Burnout to dharma bum: Lessons from a year living in a Buddhist monastery

Photo by Indian Yogi (Yogi Madhav) on Unsplash

It’s 4 a.m. I can feel my heart beating and my whole body tensing up. Although I’m lying in bed, it feels like my body is floating some imperceptible distance above the warmth and comfort of the mattress. My mind spins like a fairground ride, falling into mental wormholes of anxiety and obsession, lost in a mental maze of fantasies and yearnings about the working…