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Jose | High-Functioning Burnout

@seldefelipe

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Praised for the thing that is emptying you.
Oxford MSt MBCT · Brach & Kornfield · ex-Google
1-2-1 mentoring · DM SUNDAY
From collapse to coming home

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Today I matriculated at Oxford. Two years, part time, the MSt in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy.
I have been teaching mindfulness since 2025. I wanted the depth underneath what I already do, delivered by the Department of Psychiatry and Oxford Lifelong Learning. The University of Oxford has been ranked the number one university in the world for a record-breaking 11th consecutive years, and being part of this feels surreal.
Nearly 2 decade in corporate taught me what that pace does. Not as a theory. As something I lived.
And burnout is not really a problem with the person. It is a mismatch between us and the place we are in, which means we are performing from the same place we need to change our relationship with.
That is where this is going. One to one with people who are still performing and feel almost nothing, and in time into the organisations that produced them.
Thank you to everyone who has been in a room with me this year. Some of them have been very small rooms, and I have learned more in those than anywhere else 🙏👨🏻‍🎓 by @seldefelipe

I proudly launched my 1-2-1 programme to help people that like to achieve a lot do so from a regulated place. We are talking about working and developing your nervous system so you can flex up and down and manage stress and burnout better. The eight-week programme is a journey into yourself. From realising the same old patterns that got you to where you are, to allowing space to trust and build your next movement. Whatever form that takes. I’ve come from hight-stakes environments, top global tech brands, I’ve trained for two years on Mindfulness with some of the top teachers in the world… And now I’m embarking on a journey with Oxford University to complete a Masters Degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy. If anyone understands your journey, that’s me. DM me the word AUTOPILOT to hear more about the services. #mindfulness #autopilot #burnout by @seldefelipe

If you are new here, this is where to start.

My name is Jose. I work at Google DeepMind and I am a clinical somatic and mindfulness advisor, trained under Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield through the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Programme.

I work at the intersection of mindfulness science, cognitive psychology, and somatic practice — translating the biology of stress into something you can actually feel and use in the middle of a working day.

This is not generic wellness. It is for high-output professionals who are high-functioning on the outside and running on empty underneath. The ones who cannot switch off. Who push past the early signs. Who have tried the gym, the apps, the holidays … and still carry the week into their beds.

The problem is rarely mindset. It is almost always biological. And biology responds to physical signals, not more thinking.

Every Sunday at 8pm UK I run a free live clinical session on Insight Timer. That is where the real work happens — in the body, in real time, together.

Come and find me there. Link in bio.

🌑 @seldefelipe by @seldefelipe

You can’t always control the workload, but you can support your response to it. Drop a SUNDAY in the comments and I’ll send you the private link to this weekend’s live session by @seldefelipe

Laptop shut at eight. Phone open by five past.
I did that for years and called it winding down. It was not. It was doing doing mode, quieter.
When we absorb that much distress in a day, the mind goes looking for the fastest way out. Scrolling is not rest. It is a reaction.
And it is inherently not our fault. Nobody taught us the difference between stopping and getting away.
This was mapped two and a half thousand years ago. The distress is unavoidable. The autopilot is not.
This Sunday, 7pm UK, free live.
Comment SUNDAY and I will send you the link. by @seldefelipe

Overwhelmed does not arrive all at once.
It arrives as wired at eleven at night. As behind on everything. As feeling flat, with nothing actually going wrong.
I spent years treating all of that as a scheduling problem. Then adding more fuel to the fire.
Four things in the reel, none of them longer than a minute. I am not expecting these will fix your week. But they give you a slightly longer gap between what happens and what you do about it, which is the only thing I have found that holds and it’s sustainable.
This Sunday, 7pm UK, I am running a free live on exactly this.
Comment SUNDAY and I will send you the link. by @seldefelipe

Reactivity is not the dramatic stuff.
It is the thirty minutes before a meeting that you fill rather than sit in. It is the TV going on before the plates are cleared. It is replying to the email before you have read the end of it, because the discomfort of leaving it unanswered is worse than the cost of answering badly.
Mine was the email.
None of it is a crisis, which is exactly why nobody calls it avoidance. Including us.
Two questions worth sitting with. Did it make you feel better? And did it resolve the thing you were actually facing?
What is yours?
Free live session on Sunday 1 November, 7pm UK. DM me for link by @seldefelipe

Every one of these was a genuine consideration at some point in the last few years. If not all of them …
They all have the same shape. Go somewhere else, become someone else, perhaps a way of controlling the environment.
The thing that actually helped was slower and much less interesting to talk about with others. Slowing down… literally slowing down. The secret to longevity isn’t a hyperaroused nervous system; it’s a nervous system you can intentionally switch on and off.
Which one were you most recently tempted by? Mine was Ayahuasca 😬 by @seldefelipe

I am tired of hearing people saying meditation is boring. How could being fully engaged with life be boring? I’m determined to make it accessible in my space. Here I am, an Oxford postgrad, trained under the guidance of the best meditation teachers in the Western world (Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield). And still, bring a level of fun and accessibility to what I do. Because it’s genuine. And because I believe in it. If you want to get a taster of this… my inbox is open. by @seldefelipe

October, honestly.
I taught to a room of two people this month. I sat down beforehand feeling like a failure. Then I decided those two were getting everything I had, exactly as if there were two hundred.
What came back was the warmest feedback I have had since I started.
One of them wrote to me from Ghana. I have been teaching from a flat with boxes still unpacked, and someone in Ghana sat down and practised with me. I did not expect that to move me the way it did.
Over 400 of you came to a live this month. Some of you wrote to me afterwards and told me things you have not said out loud anywhere else. I read every one of them, and I still do.
I have spent most of this year measuring this by numbers that have no idea what happened in the room.
Thank you for being in the room.
Next free live is Sunday 1 November, 7pm UK. by @seldefelipe

There is a version of self compassion that is really just reassurance. It tells you the thing is fine, and you know it is not, so it does not land and you stop trusting it.
Mine sounded like a list. Three things I had done well that day, recited at eleven at night, while the thing I was actually avoiding sat there untouched.
Kindness is not the opposite of honesty. It is what makes honesty survivable. You cannot look squarely at something while you are braced for your own verdict, so the looking never happens, and nothing moves.
So the question is not whether you are being nice to yourself. It is whether you can be with what is true and not leave.
Can you be with this? And then, when the answer is a quick yes, can you truly be with this?
The next free live is Sunday 1 November, 7pm UK. We are going to sit with exactly this one. Link in bio. by @seldefelipe