When summer finally hit Colorado, it hit HOT.

In ways, it feels even worse than usual. The usual acclimation process didn't happen due to an unusually long, wet, and cool start to this summer. Then, with a climate crisis heat wave pattern, it flipped to 85-95+ highs.

Last week, I sat outside in the shade working as long as I could to help my body adjust to the higher temperatures. I felt the discomfort set in at 85, so I stayed until 88 then I was back inside with the fans.

Summer is the season that teaches us to embody being too much with its big temperatures and extra hours of light. Sometimes, summer pushes me to feel and experience too much. Too hot. Too long in the sun. Too much clothing. And add pre/menopause/post variable high body temps.

Our modern educational and work systems move in ways that create a whiplash of chaos, crisis, and tension. We are offered very small moments of relief - weekends, a holiday - that barely do anything to shift the body’s nervous system out of flight, fright, and freeze.

It is by systemic design that we find ourselves as adults burnt out, physically and existentially exhausted, and wholly disconnected from our body and soul.

There was a time when I didn’t even know I was disconnected from my own body. I didn’t know the extent of that separation until I started to access that connection to Mother Nature, my own soul work, and my embodied experience.

My typical response when asked what I wanted was, “I don’t know.”

“Who are you? Tell me about yourself.”

Seven years ago this question floored me as I sat in a therapist’s office on the cusp of what would become a transformational breakdown of my body from chronic overing.

At the time, I couldn’t answer with anything else other than, “I’m a professor. I’m a mom.”

Ask me that same question today – who are you? – and I’ll tell you a radically different story that involves embracing summer’s transformative powers.

Every 90 days, I facilitate quarterly client community sessions, bringing all of my 1:1 clients together as a group. In our recent one, we reflected on where we are one month after our Create your Restorative Summer workshop in early June.

I thought I’d share the four step process I led them through with you. You can use this process and reflection questions to take stock of summer so far and see what may need shifting.

With the seasonal shift to summer time, I see gardening as an invitation to the embodiment of the soul. Gardening is a practice of deep play and intentionality. Gardening as an active devotion to Nature.

While yes, there are the mechanics and logistics of gardening.

• How to do this or that?

• Where and what grows here?

• When to plant seeds?

These are the questions of our thinking brain. Important ones, but we as a society live so much from our brains that we can become disconnected from the nature within as well as outside of ourselves.

Welcome Summer! June 21st marks the Summer Solstice here in the northern hemisphere.

This late start to the warmth here in Colorado makes it feel like summer is more fleeting this year than years past. I want to grab and devour it like it’s delicious salted pistachio gelato.

Deep sigh.

Last week’s Create Your Restorative Summer workshop was a blast–and inspiring and insightful. I want to share some highlights of all the goodness. 

1. Most of us yearn for the days (even if idealized) of youthful summer breaks with unstructured time available.

2. Now our summers leave us feeling overwhelmed and torn between the things we want to do and the things we have to do. We’re struggling to find the balance. 

3. We crave deep play, creativity, and restorative activities, but we often don’t know how to make the time or  even what to do to tap into those things.

The solution? Deep Play!

With most of my clients, we work on clearing their calendars of the dreaded, the tedious, the frustrating, the not-my-work tasks. It feels great. It feels uncomfortable but right-aligned…

And then the push back comes. Mostly from others, and also from ourselves because we all get so ingrained in the system of urgency. We worry that if you slow down something bad will happen. Or we’ll get so relaxed (read: lazy) that something will get forgotten or not done and it will ruin things. None of that is true.

Slowing down is a mindset shift out of overing, toxic productivity, and unworthiness.

What does slowing down mean? And why do we keep going until we get interrupted with illness, breakdowns, burnout, depression – ours or those we love or both?

I’m having a battle right now.

In my head.

The battle is between Let’s do all the things and have a productive summer! and Ooof, I’m spent and I need some time to seriously recharge my batteries. It goes something like this…

It’s Mental Health Awareness month. And it’s the end of another academic year. I want to help normalize the conversation about exhaustion, disengagement, depression, and recovering from a chronic burnout lifestyle, for lack of a better phrase.

Let’s talk a little about chronic burnout. I talk to a lot of folks who are in active burnout or, more likely, who have been living in chronic burnout for some time. In a recent conversation with a public health colleague, she used 1st and 3rd degree burn metaphor to describe the level of burnout before and after the pandemic started.

I've been thinking about my own (current lack of) routines and talking with clients about theirs. This is often a topic when seasons change or bigger routines change (end of semester, holidays, and the like).  

If we have them, we will fall out of them.

Some of us resist them.

Many of us thrive with them.

And sticking with them is often easier said than done. 

In my recent work with overing, I’ve been exploring the deep connections between guilt, shame, and overworking.

My bike accident a couple months ago triggered a shame spiral, which surprised me. I couldn’t even name it as shame until after about 24 hours of wallowing and emotionally beating myself up. What a gift though - shame awareness. It invites us to be deeply curious about the beliefs and areas of our lives that hold us back.