What Tiredness & Exhaustion Means in Your Embodiment Practice
In this episode, I dive into a topic that's been feeling incredibly present for me lately and one that I often see in my clients: the overwhelming sense of exhaustion that can arise during an embodiment or somatic practice.
Join me as I explore two key reasons why you might encounter this exhaustion and how to approach it with compassion and curiosity. We'll discuss:
The pervasive issue of depletion and burnout in our culture and how it impacts our personal growth journeys.
The importance of rest and nourishment as fundamental components of any spiritual or personal development practice.
How our nervous systems create resistance to protect us and why we might feel tired when confronting deeper, shadowy aspects of ourselves.
Practical insights on staying with and moving through the exhaustion to uncover deeper layers of wisdom within.
If you're finding yourself constantly tired, burnt out, or struggling to connect with your embodiment practice, this episode is for you. Learn how to honor your body's needs, navigate the depths of your fatigue, and create a more rooted, nourishing foundation for your life.
I also share a bit about my recent personal journey through illness and recovery, and how it's reinforced the vital need for true rest and nourishment.
Tune in and let's explore together how to embrace and move through these challenging but essential aspects of our embodiment journey.
Listen below, or on any of your favorite platfroms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts and iHeart Radio . You can also subscribe to the RSS feed here.
Podcast Transcript:
Hey everyone, I want to chat about something that's really feeling super present for me at the moment, personally, that I'm seeing in a lot of the women around me and that I really commonly see also in my clients, which is I guess I'll frame it with this question.
What do you do if you start an embodiment practice, a somatic practice, and. You find that when whatever you drop into your body or drop into practice, what you confront is just a huge heavy blanket of exhaustion. Of tiredness. I wanna talk about two reasons that this happens,
or I guess two avenues to explore if this is your experience, if this is something that you encounter. And so the first reason that you would encounter this is just that you are just depleted and exhausted and. You know, people come to, embodiment practice or really any kind of personal growth, whether it's coaching or mindset work or embodiment practice or breath work or spiritual practice.
People come to these practices in this work because we want to feel good, right? We wanna feel better or we want to. Maybe we want to expand into something like we are wanting to create something in our lives or yeah, just step into a different identity or a different version of ourselves.
We want more. We want to, start a business, start a creative, project, have a relationship, have a baby, all these different things that people come to. Personal growth work. Wanting basically an expansion, wanting more, wanting to feel better. And so, it's not an experience that people really are happy to find when they come to an embodiment practice.
They want, like most of us want, when we come to our embodiment practice, we want to. Like a lot of people are willing to do the work and confront uncomfortable things, but it's very disappointing when the thing that we confront or the thing that we find when we drop in is just tiredness and exhaustion.
This is not the answer that most people want to get when they start on this journey. And yet it is such a common experience, I think just because. Depletion and exhaustion and burnout are just so pervasive in our collective what we want to experience. Even for people who are like, yeah, I'm willing to , go into the depths and confront the, shadows and look at the hard stuff.
And then they don't want to, find that there's just exhaustion and depletion and burnout in there when they drop in because we want to feel like we're doing something. We want to get into action, to move forward, to have something happen. I quite often I've referred to this before, to clients as green smoothing. We want to be able to just, you just need to drink some green smoothies and you'll feel better. So I'd say it a bit sarcastically, but It's kind of like if you just do some breath work, you'll feel better.
If you just start a spiritual practice, you'll feel better or you'll, you'll, you know, you'll get to this next goal or, or get the thing that you're trying to trying to create. If you do breath work, it'll take you to healing. It'll take you to the place that you want to go. Rest is not the answer that most of us want.
We want to feel like we're in a dynamic active. Productive moving forward, doing creative orientation. So, yeah, I think a lot of people, they drop in and what's theirs is actually just, I'm fucking tired. I'm really fucking tired. And a lot of people don't want, they don't want to actually face that, the depth of their tiredness.
And , they don't want the like, very boring, almost and simplistic answer of like, you, you just need to rest. And the reason that I wanna talk about this is because I think it's just, it's really overlooked in the personal growth world, in the spiritual world and the, , the yogic development world is how important and that it actually is a part of your spiritual practice or your personal growth prac practice, or your yogic practice.
To actually tend the roots, to actually rest, to actually be nourishing Your body these things are very overlooked because, a lot of us are kind of treading water in our lives. We want something that's gonna move us forward and actually rest or nourishment is asking us almost to take a step back.
Right. It's almost asking us to like slow down, do less when what we want to do is do more or do something different or do, like doing that's the thing that's needed. It's like a doing and an action that's needed that's gonna take me to the place that I want to be.
So, yes, I just wanna call out, and this is something that I'm grappling with personally myself as well, and I, and like having to confront this again and again because it's not that we do this work once and then it's done. It's like it, it will show up in different ways or at different levels or in different areas at different times of our lives.
So this is something that I'm sitting with and confronting again, is, the orientation to actually slowing down and resting and, how much of a foundational, , literally even spiritual practice that is just the simple fact of, resting and, I want to call out to our attention too that a whole process can be going on just with that rest and nourishment, with resting and nourishing your body a whole entire process.
Can be happening around that one thing.
Don't think because you're not doing the work you're not in a process you are in a process. There's a lot of stuff that potentially can and, and needs to be and will be attended to and looked at just in that exploration in that how do I, how do I rest?
How do I nourish my body? What does my body need in order to feel rested and nourished? Everything from , am I allowed to rest? Do I have permission? Do I have permission from perceived things outside of myself? Do I have permission from inside of myself? What is it in my life that's preventing me from getting the rest and nourishment that I need?
Is it structures outside myself? Is it things that I'm holding within my own self that are preventing me from that? Boundaries that we might need to set with ourselves or with other people, how to communicate those things. So like there's a lot that can come up around all of these things.
What we're valuing, what we center. And a lot of us don't even take the time to really dig deep on that one question because we're like so much in the hustle of life I speak to a lot of women who don't even know what they want, which is so understandable because we just don't create time or space or have the tools and practices to actually slow down, get quiet enough to hear our own inner voice.
There's just so much loudness coming from our external environment, from our culture, from our families, from the media and the internet. So yeah, even just that question of , what is it that I value and what am I centering? It's quite often an unexamined question for a lot of us. And again, it's not something that we just examine once and then we're done.
These are questions and, explorations that I find that we, actually need to revisit and we'll be called to revisit whether that is a, conscious. Intentional revisiting or whether life just pulls us a bit under and it's like, oh, okay, I have to look at this again. Life is pulling me like an anchor to the bottom of the ocean where I will need to confront what's there in the depths again.
I wanna point out that all the good things that we're wanting, That we desire to expand into, that we desire to experience, whether that's, pleasure or any other kind of expansion. It has to rest on this really rooted foundation that. We, do have this nourishment and this wellspring in our bodies that we, actually have to attend to.
We think a spiritual practice is I'm meditating, I'm going to meditate in the woods for hours a day, or I'm doing a breath work practice, or I'm doing cold plunge, or, I'm doing a women's circle or I'm going to Peru to do ayahuasca when actually, , sometimes what we're being called to is just to like drink enough water and.
Eat the foods that nourish our bodies and nourish our bodies in other ways. Not just food, but is your body being nourished? Is your emotional life being nourished? Are you receiving enough art and beauty? Are you being nourished by the connections in your life? Are you receiving from nature and the nourishment from nature as well?
Are you sleeping enough? Are you getting deep sleep? Are you. Two go, go, go. Is your schedule two packed? Do you have enough space in your schedule? Just these super basic things. These are spiritual practice, these are yogic practice, these are growth practices. It is not all in the crazy doing and retreat and plant medicine and all of these experiences.
It's not all in that. So. The thing is, an embodiment practice is not going to fix this for us. An embodiment practice really will allow us to, see and to feel what's there. And, quite often we, actually, we don't want to turn towards. To feel, to experience the depth of exhaustion or depletion or tiredness that is in our bodies.
So that's the gift that an embodiment practice can offer us. And, part of us turning towards our wild nature and our, essence is being able to feel what's really there. And when you start an embodiment practice, you're gonna feel what's there. And it may not be what you wanna feel, you know?
And, and I don't mean that in the sense of like, you're gonna feel some pain, like you might feel tired. And that's like, people don't wanna feel that . So what an embodiment practice can, do for us is to allow us to have that, real full sense of the depth of the exhaustion that's there.
I think a lot of times we. We have a great fear to turn towards those places within us and I see this in grief as well of people, feeling like if I allow myself to turn towards my exhaustion or if I allow myself to turn towards and really feel my grief that it's gonna pull me under and I will drown there.
Like, that's the sense that we tend to have with these things, that it's, it feels so big and overwhelming and overcoming that if we allow ourselves to turn fully towards it and to fully , open ourselves to that experience, that we are gonna get lost and we might not come back from that. And this is where it's really helpful, I feel, to get to have support.
So, Just like we have support of a doula when we go into the birth process. It's great to have support of somebody who has been through these cycles of awareness, which is really, it's, it's really a, a metaphor for the death and rebirth cycle in, in a sense, as, as so many things are. It's like a microcosm of life itself.
But to have somebody who has walked that path and has that embodied. Knowing, living in their body, that they've been there and they've been out the other side. And so just similar in a, in a birth. What a doula does for us is walks beside us as we go into that reckoning, that initiation or that dark place or that place that we feel like we might not come back from.
The doula doesn't try to save us from that, right? Like when we're in birth and we're screaming out that we don't know if we can do this, the doula is not like, oh my God, what's happening? Like we have to fix and help you. The doula is just there to remind you that this is part of the process. This too is part of the, of your process and.
The knowledge and the wisdom of how to move through this. It lives within your body so that the doula reminds the birthing woman of that. And just in the same way it's great to have, mentors or peers or support who can hold that space for you when you're turning towards whatever it is you're turning towards that.
You know, this is part of the process. And yes, it will come to an end as all things do. You know, our own bodies show us this. If you have a, hormonal cycle and you bleed and menstruate your own body teaches you this, and you have this, wisdom living in your cells it's the, cyclical wisdom of life that death happens that we go into a dissent and that.
Always, always the essence follows. The spring always follows the winter. So allowing ourselves to, to be able to turn towards is one of the gifts of embodiment practice. As we learn how to be with the intensity of sensations in the body, we allow ourselves to really turn towards our, exhaustion to really feel it.
It's instructive for then what needs to happen, what needs to happen next. So the embodiment practice is not necessarily the thing that's going to fix your exhaustion or your burnout, but it does have a lot of deep wisdom for you in terms of what's there and what's needed and what, you do need to then do next.
Whether that's like. Not doing, or, you know, creating space or whatever, whatever needs to happen so that you can get that, rest that you need. So
Our embodiment practices, I want us to be aware too, of not falling in the trap of using our embodiment practices to get us out of the exhaustion. So once somebody has done a few type of somatic or embodiment practices and you discover that you can use that to calibrate your energy to something you can use that to sort of get in your body and, you know, create some energy in your body.
We quite often want to use our embodiment practices in that way to calibrate ourselves towards actually more doing, to calibrate our energy towards, okay, I, I need to , show up for this and I wanna show up in a certain energy. So , using our embodiment practice to calibrate is a, it's great, it's a, very exciting and relevant way to use an embodiment practice or a somatic practice.
But I just wanna point out the potential trap or pitfall of, not doing that. So using your embodiment practice to be with what's there to really confront and to feel the depth of the exhaustion rather than only using the embodiment practice to calibrate to a higher energy state to pull yourself out of that.
I think quite often what we do is. We feel tired, but then we only rest just enough to have a little bit of fuel to keep going. We don't actually often get to the place where we are very, very deeply rested, nourished. The well is full. We're like full to even maybe overflowing, and we have this abundance of.
Nourishment in our bodies that can overflow into, our lives and into our doing. We don't allow ourselves, we don't do enough to get there. We, stop ourselves. We only allow ourselves a certain amount and a lot of this is ingrained collective cultural programming as very toxic and not helpful, and it's very difficult to.
Excavate and unpack and unwind the, hooks that we have of this conditioning. You know, the conditioning that says , oh, you got sick, okay. , yes, you should rest when you're tired or depleted, but well, but now you should have rested enough. That should have been enough. So, get over it now, it's time to get over it and move on and get onto the next thing.
We have that orientation deeply, deeply ingrained and embedded even within our own selves, where we're even to ourselves. We'll be like, oh, but I rested already, or , I took a break last week, or whatever. It should be enough. I should be , I should be nourished. I should be rested. I should be able to move on.
And yet sometimes we're not. And this is such a path of true embodiment quite often this is very common experience that the mind thinks that one thing should be happening. The mind wants one thing to be happening, but quite often the body is up to something totally different.
And when we have these parts of ourselves that are moving in different directions, it can be really challenging to feel very. Aligned and resonant and rooted with everything that's going on in our lives with the direction that we're headed in, because actually parts of ourselves are headed in different directions.
It just feels better to have more alignment in the parts of ourselves. So, and that's one of, the benefits and the gifts that an embodiment practice can give us, is to help bring the minds and the body or, or, you know, they're more than just two aspects to ourselves.
We bring all these different facets of our being, more into alignment so that they're, all on side and all parts are being considered and felt and incorporated and integrated so that we are moving forward with more wholeness as a, you know, in more integrity.
And integrity just means that we're actually, all the pieces are together. We're moving forward as a whole person.
This is super present for me
I'm definitely in that place of like, but I've been resting. It should be done. And there's parts of me that are like, I'm tired of resting.
I'm tired of this orientation. I want something different to be happening. So what happened for me is
I had an emergency appendectomy. So I had appendicitis.
It was a very horrible experience. It was probably the most toxic I've ever felt that, that that pain, it wasn't an acute pain, like, you got cut by something or you fell. It was just this like festering pain that, I just intuitively knew that something was terribly wrong and that if I did not get help that.
It was going nowhere. Good. So it was just this whole really toxic, terrible experience. So I went through that, had the surgery, got mostly recovered, but then never fully recovered from that and ended up. Long story short, having to go back about six weeks later and have a second surgery because one of my incisions never healed.
So yes, I'm, I'm exploring all of the energetic and psychic layers of why this manifested in my body and in my experience, this like protracted illness, illness, multiple surgeries, and protracted healing and all of that. Which I, once I sort of digest and make some sense, I may share some more about that.
But yeah, so I had a second surgery towards the middle to end of November, and to be honest, really didn't allow myself to rest and recover enough from that. I was not expecting to really need to recover that much. I was expecting it to be more of a superficial thing. It wasn't, it was, something that, Really took me down.
But instead of allowing myself to be taken down, I, I sort of just kept going. And as you know, I did slow down a little bit for the most part. I just kept going and then rolled right from there, of course, into the end of November American Thanksgiving, and then right into the holidays and entertaining my family, putting Christmas together, being a parent to my kids, all the holiday obligations that always come.
So, yeah, here I am and I just have this awareness still that I have not fully recovered. I have not fully rested or nourished my body and that I really need to tend to this. So it's very much in my awareness at the moment both from the sense of , Just culturally, why we are all just so depleted and experiencing such burnout.
And then, yeah, just the personal things that are coming up for me around, like, some of this stuff that I just shared about like, well, but you rested enough. You know, that was months ago. You should be better by now. You should be able to continue on. And yet that's not, it's, that's not really the case.
So yeah. I would really love to hear your experience on any of this and your thoughts on depletion burnout. Do you feel like you're good on, on top of handling this for yourself, or do you feel like you are in this kind of constant low level depletion, exhaustion, burnout?
Okay. So the second thing that I wanted to talk about with. Finding exhaustion or tiredness when you drop into an embodiment practice and the reason I'm talking about this second is because I feel like it's, it's not that it's less common, but it's quite often that the first part of actually needing to create more rest and nourishment for ourselves is the long pole in the tent.
And it quite often goes hand in hand with this other piece of it, which is. Quite often what happens when we drop into the body if we are bumping up against something tender, vulnerable, painful or just something kind of shadowy that we maybe haven't looked at yet, or there's parts of us that don't want to look over there because what does it mean if I look right at that and, and, you know, see what's there in that, in that dark corner over there?
Is that this can be a form of, resistance our bodies, our systems, our nervous systems. Our body mind system is very sophisticated and can create all kinds of ways to. Keep us basically in homeostasis, which is what feels safe to our bodies, our nervous systems, and our psyche, our ego we feel safe with same, even if same is toxic or unhealthy for us, you may know this already, but is one of the reasons that people, stay in abusive or toxic relationships because, It feels safer to stay with the devil.
You know, even if it's, really hurting you and why it's can be sometimes so challenging to pull ourselves out of these situations. Even if on some level we realize , this is not good for me, but it's very, can be very, very difficult to actually go through the process of pulling ourselves away from that.
So, dropping into an embodiment practice and feeling suddenly like, oh, I just feel so tired. That can be a form of resistance. And again, quite often if there is that resistance, it's also going hand in hand with the fact that there is just legitimate exhaustion, tiredness, depletion, undernourishment happening.
But it can also be a form of resistance. So if you do drop into your embodiment practice and what you notice is I'm so tired the suggestion that I would give you is to. Stay with that tiredness and see what's there for you. Because sometimes when you, when we just stay with and turn towards feeling the fullness of whatever layer is there, there's something underneath that we then slide into that then becomes uncovered.
Like that layer of exhaustion is protecting us , and that can show up as tiredness or exhaustion. It can also commonly show up as boredom or even irritation or like frustration or, an overwhelming sense of , this is a waste of time. I have other things to do. Can't even show up as falling asleep.
And if you do fall asleep, would suggest that that's, you know, that's medicine that's needed and you can keep coming back to the practice at, at different times. So, Just a short little word on, on resistance and as a additional reason why tiredness and exhaustion shows up when you start an embodiment practice.
So those are the main things I wanted to share with you. Really lovely to connect with you all and would love to hear your thoughts and reflections on what I shared today. Let me know how it landed in your world. Do you need more rest and, nourishment, and what might that look like for you?
Okay. Lots of love.