resilience

RESILIENCE IS A BOOMERANG

Resilience.
It is one of those words we nod at, but rarely stop to taste. It comes from the Latin resilire — to leap back, to rebound. But resilience is not simply about bouncing back, untouched and unchanged. It is the art of returning different. Resilience is a boomerang. You throw it into the world- into chaos, into storms, into expectations. It flies in ways you don’t predict. But when it returns, it carries the weight of distance, the force of wind, and the imprint of the journey.

I grew up as a middle child in an Indian family, raised in a home that was both religious and progressive. My parents believed in women’s rights and gave me freedom even when the world outside did not. As a child, I was raised like a boy after my older sister. I scraped knees climbing walls, played cricket in the street, and screamed until my lungs ached when someone cheated. No one kissed my wounds better. I learned to man up, to swallow the pain, and to keep playing. But then came puberty. Society decided girls no longer belonged with boys, and my parents- once my shield- began to echo that judgment. That was my first fracture. My first storm. And yet, resilience is what happens when identity shatters and you choose to keep standing. I became too loud, too bold, too much. They called me a firecracker. But resilience doesn’t apologize for being too much- it ignites.

At 27, I began traveling the world alone. Sometimes my parents didn’t even know what country I was in, and yet they trusted me enough to go. Each trip was a throw of the boomerang: unpredictable winds, unfamiliar lands, but always a return. Travel taught me that resilience is not built in comfort zones. It is shaped in airports where no one knows your name, in mistakes made in foreign tongues, in the courage to adapt when the map is wrong. Through it all, I carried my roots. Raised religious, I prayed every morning, though over time my faith bent toward deeper spirituality. The first lesson I learned on that path was to strip away ego. My first true ego-death came through psychedelics- terrifying and liberating, the dissolution of the self I thought I was. And yet what remained was indestructible. That, too, was resilience: discovering that even when the self dies, the soul rebounds.

I once learned this truth: A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not what it is made for. Resilience is not calm waters. It is not staying safe in the dock. It is the courage to sail into storms, to know what parts of you will hold and what parts must be stripped away. If you do not know your cracks, the storm will teach you. True resilience is self-discovery in motion. It is the ability to take criticism, to laugh at yourself, to stare into the storm and say: Come on. Test me.

And so I return to the boomerang. No matter how far it travels, if thrown with intention, it circles back. Spiritually, resilience is the same: the energy you release — whether love, effort, faith, or endurance — always returns, often magnified. Karma is the throw and dharma, your higher purpose, is the hand releasing it. Every setback, every collapse, is a cycle of death and rebirth — echoing Hinduism, Buddhism, and Indigenous wisdom. Life itself is a series of returns: you fall, you rise, you fall again, and each time resilience pulls you back stronger. Even when heartbreak, injustice, or despair drags you far from yourself, resilience is the gravity that draws you home. It whispers through the storm: You are never truly lost. You will always return to yourself.

Here is what resilience has taught me: you will lose yourself in the process. You will shed illusions, identities, and borrowed masks. You will abandon parts of yourself just to survive. But like a boomerang, you will return. Not as you left, but as someone sharpened by winds, forged by distance, carried back by forces greater than yourself.

Resilience is not just the rebound. It is the rebirth.

So I ask you- when life throws you out into storms and fractures, how will you return? Because resilience is not about surviving unchanged. It is about becoming someone the storm could not take. Like a boomerang, you are meant to come back- stronger, truer, and more whole than when you left.

3 Myths About Burnout That Keep You Stuck

We toss the word burnout around like confetti , in office corridors, in HR memos, in late-night text threads where we laugh about how tired we are. But burnout is not a trend, not a clever buzzword to drop between meetings. It is a physiological alarm. The World Health Organization names it what it truly is: a state of emotional, physical, and mental collapse born from stress that is chronic, unmanaged, and unrelenting.

Still, what most people know about burnout is wrong. The myths are louder than the truth. They keep us stuck in a cycle of shame, exhaustion, and self-blame. They whisper that you are the problem when in reality, what’s broken is not you, but the world we’re asked to keep spinning.

Let’s peel back the myths and unlearn the lies.

Myth 1: Burnout is just stress that got out of control

Stress is the body’s fire alarm. Your nervous system surges with adrenaline and cortisol, your pulse races, your mind sharpens. In stress, there is urgency, a belief that if you just push harder, you’ll make it through.

Burnout is not an urgency, it is emptiness. Neuroscientists describe it as a state where the body’s stress response has been left switched on for too long. Cortisol levels that were once protective begin to flatten out; the nervous system stops responding the way it should. Instead of fight or flight, you feel like you’ve fallen into freefall.

Stress says: too much to do. Burnout says: nothing left to give.

A weekend away won’t refill a nervous system that’s been running on fumes for months. Recovery means re learning how to cycle between effort and rest, how to let the body restore its rhythms instead of forcing it into endless productivity.

Myth 2: Burnout means you’re weak

This one is perhaps the most dangerous myth of all. The narrative goes: if you were tougher, stronger, more resilient, you wouldn’t be burnt out. That is the language of shame, not truth.

Research on burnout including Christina Maslach’s groundbreaking work shows the opposite. It is often the high achievers, the deeply committed, the ones who give their whole heart who are most vulnerable. Burnout is not cowardice; it is the body’s refusal to carry an impossible weight any longer.

In neurological terms, prolonged stress hijacks the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for focus, empathy, and decision-making and hands the wheel to the amygdala, which only knows survival. That’s why burnout doesn’t feel like weakness; it feels like living in exile from yourself.

Healing doesn’t come from hardening. It comes from softening, setting boundaries, reclaiming rest, and daring to say: my worth is not in my exhaustion.

Myth 3: Burnout can be fixed by self-care alone

We’ve been sold the idea that a bath bomb and a yoga class are enough to patch the cracks in our souls. Yes, rest matters. Yes, mindfulness, movement, and nourishment are medicine. But when an entire workplace or culture is structured around extraction, endless hours, little autonomy, no recognition, no amount of lavender candles will save you.

Studies in organizational psychology are blunt: burnout is a systemic condition. It arises when the demands of work consistently outweigh the resources we’re given to meet them. The nervous system is not meant to run on hyper-drive forever. The antidote isn’t more grit, it’s redesign. Fair workloads. Human leadership. Psychological safety. A culture where people are seen not as machines but as living, breathing beings with limits.

Self-care is the salve, not the cure. The cure is collective care, the kind of workplaces, families, and communities that make thriving possible.

Full Circle

Burnout is not just stress. It is not weakness. It is not solved by green juice and scented candles. It is a wound that belongs both to us and to the systems we move through.

And yet, that wound carries wisdom. It tells us: something in the way we are living is no longer sustainable. It is the body’s way of saying, you cannot keep giving yourself away and expect to remain whole.

The myths will keep you running in circles. The truth invites you to stop, breathe, and step out of the loop entirely.

Burnout is not the end. It is the edge where we are asked to unlearn the stories that broke us and begin the work of building a life that can finally hold us.

Too Much or nothing at all?

Years ago, I stumbled on a line by Osho that rooted itself in me like a thorn I could never quite pull out: “The world asks you to toughen up. When you do, you become numb. So, which is worse — feeling too much, or nothing at all?”

The world has always preferred numbness. It applauds thick skin, worships at the altar of toughness, insists that the only way through is to laugh off the cut before the blood beads. But here is the hidden cost: when you armor yourself against pain, you also lock out wonder. You stop bleeding, but you also stop breathing.

In my last article, Resilience Is a Boomerang, I wrote about how the things we survive inevitably return to shape us. Survival, I’ve learned, isn’t always clean. Sometimes it requires its own small death- the quiet muting of the heart. To keep walking forward, you dull the noise of grief. To function, you muffle your joy. That’s the paradox no one warns you about: resilience often comes disguised as numbness. And yet, duality exists. You can be resilient and still be soft. You can be tender and still endure. The deepest resilience is not in those who harden, but in those who dare to keep feeling- fully, wildly, recklessly human, even in a world that insists on anesthesia.

We are not born armored. We arrive porous, holy in our softness, our small bodies wide open to awe. The sting of a bee, the echo of laughter, the heartbreak of being left out, all of it floods through a child like sunlight through glass. But life wastes no time in teaching us to shut the window. A cousin ridicules your voice. A parent’s silence cuts deeper than any slap. A relative’s casual remark about your body lodges like glass you’ll carry for decades. These are the first bruises, almost invisible, but the body remembers. The heart remembers. Over time, heartbreak and betrayal, loss and disappointment, pile on their weight, and the vibrant child who once marveled at ants in a line learns that the only way to survive is to stop marveling.

Some professions demand this kind of numbing. A physician watches a chest rise and fall for the last time, and before grief can land, a pager rips them toward the next crisis. A psychiatrist listens to story after story of violation and despair until the humanity behind the words blurs into diagnosis. To endure, they learn to silence the part of themselves that once gasped, once wept. But this isn’t only their story — it’s ours too. It’s what we’ve all inherited in the scrolling age.

We scroll past devastation with the same thumb that scrolls past banana bread. Bombings. Starvation. Genocide. Swipe. A child pulled from rubble. Swipe. A wedding dance, a war zone, a cooking tutorial, a puppy in pajamas. The shift is seamless, and that’s what terrifies me most. Children are raised on games where killing is scored. Teenagers watch horror before they know how to name their own fear. Adults absorb grief in clips the length of commercials and keep scrolling as if the world hasn’t just cracked open. It is a collective anesthesia. It keeps us upright, maybe. But it is also what is quietly unmaking us.

We are drifting toward a future of efficiency without empathy, productivity without presence. Humans becoming machines who happen to have hearts they no longer use. But the soul was not designed for numbness. The soul was made for aliveness. To ache. To rejoice. To split open. To rise. Even pain, in its rawest form, is proof that the flame is still inside you.
Which is why I return to what I call soul invitations — tiny openings back into feeling.

• Breath work not as an escape, but as a key to the rooms where grief hides.

• Music and art as beauty’s slow hands thawing the frozen chambers of the heart.

• Safe spaces to cry or laugh until the body remembers its humanness.

• Micro-moments of presence: watching flowers bloom, listening to bird songs, the hush of a breeze, rain drops on your face

These are the signs that life is still whispering, even when we’ve stopped listening.

And so we circle back to the question. What is worse- feeling too much, or nothing at all? I know my answer. I would rather be pierced by awe than padded by indifference. I would rather drown in the flood of heartbreak and astonishment than wander the barren desert of nothing. Because numbness may protect you, but feeling —  feeling is what keeps you human.

THE future of work depends on burnout recovery

For decades, ambition was measured in late nights, double shifts, and inboxes that bled into our sleep. We told ourselves exhaustion was the price of success, that fatigue and stress were credentials of dedication. But the reality is sobering: the way we have worked for decades has left us depleted. We are a workforce of hollow bodies and fractured minds, pretending that caffeine and willpower can patch the cracks.

Burnout is not an individual weakness; it is a collective collapse. It is the silent bankruptcy of our workplaces, draining creativity, corroding trust, and dismantling human connection. The cost is staggering. The American Medical Association reports that replacing a single physician typically costs between $500,000 and $1,000,000 when factoring in recruitment, onboarding, and lost clinical revenue. A 2019 analysis in the Annals of Internal Medicine estimated that physician burnout costs the U.S. health system $4.6 billion annually. In primary care alone, turnover drives nearly $979 million in excess spending annually, with about 27% directly linked to burnout. Multiply these figures across industries, and the economic toll is staggering.

But beyond the billions lies a greater cost: the parent too drained to laugh with their child, the physician who no longer feels compassion, the leader whose spark has been extinguished by relentless demands. This is the true price of burnout.

The Economics of Exhaustion

Globally, burnout is estimated to drain the economy by hundreds of billions every year through absenteeism, turnover, and disengagement. The World Health Organization has classified it as an “occupational phenomenon,” underscoring its systemic nature.

But the deeper consequence is not just financial, it is creative. A burned-out mind cannot imagine, and a burned-out team cannot innovate. If creativity is the fuel of the future, then recovery is the engine that keeps it burning. Organizations that ignore this reality will not simply lose money; they will lose relevance. In a marketplace where top talent is increasingly mobile, the companies that prioritize recovery will attract and retain the brightest minds, while the rest will drown in recruitment costs, quiet quitting, and reputational decline.

From Perks to Systems

Ping-pong tables, smoothie bars, and ten-minute wellness apps may generate headlines, but they do not touch the root. The next era of work is not about perks, it is about systems. Systems that protect boundaries, normalize rest, and embed recovery into the fabric of culture.

The companies that will thrive are not those who squeeze the most hours from their teams, but those who honor energy cycles, design humane workflows, and evaluate leaders not just by revenue, but by the well-being and resilience of those they guide.

A Generational Mandate

Millennials and Gen Z have already drawn the line. They are not interested in inheriting a culture of collapse. They will not trade their mental health for a paycheck. Instead, they are demanding purpose, balance, and humanity in their workplaces.

The Great Resignation was not laziness, it was clarity. It was a refusal to participate in systems that sacrifice people in the name of productivity. Organizations that fail to honor this generational mandate will find themselves on the losing side of the talent equation.

Leadership Reimagined

The future of leadership will not be defined by who is first to arrive and last to leave. It will be defined by leaders who model recovery those who understand that resilience is not about endless endurance but about restoration.

Breathwork, mindfulness, and coaching, once dismissed as “soft skills,” are rapidly becoming core competencies. The ability to regulate one’s nervous system, to hold presence under pressure, and to guide others with clarity is as vital to tomorrow’s leaders as financial acumen or strategic planning.

Technology and the Paradox of Progress

Artificial intelligence and automation promise to streamline repetitive tasks, but they cannot protect us from ourselves. The paradox of progress is this: the faster technology accelerates our lives, the more intentional we must become about slowing down.

Our human edge lies in empathy, creativity, and innovation qualities that wither under chronic stress. Digital transformation without human sustainability is a hollow promise. Burnout recovery is the missing bridge between efficiency and true progress.

The New Currency of Success

Titles, salaries, and corner offices once defined success. In the future, the most valuable currency will be energy, presence, and humanity. Organizations will compete not only on products and profits but on their ability to protect the people who create them.

Burnout recovery is not a perk, nor a passing wellness trend. It is the sustainability movement of our generation. What climate change is to the planet, burnout is to the human spirit. Ignore it, and we collapse. Embrace it, and we thrive.

A Future That Breathes

The future of work is not about doing less; it is about working differently. It is about remembering that human beings are not machines to be optimized, but living systems that require cycles of rest, renewal, and meaning.

If we are to build organizations that last, we must learn the art of recovery. Because the truth is simple: the future does not belong to the exhausted. It belongs to the restored.