6 Things You Can Do Right Now to Reignite Your Inner Fire

Are you wanting to live more fully? To align your life with your deepest values and have that energy fill you and radiate out? So many of us have this desire and yet we struggle with burnout.

The constant pressure to perform, excel, meet the demands of work, family, and our aspirations can leave us exhausted. The burden becomes overwhelming, and burnout begins to creep in, making us believe that the demands will never end.

According to WebMD, burnout is “a form of exhaustion caused by constantly feeling swamped. It happens when we experience too much emotional, physical, and mental fatigue for too long. In many cases, burnout is related to one’s job. But burnout can also happen in other areas of your life and affect your health.”

Being burnt out robs you of your radiance. It dims your light. So, how do you stoke your fire without burning out?

These are six practices that I have found to make a real difference. They have changed my life, and I’ve seen them transform my clients’ lives as well.

1. Awareness of Your Fire

The first step is becoming aware of your inner fire. How is it burning right now? Is it blazing, flickering, or barely a spark? On a scale from 0 to 10, with 10 being fully ignited and 0 being completely extinguished, where do you place your fire?

This awareness is crucial in understanding when to fuel your fire and when to ease off to avoid burnout. For a practical tool to track your excitement and energy levels, try this excitement tracker.

2. Use Your Breath

Focusing on your breath is a powerful and simple tool you can use to reconnect and rekindle your energy. For a long time, I thought that I should stoke the fire with food, but I’ve learned that while food can be comforting, it can also weigh me down and extinguish my fire. Breathing, on the other hand, helps me tune into myself and assess where my fire is. Take moments throughout your day to pause and breathe deeply, noticing how your body responds.

3. Feel Your Body

Do you know how to feel and listen to your body? Through working with Kelsey Blackwell, a Black woman who is a somatic coach, I learned a powerful centering practice that I do almost every day. It has helped me to experience myself as three-dimensional through connecting me with my length, my width and my depth. Check out her free 5 Practices to Come Home to Your Body workbook for simple practices to begin feeling your body, your power and your inner fire.

4. Embrace the Space Between

Judy Brown, a poet and leadership coach, speaks beautifully about stoking the fire in her poem Fire. She writes:

“What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.
So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.”

We need space to rest. In a world that often pushes for more, more, more, it’s essential to create gaps in our lives. Take a minute and stop. Stop looking outside yourself. Pause to connect with yourself. Pause to listen, then make time to write, to draw, to capture what you hear.

5. Nurture Your Creativity

By cultivating a creative practice and taking a daily pause, you make space for discovery and remind yourself that you’re worth pausing for.

Allow the sacred energy of juicy play and artfulness to infuse your life. This can take many forms, depending on what resonates with you and what you can commit to. Start with dedicating 15 minutes a day to journal, draw, paint, sing, dance, or write.

6. Be Curious

As you track and notice your energy, try to observe yourself with curiosity, rather than judgment. What nourishes and stokes your fire? What depletes it? Judging tends to drain us, while observing with curiosity fuels us and creates spaciousness.

These six tools can help you live your passion without burning out. In a world that constantly demands more, give yourself permission to pause, create, observe yourself without judgment and feed your inner fire with what energizes and lights you up.