Meditation and Burnout
Amelia Nagoski on practicing mindfulness
Hello, new faces from the Burnout mailing list!
Emily and Amelia are now sharing Confidence and Joy here on Substack. Emily writes about the science of sex and relationships as in her book Come As You Are and the Come as You Are podcast. Amelia writes about burnout from, you guessed it, their book Burnout. They post about once a week, generally on Wednesdays.
If you have questions for them on either topic, please reply here or use the contact form on their website. They can’t answer everything, but we read them all!
And now, let’s talk about meditation.
Q: In Burnout, you reference meditation a few times in a way that leads me to think you did a bunch of reading about it that you didn't have a place to fully incorporate into the book, and I'm very curious.
After a lifetime of people suggesting meditation to me, I've started actually doing it, and I've found it helpful, and I'm the sort of person that likes to read a book (or twelve) about something if I'm starting a new thing. But meditation is in this weird spot for me; it's an intervention with a good scientific method research basis, but it's also an important cultural practice in a bunch of cultures that are not my own. I'm not looking for a new religious practice, but I want to be.... mindful as I... unmind.
Do you have any thoughts, advice, podcast episodes I listened to and forgot about, or books to suggest for how to learn more?
A: I had this same question when I first read about how super great mindfulness was supposed to be.
We did do a lot of research into mindfulness practices and their health benefits when we were writing Burnout. And we decided that there were so many other good resources available, and that it already had such good press that we didn’t need to advocate for it or go into detail.
I can’t really recommend a single resource or even set of resources because what works for you is going to be very personal. And, yeah, it might come from a culture that you weren’t born or raised in. Which might give you some feelings.
When mindfulness finally started making an impact on my life, I wanted a resource with a title like What to Do with Your White Guilt When an Asian Mindfulness Practice Saves Your Life. Because the mindfulness practice that first worked for me was tai chi.
As a white lady who tries to honor and celebrate diversity while uprooting the white supremacy programmed into my subconscious, I felt guilty about tai chi, like practicing it was appropriating it. I felt even guiltier about talking to other people about it. Then, when I presented a session on “Tai Chi for Conductors” at a conference for the American Choral Directors Association, the moderator who introduced me was an American conductor of Chinese descent who knew nothing about tai chi, but I felt like he been chosen because he was Chinese and I guess they thought he would give it some credibility?
And here I am talking about China as a monolith, when there is as much diversity in Chinese culture and in tai chi practice as in any country and cultural practice.
And anyway, I’ve literally never had an Asian tai chi instructor. The teacher who made tai chi click for me was Roger Jahnke, a white doctor of Chinese medicine who speaks about tai chi in a practical way, as medicine, always rooted in research and evidence, but also connected to the yin and yang. I certainly recommend his book, Healer Within if that’s your jam. He answered questions like yours from other students very directly, saying tai chi isn’t a religion. It’s barely a philosophy. It’s a practice, rooted in an understanding that an individual exists as part of the universe. It means as much or as little as you want it to mean.
Mindfulness doesn’t require a dogma or mythological origin story, though it can.
My favorite tai chi instructor is a roofing contractor from Rhode Island who used to be a professional mixed martial artist. He’s a beefy dude bro with hella tattoos, who talks about softness and resilience with tenderness and humor and humility.
Having spent so much time worrying about this, I developed a theory about why mindfulness is incorporated into so many diverse cultural and religious practices. All humans are human, you know? We all have circulatory systems, and stress response cycles, and giant clusters of neurons in our skulls. And mindfulness, like walking or singing, isn't cultural. It's built into who we are: apes in shoes.
The further humans get from our hunter/gatherer origins, the more information-oriented our lives become, the less we pay attention to what we're doing while we're doing it. Could it be true that Eastern cultures developed and codified mindfulness practices before the West because the East developed complex societies earlier? I don't know. This is all just speculation.
And this brings me to the real point. Reading about the science and the different cultural approaches is fascinating and intellectually stimulating. But it won’t help you understand mindfulness nearly as much as practicing the mindfulness itself. Finding resources to tell me about mindfulness has been a justifiable distraction I’ve indulged in to avoid doing the actual work of being mindful.
All of this is just to say I understand where your question comes from. And, no, I haven’t found any resources that directly address it. But the answer that came from my experience was: “Stop asking questions and do the practice.”
So that’s gonna be my answer to you. It’s a great question! The only way to find the answer is in the practice. The only resource of any value is your own experience.
-Amelia
If you’ve read Burnout and are looking for concrete practices to make dealing with it a part of you life, Amelia has written an entire workbook to go along with the book.
The Burnout Workbook is available for pre-order now and will be available January 24, 2023.
We’ll be sharing an exercise from the workbook for free on this newsletter next month. Talk to you again soon.
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
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Signed copies of Come As You Are can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.
