When Fatigue Crashes the Party: Surrendering to What Is
'Cause sometimes the only way forward is a full-body shutdown.
Hi Friends,
It’s Full Moon! Tonight we gather on the Zooms. If you’ve already registered, see you there. If you still want to, you can do so HERE. This month’s practice is non-fabrication of body and mind. More info below!
This past week, the fatigue monster swallowed me whole. Maybe it’s the earth tilting away from the sun, the slow pull towards hibernation. Or maybe it’s my weird autoimmune quirks reminding me that I am, in fact, mortal. Whatever it is, my limbs are heavy, knees spaghetti, and eyeballs struggling to stay open.
What I want is to be creating. I’ve been dreaming up a series of miniature sculptures, and the itch to dive into 24-hour artmaking is very strong. My "plan" was to ooze into that yummy creative flow and then write about it for this month’s theme of non-fabrication — about how the most surprising things emerge in unforced play.
But the body is a trickster, kids. Here I am, stuck in the mire of exhaustion, light years away from any “creative flow”. And so, I’m approaching our theme from a very different angle than planned. Turns out, exhaustion has its own wisdom to share. Huzzah!
Fatigue has been a close teacher for years. It shows up whenever I’m firing on all cylinders like an ADHD 8-year-old on a sugar high (which is pretty much my whole vibe). It appears when I’m pushing too hard and too long for a creative project to bend to my will. In its wise, super annoying way, Fatigue taps me on the shoulder and says, “Nope. Soften, simplify.” And when I don’t heed its whisper, it comes back as a roar.
Fatigue humbles us into seeing that our attention has been misplaced, that we’ve been fighting the river. It tells us we’re holding on too tightly to our expectations, pushing at something that will not be pushed. Fatigue reminds us that the flow of life is vastly bigger than our personal agendas.
My most life-changing lesson from Fatigue came in 2019. I had just kicked off a tour — the culmination of two years of grueling creative work — and something was very wrong. I was having severe heart palpitations, my skin was painful and prickling so that clothes became unbearable, and I hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in weeks — an acute state I would later learn is called thyroid storm. Not wanting to let my team down, I dragged myself back and forth between coasts, doing press in New York and LA, pretending I wasn’t coming apart at the seams.
Here’s 2019 me doing press while in secret full-body meltdown. At death’s door, but make it cute! 😙
And then Fatigue took charge and knocked me out cold. I woke up one morning and just could not keep going. That saved me, tbh. In the forced pause that followed, I had space to get a diagnosis (Graves Disease) and finally had a quantifiable reason to stop touring. But most of all, I got the stillness I needed to retrain my nervous system after a decade of pushing and pulling.
Adversity as a teacher shows up in a zillion ways. Lately, mine is the Graves Disease rollercoaster that always ends in a crash. When I was young, it was existential depression. For you, it might be illness or panic or interpersonal strife. Whatever shows up uninvited and sits you down on your ass — hard. That’s the teacher. It shows us how much we’ve been trying to manage, control, and shape what is inherently unshapeable, inherently cosmic.
This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t go forth and build things or try to make the world better with our whimsical ideas. It means we gotta do so with the wisdom of the body and the honesty of our full awareness. We are not herculean — we are mortal and impermanent and inextricably part of the bigger picture, not some chess master sitting separate from it all. When we resist the natural flow of things, we experience pain — a visceral reminder that our relationship with reality is askew.
As an artist, I notice this most in my expectations around creativity. Sometimes, it feels like I should be able to summon creativity at will just by sitting down with pencils and paper and my big important dreams. But creativity, like life, doesn’t work that way. Expecting it to and being frustrated when it doesn't pull us further out of alignment with what is.
When I stop fabricating and controlling my experience, things start to unfold as they are. It is not the creativity I had planned, not the creativity of my excitable ego; it’s big ‘C’ Creativity — unobstructed. The sculptures I wanna make will emerge when they’re ready. Today’s not the day for that. Today’s the day for this. Whatever this is - elegant in its simple alignment with reality.
What’s sitting you down on your ass lately and making you stop all the pushing and pulling? Let us know in the comments & join us in community tonight! 👇
Tonight’s Meditation Session
September Meditation Session
TIME: Tuesday, Sept 17 @ 8-9 PM EST
TOPIC: Non-Fabrication. Where in your body, your creativity, your mind, are you resisting? Where are you pushing the river? And what happens if you stop? Let’s try! Or rather, let’s not try. Let's not try not trying! Who knows! See you there!
COST: Open to everyone. Please consider paying what you can within your means.
See you tonight :)
❤️ Tasha
I enjoyed the meditation because I struggle with chronic fatigue as you know. This meditation was very simple and easy for me to do, because i really didnt have to do anything. Thank you for doing these sessions. Would it be possible to incorporate this into my sadhanas that I practice?
Sorry I had to miss the meditation, but I'm doing my own little non fabrication meditation with the not-quite-full moon tonight. I feel like I've been fighting the river for so long that I'm not quite sure what it would feel like to stop doing that. And yes, I can make it cute, dammit.