Hey Everyone,
Nyam Adodoadji is a recent client of mine; we worked together from last summer to this one. Collaborating with her has been nothing short of illuminating. She’s a profound writer, a deeply sensitive and careful observer, and incredibly passionate about the impact of her work—on career grief, intuition reclamation, rest, and sabbaticals.
So when I invited Nyam to be our guest writer for August, I knew her words would land with gravity and grace. This piece is about burnout, yes, but even more so, it’s about the quiet miracle of returning to your body after years of treating it like a machine. It’s about honoring what the body whispers and shouts, aches and releases—often long before we’re ready to give it permission.
Nyam and I resonate on many subjects, especially around the sacred practice of pausing—of sabbaticals not as escape, but as embodied commitments to choosing differently. She has lived what so many of us only dare to admit: that when the body says no, we must listen. That healing can be slow, sensual, sacred. That a life led not by performance, but by presence and attunement, is not only possible—it’s sustainable.
Savor these words. Let them land. Meditate on what stirs for you. And if something arises, sit with it.
Be Well,
Christine
On the body as the vessel for life, living & intuition
When I first saw the Grand Canyon, my soul gasped. I drank in the otherworldly curves and colors of years, decades, millennia shaped into heavenly craters. I wondered at the water that moved between the monumental fissures. What volume of water had flowed to craft this land? What magnitude of torrents had thundered and raged to form these chasms?
Many years later, I touch my hand to my chest. There is a searing there, and I think of the rivers in the Grand Canyon searing a path--the force powerful enough to make rock and stone obedient. And this searing stream seems to have progressed to my chest and submerged me. The slow laceration of the flow of pain, carving my rib cage open, unleashing a flood, an ocean emerging. I didn’t know I had so much water within me. I didn’t know I had seas lying in wait to rise up with giant waves to draw me down to the deepest part of unknown waters.
When we talk about trauma and grief, we don’t often discuss it as it relates to corporate work. Trauma is for hospitals, for broken homes, for the death of loved ones, for tragic accidents. Trauma is not for cubicles and product launches and Zoom calls, and client meetings.
So what would people think of me blankly staring at a computer screen and wailing? No one would imagine the Grand Canyon breaking open my chest, rivers splitting me wide as I weep in a basement office in front of a glimmering Mac computer, unsure how I got here. Unsure why, despite never experiencing war or the aftermath of a bomb site, here I was in the wreckage of a catastrophe. Here I was, carnage and collateral damage. “That’s hyperbole,” people would say-- ”it’s just work.” It’s just a job after all.
–Grand Canyon (Wreckage)
The brief essay above illustrates my experience at my first job at 23. When I started my career at a Silicon Valley start-up, the long hours, anxiety, and stress were the first time I felt grief and pain in my body like this. Despite my first job leaving me in wreckage, I continued this pattern of being a “work horse” at the subsequent roles I worked in the tech industry. Plowing through mountains of work in 15-plus-hour days as though I was indefatigable. I pushed away signals of hunger during lunch. I pushed away signs of fatigue when it was already 10 pm, and I had been at the office since 8 am. I roiled with sharp pangs of defensiveness piercing my body when colleagues noted a mistake I needed to correct. I regularly cried rivers and lakes and oceans, and I often felt the clamor of angst gripping my throat in panic attacks.
By 2021, many years had passed, and I had left behind the detrimental habit of working 15-hour days. I had taken more agency over my boundaries with work, but I still often felt bereft and disconnected from my body. At my remote job, I still experienced virtual calls lasting from 9 am to 5 pm, where I shoved in food or bathroom breaks, jamming in slivers of time for these biological needs. I decided to take my sabbatical in 2022 because of an alarming truth that became clear to me. My body could not sustain the pace and force that I had demanded of it for the majority of my career. When I was younger, I could power and push through and somehow still stay sharp, but now in my late thirties, I woke up exhausted and made minor mistakes from a fatigued mind. Chronic health issues began to emerge and progress. If I wanted to sustain my health, I had to pause and figure out how to save my body.
My sabbatical kicked off in February 2022, and soon after, I had a health scare that became a moment of reckoning. As I left the doctor’s office, tears clouded my vision as I drove, memories of overworking rushing through my mind. All the years I had sacrificed my body for my career, and this was the result of that negligence. In one of my prior Substack essays, I wrote, “I was never taught that my body was a credible witness to my life.” Meaning that, in my early years, I normalized ignoring my body’s cues in the course of living in favor of external factors. Beyond the impacts on the physical body, the danger in this type of existence is that it cuts one off from the body, the main avenue through which intuition speaks – the vessel for life and living. The most profound gift that my sabbatical gave me was hearing my body speak again.
So after that health scare early in my sabbatical year, I became devoted to my body, patiently learning to listen to how she communicates after so many years. I re-rooted back into movement, like walking and strength training. I came back to nourishing and nurturing foods and mindful eating. I let my body guide the type and intensity level of movement I needed from day to day, some days vigorous and some days gentle. I let myself rest when I needed to instead of pushing through. And in this contemplation and these rituals for my body, I returned home to myself. I reignited my relationship with my vessel for life, so that I could trust what she was telling me. I could let her lead the way.
Later that year, I visited Mexico City and Lisbon, Portugal, and in both places, I would walk the city streets in exploration for hours and hours. The movement of my feet like an urban pilgrimage, a testament to how vibrancy had returned to my body after so many years of neglect. In Medellín, Colombia, I danced salsa and bachata with jubilant strangers at an impromptu dance party on the street. Here, my body became the witness of and the avenue for my exploration, curiosity, joy, and connection.
My sabbatical gave my body back to me. My sabbatical gave my connection to my intuition back to me. Now, more than three years after my career break, movement has become one of my core daily rituals. It’s the way I clear out energy or stress. It’s a way that I challenge myself, and I see I’m able to do more than I actually thought I could. It’s become the marker that closes out my work days.
My body gives me the first signals if I’m not being honest about what I want. If I’m saying yes when I want to say no, she gives a slight twist in my belly. My body is the first to let me know a decision brings me joy when I feel my chest open and energy radiate throughout me. She communicates if something feels off about a situation or person by a wave of unease, and conversely, she softens my shoulders when I’m in the presence of a trustworthy person.
My body is my vessel for life and living. My body is my vessel for how my intuition speaks, and so it is for you. Perhaps you don’t have the chance to take a year off from work and your standard responsibilities, but creating pause and nurturing and attuning yourself to your body’s rhythms is always accessible to you. Your body is speaking – are you listening?
A tech consulting professional leading digital product delivery for past clients such as Kia, Visa, and LGE, for Nyamwathi (Nyam) Adodoadji the pandemic forced her to confront a 14 year cycle of crushing workloads, unsupportive managers, and burnout. Discovering others that used career breaks to redirect their life trajectories, she took her own one year career break in 2022, in which she traveled to Mexico, Portugal, Ghana, Colombia, and Spain. Through her sabbatical, she sifted through her pain to redeem her life’s broken pieces. Two years later, she launched a sabbatical coaching venture to partner with mid-career tech professionals to craft intuitive, creative, and joyful sabbaticals and transitions as an avenue for inner change.
To learn more about her work and story, connect with her at nyamadodoadji.com or via LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/nyamado/) or Substack (shespeakssoftly.substack.com).
Thank you so much Christine for this conversation. A small note that the last headshot photo credit is Karen Santos (https://www.karensantos.com/).
the grand canyon metaphor opening this is doing something most burnout writing doesn't attempt - making the body's experience of corporate damage feel geologically scaled. wailing in front of a glimmering mac in a basement office while rivers split your chest open. and the reflex to dismiss it because trauma is supposed to be for hospitals and broken homes, not cubicles and product launches. fifteen-plus-hour days at a silicon valley startup and shoving food into slivers of time between back-to-back calls like biological needs were an inconvenience to the schedule. the line about never being taught that your body was a credible witness to your life is the most important sentence here. because that's the mechanism - we learn to override the body's testimony so early that by the time it screams we've forgotten it has a voice. walking the streets of mexico city and lisbon for hours after the sabbatical wasn't exercise. it was evidence that vibrancy could return to a system everyone assumed was permanently depleted.