Part 1: When Meditation Stops Being Stress Relief
What happened when I stopped running from burnout and started turning inward
[Level 0: Technical]
On my burnout post, I mentioned in the P.S. that I would revisit this topic.
This is that post, or at least the first part of it.
It can happen to anyone
From those struggling to survive to those who labor and strive, no matter how much you do, there’s always the Next Thing looming in the distance, the finish line receding further and further away into the horizon.
Eventually the human spirit tires of chasing and wonders why it was ever running in the first place.
At one point, it was towards love, but now it only seems to be away from fear.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that switch happened. Perhaps you can’t remember. I know I can’t.
Fear
Fear uses up a lot of life energy (the will to live) over long periods of time. In a burst, it can save your life in a dangerous situation, jolting you into action, urging you to move towards safety or defend yourself from an incoming attack.
But sustained even mildly over years and decades? You get where we currently are now. Numbed, disconnected, tired, and / or existentially exhausted. All of the above if you’ve already been reduced to ashes.
Ironically enough, resting is HARD at this point. Lying in bed, the thoughts are too loud. Maybe you can’t fall asleep so you drown it out with background noise while you drift off. Yet, even in dreams maybe you’re getting chased or stuck at the office as if working a double.
If the mind is such a hostile place when you’re trying to just rest, why would you want to sit with that during the day, especially when everything needs doing and you’re already running behind from exhaustion?
Something’s gotta give
Either you’re going to becoming a husk of a person going through the motions of the daily grind, your mind either too overactive or too numb to the point where you can no longer truly see what’s right in front of you. Or... you stop... and maybe even turn around to face the other way.
When you stop running, you realize:
The next promotion will not bring you the peace.
The next trip will not bring you the satisfaction.
The next thing will wash right over you.
And you will still be here.
I’m not saying to quit your job, stay home, or never try to have fun again. I’m also not saying that you should never run, especially if your life truly depends on it (though sometimes we don’t know if it actually does or not).
But if you’ve been chasing that Next Thing with the expectation that it will bring you joy, happiness, or contentment, you’ve already set yourself up for failure. This is what I did for my entire adult life. It’s something I still catch myself doing.
“If I just get this promotion...”
“If I just make this much more money...”
“If he would just propose...”
“If we could just buy a house...”
I would torture myself so much over wanting the Next Thing and how I don’t have it right NOW. I’m a very impatient person, especially if I think I’ve put in enough effort for something. Historically, I’ve never been pleased with where I was and would be so miserable in the process of striving for the Next Thing that when things finally came together (due to time, herculean effort, sheer luck, profound grace, or some combination), I wouldn’t even be able to enjoy the results.
And exhaustive efforts with no perceived reward? A recipe for burnout:
“Maybe if I just do / have this instead, then I’ll be satisfied”.
Sound familiar?
Enough is enough
It took me multiple projects getting killed mere weeks before launch back to back within a couple years all while I was gunning for a promotion (which depended on a track record of successful projects) to realize my actions needed to be decoupled from my expectations; they were already decoupled from the results. I didn’t realize this at the time. I just thought I needed to “sublimate my driven ego”, something I knew conceptually that meditation was well-suited for according to Dr. K (my favorite Harvard educated former monk turned psychiatrist) from HealthyGamer.
I had decided in early 2022 after the rubble was settling from an acquisition to start meditating daily, and I was going to need help.
Community practice
This I think was the key. Had I started on my own with some simple guided meditations on a mindfulness app, I think I would have lost interest and fell off.
While counting the breath or visualizing a soothing scene works for some people, that kind of stuff didn’t land with me. I’d tried some things here and there before (YouTube in college for stress and well as Calm and Headspace at another point), but these helped only in a superficial way.
I joined the HealthyGamer Discord’s meditation channel, interested in the community participation and live guided sessions. I took part in these daily when I could and was introduced to new meditative practices including:
samatha (calm abiding)
metta (loving-kindess)
neti-neti (not this, not this)
and (my favorite) self-inquiry
Many others on the channel also resonated with self-inquiry to the point that the meditation lead took the time to compile an entire YouTube playlist on the topic. I binged all 30ish hours of it in one weekend. I was hooked.
Who are you?
I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole with self-inquiry around the end of April. Who am I if not anything I can witness?
Exactly a month after participating in these meditation sessions daily, I was going about my normal morning routine. I don’t normally talk out loud if by myself, especially in the shower, so I was a little confused why I suddenly said out loud:
“Who are you?”
Instantly, something beneath the usual mental chatter shot back with a crystal clear:
“That’s for me to know and you to find out!”
It stopped me in my tracks.
I hadn’t heard that phrase since my childhood. I had completely forgotten about it and yet here it was popping into my mind without any effort or prompt to “dig up” the memory. It was unsettling.
I brushed it aside shortly after, but mild curiosity persisted underneath.
Going deeper
Something was there, something I felt like I’d forgotten long ago, just like the quip in the shower. I was suddenly not so interested in mere stress relief and started craving something deeper.
I was then on the hunt for anything that could point the way: books, videos, lectures, podcasts. I wanted to dig deeper into my mind and beyond it into the stillness, into this sense of “Am-ness”.
About a month later, The Impersonal Life found me in its purest of forms: no cover, no author, no table-of-contents, no foreword, just a raw PDF that felt like it grabbed me. I remember the feeling of the hair on my arms standing on end as if my body was remembering something my mind was failing to process but something else even deeper recognized from my meditations, but in written word. Another weekend, another binge (still my favorite book, BTW).
The outer reaches of inner space
Now was the work of applying teachings. I couldn’t keep solely reading, listening, watching. I had to experience it for myself. Thus began my Jungian-style “psychonautics” (Red Book anyone?), sometimes assisted by a small edible. Later I learned cannabis has historical use as an entheogen.
This stirred up many archetypal images: the carp who became a dragon, the ouroboros, the shepherd, and finally, the Self. Now communication seemed to be established, albeit the signal wasn’t very clear this early on.
The dream
To reiterate, I originally started meditation because I was burnt out from efforts that were either thrown away or didn’t bring me joy.
As of late 2022, I was still trying to do well at work. I was at this point being asked to spearhead a new customer product with a next quarter due date for the beta according to the CEO.
Because of this, I was at my most stressed point yet in my career. Yet, I couldn’t seem to stop caring, striving, even when I felt like I was doomed to fail. I was too scared to let that happen, too terrified to not try.
After a month of frantic struggling to make headway on the mountain of work to come up to speed on the new technology and meet the deliverables, I was feeling as gray as the mid-December sky.
One day, I ended up waking up at 5 AM and wasn’t able to fall back asleep for an hour. As I was drifting off, something was telling me that I had to not rely solely on my brain for answers and to that, I internally approved of any answers that came forward from the rest of my being.
My mind then started to disconnect and it seemed to start talking on its own in snatches of speech. I didn’t take it too seriously and next thing I knew, I was in a vivid dream.
It was a warning of exactly what would happen if I continued down this path: staying late at the office fixing production bugs I caused, all sense of enthusiasm for life gone.
But it didn’t end there.
I was visited by a woman that spoke in a soothing language that captivated me in a trance. I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t understand the words, but understood the message of compassion.
Her touch on my heart felt like home and she sang a song that lulled me into a dream within the dream.
Her song accelerated into a waterfall of information that flashed before me against the blackness in white text, words appearing faster than lightning.
I tried to keep up, but it was no use. I only saw one word several times that I recognized just before it would disappear:
God.
I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know what was happening. But I knew, somehow, that this wasn't just a strange dream.
