Join Sophia this week as she talks with Dr. Heather Clark about the many layers of chronic stress and burnout. This lively conversation has so much rich information in it, you’ll walk away feeling so much more informed and enriched. These brilliant people aren’t afraid to change their minds when presented with new information and show what learning and growing can look like in real time. They have unshakeable centers and share from those centers in truly generous ways. Enjoy!

Some of the points of this fantastic discussion are these:

• Stress and burnout can come from being something you aren’t or putting your center outside of yourself. This can happen easily when your soul evolves and you keep living life in your old pathways instead of forging the new ones this new version of you requires.
• “Sipping beauty like a hot tea.” Sophia put into words a feeling you may recognize or at least empathize with. It’s when there is so much beauty and goodness in this world and when confronted by it, you shut down instead of basking in it because it’s just so intense a feeling. It can be quite painful to be confronted with beauty in the midst of grief, so it can help to sip on that beauty like it’s a hot tea and respect your own need for grief and insulation around your heart. 
• Do your own work, and only your own work. Let’s say it again, do your work and only your work! Be self-centered! Practice ruthless, constant, profound self care! Bubble baths and outdoor walks are excellent ways to tend to yourself, but don’t mistake them for the end-all and be-all of Self-Care. But on the other hand, don’t dismiss them as weak or useless just because of their popularity in the mainstream. If anything, their popularity speaks to their effectiveness. 
• When you center your life around yourself, you aren’t inherently sucking the life out of other people, you’re just centering your life around yourself. Where you are. Where you always are. Is there anywhere else your life is supposed to be? Didn’t think so. 
• When you denormalize and lay down the abusive/colonialist/patriarchal/etc. patterns in yourself; when you really stop harming your self, you suddenly start to see those things where you didn’t before. When a tv show or a person at your dinner table or a fellow student in your class says or does something harmful, you notice. Because it’s suddenly a statistical outlier to you in your experience. When even only a small number of us lay down those weapons of both self and community harm, we can pick up the tools to build a bridge to the world where everyone lays them down. 

Here is a link to the shame episode Sophia mentions , 055 Reveal to Heal

You can find Heather's podcast, Unshakeable Being Podcast on all your favorite platforms, you can find her on Facebook as Vibrant Again or go to her website VibrantAgain.com