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:

1. Discovering and embracing the Highly-Sensitive Person (HSP) identity.

2. Learning that somatic (body-based) work would likely be the best option for healing from my past trauma and neglect experiences.

3. 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.

4. 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!

Wishing you the aligned life of your dreams!

-Desiree