Tag Archives: burnout

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what the buddha taught about burnout

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The Buddha’s story as burnout and recovery

          The story of Buddhism is at once the story of an individual’s lived experience of his spiritual unfolding and the larger unfolding of a paradigm shift in conceptualizing suffering and its transformation (Suzuki, 1996).  For the purpose of this thesis, the unfolding of the Buddha’s life serves as an exemplar of experiencing and transforming value conflict, the trigger for burnout symptoms. Twenty-six hundred years ago, Gotama, also referred to as Sakyamuni (Humphreys, 1987; Nakamura, 2000), is believed to have lived and taught on the existence, cause, cessation, and transformation of suffering (dukkha).

Given the name Siddhartha, his coming into being was a paradox of loss and gain. His mother died giving him life and, at his naming ceremony, the Brahmins declared him to be one who had achieved the spiritual purpose of all beings (Nakamura, 2000).  They prophesied that if he stayed in a secular life, he would become a great monarch; but if he renounced the world, he would become a Buddha – one who will remove the veil of delusion.  Suddhodana, Siddhartha’s father and ruler of the kingdom of Sakka, having no wish to lose his heir to a life of a recluse, asked what would lead to his son’s renunciation; he was told that Siddhartha would see four signs: an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a renunciate.  In an attempt to prevent this loss, Suddhodana ordered that all such persons be kept from the sight of the young prince.  Although more legend than fact, this story of the future Buddha’s developmental years is an exemplar of way in which reality can be constructed for an individual and how it subtly creates a resistance to change.  Old age, illness, death, and the need to release ourselves from all forms of bondage become natural transitions we deny and life is lived as if youth, well being, mortality and possessions are eternal.

Siddhartha, growing up in his father’s kingdom, was sheltered from these realities and groomed for a life of statesmanship and power.  In his position of heir, he would have been trained in the craft of caring for the people in his kingdom although distanced and disconnected from them.  Politically and culturally, it is likely that Suddhodana and Siddhartha ruled not as protectors of their citizens but as protectors of the land and commodities they possessed (Armstrong, 2001) against the neighbouring kingdoms.  In that sense, their world would not have been very different from that of a corporation whose mission is to provide care to those in their jurisdiction but whose actions may not account for the human face of the organization.  However, Siddhartha inevitably encountered the human face of his kingdom in the form of an old man, a sick man, a dead man, and a renunciate (Lopez, 2001).  The cocoon constructed by his father fostered a hedonistic lifestyle and it is likely this lifestyle cultivated a set of values removed from the attitudes and struggle of the ordinary person (Wallis, 2007).  Unable to reconcile his life of protected splendour with the harsh truths of aging, illness, and death, Siddhartha found his worldview challenged.  As his realization deepened he understood that despite his privilege, he was not immune to the way life unfolds; he and all beings suffer the same fate (AN 3:35, I 138-40 in Bodhi, 2005; Nakamura, 2000).

from Burnout and Spiritual Incongruence, Lynette Monteiro 2012©

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the ta-da list

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Burnout is marked by exhaustion, cynicism, and sense of personal ineffectiveness.  It arises when our values are out of sync with the place and people we work with.  It’s a vicious cycle: try to bring it all together and we get tired enough that the worth of the work comes into doubt.  Not only that, the people we serve become the target for our frustrations and disgruntlement.    Slowly, our confidence erodes and we don’t feel like showing up for fear that we will be discovered to be incompetent.  Dissonance in our internal value system can also feed into this depletion cycle.

Somewhere in my long, slow, sinking spiral, I began to see that the connection between what I set as my ideal experience and how I judged my lived experience was doing more damage than any Captain Bligh I could serve.  It was exhausting to wake up every morning to the same refrain of failure and inadequacy.  It was heart-numbing to bear the unending assaults of disappointment and recrimination for the slightest misstep.  It was terrifying to believe that all the years of training, practice, and dedication had not made me good at what I loved.

Caught in the thrall of my fear-fueled ego, it didn’t occur to me to check in with reality which told a different story.  That only came with unrelenting practice on the cushion; it gave me the Ta-Da List.  Not only was I learning to check off the icky, sticky treacle of the mind, I was also beginning to note the neutral and pleasant stuff.  I was learning to observe and study the whole landscape – the real nature of my life.  In truth, my ideal set point didn’t really drop a notch; I enjoyed (still) setting high standards for myself.  My actual experiences didn’t change much either; I got the work done, met demands and requests as best I could, and deadlines were met or not.  However, I did stop becoming harsh in my judgments of the differential between the ideal and actual states of my experience.  I learned that clutching to the ideals was what made me Captain Bligh; appealing only my lived experience was a flight into hedonism.  The path was to be navigated somewhere between the jagged cliff and the whirlpool.

One of the neat discoveries in the Chaplaincy thesis was the relationship between the three burnout factors and spiritual incongruence in the personal domain; the other domains are Community, Environment, and a Relationship with the Divine which were only related to personal ineffectiveness.  People who experienced high levels of exhaustion, cynicism, and belief of personal ineffectiveness also felt the greatest differential between their ideal and actual personal spiritual values.  They felt disconnected from joy, self-awareness, self-knowledge, and meaning.  They had high ideal scores on spiritual well-being and felt they moderately met these ideals.  And, the personal domain showed the greatest dissonance between their ideal and lived experience.

It makes for a good argument for self-compassion, doesn’t it?   But self-compassion is only indulgence without the fierce companionship of our values.  As long as I am willing to be dragged along in the wake of strong forces that are the trademark of organizations and internal cravings to be protected and cared for, I cannot stand true to my values.  And it is only by noticing the differential between my ideal and actual self that I can adapt to navigate the waters safely.