On burnout and cannibalism

Or how I learnt to relax and love being eaten alive

The image above is a gatekeeper, a guardian of sorts. If you find it too much, too disturbing or too gory—please stop reading now. This note tells the story of how I got burnt out and in the process of dealing with it had one of the most intense, horrifying and beautiful mystical experiences in my life. This note comes with a “don’t do this at home“ written in blood at the top. Please, if you are feeling burnt out—talk to a friend or a shrink, go for a walk, take time off, or write an angry post about Capitalism.

Read this note as a crazy tale, a trip report, a strange experience of a meditator. If you are, however, a vajrayana practitioner with experience and you accept the risks, please do get inspired.

The base: burnout

I’ve been exhausted for some time. It was hard to focus, because the stress-tiredness is pulling the attention. It is easy to get distracted, by finding something more salient than the stress-tiredness to attend to. Like my phone. The news are salient, the tweets, the stocks, the war, the elections, the shops, the cat videos. They have a catchy, looney tunes kind of quality to them.

The stress-tiredness is an itchy, prickly, burning, heavy, yearning-like feeling under my ribs, a dragging pull in the heart. It is also sometimes in the center of my head, behind my eyes. That latter is from mental attention, while the former is from emoting and feeling. Activity comes with friction and struggle. As you try to look away from it to get anything done, the burn intensifies. Every incoming message, ping, email, doorbell are causing almost physical pain. Meditation helps, so does physical activity. Most days I can keep it at manageable levels. When I’m sitting in meditation the feeling becomes balmy and smooth, I can make it drip away out of my body, but it keeps building up over the days.

Built up over months it eventually led to a snapping experience of “I can’t do this anymore”. The first crack was the suicide of a colleague (mental health issues, stress and an unfortunate self medication). The snap came while listening to a radio show about burnout, which my wife’s friend made for the BBC 4. We played it in the evening and I simply recognised my experience in the description. After that something felt just broken. Going back to work the next day was a massive struggle. It took a lot of effort to simply open my laptop and logg in. There was a burning “NO” sensation in my subtle body. I had to wrestle to even start the day. Next few days at work were hard, some tasks would take a great pain to accomplish, although some were alright. It was as if I'd broken a limb, but in my subtle body. Certain tasks that required particular emotional involvement became almost impossible, but others I could manage.

The path

I decided to take the coming Friday off and approach it with practice—to simply meditate a lot. I specifically had no plan on how exactly to proceed, I just knew that once my wife is up and can take over our daughter I am going to sit for as long as needs be and let whatever needs happen happen. I sat facing the window and I hung a yab-yum thangka right in front of me. This was the Yidam I used for my nyi-med retreat. I decided to share the image (above) of the Yidam, although it is very private. I don’t think I could describe it better than the image itself and using an image from online somehow felt wrong.

I started with what was a standard for the last couple of weeks. Eyes closed, staying with my subtle body, letting the buzz spread and fill me. The feeling of overwhelm became pleasant and steady. After about 40 minutes I opened my eyes. The sun was shining through the window and lighting up the thangka from behind. My awareness went into the Yidam. There was a strong sense of sexual arousal through my body, but not in “I’m so horny” way, but rather as my being is sex. It is hard to explain exactly what that was, but it came as suddenly as it went. Then my mind yielded and relaxed to the Yidam and it acquired depth, volume and feeling. It was familiar. The pattern of the Yidam is specific and alive, but it is not to be thought of or understood, but to be noticed and perceived with clarity.

It suddenly became clear what I needed to do. I had to go all the way in. The only path was through. I had to pour petrol on the fire, throw some fireworks in for good measure. I had to raise the temperature of stress as much as I could. I let all the stressors come up. All the things I had to do that were causing the angst, all the emails I’m too tired to look at, all the people that were waiting on me or wanted something, all the “opened tabs” in mind and my browser, all the unresponded messages. They came at me like a maelstrom of faces and images. They all wanted a piece of me, tearing me apart. I dropped all the resistance I had to the experience. And then there was clarity.

The following experience was vivid, visceral, visual, with smells and sounds. It is quite gory and I recommend skipping the third paragraph if you are a sensitive person.

The feast

This is my sky burial. I’m both the corpse and the undertaker. It is a clear day on the top of a mountain, the sun is at its zenith. It is a feast and everyone is invited. I’m standing by my sitting body with a sword, carving myself up. I invite everyone and everything to feast on my entrails, eat my heart, spoon my brain out, suck the marrow of my bones, play with my vertebrae.

The guests are here. Every friend, family member, school bully, colleague, and acquaintance are here for their pound of my flesh. Every unanswered email, unfinished business, open tab, broken appliance, postponed event is here. And I happily give myself to be consumed.

The burning stress feeling was now the feeling of being eaten alive. It was very graphic. Guests tearing my skin, pulling my sinews, cracking my browns. Little green winged demons with triangular heads are going through my ribs (these were unanswered emails). The face of my daughter, covered in my blood, smiling, laughing, holding my entrails… (I will never forget this image). My wife is eating my heart. Someone is going through my guts and squeezing the excrements out, my daughter slips on them, my wife catches her by the hand. They are happy, the white of their teeth red from my blood, their fingers sticky, their hair clumped into locks with my blood and viscera. My bones and ribs are toys, my eyeballs a dessert. I feel my skull being cracked and the brain scooped out.

My actual body on the bench is shaking, crying, screeching and drooling (I think there was probably a good cup of saliva and tears in the carpet by the end of it). It wasn’t in pain, but in something closer to hysteria or ecstasy. As I was being consumed, the feeling of stress was being liberated, excavated out of my body.

When nothing is left of me and the mountain top becomes clean with just a few pale bones among the rocks, the light comes. Pure, white light. There is the face of my vajrayana teacher (interestingly, not present at the feast until now). Then other faces appear. All the guests of the banquet are here; they are sated now. Clean from the blood. A thousand eyes are staring at me. I find it hard to hold their gaze, but I manage. I cry, I laugh, I shake.

There is a sense of abandoning any hope of not feeling the feeling of stress. This loss of hope is liberating. It becomes a feeling of infinite generosity, with which I can feed everyone.

Second day

The next day I sat again. No plan as before, but I had a vague feeling that I will simply revisit the experience, possibly have it with less intensity. This is often what happens with mystical experiences in meditation like this–you come back to their less vivid version, taking them in and integrating. Again, I had no upper bound on the time again and used the same setup with the thangka on the window. Needless to say, things turned out slightly different from my expectations.

I am back to the charnel ground, but now I am here to eat. I’m a ravenous ghoul, here to consume. This was intense, and thank fuck I had an empty stomach, I would’ve thrown up many times otherwise. Ripping through your loved ones flesh, chewing on their skin and swallowing their scalps, feeling the hair running down your throat… This was quite something. I will spare the gory details, I think there are enough of them now.

The experience was naturally revolting, but I knew I had to relax and yield to it. I had to find pleasure and delight in it. I managed. I was getting satiated, the bones, the marrow, the hair, the flesh, the blood I was consuming were finally satiating me. As I was relaxing, the gory meal I was consuming turned into the white, radiant light. It was nourishing and filling me up. The disgust and fear at what I was doing turned into gratitude to those that fed me with their flesh.

The world is charnel ground full of flesh eating ghouls and vampires. You are a ghoul and their meal at the same time. You cannot extricate yourself from this horrible feast, you have to take part. It is not enough to accept being eaten alive. You have to accept being a hungry ghoul, ripping through the flesh of the living, consuming everything you touch.

Integration

What is a mystical experience? It is transformative, but is not conceptual, neither in its path or fruit. You cannot simply explain what happened and how it changed you in words so that they sum it up completely. It changes you, but explaining how is not possible. You see it and you feel it, but you can’t quite explain it. In what follows I will present some thoughts that arose after the experience as I was making sense of it.

What the hell was this?

Through an academic lens, the sitting has spontaneously arisen as chod practice. An educated reader would find a lot of links to the charnel grounds view and practice. It did not come out of the blue, I did receive some training in modern version of chod about two years ago and have recently written about the charnel grounds practice of view here. Never before had I had such an intense experience, moreover chod meditation that I did practiced did not involve experiencing feeding my flesh to relatives (or consuming theirs). There are probably many ways to read into the experience to create some metaphors or psychological narratives, find links to some historical accounts and so on. In my opinion, that would be a waste of time.

What was significant and transformational about the experience was the experience itself. The visceral feelings, images, smells, sounds and emotions I went through. The proof is in the pudding.

It is important though to take an account of how the practice actually functioned, and what was the principle. It is also important to take the account of the fruit—what has actually resulted through the practice.

The practice hinges on the move of amplifying the felt experience of the burnout, specifically the emotional subtle-body aspect. I was using concentration to zoom in to the sensation and amplify it to an exaggerated almost theatrical degree. The imagery was the result of this. I did not plan, seek, intend or even anticipate the gory feast. It was however functional in terms of moving the experience forward and transforming it. Having to go through the experience was only possible if I could yield to it, drop the resistance and relax into it. The very act of accepting being eaten alive by others is transformational. For it to be more than just an intellectual exercise, it had to be visceral and as real as possible.

To be able to actually do it and yield to a, in every aspect, horrible experience you need to find the move in your psyche that allows that. It is like putting on contact lenses or shoving your finger up your throat to throw up. It is not a simple volition, there is a considerable amount of resistance to overcome. This is where the Yidam comes in. The experience was set off with some sort of sexual arousal. I felt it was pointing to the ambiguity of pain and pleasure in sex. This was projected on the phenomenal fabric of the experience. The terrifying form of the experience was penetrating the space of my awareness and the energy of this act was experienced as friction. But it didn’t have to be, it could also be experienced as a release. By genuinely allowing myself to be consumed, I was transforming the overwhelmingly negative experience into a positive one. Everything above was also true for the second day and having to play the role of the consumer.

At any time I probably could stop the experience, stand up and reject going through with it. This would be a terrible idea, which could easily traumatise me. Once you get far enough, you have to go all the way. When I saw my daughter after this experience sitting in the bath I had a vivid flashback-like experience where she was sitting in the bathtub filled with my blood. It was intense and overwhelming, but since I went through to the end, this was not disturbing and, if anything, triggered a sense of generosity and love towards her. If I didn’t I would probably freak out or at the very least feel very disturbed. I leave it to the reader to imagine how it could go wrong.

The fruit

So did this all help with the burnout? Yes, but. Yes, it definitely changed how I relate to the situation, unlocked a way of going through it without much effort and struggle. But, it didn’t “fix” the exhaustion. Speaking in physical damage metaphor, I slotted in a misplaced joint and aligned the broken bone. I can heal up faster now and without lasting damage. I can move around and go about my day, but it would be silly trying to run a marathon.

Burnout is not just an immediate psychological issue, it is environmental in the sense that I have configured my lifestyle in the way that I was spending more energy than I was generating. Unsustainability was baked into it. Practically speaking, I will need to make adjustments to my lifestyle and get more rest. The questions of how are technical. What I won’t have to face is the struggle of shame, anxiety, and anger of resisting the feeling of being consumed or consuming others. This is the human condition. I have to simply give into it with gratitude and generosity. Pain is inevitable, struggle is optional.

Being relieved from the struggle, liberates a considerable amount of energy and in that way is also very helpful. It makes certain actions much easier, as there is no (or less) resistance to them. For one, I am finding it a lot easier to ask for time / support / help for myself, but also to grant it to others.

Relationship with food

This experience did something to my relationship with food as well. I can’t help but see the brutality and goriness of it (doesn’t have to be meat, by the way), but rather than finding it repulsive I find it… well, ecstatic. It is a mix of gratitude and indulgence and also willingness to one day be on the plate myself.

Final thoughts

My overall sense of the conversation around burnout is that it is oriented towards a hope of healing, transcendence of the world that is consuming us. The intention is to regenerate to our full, complete form. The podcast that triggered this chain of events was talking about how “to heal we need to go to our family, where we are loved simply for who we are” (not a direct quote). In my humble opinion, this is a delusion. The closest family is who “eats us the most”. Yes, we are loved simply for being ourselves, but we are being consumed by them and we consume them in turn. There is no way out of it, no paradise to get back to. In that podcast, to stand for that familial moment, the author recorded playing with her nephews. What if instead of nephews it were her own children? They wouldn’t want to just play, they would also want three meals, two snacks, a unicorn, a race car and lots of attention.

Why did I not simply go to a talk therapy? Or talk to a good friend, take a vacation, buy some crystals, make an expensive purchase, [insert your way of dealing with stress here]? It is a good question. What I did was dangerous. Tantra is inherently dangerous. It took a big risk.

Yet what happened was as effective as it was brutal. Unlike a shrink, the Yidam didn’t spend weeks on validating my feelings or helping me find exactly the right words to express them or whatever shrinks do these days (with all due respect). The Yidam gave me clarity to see for myself the very nature of the problem. It was a brutal, visceral demonstration without any offer of salvation or hope. This experience is only liberating if you have no hope of transcending or escaping from it. The universe is one infinite charnel ground where ghouls feast on flesh. The trick is to relax and enjoy the ride.

You are not doing fine—there is no way out of the charnel grounds. Life is a feast—you are both a guest and a course. You are not going to heal and be ok—you are going to be devoured, digested and excreted and that would be devoured and digested in turn. It is a wild circus of beauty and horror. But you can choose not to struggle and needlessly add suffering to pain. Once you stop struggling you have the energy and time to notice and feel the love, beauty, humour, glory and sanctity of the this wild ride.