Same happened to me except one difference. I wanted to get out for around 15 years then I quit my job and lived in another country and travelled to try to leave it but I couldn’t find something else I enjoyed. then I came back to the industry and still hated the stress around it. Due to the pandemic I was forced to, in a way, face my fears around work. I stopped avoiding the parts of the work I found stressful and instead challenged myself. I stopped trying to do things in a half ass way when I knew what the right way was. In hindsight I think I was a pretty mediocre software engineer. And just recently got a new job that is the most challenging I’ve ever had but I chose into the job and sought something that felt very mission driven. So it took me roughly 20 years to get acceptance around the work and my relationship to it.
Doesn’t mean work isn’t stressful but everything else around it has changed. I care a lot more about what I’m working on and participating in a deeper way.
So… the way out can mean being exactly where you are now
I talked with a financial advisor. He said for some of his higher end clients who have 25 million dollars that are simply sitting around in investments. The money is doing nothing for them except accumulate. He advises them to at least spend some of it.
It's interesting how the amount of money involved can change your perspective. For me the single most important thing to do with money is save it. Nothing I can buy will give me as much happiness as being able to help make the lives of important people in my life easier. We have a broken housing system that screws over almost everyone who doesn't get help so I want to save a sizeable contribution to my son's downpayment. I want to help pay for his wedding. I want to pay for his education. I want him to have a better start to life than I did and I want him to have more opportunities than me. I guess once you accumulate enough money you can do all that and still easily have more left over for the nice to haves.
The real work is facing your own fears. How? A lot of work. Meditation can help but you need a good teacher. Find people who are obsessed with and in the pursuit of “obtaining” enlightenment and I found people who know their inner thoughts and feelings at a deep and intimate level. I found people who want to be happy but ultimately need to find what is “getting in the way” of enlightenment. The irony though is that there is nothing in the way of enlightenment and “it” is already there but that’s a separate topic.
People do and can get to the bottom of what is ultimately is driving them in their own humanity.
You can go in circles trying different spiritual practices. You can have earth shattering changes with plant medicine too. You can do dream work with dream yoga too (google Andrew holecek). The rabbit hole is long and wide.
I would not swear by ayahuascha. All of life is ceremony. It might help in the short term but what you are seeking is an active thing and high effort thing until it becomes effortless. To be curious about your pain, fear and anxiety. Even to see the beauty in them. To have humility. To listen. To surrender it all.
There is no magic pill though. I’ve tried many things. I’m not the same person. You can change. There is a way out but the way out is not what you might think it is. The way out is the way through.
To do dream recall it is suggested to do keep a dream journal but if you instead before falling asleep right down the memories of your day AND do the dream journal in the morning… my experience was seeing very clearly the links between the dream content and the memories of the day previous. The unconscious mind trying to make sense of it all, sometimes going in circles.
Being aware while asleep is something that can happen to advanced meditators. The more aware you are the more you are there is no difference between being awake or asleep. I haven’t heard it brought up in any other contexts except maybe for lucid dream practitioners. I’ve also read accounts from those who have done dark room retreats where perception of being awake and asleep blur and the perception of what you are experiencing has a lot of mind generated in experiences that can seem very real, dream-like, or using Buddhist language, empty.
I went to school at Naropa University, where a lot of meditation was part of the required curriculum (at least, when I was there; I have no idea what it's like now). I never experience the awake/asleep thing in connection with meditation, either at Naropa or in meditation practice outside the school, but I doubt that I could be in any way considered an advanced meditator.
Should be clear: not every advanced meditator experiences this and is not a prerequisite to be “advanced”. It would just not be unusual if it did happen.
Where I work everyone will do their check-in but the important part is that everyone has a different personality. Like some people can be more confused and have a hard time explaining or even remembering what they did before so it's helpful to ask questions during their check-in to see if they need help. Some people might work on the same task for weeks. People are often afraid to ask for help. Or, maybe their task needs to be broken into something smaller given new information. The daily check-in is also a way for them to connect with someone else in the team who can actually help them. I'll tell them to either hang out at the end of standup or schedule a meeting with each other.
Having someone leading the standup, if done correctly, can help hold people more accountable for what their progress is toward the sprint goal and remove obstacles. This is one of the responsibilities of a scrum master although you don't need to be a scrum master at all to do this.
