Burnout is a vehicle

And the ride is wild

This is my second note, which I have written while going through a burnout (the first one is here). This is an edited, and structured version of the notes that I have been making while going through it. I’m keeping it quite raw on purpose, since it feels authentic to the experience and also allows me to publish without too much contemplation, which comes easier in my current state.

My burnout seems to be functioning as a vehicle (yana), in the sense that it has created conditions for a spiritual practice. Specifically, it is a tantric vehicle for transforming emotional energy.

The intensity of distress and the emotional rollercoaster it put me is its fuel. I have ended up in a “forced retreat”—had to take time off work and my wife has generously picked up some of the childcare slack from me. My experience is a roller coaster. First, I climb up over a few days with a particular emotional energy building up (anger, loss, fear). Then once I’m at the top, I simply have to sit for a prolonged period (usually 2 hours) and then I ride that energy all the way down into a particular mystical experience corresponding to that feeling, which transforms it by teaching me how to enjoy it.

Afterwards I feel exhausted, but much lighter and freer. I get quite tender, like a crab that just shed its shell. Meditations become much calmer and more pleasant, until the next energetic hill starts pulling me up. At the moment of writing, I had (roughly) 4 big “rides”. Sometimes, the ride down can take more than one day and after the initial drop there is a second one coming right after, like a “double dip” (sometimes more).

The burnout feeds the process by making any struggle with the experience become painful. To stop the pain I have to relax whatever the struggle is. The pain also acts as a targeting mechanism. It is hard to ignore it and it points in a clear direction. By following the pain I can hone in on the resistance/struggle that I'm having with feeling a certain way. When I follow through to the end, I arrive at a specific mystical experience, which I will call a “nyam”. I have talked about nyams before in my previous notes, but in short, they are special meditation experiences.

The nature of a struggle is a certain emotional feeling. I’m slightly reluctant to use the word emotions, since it carries a large baggage of interpretations, often referring to an integrated psychological and somatic phenomena, which is often assumed to have a conceptual component. What I'm pointing to when I'm saying emotional feeling is the raw sensation of the experience, its taste, texture, viscosity, fluidity, direction and flow. And although there is a texture to the conceptual fabric of the experience, the content can be rather arbitrary. To make an example of anger, it is not important who or what am I angry at, or what thoughts and images are going through my mind. What is important is the burning sensation below my ribs and the burning of the back of my neck and the single-pointed fixation of my attention.

A nyam is often preceded by imagery, sometimes childhood memories and often loads of crying. There seems to be two related, but separate processes going on. First, there is a release of a certain stored tension, resistance to a feeling. It is the process of burning the emotional baggage, cleaning up the skeleton in mental closets and purifying the butter of sensitivity. To get “through” the nyams, I have to relax and find enjoyment and almost ecstatic pleasure in the feeling. Finding enjoyment transforms the feeling or rather the experience of it into something new—open and liberated. Once this tension is released, there is a possibility of the second event—the transmission.

It starts with a sudden almost thunderbolt like instant experience. That experience feels like communication (thus I use the word transmission). What I mean is that what arises is experienced as if appearing already complete out of nowhere. It is not being built over time out of small pieces like intellectual understanding. Neither it is atomic like an altogether new sensation (imagine seeing a new colour). Neither it is an absence or a release of something. It is not a fixed permanent structure. What is communicated is in some very real sense alive. They are interactive. You can relate to them (be in their presence) or you can step into being them. They are beings and modes of being.

The best name for them in English is “awareness beings” (by Ngakpa Chogyam Rinpoche). Both in terms of pointing to them being in awareness and to awareness being alive through them. The Tibetan term is Yidam, which I will use for brevity and respect for tradition. I sometimes experience my body as a house or a spaceship, where each of them occupies a certain place (abdomen, belly, heart, throat, head). I believe the traditional term would be mandala. The image below didn't mean much to me before, it was just a quaint piece of Vajrayana art that I appreciated, but didn’t connect in any way. Now I see that it is someone’s actual experience that could be depicted here.

Illustration of a body mandala from Tibetan Yoga: Principles and Practices Ian A. Baker · 2019

I can step into them, like into portals, which involves locating the associated feeling expanding it and letting it wash over the whole of my being. I then experience the world as the Yidam, seeing it as its realm. In my previous note, I described the nyam of charnel grounds, stepping into it quite literally turns the world into a morbid horror movie, but also unlocks an immense sense of generosity and gratitude.

I found some of them to correspond to certain traditional, “personified” Yidams from the Tibetan tantric tradition with extreme, uncanny precision, to the degree that I have a very personal relationship with the details of their depictions. Some of these details I first saw and felt in the experience itself to later find them in the depiction (Mother Ekajati is wearing my skin and biting my heart), some I knew already but only realised their meaning through the experience.

Like the image above, I feel like there are yidams residing in my body, unlike the image above I find only 5 of them at the moment. Each of them is a portal to a realm, and a way of transformation of emotional energy.

In the following I will describe each nyam and its fruit—the Yidam. I will break it up into a few notes for my own convenience and will present them in chronological order. The first nyam was described in the note “On burnout and cannibalism”. You don’t have to read it before the rest, but it will nicely set the stage if you do.

Isolation and sorrow to freedom and hopeless love

This is a second, much less gory than the first, nyam. It happened about two weeks after the first one. I went back to work, thinking I was more or less done, but soon the energetic distress and feeling of burnout started building up again.

This time around I had a slightly higher resolution on the sensation itself. The most striking characteristic is that it is not always unpleasant. It is like a warm, honeyed balm. It is like a warm blanket, which you can cover yourself with if you only pay it exclusive attention. It is like a cozy sleeping cat. Any call to action yanks its tale, turning it all tooth and claw. The feeling becomes painful, scratchy, burning.

Probably for the first time in my life, I had an experience of not wanting to get out of bed. Staying with the warm cat was soothing and easy. Just don’t do anything and you can stay undisturbed, soothed, hidden. The idea of doing anything disturbed the cat turning it from a soft ball of fur to a violent maniac. It is not only action, anticipation is enough. The thought of having to do anything is already painful.

The practical and social implications of burnout also started weighing on me—what am I without everything? Striped bare, no money, no job, no help around the house? This felt like loneliness, separation, and rejection. Inspired by reading bits from “Feeding your demons” I decided to try visualising the feeling like a demon. The demon looked like a Cronenberg creature from Rick and Morty. Small and lanky, with polyp-mounted eyes and small tube of a mouth with sharp teeth. An unhappy, annoying creature. I tried “feeding it” and it was sort of working, but not doing that much.

The first “dip” of the nyam came during a long sit, maybe 70 minutes in. The feeling I was working with suddenly started glowing, burst with intensity and turned into a baby. It was the size of a one year old, flowing with blueish light and very upset. I felt a lot of love for that baby. It was clearly not my daughter, not exactly myself either but maybe a part of me. I had a strong rush of emotional energy and broke down weeping. The words that came out of me were “I love you” and “you are not a problem”. Then there was a lot of crying and me hugging and cuddling the feeling in its baby form. It is tempting to start talking about internal family or some other kind of archetypical or psychological construct. I honestly think it is not relevant and what came after sort of proved that point, although it is fair to say I did feel like a problem in my family growing up.

I thought this would be the end of the story, or at least a break. The whole “love your inner child” story just made so much sense. I was wrong. Things took a slightly disturbing tone when I woke up in the middle of the night with a strong sense of anxiety and fear. I couldn't fall back asleep, I was rolling around for a good few hours. When I finally dosed off I had a vivid dream, of which I remember just fragments. I was hiding in the snow by a railroad. Something was looking for me, something scary. I think I managed to hide, but somehow I realised it got my daughter. At this moment I got woken up by my daughter's cry on the baby monitor. It was morning. I woke up in a very confused state, almost a panic attack. My wife noticed that I’m not ok and left me to try to fall back asleep. After struggling for some time alone I went downstairs to the family and broke down in tears. I went back up and finally fell asleep, but I knew something was up and I had serious unfinished business.

When I got up I went straight to the sitting. This time around the nyam started in about an hour with a vision from my memory. I am outside of the housing block I grew up in. I’m running away from home. I have a transparent cellophane bag with half a loaf of bread in my hands. This is supposed to be my food. I also have keys from the flat where I live with my parents. This episode has actually happened. I was 10, maybe 12 or something like that. I didn’t end up running away, I turned around and came back. I couldn’t do it. I was too scared. My parents found the note I left, but didn’t understand what it meant. My mother shouted at me for it regardless, I think she thought it was some stupid joke or something or just felt it a bit of shouting is always a good idea. I was too scared, sad, and angry to explain myself properly. I once brought it up when I was older, but she simply denied it ever happened.

The feeling of the memory was of total isolation and loneliness, but with hope that somehow it will work out and I will be heard and embraced. That hope was what made me turn back. But in the nyam things turn out differently. In a flash, I realised what I have to do. I take out the bread of the cellophane bag and feed it to a stray dog, a small black mutt. I throw the keys into the canalisation drain—a sure way to never recover them. I give up the hope of return, the dream of being understood, loved and heard. This act of giving up suddenly transforms the feeling. I am free! My heart feels like and radiant.

I walk out of the courtyard and it is just darkness out there. I stare into the void and I start glowing, I am made of light. There is no safe space, no hope, and no fear. There is freedom, sorrow, and joy. The energy that I would recognise as stress fills my whole body, which doesn’t resist it anymore. My chest is relaxed, I breathe lighter, slower. There is equanimity, which I experience not as an absence of but non-resistance to emotional feelings.

In the next few sits I meditate on giving away. Giving all the sensations away, giving the anxiety away, giving the peace, hope and stability away, giving the attainment away, giving away the arising thought and structure. The feeling reminds me of the Avalokiteshvara practice that I was given by my teacher sometime ago, I pull out the invocation (words you recite while meditating) and give it a try. The practice resonates immediately. There are specific words that make me weep and laugh at the same time “Unconstrained, sorrow and joy overflow into activity. I am shining, made of light”. It adds an aspect of finding power in kindness that completes the experience.

The yidam settles in my heart area. It feels like hopeless love and reminds of the time I was falling in love with my wife. As if you are falling in love but you do not need or expect reciprocation. The sadness and loss are already accepted, but without hope there is also kindness and joy. There is an incredible sense of freedom to this hopeless love. I feel light and transparent. Once the experience in the subtle body is not resisted, it flows through you, like mist through moss. The feelings are no longer trapped in your body, they are part of what is happening. They come and go with the situation, like the weather.

Anger and shame to clarity

There were incredible strange dreams / visions preceding this nyam. I was flying and suddenly exploded with energy. I woke up and the explosion kept going on in my sublte body. It wasn’t unpleasant, but lasted all the way into the early hours of the morning and left me with no sleep. There where some moments when I would dose off and have an incredibly crisp and vivid dream / vision for a few moments just to wake up from its intensity. Needles to say, the next day I was very tired, but I had a big day at work and had no choice but to show up and have a full on day.

The next day came with a strong sense of anger and irritation. It was much like the irritability that I get when I have a strong pain. You get triggered by little things, which you know for sure are not a problem (the problem is toothache or whatever). In this case, there was no actual pain, but when anger would arise I was pretty certain that whatever was in its crosshair wasn’t actually the issue. My conceptual mind would keep coming up with justifications and reasons why it was someone else’s fault, luckily I managed not to get caught on that hook and let the chatter roll on in the background.

The day after I managed to clear out some time and sit. Again, it took about 2 hours to go under the surface and get to the root. The root turned out to be shame and justification.

The nyam started with another image from the past. It was at the time when I was sitting entrance exams for the Moscow state university (in Moscow back in the day to get into uni you had to pass a competitive exam). It was a trail run (I had one more attempt). I failed. It felt really bad, upsetting and scary. The main emotions was an intense shame. I was in my room, lying on the bed, trying to feel better. My father came in with a newspaper in his hand. He hasn’t said anything to me about the exam yet, but he knew I failed. He came in and said “hey, you know, I found an ad for a delivery boy job in the paper, maybe that’s for you!”, and laughed in my face. The anger and hate I felt for him at that moment was something else. My whole being was single-pointedly aimed at him, my stomach was twisting and the back of my neck and shoulders felt set on fire. I was trembling with hate. My reaction back then was to hide behind justifications. There were reasons I failed and there are reasons why I will not next (I did pass the next time around).

Underneath the anger was, of course, shame—it was me who failed the exam and my father was simply pointing at it. I realised I had to go through with the total, maximal shame possible and find enjoyment in it. I came out as a vision of being completely naked in the presence of others. So naked, that I felt my skin being peeled off and I became completely transparent and porous which no ability to hide anything. I was visualising myself in front of crowds—school class, meeting at work, conference, my own wedding, etc. Flayed of any membrane, unable to hide absolutely anything. My heart went “pop” like a balloon, as if it got peirced by a sharp needle or a tooth. This radical transparency leaves no place to hide and liberates from an attempt to hide behind justifications. There is almost an exhibitionist kind of ecstatic pleasure to it—you feel what you feel and you hide nothing. This affords a radical kind of clarity that I can have with my experience. Justifications and mental gymnastics that are supposed to hide how I feel and present myself in a particular way are obstructions and distort the experience. Letting them go feels like the moment when the wind blows away the mist and clouds which obscure the view of the landscape.

Mother Ekajati, image from here

After the experience, I decided to read the anger chapter from “Spectrum of ecstasy” (the best book I know on vajrayana view of emotions), which was exactly about transforming anger into clarity. I find out that the associated Yidam is Mother Ekajati, I look up the images and I find that in all the depictions she is wearing the flayed skin of a person around herself. The first time I saw this, I couldn’t unsee this–she is wearing my skin—was the immediate reaction I had in my body when I saw this. After a bit of research, I never found any explanation or the symbolism of it, only that she is “wearing the skin of her enemy” (I guess to simply make her more wrathful). She has a single tooth with which she is biting through a heart (she also has only one eye and one breast). I felt that it was pointing to the feeling of my heart being pierced.

The yidam settles in my stomach, below the ribs.

I could just leave this at that, but I feel that some explanation is warranted. Or at least a short discussion on the nature of Yidams. Are the real Tibetan deities? Are they some sort of psychological construct or archetypes? How come I seem to find a lot of meaning and correspondence to my experience in the images created in a very different culture in a distant land more than a thousand years ago? I think it's best not to over intellectualize the question and simply stick to the facts of what I am experiencing. I experience phenomena in my awareness. This phenomena are beings. They are not the only beings of my awareness. There is also I myself and other persons, including animals. So it is not that unusual to have beings as phenomena in your awareness. What is unusual is that they arise in meditation and then stick around over waking life.

In the next notes I plan to cover other nyams and Yidams I encountered and take a moment to take an account of what they are and how they function. Most importantly, what is afforded by their presence and how it interacts with the experience of the burnout. I’m still very much in the midst of it and don’t give editing that much attention at the moment, so the texts might be a bit raw, but I feel there is a charm and realness to it as well.