Hi, my loves. Welcome back to Lavendaire.
About a year ago, I posted this video.
I was burnt out, exhausted, and wanted to do nothing.
And it seems like you guys really resonated with it.
I wanted to make an update video a year later
to share how I've been recovering from burnouts
and healing all the parts of me that tied my self worth
with productivity, success and achievement.
The past year has really been about slowing down,
healing, rebalancing my energy,
and really rebuilding my life on a new foundation,
changing the way I operate from a very deep level.
There's been a lot of letting go.
Today, I want to share how I've been healing,
what I've been doing,
and the lessons that I've been learning in this process
that have really helped me find peace
and set myself free.
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To recap how I have been healing for the past year
from burnout and overwhelm and pushing myself too hard.
First, I already mentioned in that video from last year,
was to just slow down and do less.
I needed to take things off my plate
and give myself more space in life
to breathe and to allow myself to rest.
I actually quitted doing my podcast.
And during that time, I didn't stick myself to a content creating schedule.
I allowed myself to create when I felt like it,
but if I really wasn't feeling like it,
it's okay to skip a week or two.
In the content creator/influencer world,
that is a very scary thing to do
because you are supposed to be consistent
and post every week
and to stay relevant and whatever.
I had to let go of the anxiety that my image
or that my channel would start failing
if I started giving back to myself.
Ultimately, I was just working on untangling
my sense of self worth with productivity, achievement, and success.
I had to learn to disassociate my level of success—external success
with who I was, who I identified with.
Second thing was learning to say no more often
and building stronger boundaries around me.
I feel like a lot of us burn ourselves out
and overwhelm ourselves
because we're overstretching ourselves.
Maybe we're trying to please the people around us
or we're trying to prove to ourself our own worth.
We're trying to prove something to either ourselves or other people.
Setting better boundaries really is acknowledging
and recognizing what your limits are,
what is within the sphere of "you can do this and still be mentally & emotionally well"
versus "you're pushing yourself too far and you're overstretching yourself".
There's a limit of how much you can do
and still feel good and balanced in your life.
And there's kind of a breaking point where you push beyond that.
and then that's when you're sabotaging yourself,
your own mental, emotional, and physical wellness.
Third is I had to learn how to release the pressure
and the high expectations that I put on myself.
This is a habit and a mindset that has been so deeply ingrained my entire life,
to set high expectations and high goals
and try to achieve them.
And if I don't, then I feel like
"Oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not doing enough.
I need to be doing more."
There was always this inner feeling that,
"Oh, I should be doing more. I could be doing better."
And that is ultimately not feeling good enough.
I really had to learn to release
all of this expectation and this pressure
that I put on myself.
And there's a lot of shadow work that goes into that.
Ultimately, just knowing that at the end of that road,
releasing all of that will allow you to be freer
because you're not tied down to your own mental blocks,
the ways that you hold yourself back
and put yourself down because what you're doing
isn't good enough.
If you can relate to being really hard on yourself,
expecting yourself to continually strive
and be better and succeed and achieve.
I invite you to question yourself,
"Why do I have to do that?"
"What fuels that need/desire to achieve and to prove my worth?"
"Who am I trying to prove?"
"Who am I doing this for?"
That will get you started on unraveling your thought process,
the way you've been operating your entire life
and start to understand like,
“Oh, I've been trying to prove my worth
because I believed that approval meant love."
or "I believed success meant that you are worthy.”
A big part of what I've been doing the past year
has been a lot of physical healing as well.
Meaning healing yourself on a physical, energetic, and thus emotional level
because your physical body is connected to
your energetic and emotional and spiritual body.
Everything is connected.
I shared on a couple past videos about the Eastern holistic healing practice
that I started to do with Wilson last year.
We're still doing it, still being consistent with it.
Doing things like that,
breathwork,
yoga,
things that are physical but help you tap into a deeper level,
whether it's energetic, emotional, or spiritual.
Those have been really empowering and really releasing
because they help you unearth those deep traumas,
those old memories,
limiting beliefs that you might have,
and where they come from.
It's just so interesting.
I invite you to explore all of these different healing modalities.
There's so many resources out there
and the truth is the healing journey never ends.
You might feel that you've healed.
You might have a breakthrough
and think that you're done,
but it actually doesn't work that way.
The breakthrough is just the beginning.
And in my own healing journey,
It's really been years since I've been doing this healing stuff.
I've talked about it in so many videos,
but it's so fascinating how,
even after you heal the big things,
there are still so many smaller things that pop up
and you're like,
“Oh, I didn't know. I still held the grudge about that.”
“Oh, so that's where this fear comes.”
“That's where this anxiety comes from.”
I see it as exciting now.
I know some people look at healing
and see like people crying like it's so painful
and difficult to go through, to face some things.
And sometimes it really is.
But I think I'm at a point where it's more like
finding little treasures and surprises inside of me
and you're like,
“Oh, that's why I'm wired this way.”
“Oh, I see where that came from.”
And then once you see it, the awareness is power.
Because once you have awareness, then you can analyze it.
You can dissolve it. You can choose to let it go.
You can choose to be like,
“Okay, I know that happened and that shaped the way I think,
but I can choose not to think that way anymore
because it all makes bigger sense now that I am an adult.
I have a bigger picture view of things.”
That is a neverending journey and it's beautiful.
Let's move on to the lessons from this experience.
I'll try to not be so long-winded because I feel like
I can go on about this.
The first lesson is recognizing why I was the way I was,
is recognizing the part that was really deep inside me,
really ingrained of why I felt the need to push myself so hard,
to achieve, to succeed, to work hard, to be productive.
And also why I do all of those things at the expense of my mental and physical wellbeing.
Even if I have everything I need,
why do I still push myself beyond the limit of
what is okay for me, what's okay for me to handle.
A lot of this boils down to our childhood traumas
and the beliefs that we latched onto
as a result of how we were brought up.
It's both in your household, with your parents, and experiences in your immediate life,
but also society as a whole operating
with capitalism and our education system.
For example, in school, there are grades and you have a gold star for doing well.
There's kind of a ranking system that inherently
teaches kids to show their worth by doing "well".
You can look at it from this lens:
Our society values productivity.
It rewards productivity, achievement, and success.
It kind of puts those things in high esteem
and thus connects it with the worth of an individual.
And the deeper purpose, whether intentional or unintentional,
of all of that is to fuel capitalism
because they're trying to have an efficient system
where humans are being productive
and producing at their most efficient level.
That's the way our school systems are built.
That's the way we're trained in the workforce,
is to just be productive and as efficient as possible.
Then, it kind of becomes a race or competition
to see who can achieve more, who can do more,
who's more successful.
And people chase that to their entire lives.
I'm not saying it's wrong to see someone
and want to be like them, want to be successful too.
I want to be successful too.
But it's tying your identity and your worth with that achievement,
with that success or productivity,
that's where the problem lies
because you feel bad about yourself
if you're not working, if you're not achieving.
You feel like you're not as good as other people who are achieving.
It's people's unhealthy way to view life.
Human beings are not machines.
We're not meant to work and be as efficient
and productive as possible.
We're literally here on earth with no rules.
There's no one forcing you to get a job
and doing this and going this path.
Yes, people can influence you with their opinions,
but there's really no hard rule
that's telling you how to live life.
We are here to explore and experience
and to make life what we want to make it.
It really is open-ended
and it doesn't have to feel so constraining.
I feel like a lot of people operate in a way where life feels very constrained
and it feels like you have no choice, but to keep working at this.
It's so stressful, and life is so overwhelming,
but you have no choice, but to keep going because that's what you have to be doing.
I just want to invite you, if you do feel that way,
to question it on a deep level.
Keep asking why, why, why does this make sense?
And then start to undo it.
Take off those layers, take off those expectations
because they're not serving you.
They're not good for your wellbeing.
Look, I'm not here to demonize productivity or achievement,
but I'm just saying that there needs to be a balance in life.
There needs to be a balance between doing and not doing, achieving and not achieving.
And in the middle of that is just being.
Just existing as yourself
and accepting you as you are right now.
You just being here right now is perfect.
It's okay.
Your worth is here.
You’re beautiful.
You're amazing.
Nothing you need to do, nothing you need to prove.
Even in terms of energy, there's yin and yang.
Masculine and feminine energies.
A lot of our society operates off the masculine energy.
The patriarchy, the ‘go go go’ hustle culture.
That has just dominated our culture for such a long time.
And people are so used to overworking themselves
and pushing themselves so hard.
It just trickles down.
This culture really is infused in our minds,
whether we like it or not,
because we grew up in this environment.
Leaning in towards more of the feminine energies,
the yin energy is learning to appreciate
the quiet stillness of rest, of doing nothing,
of nourishing yourself, being in nature,
essentially giving back to yourself and nourishing your soul.
We need to be doing these kinds of things
just as regularly as we go to work.
It's normal for people to show up and go to work five days a week, even more sometimes.
And that's it.
But what about like the regular consistent showing up to meditate, to go into nature, to do nothing?
We talk about that on Lavendaire,
so I feel like if you're watching this,
you do have some sort of self care routine.
But I don't think people emphasize the ‘allow yourself to do nothing’ enough.
Some people can even make self care like,
“Oh, let me have this list of things to do.
Let me journal, let me do this, let me do this.”
It's not about that.
Self-care is not having a to-do list
and knocking these things out.
“Oh, I ate healthy. I walked, I ran today.”
It's not about that.
It's about tuning into your intuition
and asking yourself,
“What do I truly need to feel good about myself?”
Sometimes it's just taking a bath.
Sometimes it's putting on good music.
Sometimes it's ‘I need two months off to do nothing for my life’.
It looks different for everyone.
But I just don't want to promote this version of self care that is so hustle culture like
“Boom, boom, boom. Let me do all these things.”
“Oh, look at me. I'm so enlightened.”
It's not about that.
It's softer.
It's so much softer than that.
This is the balance of yin and yang.
The balance of masculine and feminine.
And after you give yourself enough rest,
enough yin, quiet/calm energy,
then you might get inspired again to do something
and be productive again.
Like I said, it's not saying no to either of them,
but it's a balance of both.
Ultimately the favorite thing
that I've learned from this experience is
the more you let go,
the more you allow yourself to be who you truly are.
And that is beautiful,
because your true self is beautiful.
She's amazing.
All of these expectations, all of this pressure,
all of this internal pushing
“I have to do this. I have to be that. I have to succeed.”
All of that is not you. It's not who you are.
Maybe it's your parents' voice, or you've internalized it from somewhere else.
But that is not the true you.
The true you does not need to strive.
The true you does not need to improve even.
You are perfect as you are, as your imperfect self.
As cliche as that is, it's true.
What I found in my healing journey is
the more I learn to let go of these old beliefs
and these old fears and anxieties,
the more it literally feels like I'm lifting a weight off my shoulders.
I used to carry this baggage.
And then one by one, I'm like throwing things out
and I feel lighter and lighter and lighter.
And I'm not even sure if you guys can feel it in my videos or anything,
but I do feel with healing and time and age,
I'm learning to be more and more my authentic self.
And that authentic self feels really free.
It feels very light.
It feels very natural.
It feels fun and joyful.
And that feeling is the light that I'm talking about.
The light that we all have.
We all have an inner light.
Your soul, your spirit.
And we should really live following that light,
allowing that light to lead us here and there.
The problem is we let all these external forces
control or dictate what we do with our lives,
our parents, society, peers, your mind.
Your mind and your light is not the same thing.
Our mind is crazy.
Your mind can think so many thoughts
that you're not even trying to think.
That's just how brains work.
Recognize the part of you that is the true you,
the part that is your light,
and then recognize everything else.
That's not you. That is just a layer.
It's just a piece of clothing that you're wearing on top.
And you can take it off if you choose to.
I hope you guys enjoyed this talk.
Let me know what was your favorite point that I made today down below.
Or if you have any thoughts or inspirations that came up as you watched this video.
I feel like I've talked about this topic before,
but I realize I never honed in on it as much.
And like I said earlier, I feel like I could hone in on it so much more.
So if you still have questions, if you want to get technical,
let me know what you would like,
what questions you have,
what you want to hear more from me
and I will share it in the next upcoming video.
Thank you so much for watching.
Sending you so much love. Bye.