Spiritual and Emotional Fatigue

One thing that is true about taking on the challenge of spiritual and emotional healing is this: it takes time, patience and commitment. So many of the people I’ve worked with have gone through stages of discovering just how true this really is. For example, as we lay the foundation for a healthy life, deeper potential wakes up asking for even more time to develop and explore. The process becomes one of not months, but years of transformation and mastering the dances of relationship, opening the heart and finding our true creativity and spiritual service.

Another truth is that you have entered a process that is organic and requires patience to reveal itself to you. Healing lives in cycles and rhythms that are determined by two forces: your own unique life experience and the natural cycles of lunar and seasonal time. While your own personal history dictates that you will have a healing timeframe that is unique to you, the archetypal patterns which govern how our psyches heal will nonetheless hold you in their embrace as you unfold in your path.

For example, no matter where you begin and how far you have to go, the initial integration stage of committing to a healing path still takes a year. To borrow an idea from the 70’s Humanistic Movement, you can’t push the river of your own healing.

There is yet another reality that exists in the path of healing: you will eventually reach stages of “commitment fatigue” in which the reasons for wanting to heal become blurred, and motivation drops off. And in the advanced stages there are a few truly intense crux point stages of fatigue that will precede the greatest breakthroughs and integration. So many people are experiencing one of these crux points this year that I chose to write this article, because fatigue is one of the most challenging and discouraging times in the healing journey.

So why, if we are healing, must we go through fatigue? Well, to understand this, you must start with the fact that there are three emotional precursors to any deep fatigue stage in our healing: having lived with compromise, lies and denial.

One early stage of fatigue occurs in the initial healing commitment to challenge compromise, lies and denial. When you encounter resistance from family or relationships to your desire to end codependency, you will eventually get tapped out. Codependency is a primal enmeshment that deeply resists conscious change and requires real commitment to release.

Another form of fatigue occurs when you reach the stage of successfully telling the truth about your needs and boundaries. You will naturally come into a whole–body awareness of the energetic cost of having accepted compromise, lies and self-denial in the past. And when the emotional and physical bodies are allowed to feel that, the fatigue sets in. It is like the emotional equivalent of having carried a heavy backpack for years: when you finally take it off, you realize how exhausted you are. That fatigue wants to resolve through a much greater commitment to live freely.

Another stage of fatigue comes as your healing progresses further, and you go deeper into living the authentic creative self that couldn’t wake up in the family. When these energies are allowed to shape your life over a period of a year without serious interruption, you will again drop into a fatigue that is your psyche taking stock of just how deep your old, unlived life really went. This fatigue heals through the commitment to finally take your creativity seriously.

The key to overcoming fatigue is to rebirth your commitment through a new vision of what you are doing all of this for. Investing time, money and energy into something for your growth — classes, training, creative tools, trips, retreats — all these things anchor an uncompromised truth that your healing matters, and release the self-denial.