Opening Your Heart
On Inspiration When Feeling Un-Inspired
“A meaning-ful life comes with work and love. The moral exhaustion at the heart of burnout is a love turned to loss” freud
In helping professions we often say that we were “called” to the work.
We may have found in our beginnings that we were cared for by a professional who “helped” us heal.
We may have watched this journey unfold where those who were “helping” were the heroes for our family, friends and loved ones.
A question: Why you?
We may share at some point in our practice an experience when we begin to depersonalize care and make excuses for showing up day after day when the love of our work has turned to temporary loss. Like a garden untended it will lay fallow and be overrun by the current contract we have signed on to: one that no longer suits us nor nourishes us. This bed will die back and weeds entangle in the soil.
Nature if we allow, will insert itself and make whole once again. It will come from our practice day in and day out. It is a refinement of our eye in doing different and better repetitions.
We accept change.
We grow from the struggle of understanding one of many moments that brought us to the threshold of leaving it all. It may be in feigning the ugliness of burnout, excusing the chronic fatigue and physical and mental discomfort….
And it maybe playing the part of the culture to which we bought into to give “more than we receive.” The latter as an unspoken given in this body of work. It is sacrifice and commitment to the love of our practice.
When I began to feel the burn and dross of Joy in my practice, I used my love of patient care as the reasoning for staying in this game. My mental burnout found its way into the joints of my thumb. They began to fail in painful limiting movements. The more I worked to be “needed” and for the “Love” of my patients the more my body began to say in sometimes deafening thunder, it was just quite enough!
Or was it about not being enough?
I reminded myself of why I got into this practice. The Connection. The Love of Healing.
The re-seeding begins.
I asked the Angels for another way to find better health to remain in practice. In time, I received more than I imagined in asking for help. I stepped further away from the confining walls of my profession’s inter-professional discrimination and found experts in healing modailities to support others healing trajectory through with less impact on my body. I was able to recapture and reclaim the abundance I initially sought as a student of the Practice. I fell once again into the great practice of “beginning again.”
If we love and find inspiration in our practice and we believe our reason for being then may we look to new pathways of health in ourselves. May we turn in and ask clearly the question we have been avoiding………..that leads us forward.
“Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists, generally.
There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It is made up of those who have consciously chosen their calling and do their job with Love and imagination….
Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they keep discovering new challenges in it.
Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity.
A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve.
Whatever inspiration is, it is born from a continuous, “ I don’t know.””
Wislawa Szymborska