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Most of us have days when we feel stressed out, overloaded or unappreciated; when the batch of responsibilities we juggle aren’t noticed or rewarded; when dragging ourselves out of bed requires Herculean effort. If you feel like this most of the time, however, you may be flirting with burnout.

While everyone experiences stress, it does not have to lead to burnout. Stress has to do with too much: too many demands on your time and resources, leading to physical depletion.

 

Burnout has to do with too little: too few reserves left to cope effectively with life challenges, leaving you feeling emotionally and mentally empty. Burnout happens as a result of exposure to long-term, chronic stress without appropriate support or coping mechanisms.

When running on empty, it is tempting to grab a quick fix like coffee, candy bars or some high-powered energy drink and keep going. Instead of reaching for an artificial energy boost, burnout means it’s time to find more appropriate ways to support yourself. If you take proper action now, you can interrupt the downward spiral of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion, and turn it around before it causes real damage.

Dealing with burnout requires a three-step approach:
•    Recognize the warning signs of burnout
•    Reverse the damage by managing stress and seeking support
•    Resilience – build long-term resilience to stress with proper self-care at levels of body, mind and spirit.

Step 1: Recognize the warning signs of burnout:

You may be on the road to burnout if:
•    Your state of mind is marked by not having enough: not enough time, resources, energy, enthusiasm, motivation or caring; instead, you feel all dried up and emptied out.
•    You’re feeling physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted or drained.
•    Frequent headaches, back pain, muscle aches or changes in appetite or sleep patterns.
•    You disengage from people, activities and interests that you would normally enjoy.
•    You’ve lost your sense of confidence and faith. Instead, you're focusing on shame and doubt, feeling shaky in the present and insecure about the future.
•    You struggle with a sense of loss: loss of control, loss of goals and ideals, loss of motivation or loss of your ability to cope.
•    Your emotions become blunted: You feel like nothing you do makes a difference or is appreciated, so why bother?
•    You feel increasingly helpless, hopeless, cynical, angry or resentful.
•    You feel like you have nothing more to give, and you are stuck in a no-win situation.

The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life – including your home and social life. It can also wreak havoc on your health: constant stress has been shown to suppress the immune system, cause chronic inflammation in the body, and make you more susceptible to a host of illnesses. When long-term stress turns to frustration, anger and resentment, it can lead to hardening of the arteries. High blood pressure, hypertension, cardiovascular complications, even heart attacks and brain attacks (or strokes) are potential health risks. Prolonged stress over time also impairs your hormonal and biochemical systems, influencing neurotransmitters such as serotonin that support mood stability.

Step 2: Reversing Burnout

Before throwing up your hands, remember, burnout is not for wimps. A lot of folks reach the advanced stages of burnout because of their sense of responsibility and dedication… taken just a bit too far.

If you recognize the warning signs of impending burnout in yourself, it’s time to take action. You can prevent further breakdown, provided you make some important changes. Remember that it will only get worse if you leave it unattended. By taking steps to get your life back into balance, you can prevent burnout from becoming a full-blown breakdown. Here are some to get you started:

•    Slow down.
By the time you reach the later stages of burnout, adjusting your attitude or taking some vitamins won’t be enough to solve the problem. You need to force yourself to slow down or take a break. Cut back whatever commitments and activities you can. Give yourself time to rest, reflect and heal.

•    Get support.
When you’re burned out, the natural tendency is to protect what little energy you have left by isolating yourself. But friends and family are more important than ever during difficult times. Turn to loved ones for support. Simply sharing your feelings with another person can relieve some of the burden. Seek out professional support to help you change unhealthy habits and find the way forward.

•    Reevaluate your goals and priorities.
Burnout is an undeniable sign that something important in your life is not working. Take time to think about your hopes, goals, and dreams. Are you neglecting something that is truly important to you? Burnout can be an opportunity to rediscover what really makes you happy and to change course accordingly. 

•    Acknowledge your losses.
Burnout brings with it many losses which can go unrecognized. Common losses include:
     Loss of your idealism or dreams
     Loss of your role or identity in life or in society
     Loss of physical and emotional energy
     Loss of friends, fun, and a sense of community
     Loss of esteem, self-worth, and a sense of control
     Loss of the joy, meaning and purpose that make life worthwhile

Unrecognized loss traps a lot of your energy. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional control to keep yourself from feeling the pain of these losses. When you recognize them and allow yourself to grieve them, you release that trapped energy and open yourself to healing.

Step 3: Build Resilience

 

To prevent yourself from slipping into burnout again, you need to build resilience to stress by taking excellent care of yourself at the levels of body, mind and spirit.

•    Start and end the day with a relaxing ritual.
Rather than jumping into or out of bed, spend at least fifteen minutes meditating, writing in your journal, doing gentle stretches, or reading something that inspires you.

•    Adopt healthy eating, exercising and sleeping habits.
When you eat right, engage in regular physical activity, and get plenty of rest, you have the energy and resilience to better deal with life’s demands.

•    Set boundaries.
Don’t overextend yourself. Learn how to say “no” to requests for your time without feeling guilty. Remind yourself that saying “no” allows you to say “yes” to the things you truly want to do.

•    Take a daily break from technology.
Set a time each day when you completely disconnect. Put away your laptop, turn off your phone, and stop checking email. This strategy does wonders to help me recharge after an intense week!

•    Nourish your creative side.
Creativity is a powerful antidote to burnout. Try something new, start a fun project, or resume a favorite hobby. Choose activities that have nothing to do with work, and let go of trying to be perfect when engaging in them.

•    Learn how to manage stress.
You may feel helpless when facing burnout, but you have a lot more control over stress than you think. Learning practical techniques to manage stress can help you regain equilibrium.

If you are prepared to make these adjustments, burnout can be a powerful incentive to find more clarity, balance and fulfillment in your life.

 

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com. This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.  

There is a world of difference in the approaches to healing found in western allopathic medicine and in traditional Chinese medicine.  In the Western world, physicians are trained to separate mental, physical and emotional symptoms to address the root cause of an illness. In contrast, Chinese medicine views the patient as a whole, with all aspects interrelated.

Clearly, there is a time and a place for each approach; often, the best approach is a combination.  Numerous medical studies in the west have shown the correlation between emotional health and physical ailments such as heart disease, cancer and autoimmune disorders. 

In Chinese medicine, feeling any emotion intensely is considered an imbalance. When there is balance among mind, body and spirit, every experience is processed in a natural, fluid way. This allows one to experience the full range of emotions without getting stuck in any one area. Stuck emotions block energy flow and can lead to illness.

Chinese medicine associates each organ with an emotional spectrum. To restore balance in the body, an organ or system is treated along with the predominant emotion linked to that particular organ.

For example, the kidneys are associated with strength and willpower - and on the negative end of the spectrum, with fear. The lungs and respiratory system are connected to our sense of order and stores a range of emotion that can range from perfectionism at one extreme to grief at the opposite end.  The liver supports planning and decision-making - skills needed to manage life well. At the far end of the spectrum, the liver also stores feelings of anger. The heart represents the center of body and soul; the emotions associated with this organ range from sadness to joy. The stomach can store emotions ranging from sympathy to worry.

These emotional-physical ties are not quite as simplistic as presented here to illustrate the principle.  In practice, it takes into consideration a number of other interrelated factors that assist in identifying areas of imbalance and restoring balance to all levels of being.

At its core, traditional Chinese medicine holds that all disease indicates a need for change in one of three basic areas of life - physical, emotional or lifestyle.

When we resist this need or do not know how to make the necessary change, it sets up conflict that expresses as symptoms of illness. By facing the issues that life brings your way and being willing to address them, you can eliminate energy drains and blockages.

This comprehensive approach offers many valuable guidelines to promote health and well-being in body, mind and spirit. A few of these concepts are offered here - integrating some of these concepts into your life can reward you with more balance and well-being.

Live in harmony with the seasons. The winter months are valuable for rest and rejuvenation; in the spring, we ramp up activity. Summer is an appropriate time to expand and expend energy in many activities, while in autumn we can benefit by slowing down, evaluating and retreating from excess activity.

Follow the light.  Before the invention of electricity, people got up at sunrise and went to bed soon after sunset.  This instinct to follow light is a good one - it has been shown to increase longevity and protect health.  Early morning exercise can increase cellular oxygen and boos the metabolism all day long for increased productivity.  By evening, it is helpful to switch to relaxing activities that allows one to unwind and prepares the body for sleep.

When illness sets in, respect your body and mind - take time off to heal.  Instead of popping medication at the first onset of a cold, for instance, it is a good idea to tough it out (within reason, of course). Let the cough and congestion run their course naturally, so your body can rid itself of pathogens and toxins. Use natural substances such as water, whole fresh foods and spices to strengthen your body and provide the resources required for recovery.

Recognize that disease may be happening for a reason. Illness may be an indication of working or playing too hard, or of lack of proper self-care.  Use the symptoms of disease as a wakeup call to review behavioral or lifestyle patterns, and make the necessary adjustments to restore balance.

Remember, true healing always involves increasing awareness. Illness is a call and an opportunity to evaluate your internal state. Medication may sedate painful symptoms, but true healing requires you to evaluate the choices that brought you to your current situation so that you can make different choices. Are you heartsick about something... suffering from anxiety... or feeling stuck in a work or relationship situation?  When you identify the issues that are creating toxicity in your life, you can make healthier choices to help you heal in every way.

Use daily reflection as a conscious tool to balance your energy. Think about what things are truly important to you and how you are using your energy to work toward those goals. Differentiate between essential needs and things that don’t really matter.  This process will free up your time and energy to focus on what truly matters in your life. 

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com
This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.

By Ada Porat

“So you do vibrational healing, hmm… now what is it that you really do?” the accountant asked as he read my business card, then peered over his glasses at me.

Try answering that question with a pithy 10-second sound byte!

People often ask for a lucid explanation of how the vibrational frequencies of body, mind and spirit interact in the dance of healing. Here’s how I usually try to explain it.

Each one of us exists as a holographic, integrated system that consists of body, mind and spirit. Yet you are much more than the sum of your parts – what you are is pure Life Force energy, expressing life through these levels of being. All the information about your life on earth – the good, the bad and the ugly - is contained within the cellular blueprint of your body.

Your life story is held in the form of frequencies. Just as every object in the universe has an innate frequency, so every emotion, memory and feeling you experience also carries specific frequencies. If you magnify your cells down to the atomic level, you would see that you are made up of subtle bundles of informational energy. Quantum physics has also shown us how the basic building blocks of matter consist of light and sound. Every type of cell is in continuous communication with every other cell of the same type through the resonance of their innate frequency level.

The cells of your body are derived from the original stem cells that divided after conception. These stem cells differentiate into different organ cells by virtue of their biochemical predisposition. This innate capability to differentiate, accounts for why some cells turn into skin, others become organ cells, and so forth. In this way, cells truly are the basic building blocks of your holographic being: your totality of body, mind and spirit.

From the core of your physical cells, messages travel through 6,000 miles of neural pathways in the body. Beyond that, the electromagnetic field (often called the “aura”) radiates out around the body with yet more information held in its field, and flowing from there into ever more diffuse fields the further the energy travels out from the physical body. Collectively, these energy fields become a holographic vehicle for your existential experience in this lifetime.

So how do we know where we need to go in the body to clear out a disturbance? Most often, people focus on painful or annoying symptoms and try to make them go away. If you have a headache, you may choose to pop a pill. However, the headache is not the problem; it is merely a symptom of the problem. And once the pain killer wears off, the pain may well return. So what to do?

For lasting results, it is necessary to address the source of the problem instead of the symptoms. Scientific research at NIH and other institutions have found that the answer lies in the cells. Cellular DNA contains the complete genetic blueprint for the design and function of your physical body. The cells also hold the blueprint for your mental, emotional, and spiritual state. Your cells retain information of all your life experiences and your genetic heritage. Everything you have ever experienced - whether positive or negative - is programmed into these basic building blocks of life!

The conscious part of that information is stored in the conscious brain and consists of less than 10% of the total. The other 90% of that information is submerged deep within the subconscious which is held in the cellular memory. So the largest storage area in your being is not really the brain, but the cells!

Here is another surprise: you need more than food and rest to live! Your being was designed to require non-material nourishment in the form of love. It is the most critical form of nourishment for life! Cells have a limited number of receptor-sites available for neuropeptide proteins. When your cells are bombarded through repetitive thought patterns and beliefs that generate toxic emotional reactions such as anger, depression, or grief, there are fewer cellular receptor sites available to absorb nutrients, release toxins, and heal.

Abundant research shows how individuals who regularly give and receive love, enjoy vibrant health. This is one of the reasons why statisticians find higher longevity and health among individuals in committed relationships. Love literally fills your cells with life force, while the absence of love drains your life force.

Just as life continuously evolves, so your cells are also growing, changing and dying. They represent a perfect microscopic model of how our universe works. We have freedom to choose how we respond to this on-going process of evolution: either we flow with change or we resist it. Disease almost always reflects a person’s decision to resist the flow of life at some level, albeit subconsciously.

This nature of continuous change holds tremendous potential for renewal in our lives. Any change made in your cellular hologram will have a profound effect in healing. When slivers of trauma or shock are neutralized in your cellular memory, all physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual data on file is rapidly updated accordingly. As low, dense vibrational patterns are removed from the cellular memory and replaced with the life force energy of love, your being can be restored to its blueprint at every level!

Is it possible to over-do the process? In a world where allopathic medicine and medical intervention override the body’s natural healing and rhythm, this is a very valid question. We may be afraid of facing negative patterns in the cellular memory, thinking that it could be too overwhelming or painful.

Here’s the good news: Cells are built to throw off old patterns and integrate new patterns as part of their life cycle. Just as the body eliminates waste products through excretion, sweating or coughing, the cells are designed to energetically rid themselves of frequencies that no longer serve you in order to return to homeostasis.

In vibrational healing, your system’s innate wisdom determines just how much is released without sacrificing optimal balance and well-being. Old patterns of being are discarded and replaced by new, more appropriate ways of seeing, being and knowing. Your system will take as long as it needs to integrate so that you can ground the spiritual, mental and emotional transformations gradually. When you live your life consciously, you will notice that your cells always seek to release negative patterns and integrate positive ones.

Our bodies are designed to support health, harmony and connection among all parts. So why do we get sick or develop illnesses that won’t easily go away?

The unconscious patterns in your cells are constantly being triggered by current life experiences through the Law of Resonance, drawing to you matching life experiences. Not that you go looking for it – it happens spontaneously! Many of these frequencies are beneficial sources of strength, skill, ability and talent. However, resonances that keep you from experiencing your highest potential, will deplete and block your life force as long as they remain in the cells.

The innate state of being in the cells is one of harmony, balance and flow – as in the behavior of babies and small children. When we are exposed to high levels of shock, trauma, fear or other emotions that are difficult to process at the time, the brain will suppress these emotions by storing it in the subconscious field of the cells. Over time, these lower vibrational frequencies will cause the energy level of the cells to slow down, affecting the ability to assimilate life force energy and eventually culminating in pain or disease. This accumulation of collective pain, grief, fear and shame is what Eckhardt Tolle refers to as the Pain Body.

When left unaddressed, this accumulation of unprocessed emotion can wreak havoc with our lives and relationships by surfacing at the most unexpected times and causing us to act on our unexpressed pain and fear from the past, instead of responding to the events of the present moment. For healing to be effective, the imprint of the energetic disturbance needs to be cleared from every level of being – body, mind and spirit – in order for symptoms to clear up.

By identifying and releasing the old, stagnant emotions, the cells can return to their blueprint of harmony and flow. As we release what no longer is beneficial, our cells open up to embrace the full flowering of our potential. This is the journey from separation to wholeness, and it is an essential part of our growth in consciousness.

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com
This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.

by Ada Porat

What is holding you back from life’s best today? Could it be fear of leaving your comfort zone?

How are you doing on your journey of growth and transformation? Are you moving forward at a rewarding rate or have things been slowing down recently? Is your life aligning with your dreams or are you still stuck with the same problems?

Perhaps you’ve made good progress earlier, only to find yourself stuck now.

That can be a very frustrating place because you’ve dreamed about how your life will be when you’ve reached your goals. You can see the benefits: a healthier lifestyle, a larger income, more satisfying relationships, more fulfilling work, and the satisfaction of knowing that you are doing exactly what you’ve always wanted to do.

Yet, although you can see the finish line, you are standing still.  You have put in lots of time and effort to develop new skills and change your habits. You have taken courses, embarked on new ventures, only to find yourself stuck now. 

So what happened?

I can't say I know the answer for you.  There could be many reasons, but I always suspect one factor when this happens. Up to now, you might have coped with change comfortably, making great strides without having had to stretch yourself too much.  But from here on, any new step forward requires a step out of your comfort zone.

To change your life for the better, you have to accept the fact that you can no longer do things the same old way.

Making a commitment to change is a big step.  During the early stages of growth, the excitement about the new process may energize you to read a book, take a course, or go through the details of setting up a new business or lifestyle.

All those preparations are necessary and good - but they amount to nothing unless you are able to follow through on your dream.  Creating your dream means venturing into new territory – new, unknown, and often uncomfortable terrain.  And that is where the rub lies. 

You may be spinning your wheels with all kinds of ‘keeping busy’ projects, yet not tackling the core issue because that would require stepping out of your comfort zone.

If you feel that you've made pretty good progress but are currently stalled, you’ll need to address the old habits, beliefs or fears that are holding you back.   Only by clearing out these limitations, can we free ourselves up to move forward into new ways of being without sabotaging our progress in some way.

Some of the biggest agents of sabotage in our lives are those subconscious belief systems that we inherited from our families, communities, the media or from peers.  These limiting beliefs will defeat our best efforts of willpower and intellect with their insidious messages of fear, lack, limitation, failure, shame, guilt and judgment.  Just as a weak foundation cannot support a tall structure built on it, so we are not able to successfully build positive outcomes in our lives when there are conflicting patterns at the core of our being. 

Limiting beliefs and patterns in the subconscious set up a low vibrational attractor field that will attract similar, low vibrational outcomes no matter how hard you try to accomplish optimal outcomes.  So instead of beating yourself up because of feeling stuck or because of your inability to venture out of your comfort zone (and thus adding to the problem), how about clearing those limiting patterns instead so you can set up high vibration attractor fields for optimal outcomes?

You don’t have to be the victim of your past conditioning or limiting beliefs any longer – unless you choose to remain there!  Today, there are wonderful techniques available that can help you to identify the root causes and triggers that cause energy blocks and stagnation in your life. 

As soon as you clear these low vibrations out of your energy field, your vibrational frequency will rise to higher levels and you will attract higher outcomes with grace and ease.

You are the captain of your ship, and you can change the course of your life for the better.  Make a commitment today, and in a few short weeks you will find that you are able to operate comfortably in areas you previously regarded as a discomfort zone.

As you clear out the causes of fear, confusion and insecurity, you will be able to access and radiate more peace, assurance, trust, faith, confidence and joy.

 

©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit www.adaporat.com

This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.