After my own experiences with burnout, people-pleasing, and perfectionism, I realized that playing “by the rules” left me overwhelmed, disappointed and living a life out of alignment with my needs and personal values.

If I say my family, health, and nature are important to me but I ignore my spouse, rush my children, work through meals, and rarely go outside because of a never-ending to-do list or pure exhaustion…I’m not living in alignment.

A few wake up calls later (thyroid disorder and divorce consideration), and I was ready to take some big leaps into healing and recalibrating my life. This was over a span of about 7 years.

Now that I have a few years of distance from the intense chapters of my own burnout recovery, I can zoom out to enjoy and share some big-picture pattern/themes/hindsight wisdom and conclusions.

As a highly-sensitive person recovering from burnout, people-pleasing, and perfectionism, I struggled with:

slowing down
prioritizing play, rest, and pleasure
not having my work be the center of my world (and self-esteem)
avoiding the need to constantly achieve in order to prove my worth
engaging in hobbies for fun
focusing on process rather than outcome
having empty, open space in my calendar (gasp!)
revisiting the variety of people/things/emotions I avoided by overworking
knowing who I was and what I wanted without the constraints of my old lifestyle dictating most things about me:
- What kind of clothes I wear
- When do I want to wake up and go to sleep
- What food I eat and when
- How and where I vacation/travel
- How I play/interact with my children
- What interests/hobbies to pursue
- What kind of friend and partner I am to others
- How do I want to move my body
- How much cuddle time I can have with my 3 cats
- How can I honor and listen to my body
- and many more questions!

Phases of My Burnout Recovery Journey

After plenty of reflection, journaling, talking with supportive people, pulling oracle cards, reading affirmations, shedding tears, and body movement (dancing, walking outside, swimming); I believe I can organize my journey into the following phases:

Discovering and embracing the Highly-Sensitive Person (HSP) identity.
Learning that somatic (body-based) work would likely be the best option for healing from my past trauma and neglect experiences.
Understanding that the status-quo of western culture (workaholic/hustle and grind/etc) is harmful, incongruent with my values/ability to heal, and not the only way to exist.
Searching for another way to live my life. Another framework or structure that I could believe in and use to help me conceptualize what life might look like in a thriving state where I listen to my body, honor my needs, heal/grow/rest, and reset from the surviving mode I was used to and needed in the past.
- Realizing that my love of nature, seasons/cycles, oracle cards, crystals, women’s empowerment, etc wasn’t just random interests but fit into some existing concepts (paganism, witchcraft).

Once I realized that all the advice I read on how to:

honor my needs as an HSP
heal from trauma/neglect/burnout
challenge the status quo by not supporting the cultural systems that I fundamentally disagree with (patriarchy, white supremacy, toxic/late-stage capitalism)

involved changing my lifestyle priorities and definitions of “enough” in a variety of ways that could be based on a new framework that emphasizes my unique needs, values, desires, and inner wisdom/intuition. I had to let go of trying to be the “perfect good girl” which had been my main strategy for gaining love/acceptance/safety and avoiding pain/abuse/abandonment.

Another Way to Live

I wanted to create a system that I could use to help me on this journey of unlearning, refocusing, and resetting. Without the status quo definitions of success, good enough, productive, worthy/valuable, etc, I wasn’t sure, at first, how to assess my own happiness, contentment, inner peace, and what thriving could look like (and how to make it happen).

Just “follow your heart”, “trust yourself”, “be happy", and “relax” were too vague for me. For example, if working 40-60 hours per week was no longer going to be the norm, what would be? How many hours “should” I work? How many hours “could” I work? How many hours per week did I “want” to work?

What worked for me?
How could I begin to notice, track, appreciate, etc. during the trial and error phase of pivoting to rebuild a life that I loved?
How can I organize all the thoughts, feelings (fears/hopes/joys), habits, and goals?

These questions led to my creation of the Aligned Goddess Living wheel of mystical life balance!

Aligned Goddess Living Wheel of Mystical Life Balance

On a warm summer day, relaxing in my backyard, I realized my love for nature-based correspondences (elements, directions, seasons, menstrual cycle phases, tarot suites, moon phases, etc) matched up pretty well with the daily to-do list framework I was already using for myself. I then matched my to-do list categories to my values and loved how it all flowed together in an organized way!

I boiled down my values/life goals into four main categories: Healthy, wealthy, loved, and fulfilled and matched them with the correspondences that I had learned about on my spiritual awakening journey. The words at the end in parentheses are my daily to-do list titles.

🟢 Healthy-Earth-Winter-North-New Moon-Bodily Sensations-(Tasks)

🔴 Wealthy-Fire-Summer-South-Full Moon-Behaviors/Actions-(Work)

🔵 Loved-Water-Autumn-West-Waning Moon-Emotions-(Relationships)

🟡 Fulfilled-Air-Spring-East-Waxing Moon-Thoughts-(Fun)

I began thinking about my resources (time, energy, attention, money) in terms of these four categories. How much resources am I spending on/in each one? Which areas need more from me this week? What areas need to be scaled back and when? I visualized the categories as a wheel with quadrants that move fluidly each day, month, season, even hour by hour!

Aligned Goddess Living Categories & Examples

I now had a framework for organizing:

what I want to do
what I have to do
who I want to be
and measuring/tracking if my thoughts/feelings/behaviors/habits were in alignment with my values/needs/goals/desires

Here are the definitions and some examples of what I put in each category:

🟢 Healthy/Tasks

Physical, emotional/mental, financial, environmental well-being and “adulting” tasks
Paying bills/taxes, creating a budget, paying down debt, saving/investing
Body movement
Eating in a way that is nourishing
Sleeping and needed amount of rest
Cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, car maintenance
Attending appointments (dentist, doctor, therapy, etc)
Grooming (showering, haircuts, massages)

🔴 Wealthy/Work

Career, paid work responsibilities
Seeing clients and writing notes
Answering emails, marketing, continue education trainings, etc.
Entrepreneurship!

🔵 Loved/Family

Family and relationship responsibilities
Taking kids to extracurricular activities
Attending school functions
Updating their wardrobe as they grow
Date nights
Quality time together!

🟡 Fulfilled/Fun

Hobbies, spirituality, pleasure, joy
Reading, traveling, painting, scrapbooking, duolingo French language practice
Spiritual practices (divination, journaling, meditation)
Anything from my “bliss list”

Next Steps…

I hope that by sharing what worked for me on my burnout recovery journey, including the Aligned Goddess Living wheel of mystical life balance, it can inspire others to find clarity, hope, community, and even joy in the process of re-calibration on their own life journey. I definitely don’t think this is the only way or best way to think about life alignment or heal from burnout. It’s just what worked for me as a Pagan, HSP woman.

🎲 It has been such a joy to think of my post-burnout life alignment this way that I created a game to make examining life balance a more playful and pleasurable experience. I facilitate the game through an interactive workshop-style presentation. It can be played with small or large groups and involves discussions, tarot cards, and creating your own wheel of life balance! Email me if you are interested in knowing more or inviting me to run the game in your group setting!

🔮In addition to the workshop game featuring the Aligned Goddess Living wheel of mystical life balance, I am also facilitating an online support group for highly-sensitive persons wishing to work on burnout prevention/recovery.

You do not have to agree with, love, or use the Aligned Goddess Living framework to join the group. The framework will be discussed as much or as little as group members prefer.

We will discuss burnout recovery, self-care, validation for our unique HSP needs, offer support and celebration to each other, and help implement changes to increase life alignment. The group size will be 4-8 adults and you can request more information about the group here.

Wishing you the aligned life of your dreams!

-Desiree

About the author

Dr. Desiree Howell is a licensed psychologist providing online therapy services to adults in New York, Iowa, and all PsyPact states. She is trained in a variety of trauma-focused healing modalities to best support clients who are ready to feel better.

Aligned Goddess Living: Wheel of Mystical Life Balance