Infinite Mindfulness

We all go through phases in our lives where we start to feel like everything has no meaning, no flavor anymore. What used to bring us joy no longer moves us. We feel like we’re just going through the motions. And it’s hard to remember our purpose. Perhaps you’re feeling stuck in that burnout right now. Or you can tuck this advice away for the next time you catch yourself drifting toward that desolate place. In this post, I am going to explain to you the energetic picture behind burnout and show you how the solution is both simpler and softer than we first think.

With burnout, we might feel angry and resentful. On the other hand, we might feel jaded and shutdown. Or we could find ourselves swinging between the two sides – at times, full of passionate emotions, and at others, completely numb. In these cases, it’s easy to fall into all-or-nothing solutions – oscillating between wild dreams of radically transforming our lives in one fell swoop, and the feeling that we should give up on our goals entirely.

I invite you to imagine the following example with me instead. On a simple table there sits a small bowl. If you look at all, you might notice that it is filled with something. If you look a bit closer, you might notice something like an indistinct mass of pebbles piled together. Each little stone is just part of the group – just a marker blurred in with the rest. You might not appreciate it or take it into account. It might not feel very special at all. But if you pick up any one stone and look at it carefully for a moment, you’ll start to notice its unique shape, its sparkle, its color, its texture. Even its quirks and flaws will begin to take on an element of beauty. You might even discover that it is, in fact, a precious gemstone.

The same thing happens in our own lives. All of the little miracles, the things of beauty get jammed together. Life starts to move so fast that we lose our ability to catch their meaning or breathe in their inspiration. Instead, we just feel this amorphous weight of everything stuck together, this endless rush of trying to manage it all. And out of this heavy blur, the only elements that jump up and grab our attention are the stressful ones – the ones that carry a sense of immediacy and activate our survival instincts. Soon, we find ourselves doing nothing more than putting out fires, while inside, we are just smoldering.

Now, what would happen if you took a moment to look closely at one of the stones in your bowl? What if you let yourself get curious and gave yourself a moment to explore its preciousness? Maybe there’s a leaf outside your window fluttering in the wind. Maybe there’s a smile on a stranger’s face. Maybe there’s a glass of water that feels especially refreshing as you swallow some of its drops. Maybe it’s just this breath that feels delightful as you take a nice, deep inhale followed by a good, long sigh.

The amazing thing is that, as we pick up one of our gemstones and begin to connect with it, we discover beauty, meaning, inspiration…We might even find after a moment of connection that the solutions we needed begin to slip into place as if on their own. The answers appear. The path opens up. This could feel like magic. And perhaps we could say that it is. But it’s not because any one stone is more magical than the rest. It’s because every stone in our lives, every single thing is a piece of the Universe – and every piece of the Universe is connected to all of the rest. And so, in a sense, each piece is infinitely full of meaning and value. If we just slow down for a moment and look with openness, we can sense it. And anything that we connect with deeply carries what we are looking for somewhere inside it. As the 17^th Century philosopher and mathematician Gottfied Leibniz said, “each simple substance is a perpetual, living mirror of the universe.” (Monadology, Paragraph 20).

Now, you might say, “That’s beautiful, Alyssa. And it might even be true, but I don’t have the time to slow down right now and give it a try. Maybe I’ll give it a try later…” Except, I think, as you’ve been reading with me, you’ve already started to taste a bit of the richness that comes with slowing down. You can already begin to feel in the softening of your muscles and the deepening of your breath that there is something more – a lightness, a sense of peacefulness as time begins to dilate. And perhaps you can even sense how as we slow down and allow ourselves to connect, we find whatever we were looking for. The answer on how to create more stillness, more meaning, more time, more possibility in your life – is right here inside the stillness itself.

So, put your feet on the ground, feel your breath in your belly, and take a nice, long exhale with me. Reach into your bowl of stones. Connect with the preciousness that is already right here. And let me know what you find.