Compassion fatigue, the release of suffering, becoming nobody in nature, and Vietnam

I’m back after a much-needed two-month break from writing and miscellaneous mental health advocacy work. I felt myself sliding back into exhaustion, anxiety, irritability, and numbing out, but I didn’t understand why until a Healer I’m close to illuminated the elusive yet obvious explanation:

“Andy, you’re giving all of yourself to others and nothing to yourself. No wonder you feel this way. What are you doing to refill your spirit? What are you doing to care for yourself?”

Truthfully, the answer was “Close to nothing.”

That’s how I learned about a concept sometimes referred to as "compassion fatigue", which is a form of burnout that stems from the emotional, spiritual, and physical fatigue that arises from repeated secondary exposure to other people's suffering.

As both the student and the teacher during the process of personal transformation, I also learned a bit more about my subconscious programming.

My programming to achieve and prove myself lovable had latched onto mental health advocacy as its new host. Helping others had transformed (in my mind) into another job — something to be done urgently, constantly, and with a fixation on results.

The subconscious mind is a clever fucking bastard. It jumped hosts from my tech career to my emerging mental health advocacy work. But, this time, I caught it before it drove me further into burnout and dissolution and transformed an act of goodwill into another stressful job.

This is the process of personal transformation in action. A few steps forward, then a few back. Sometimes, a waltz in the wrong direction, a few stubbed toes, and then back into rhythm with grace and effortlessness. No need to be self-critical about it. Just dance while the music is playing. So, I dance on…

That said, what has happened over the last few months?

THREE BIG ASS THINGS.

The Release of Suffering

My advocacy work had brought me into contact with hundreds of people, their personal struggles, and their stories. I was still carrying old emotions and memories that hadn’t been released and accumulating new pain through vicarious absorption when working with others. My internal payload of suffering was growing, and I needed a release.

So, I trekked to a remote corner of the world to work with a powerful Healer who had previously helped me expunge emotional pain. This time, it was with the assistance of 8 grams of mushrooms from the Mazatec tradition. (This is not a recommendation to do a big dose of mushrooms.)

What followed is hard to describe, but the simplest image I can paint is that of an exorcism. If there was an interpretive dance for the word “suffering”, my body expressed that better than any trained dancer could hope to.

I was shaking and convulsing so intensely that it was dangerous for anyone to be near me. I writhed in the corner of the room, profusely sweating through many sets of sheets and pillows. Sometimes, the body-stored energy would become so intense that my whole body clenched up as I curled into a stiffened fetal position with veins bulging from my neck as I struggled to let out agonized screeches and whimpers.

On one hand, I wish I had a recording of it so that I could share an example of what it looks like to have a huge nervous system release of body-stored emotions. On the other, I would never want my family to see what I went through because it would probably traumatize them.

Healing experiences can sometimes be beautiful and wonderful. Sometimes they aren’t.

At one point, I was on my hands and knees with the sheets clenched in my fists, screaming so intensely that I eventually blew out my vocal cords. The screaming was prolonged enough to perturb my vestibular system, leading to two subsequent weeks of near voicelessness and disrupted equilibrium.

While on all fours, screaming away my suffering, my mind imagined weight being placed on my back. Ceaselessly, more and more weight was pilled on. I clenched more intensely, screamed with intensified rage, and I refused to break. The weight of all of my own old emotions and the suffering of others continued to pile on. More weight. More pain. More suffering. More furious screams of “FUUUUUUUUUCK! FUUUUUUUCK! FUUUUUUUCK!”

Visions of my ancestors and their suffering, my mom and her suffering, and visions of childhood abandonment continued to flood in, splashing down on my unbreakable back.

I held on as long as I could. Eventually, I broke, falling over lifelessly on my side, weeping, sweating, and convulsing until I had nothing left. Until I could no longer fight, and my body cramped up on me from exhaustion. Until I accepted that I couldn’t carry this suffering anymore and that it wasn’t my responsibility to carry the suffering of others. Not my mom’s suffering. Not my ancestors suffering. No one else’s, including my own.

Four hours later, it was over. My eggs had been thoroughly scrambled. Ancestral, familial, and personal suffering had been released. Not all of it, but a lot. For now, that’s all I could handle.

I slowly returned to reality and made my way home.

Becoming Nobody in Nature

A month later, I was on my way to Alaska to meet up with two people I would spend the next ten days with.

One was a retired pararescueman (or PJ for short) who served for 20 years in the US military, as a mountain rescue expert on prolific mountains such as Denali, and an all-around life-saving badass.

You think Navy Seals are studs? Well, they are. But PJs take it to another level. PJs are the ones that drop into a gunfight to pull shot-up Seals out of danger, stick fingers in gunshot wounds, take part in emergency amputations, and pull half-dead climbers off of high peaks they shouldn’t be on.

Needless to say, I was in good hands when it came to surviving in remote Alaskan backcountry.

For the next ten days, we resided in an alluvial basin that rested between two mountain ranges that shot up 4,000 feet on both sides. The river that ran through it was fed by runoff from a nearby toe of a glacier that marked the beginning of a 100-kilometer expanse of icefield.

Fresh animal tracks were spotted within minutes of being dropped off by the bush pilot. Black bears, brown bears, wolves, and caribou would be the closest thing to a neighbor for our brief visit to the cradle of our ancestors.

Imagine yourself several hundred kilometers from the comfort of civilization. Its doctrines, expectations, and influences are gone. Your job isn’t there. Nor is your sense of fashion. The messages you absorb on a daily basis are also gone. No timeline to scroll through. No billboards beckoning you to buy. Nobody else to mimic, envy, love, or hate. Nothing but the omnipresence of nature.

Who are you in that situation? Who are you in the absence of the civilized world telling you who to be? Are you anybody at all?

Your mind doesn’t like how unstimulated it is. How quiet and featureless things have become. It finds ways to revolt in protest of the silence. Sometimes, sitting quietly on the banks of a nearby tributary, I would feel a rush of anxiety — panic for no reason at all. Next would come 8-10 hours of tranquility. Then, a flood of negativity and self-criticism. And, again, nothing at all, until the next bout of subconscious impulse pushed something disquieting to the surface.

With nothing to distract yourself with, the mind begins to reveal itself.

I had originally met my PJ buddy turned Alaskan backcountry guide at an Ayahuasca retreat for military veterans in the Peruvian Amazon. He would often say to me, “Nature is a psychedelic.” By day 7 in the mountains, I began to understand what he meant by that.

You see, the word “psychedelic” is derived from the Greek words ψυχή psychḗ 'soul, mind' and δηλείν dēleín 'to manifest', with the meaning "mind manifesting."¹

If a psychedelic is “mind manifesting”, he meant that prolonged periods of isolation in nature could be just as mind manifesting as a heroic dose of your favorite psychoactive substance.

You may not need to spend a few grand, make your way to the Amazon, and uncomfortably purge your guts out to explore your mind. That’s one way of doing it that’s captured much attention lately. Yet, it isn’t the only way.

Another way is to step into the wild, immerse yourself in it, allow it to wash away your identity, and through stillness and presence, become aware of the shadows within you.

Vietnam

Several months ago, I sold my home in California after listening to the voice in my gut that beckoned, “It’s time for you to go.”

At the moment, I call Southeast Asia my home (Vietnam, to be specific).

Why?

Because the body is a tuning fork to its environment. It will fall into resonance with wherever you put it. Monks don’t meditate alongside the 405 freeway in Los Angeles. They quiet their mind in quiet places.

More specifically, I want to be in this part of the world at this point in my life because of what I want for myself.

I want easy access to delicious, healthy food. I want to be in a more social, communal, and family-oriented environment where it is common to see groups of people spending time together. I want to be around people who are moving at a pace I want to move at — slow, relaxed, and present. I also want to be in a place that changes my perspectives on the art of living. And I want to do all of that affordably.

Sometimes, if we want to change our internal state, it is helpful to change our external environment. For all of the talk about the power of the mind and how healing comes from within, which is true, it is also true that it’s not necessary to be in a fight with our environment. That’s how I felt being in California.

Fighting the frenetic pace, high cost of living, an ocean of processed food, nonstop political and social news weaponized to disturb you and distort reality, the omnipresent scent of self-glorification and egotism, and the drive to earn the almighty dollar. I’d had enough of that and my body and mind were telling me it was time to go.

So, I did. Who knows where I’ll end up next? But for now, my tuning fork is quite happy with this new frequency. And my belly can’t get enough delicious Bun Bo Hue.

---

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelia#:~:text=It%20is%20irregularly%20derived%20from,potentials%20of%20the%20human%20mind.