The Body and Spirit Hijack
Excerpt from The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life
and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Author’s Note. Read This First.
Before you begin with this excerpt, I’ll lay out what’s already been covered. In Sections One and Two of the book, readers discovered the inner framework that makes every comeback possible. Both sections are devoted to recognizing your Life Assets (the inner resources you’ve accumulated that enrich your life, and that are valuable and exchangeable with the world around you), then, how to let them work for you.
Within your portfolio of Life Assets, we have focused on these two:
Your Values. The personal ideals, organizing principles, and natural priorities that keep you sane and true to yourself.
Your STACKWINS. The unique collection of your Skills, Talents, Aptitudes, Competencies, Knowledge, Wisdom, Insights, Nature, and Strengths.
Together, they form an important part of the foundation of who you are, and give you the tools to experience success and satisfaction in everything you do.
This excerpt begins at a key moment in the book when I list the hurdles created by the fourth of four clusters of megatrends. (For this online series, the full megatrends chapter has been divided into six excerpts for easier reading.) Here you see how these global pressures shape how you live, work, and feel. While I have chosen to isolate this subset into a group, and I have given it a name, the megatrends included are not mine; nor are they theories. They are studied, measurable forces acting on your brain, body, and choices every day. Each one is insidious, sneaking into your life, putting demands on you, and pressuring you to comply.
Cluster by cluster, you’re looking at twenty megatrends that have been pushing and pulling you off your own path. Twenty!! You are discovering why your energy has been leaking…why you have felt tension and exhaustion…why the expression “burn out” makes perfect sense.
After reading more, I hope you have a sense of indignant rebellion. You do not have to live by anyone else’s definition of aging, faith, wellness, or personal evolution. Your own ideas of success, happiness, and purpose count.
Excerpt Series: The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Excerpt Table of Contents
(You’re reading Part 6 of 6.)
Cluster Four: The Body and Spirit Hijack
Rate the Intensity of the Megatrends’ Impact on You:
As you’ve read through the megatrends, have you identified which ones have had a particularly heavy impact on you…maybe ones you didn’t even know about?
If you rated each one on a scale of 0 to minus 5, with minus 5 being the most negatively impactful (“impacting me greatly in a negative way”), what would your score be?
Many of my clients have rated themselves at minus 80 out of a possible minus 100 when considering all twenty megatrends.
I call that kind of score the
Sucking the Life Out of You Score.
But the moment you see them (even if you see how they’ve been sucking the life out of you) you gain an advantage. When you can see something, name it, and know what you think of it, it loses power over you. This chapter is meant to give you your power back by naming the beast that’s been chasing you, the hurdles you’ve been jumping over, and the source of the stress you couldn’t quite name.
It’s not you.
You are not crazy, lazy, stupid, old, or over it.
You are sane, capable, smart, powerful, and on it.
Let’s continue.
This last cluster, called the Body and Spirit Hijack, covers what’s challenging your very embodiment, spirit, emotion, and what’s sacred. All four of these megatrends distort human signals, aging, and relationship with the divine, meaning, emotion, and spiritual work into problems to hide or bypass. Each of the four profits by attacking what is sacred, criticizing what’s subtle, and invalidating primal and profound truths.
The Anti-Aging Panic
Definition: The expectation is to stay young. The mirror has become the scoreboard, and the years feel like penalties. If you don’t keep up – if you don’t stay ahead of aging – you become irrelevant.
The Trap: Looking in the mirror and expecting it to reflect what others say you should see.
The Lie: You can appear timeless while the clock is
ticking and somehow get back what has gone by.
The Truth: You can modify your appearance in many ways, but it’s the love of your life, the sparkle in your eyes, and the timbre of your voice that reveal your joy of living.
The Cost: When those around you spend time, energy, attention, and money trying to turn back the hands of time, it’s understandable that you feel the pressure to keep up, or a fear of being judged. It’s no wonder it’s hard to stay present, enjoying yourself, As Is. Wrinkles can start to feel like flaws, and confidence about your attractiveness might fade. The pressure to look younger can make you want to avoid the mirror, or even your own birthday cake.
Alternative nomenclature: Ageism, internalized youth obsession, appearance anxiety, age denial culture
The Collapse of the Sacred
Definition: The unifying role of faith gets dismissed or mocked. The blessing of a higher power gets ridiculed. The importance of a spiritual life gets forgotten or discounted. Science is pitted against divine knowledge and experience. Busyness and cynicism erode connection with the Divine.
The Trap: Putting time for faith, shared worship, or prayer last on your list.
The Lie: Faith is outdated, useless, and irrelevant.
The Truth: The sacred is timeless. Faith is a natural expression of humanity across all communities. Science does not own critical thinking. Faith includes the courage to question and the power of discernment. It is its own form of knowledge.
The Cost: When there’s little or no space for wonder or awe, the steadiness that comes from hope and possibility disappears. It’s no wonder you hesitate to prioritize what’s sacred when it’s treated as foolish or outdated. Of course, there’s an ache that longs to be soothed.
Alternative nomenclature: Spiritual drought, secularization syndrome, meaning crisis, sacred void.
The Medicalization of Emotion
Definition: Sadness and fear have become pathologized. Normal human emotions are labeled as disorders and medicated away instead of honored and allowed expression.
The Trap: Believing you’re abnormal if you grieve, worry, or question life. Or accepting that a pill can erase those emotions.
The Lie: Happiness should be constant, and you should
bounce back fast from everything.
The Truth: You’re a human being meant to experience the full spectrum of emotions. Nothing about that is a disorder. It’s life itself.
The Cost: When sadness and fear are labeled as illness, you may feel guilt, confusion, or shame. The pressure to get “back to normal” robs you of the natural expression that heals. Normal emotional rhythms get flattened or hidden by prescriptions. It’s no wonder you feel incomplete or disconnected from your own messages. Of course, emotions are necessary expressions of your very existence.
Alternative nomenclature: Pathologizing normal emotions, psychiatric overreach, emotion phobia, feeling medicalization.
Fake Transcendence
Definition: Chasing the image of spiritual awakening has replaced grounded practice. Spirituality gets packaged. Positivity has been sold as a cure. Consulting an oracle has replaced real inner work.
The Trap: Trying to stay positive, avoiding discomfort, and resisting the necessity to confront what hurts; suppressing your body and mind’s disagreement.
The Lie: Everything is fine if you just think positive.
The Truth: Creating the world you want requires criticism, confrontation, and disruption. Pruning the tree of life keeps it healthy.
The Cost: When fear of negativity replaces respect for discernment, positivity becomes a mask that blocks transformation. It’s no wonder you feel exhausted trying to maintain forced optimism while real issues fester. It’s unnatural. Of course, this lopsided positivity increases stress and drains energy.
Alternative nomenclature: Toxic positivity, spiritual bypassing, New Age materialism, enlightenment commodification.
We’ve Finished All 20 Megatrends
Good job.
Look back over this list. It’s a lot. It’s more pressure than anyone should have to face alone. And yet, here you are.
When I read this list, three things happen to me every time:
I’m struck by how well we are all doing under the circumstances.
I feel a healthy rebelliousness.
And, I feel renewed energy rising because it’s clear to me that I have a choice. To have an opinion. To be the architect of my little corner of the world.
How about you?
If you hadn’t recognized these megatrends before, you may have been blaming yourself…thinking you’re not enough, that you’re weak, fed up, or you might simply feel like you don’t care anymore. You may have felt so much pressure that you haven’t even known where to begin. Of course, it’s no shock if you’ve felt burned out. Every one of those feelings makes sense.
But that’s not where your story ends. You’re not done. You’re not going to let these megatrends extinguish your light.
You’re here now, and I’m here with you. That’s the reason for this book, and for my life’s work. I have the certainty and strength to help you step out of the opaque cloudiness of the ordinary and into the brightness of extraordinary, where your brain, body, and being belong.
It’s time to light up your life and love it again.
Based on my experience with thousands of people over the years, I’m hoping (and guessing) you feel more fired up now than before you began reading. That’s the entrepreneurial spirit: it can’t resist taking raw material and putting it to good use. I wish I could sit down with you right now to hear what thoughts and ideas you’re processing. They’re valuable. Are you trusting your insights? Your creativity and innate power are endless.
I hope you’re beginning to see that the richness of your Life Assets – the inner resources that sustain and enrich you and that you naturally exchange with the world around you – contain all you need to reawaken to your lighter, brighter, best self.
Out of the many Life Assets in your personal portfolio, this book has focused on two that are immediately rewarding:
- Your Values: your personal ideals and natural priorities that act as your shield.
- Your STACKWINS: your Skills, Talents, Aptitudes, Competencies, Knowledge, Wisdom, Insights, Nature, and Strengths that serve as your personal reserve of practical tools ready to make what you want to happen, happen.
Your Values shield you from the forces of the megatrends that don’t belong in your sphere. Your STACKWINS make it simple to put your Values to work for you.
You don’t need to learn something new.
All that is needed is for you to recognize, celebrate, and rely on what’s already within you, what you may have taken for granted.
Postscript: End-of-Part Reflection
You’ve now seen the fourth cluster, The Body and Spirit Hijack, containing four megatrends that have been overtaking parts of your personal life, interfering with your privacy, and overstimulating your nervous system’s natural defenses.
If you’ve felt your mind racing faster, looking for a solution, that’s a healthy response. Your mind seeks a way to protect, reclaim, and maintain its personal sovereignty. Every bit of tension you’ve had while you’ve read these words is proof that you are a human being. You are not an automaton. And though what you are processing may feel like pressure (you are not imagining it), it’s also empowerment. You’ve put a name to what has been usurping your power. It is no longer a nameless, faceless bogeyman.
The problem was never you.
