellness/