I know I haven’t been writing much here, but it’s not for not trying. I keep starting posts and then scrapping them. I can’t seem to fully germinate an idea to share with you before it seems already irrelevant and tired.

Something’s off, and doing what I’ve been doing’s not fixing it.

But I’ve noticed too that while I’ve been trying to wrest water from this unmoving stone, something else has been going on at the periphery, and almost just out of sight. Like a sudden flash of light that grabs my interest before extinguishing. If I can focus I just catch a glimpse of something, something different, something even exciting if maybe also awkward in its newness.

I don’t know if this has been happening for you too of late, but I’m beginning to think these flashes of light contain the seeds of the new that’s emerging. The new we need but don’t yet know much about. The new that perhaps asks each one of us to allow our focus to drift, even linger, on these bright bursting edges, and maybe even follow what we discover there.

I don’t know. But I am curious.

And in the spirit of adventure - which the Via Dae Nova embodies - I decided to follow the spark that appears as I try to write a post for you, and write from there. Here goes …

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Right now every third headline seems to be about burnout. It’s the follow-on pandemic behind the more obvious one on everyone’s mind.

I get it; there really are extraordinary demands on us at this time. And most everyone‘s over-the-top-busy trying to figure things out and stay afloat. And yet it’s interesting that from this state of depletion we continue to choose more depletion, in a way saddling ourselves with more of the very thing we’re trying to escape.

Let’s be clear. I’m certain no one wakes up with the ambition to create more exhaustion and overwhelm for themselves. At least no one I know chooses burnout so directly.

But when there are opportunities to choose differently and we don’t, well, what do you call that? I call it the indirect route to burnout, the discreet way women do themselves in.

The reasons we might give for staying tethered to our hamster wheel most often have to do with what I call “reward dosing.” We don’t choose over-production because we’re trying to stretch ourselves to breaking. Nope. Usually we’re going for the goodies,” the little hits of praise, or appreciation, or favors or outright money we get in exchange for our willingness to yield to over-production.

Reward-dosing is a powerful incentive to keep us on the scramble. If I ended the post right here, the question of why we’re so vulnerable to reward-dosing could generate enough to reflect on for some serious re-directs and newfound ease in the New Year. And if you do want to stop reading now, here’s a good way to ponder it all. Ask yourself: “what am I really getting - and really losing - when I squeeze myself, my needs and wants, into the margins and chance moments of each day?”

But for those of you who want to go a bit deeper there’s more to discuss if you’re seriously aiming to knock the burnout-monkey off your backs.

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“Women are stepping up and burning out” rang the subject line of a recent newsletter from a women’s advocacy group I follow.

And it’s true. Women are throwing themselves at their work and routing obstacles “by tsunami,” I like to call it. They advance by unleashing a noticeable volume of output, which of course fits nicely the narrative that women must “overdo” to be recognized and valued.

But if you think about it that’s just the opposite of being valued. What’s valued here is the magnitude (volume and quality) of our production, and our ability to generate “more” than the next guy – and in this situation I do mean guy.

What then is valued in this exchange is not who we are, and not even what we personally contribute, but rather the volume of what we contribute. Not just better than, but better than by a long shot.

No wonder women are burning out. On the surface this is a very easy equation to understand. But this is hardly the full truth of why women are burning out.

Women are burning out because we accept this equation, that our value equals our output.

We’ve been going along with the unspoken narrative that our value lies in the magnitude of our contribution and so we do all the exhausting things that such a narrative would suggest.

Transform the ailing department with limited support – no problem. Mentor five more people – no problem. Work full-time and care for the house and kids full-time – no problem. We go along to get along, waiting for that big cultural paradigm shift that’s supposedly coming and will of itself turn things around.

Ha. And again, ha ha.

No one’s coming to save us. We are in fact the engines of that cultural shift, and it is in our hewing to a new narrative, right now in the midst of the old, that the tide will begin to turn.

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So many of us, directly or indirectly, yearn for a “better” experience for ourselves. Whether it be a new role at work, a relationship that “meets our needs,” or just a more alive way of being in our day-to-day, we want more.

And riding shotgun on our desire for a better life is the experience of the unknown, of pushing past what we know into something foreign and new.

New is by definition unknown, and let’s face it, the open space of what’s yet-to-be can be intimidating.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, and right on cue, we start scrambling to fill the unknown space with whatever we can to make it less threatening. And this usually means filling it with “what we know.”

For many of us this can mean throwing our self-limiting fears into the void. We fill the space of possibility with self-doubt, our “imposter” misgivings, our myriad “mistakes” and reservations. We feel uncomfortable and awful, and maybe progressively more so as we ignore our discomfort and continue our steady march toward our goal.

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Just finished posting to Instagram on the guiding capacity of pleasure, it’s ability to help you experience not only pleasure, but more pleasure, and then more pleasure still. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

Did you just cringe? I know many women do when a conversation turns to the topic of pleasure. For some it’s associating pleasure with sexual pleasure - which can be a thorny topic for women - and for others it pushes that button that says we must not own our pleasure directly, but only in stealth-mode and as a by-product of satisfying others.

So talking about pleasure and it’s pursuit by women is already challenging taboos - ones that in my opinion need to be long gone. But more importantly, re-engaging one’s pleasure can activate a significant through-line to what animates us and brings us joy

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Lynn Kraus. Senior Project Manager/International Projects for a 30+ Billion Company.

Lynn’s stats. Age: 59, Race: Caucasian, Pronouns: She/her

Lynn: “I have an associates degree in advertising and design from a very long time ago.

“Over the course of [my] career path I fell into another area, more on the production side of graphic arts, which was super abstract. How do you take a design and get it into production to actually print it on something?

“I had been looking for work and I couldn’t find work in [graphic design], and somebody pushed me and said ‘Go over here, go look at this, and I was like, ‘wow, that is cool,’ and all of a sudden something I didn’t know I was even interested in I was just completely interested in. I wanted to know everything about it. It fascinated me; [printing] is very abstract, very technical, but also requires problem solving, and you know, experience which I didn’t have.

“I didn't have any experience so I made a lot of mistakes, but [the work] was just fascinating, and it just took me down this road. The more I learned, the more I realized there was way more to learn and that really fueled me. I just pursued that type of interest because [it] got me up in the morning. I was like, ‘I'm ready to go. This is great.’

Eva: “You know, let me just say something here Lynn, because I actually think this is one of the key ways we understand what is authentic to who we are, when we do something and it gives us energy, lights us up. And it's something that we want to keep doing. Right? You knew intuitively, ‘hey I'm going this way, sorry, despite what [you trained in]. This resonates with who I am.”

Lynn: “Yeah and I've made a lot of mistakes. I mean, I didn't know what I didn't know, but I had a lot of personal drive to go and learn it because it was very interesting to me.

“So I kind of BS’ed my way into it, like ‘I'm confident, I can do this if you give me the chance,’ right?.

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Tina Shattuck: founder, Women Hold the Key - an organization cultivating connection, community, and recognition for women and girls.

Tina’s stats. Age: 51; Race: Asian/Caucasian; Pronouns: She/her

Eva: Welcome to the Dae Nova Interviews: where we explore the fundamentals of women’s personal power. Today I'm speaking with Tina Shattuck of Women Hold the Key. Hi Tina.

Tina: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Eva: So Tina, can you flesh out a bit what Women Hold the Key, what it's about and how it captures your particular brilliance and your dream?

Tina: Well, Women Hold the Key is actually a new endeavor. It's about a year and a half old. I’d been thinking about this idea for quite a few years - of women in community - and actually an amulet that would connect them. So that we as women in the world wouldn't have to feel like we [first had to] know somebody, but could connect to them just by, you know, a visual amulet. Sort of like what lots of organizations and religions already do all over the world, right, in very different iterations: religious, community service organizations, and all different kinds of things.

And I had thought about it for quite a while and did some research and couldn't find one that was really just for women, that just connected women together.

And I turned fifty on a pretty auspicious day a couple years ago. It was the confirmation hearings of a certain Supreme Court justice, and I woke up in the morning and looked at the news and was really hopeful. But by the afternoon I realized it didn't really matter what women said…

And I think that was sort of like the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. And I was just like, you know what, it's time for me to gather my tribe, my people, to reach out and let them know that they're important to me. To support them in their own personal lives, but also as a way to galvanize women to really step into their own personal power and start making decisions that will eventually help us all out as a collective society.

So it [all] really started with a very simple idea of gathering my community and my tribe, and the people that I knew, and that's kind of how it is.

I designed a key because I think keys are symbolic, and this particular key that I designed is modeled after keys that were found in the graves of Viking women. So if you go to a heritage [site] like the Nordic Heritage Museum, you can see all of these really interesting sorts of primal looking old keys, and they were thought to symbolize that women were the power centers of their communities because all of the men were gone. They were off at war, you know, doing probably terrible things.

And women were the power centers of their communities. They together held the keys of power, and I really love that symbolism, and I do really believe that women are the key to sort of what we do next. And I think we see that, we see that in young women, we see that in Greta Thunberg, we see that in lots of different places. But we really have to, as a collective of women, really step into our own personal power so that we can make the changes that we know need to be made.

This is a really critically interesting time to think about everything falling away and nothing working in the way that that it will, or has been working. We're gonna have to create a new normal and maybe there's some opportunity there.

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Andrea Egert: musician, mental health therapist, shares her thoughts during this time of Covid.

Andrea’s stats: Pronouns: She/her.

Eva: Welcome to the Dae Nova conversations where we explore the fundamentals of women’s personal power. Today I’m speaking with Andrea Egert, musician and mental health therapist. Welcome Andrea.

Andrea: Thanks for having me.

Eva: We’ve been talking about your situation over there in New Jersey.

Andrea: I think there's a little bit of a disparity with Covid between where you are and where I am, and where I am it's like a hardcore hot spot. I have Covid cancellations and it's just like that around here. It really is a bit of a war zone. My friend, I was doing a zoom session with her and she showed me her hazmat suit that she has to wear.

I hope that everybody can find it within themselves, can find ways to really stay connected with their own resilience, their commitment to themselves, to not give up on themselves, to protect themselves and their lives and to contribute to protecting people around them.

Eva: Doesn’t such a commitment suggest that [at the core] each one of us matters? I mean under oppression and duress, to continue to take the steps to keep oneself safe, to keep oneself healthy? It's all about [acting on] a care and a regard for the Self, right?...

What do you draw on Andrea to keep that flame of self-mattering alive, and to keep investing in it?

Andrea: It kind of comes back to something very deep and profound about what I think about me as a person and my existence. It's kind of essentially existential in a way when I really think about it.

Because somehow I was - even before any of this, before any of my adult iterations I'll call them -somehow I was fundamentally lucky enough to connect with a sense of myself as having some kind of intrinsic value.

Some intrinsic strengths that had value, where I deserved to be here. Really a sense like I do deserve to be here. If I were to sort of to identify positive cognitions, somehow I had this: I deserve to be here, I deserve to be heard, I deserve… I deserve to live.

Eva: Do you think this [“right to matter”] came from the experiences you had [growing up], or did you, do you feel like it erupted from deep inside of you?

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We're wading through a lot of unconscious material both personal and from the collective right now, so before I write today’s post I just want to acknowledge it and ask “Are you all doing alright?”

Leaning into trusted friends and family, even kind strangers, can sometimes give us the very thing we need to keep going.

These days I’ve been finding grounding and release in movement; for me there’s nothing like an immediate conversation with one’s body to restore balance and perspective.

I hope you're all finding resources where you need them. That’s the prayer and blessing for today.

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These days I’ve been thinking a lot about suffering, and how easily women take on the suffering of others.

Now, I fully believe this particular moment calls for each of us to truly “yoke together" if there’s to be continuing and true transformation. And that means experiencing others’ pain.

And let me say up front that I believe in this particular kind of suffering, and have seen its transformational power up close and in my own clinical work over twenty years.

But that's not what’s been at me.

What won’t quite leave me alone is this other and companion reality, which is that women can be quick to assume the pain of others. We do this. And we do this well, and often without ever pausing to consider what's going on with us and if we even have the room to take on more.

This willingness to yoke ourselves so readily can lead women into overwhelm. And as the overwhelm continues, can lead us further into a real disconnect with ourselves: with our bodies, our resilience and even our hearts.

Many of us know this merging of experience because to one degree or another we live it daily.

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This cultural moment, and the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, elevates the question once again, “what constitutes women’s power?”

Regardless of your perspective it’s undeniable that Judge Barrett stands on the brink of embodying a significant expression of power. But is she truly a woman of power, or does she simply check the cultural boxes that say she is?

And what’s the difference anyway?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately, one that can be situated as one of institutional power vs. personal power. And just as a refresher:

“Institutional power is power conferred by an institution - it’s given or derived power - and the quest for such power is an outside-in pursuit. Personal power is just the opposite. It’s inside-out power, meaning the power you express outwardly is an extension of the power you experience internally.”

Inside-out power is self-generated and self-validating. Outside-in power is other-generated and externally validated.

Outside-in power is dependent power, and as such can be taken away, and sometimes at a moment’s notice.

Inside-out power is independent power; it stands on-its-own-two-feet as they say.

And let’s be clear. The two powers are not mutually exclusive.

It’s totally possible to be in a position of institutional power and stand in your personal power. The difference is that institutional power is then an expression of your personal power, and not a replacement for it.

Personal power is an inside job, and where you sit relative to your personal power is something only you can determine.

Is Judge Barrett working from a place of personal power? Only she knows.

Or maybe she doesn’t.

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As we end this year and get ready for the next, I’ve been thinking about the enormous amount of uncertainty we’ve been living under.

When the ground shifts to the degree it has old systems tend to collapse, and the new solutions that come to take their place, while helpful, carry with them their own amounts of confusion and uncertainty.

Faced with so much that's unfamiliar I've noticed some large part of me just wants things to “settle down,” take on some semblance of "normalcy" and offer back up the "predictable” and “anticipated.”

And I’m not the only one. There is everywhere a resistance to the level of disruption we've been navigating. In a way we're ready for the “new” to be over.

And this is what I’ve been thinking about lately, this aversion to deep change and its accompanying state of "not knowing."

Not knowing is a very unstable platform from which to leap into yet more unknown. We can feel the free-fall of it and it’s not comfortable.

But if experiencing the unknown is a necessary and key aspect of change, including positive change such as growth, then learning to co-exist with the unknown is not optional.

Learning to thrive in the unknown becomes an even better goal.

Learning to navigate the unknown nimbly and well is no ordinary skill, and not a choice if we’re looking for the continued growth many of us are after.

So how do we tolerate external disruption without being internally disrupted ourselves?

How do we best navigate the rapid change that comes with accelerated growth?

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