Inner Alchemy of Burnout: How to Recognize, Work through, and Recover from Spiritual Burnout

We will learn how to welcome in spiritual burnout and work with it as a force of positive change that helps us transform our relationships with ourselves, the spirits and the universe itself. 

The completion of this course will provide you with essential skills to navigate the experience of spiritual burnout and turn it into an opportunity for deep internal work that plants the seeds for spiritual growth and creativity to flourish in your life when you are ready for it. You’ll learn how to relax into spiritual burnout and work with the experience instead of against. You’ll discover why rest and relaxation are so important and why as with anything else in life, we can’t burn the candle on both ends indefinitely. You will learn how to redefine your spiritual work and life in a way that invites play and creativity and imagination back in but at a pace that is restful and reinvigorating.

In Inner Alchemy of Burnout, I share my process for recognizing, working through and recovering from spiritual burnout, and show you how you can integrate mundane and magical activities into this process that won’t push you further into burnout, but will invite you to discover the cause of your burnout and work through it so you can move forward and be empowered in the process. You’ll discover how burnout can actually be a sign you are moving in the right direction, but also a reminder from the powers that be of the importance of stopping and sitting with your experiences before continuing on.

This course includes: Weekly videos, Zoom conference calls for live Q and A, and a Facebook group that is only available to members of this course. 

Why you should take this course

Spiritual burnout is a natural experience that all of us encounter at one time or another, but there are very few resources available for how to work through it, and a person undergoing an experience of burnout can feel alone and overwhelmed. You aren’t alone though, and in this course I’ll share with you resources and best practices that can help you accept and work through the experience of burnout. Most importantly you’ll learn that you really aren’t alone and that regardless of what your specific spiritual practice is, there are ways to embrace burnout as an opportunity that leads to deeper growth and spiritual creativity.

I know this because I’ve gone through multiple experiences of spiritual burnout and have even written a book on the topic. I’m offering this class because spiritual burnout doesn’t have to be faced alone…and because it is actually an invitation to sit with your experiences and work and discover the profound depth of realization and experience that is all too easily glossed over in the rush of everyday life.

What you will learn

Week 1: What is Spiritual Burnout?

In the first week, we’re going to explore what spiritual burnout is and discover how it can differ from other forms of burnout. We’re also going to learn why burnout, of any type, is actually a very natural experience and a call for us to slow down and take stock of our situation and lives. We’ll end this week with a breathing meditation exercise that can be used to dissolve internal blockages but can also help us reach a place of stillness and deep relaxation

Week 2: How to embrace burnout as an opportunity for growth and reflection

In this week, we’ll explore why it can actually be helpful to embrace burnout as an opportunity for growth and reflection. Many people try to resist spiritual burnout, but resistance only causes burnout to last longer. I’ll share how you can embrace and accept burnout by discovering what is at the root of your experience of burnout. Discovering the root cause and accepting it allows us to begin the process of recovering from burnout, because we understand what has caused it. We’ll end this week with an exercise designed to help you uncover the root of your spiritual burnout.

Week 3: How to build rest and recovery into your life.

Burnout of any type happens because we strain and exhaust ourselves getting caught up in a narrative of the need to be productive. At some point we burnout because we hit our limit and then extend past it without recognizing the need to rest and recover. During this week’s class we’re going to look at how to build rest and recovery into our daily lives so that we don’t hit burnout again. I’ll share some ritual suggestions that are simple to apply and can help you achieve a sense of rest and relaxation, which is essential for recovery. This week’s exercise will changing your daily routines to incorporate some element of rest and reflection into your life.

Week 4: The Power of Limits

In this week’s lesson we learn how to identify and respect our limits. When a person hits burnout its often because they don’t recognize that they are at their limits. They’ve pushed themselves past the limits, but if they knew what the limits were they could plan accordingly. We’re going to have a frank discussion of what limits are and how to recognize them. Then we’re going to explore different ways we can stop and work within our limitations to do the spiritual work we want to do without exhausting ourselves in the process. This week’s exercise will focus on integrating limits into your spiritual work as a way of recognizing the power that limits can bring to your life.

Week 5: The Joy of Essentialism

We live in a culture that emphasizes busyness as a form of productivity. In this week I’ll present a different philosophy that of essentialism and we’ll explore how focusing on the essential can actually help you pare down that busyness in your life to discover what is really important and needs your attention and focus. Instead of trying to do all the things, we’ll focus on doing the things that are truly important and let go of anything else that would be a distraction and cause us to feel burned out. This week’s exercise will focus on apply essentialism to your life, and letting go of areas of needless busyness that are keeping you from your joy and purpose.

Week 6: Tapping into Embodied Experience through meditation and internal work

Embodied experience is an awareness of your body, mind and spirit that helps you communicate both internally, with your inner universe, and externally with the universe around you.  When we experience spiritual burnout, we can be out of sync with our embodied experience and with the signals and messages that are being sent to us by the spirits and the universe and ourselves. In this class, we’ll focus on using meditation and internal work to connect with our embodied experience. I’ll walk you through several different Taoist meditation techniques that you can use to connect with your body consciousness. We’ll also explore how your body consciousness interfaces with the world around you and how you can learn to “listen” to your body in order to achieve a better balance in your life. This week’s exercise will include some embodied experiential practices that you can apply to your life to help you work through burnout.

Week 7: The Ritual of Reinvention

Sometimes what burnout calls for us to do is reinvent our lives. In this week’s lesson I will introduce you to a powerful ritual you can do for the purpose of reinvention. I’ll share when is a good time to do this ritual and walk you through the specifics of how the ritual works and how it can be adapted to your spiritual tradition. We’ll also discuss what coming out of burnout looks like and why it can be important to take your time with coming out of burnout, so you don’t go back into it. This week’s exercise will focus on creating your own ritual of reinvention and applying it toward your life.

Week 8: Conclusion

In our final week we wrap everything together and explore spiritual burnout as a journey of process and change that can help us bring balance to our lives. I’ll discuss how to tie everything you’ve learned together but also how to embrace the spiritual and mundane lessons that burnout can bring you. You’ll learn why spiritual burnout will likely happen again but also how you can prepare for it, embrace it, and ultimately use it to help you flourish in your life by learning the valuable lessons it has to offer. The exercise for this week will focus on mapping out your burnout experiences and reflecting on the lessons you’ve learned while in spiritual burnout.