How Your Burnout Will Turn into Regeneration
The Michael Jordan of food systems on burning it all down to reimagine the future
Welcome back to The Link, a bi-weekly circularity newsletter making the connection between regenerative farming and you, every other Tuesday.
I don’t know anyone who hasn’t suffered burnout at this point in adulthood. Between a global pandemic and the rising popularity of books in recent years like How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell or Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey, or my favorite podcast episode of The Happiness Lab, late-stage capitalism is punishing us all. We aren’t built to sustain the structures of the industrial revolution because we aren’t machines.
Just ask Michael Jordan. Well actually, ESPN did in their brilliant docuseries, The Last Dance, about the greatest living basketball player of all time and the Chicago Bulls. Reflecting on winning the NBA finals in 1993—the Bulls’ third consecutive championship—Michael Jordan finally admitted his humanity. “Physically, I was getting exhausted. But mentally, I was way past exhausted. When you try to do something repetitively, you lose some of the hunger, some of the edge.” Throughout his legendary career, burnout bubbled in multiple hiatuses disguised as retirements (remember the baseball stint)?
I personally self identify more as a Larry Bird—sans mustache and if he was benched 24/7 and valued for being the kind of player who knows where to find the good Gatorade—but I too, have been climbing out of an 8-year burnout stretch myself. So many industries are collapsing in infrastructure, with layoffs as the new norm; forcing employees to absorb the jobs of their former colleagues they’re often not qualified to do.
I know, I know: you came here to read about farming and stuff and you will, but if you’ve been following along here for a while, it’s all interconnected, man (insert the Big Lebowski voice here). So to get to the root of why regeneration starts with ourselves, I wanted to speak to the Michael Jordan of circular food systems, Emma Chow. Emma co-developed and led the global food systems transformation initiative at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, a brilliant team that questioned the status quo and dared to imagine a future where food regenerates nature, based on the principles of a circular economy. Emma and her team’s report, The Big Food Redesign, has largely inspired the direction of my own work in the regenerative farming space that I’ll elaborate on soon.
I had the recent joy of sitting down with Emma to learn about how her own journey of burnout was essential to launching her new business, Nature X Nurture, and why she believes that burnout is a pathway towards regenerating what’s possible in food systems, climate solutions, and resiliency. Spoiler alert: it has to start within us.
How did your path bring you into food systems work?
When I was 18, I read
’s book, End of Nature, and it woke something up in me that was like, “I must do everything I can to save nature.” That’s what ultimately led to burnout ten years later, but I learned about all the environmental issues and taking a systems approach to solution making through my studies and scratched the surface on some food issues. I was hoofing on organic farms for a bit before I went into consulting, and I was struck by how I was eating vegetables I thought I hated, but the difference was that these actually tasted good and I was getting them fresh out of the garden rather than eating them in the middle of winter after they’d been shipped from California to Canada. It sat with me. We’re not going back to old models where everyone becomes peasant farmers again and turn their backyards into farms, so how do we reconcile these systems for the future?I was also always obsessed with waste, and was in Southeast Asia at the end of those travels and remember seeing all the piles of food and other organic waste streams intermingled with plastics. I was with my friend—who is Cambodian and whose parents are farmers outside of Phnom Penh, the city we were in—and asked her, “What’s gonna happen to all that? Will it go back to farms?” and she was like “No, it probably won’t get picked up.” I had yet to discover the language of the circular economy and that framework, but in my mind, I was seeing linkages between cities and the surrounding farms.
I discovered the circular economy through an open IDEO challenge on plastics. I was advising a startup in Boston at the time, and they kept mentioning the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. I had never heard of it. I looked at it and became obsessed and could not read enough and felt like I had finally found the language I had been looking for in talking about sustainability. It fed my mindset of tweaking the system and this job came along that focused on cities and the circular economy for the food system. I signed up for an 18-month contract and started up the food initiative, and left after four years.
Since this newsletter is all about regenerative systems, what does regeneration mean to you?
The state of homeostasis, where all of the different, intricate nutrient cycles in nature exist: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, all of that, is naturally flowing as it inherently does in nature’s intelligent, elegant design. We have that in our physiological bodies as humans because we, too, are nature. For me, regeneration is not discovering something new, but rather a remembrance and a return to that natural state that I believe deep down in the core of our humanity have all the wisdom and answers we need to be in that right relationship with ourselves, with other human beings, and with all life itself. It's essential that we develop and embody that in ourselves rather than striving or craving something that we call regeneration in the natural world because that will simply come as a byproduct. That will just come if we just focus on that right relationship from within.
Well said. The Big Food Redesign is super impressive and inspiring, but I can only imagine the hard work that went into it. How did your personal path towards regeneration inspire you to step into the work that you do now?
I left my job in March 2022, and I was feeling very depleted, like a natural forest fire. Indigenous people in past centuries would facilitate controlled burns when the forests became too dense and served as the keystone species to enable it.
I like to think of my experience as the burning down of the excess density that was too much and was not serving the system of the forest anymore—it literally had to burn out and shut down. Then there was this period of honoring death and it was a lot of grief and learning to be still, which was so foreign to me. That took a few months until June of last year, when I started to feel energy flowing through me again and that’s when I had the confidence to say, “OK, I’m ready to put a backpack on and physically carry it,” and I never felt so much fear as I did going into those travels as I did on June 20th last year that I got on a plane to Peru.
I was not feeling a state of regeneration in myself. It was the early beginnings of recovery, of returning to my older standard of baseline, which was low. And then I went to the Amazon and that’s where I didn’t feel it right off the bat, but I learned through osmosis from the Indigenous people I was living with in that healing community of women and initiating my own healing path of decolonization and ancestral healing and changing my relationship with plants and the natural world was when I started to realize I wasn’t miraculously recovered, but my own level of hope and inspiration jumped up several notches.
A month or so later I went to Guatemala and experienced a period where the ideas were flooding through. I finished my trip in Mexico, which was really beautiful because I hadn’t even planned to go there. I got back into art there, which I had always done as a child and then pushed away. So instead of feeling older, it was reverse aging and going back to the little 4 year old me and feeling that in my body in the jungle, where there were no rules. I realized I had been trained to feel businesslike and rigid. I began to ask myself: “Who am I without all those ropes?” By the end of the trip, I could equate it with being in that regenerative state because I felt strong, inspired, and rewired that conditioning with how I saw myself.
Ah yes, the ego death. Is that what prompted you to start Nature by Nurture?
Yes, but the seed was first planted 8 years ago when I was in corporate consulting. I was in a session on mindfulness with all these powerful partners at the time who worked with the wealthiest companies and a simple question was asked in the room: “Who feels like they have any sense of what mindfulness means?” Me and one other person raised our hands. It was then that it first started to click with me: “What if the people who advise the biggest companies had more pause and more wisdom in their lives rather than reaction and ego driving their day to day? What would our world look like then?
During covid, I began teaching meditation, and so my own journey was coinciding with over the past decade of doing this work in service of nature. Then the burnout happened and that was even more of an amplifier of “how can this happen to me? I’m a meditation teacher.” It had so much shame in it. Then I realized, “oh I need to embody this and bring this into all aspects of my life.”
I’m very visual, and I see visions and things I want to create, and the challenge is often turning those into real world renderings. Last April I was doing an advanced teacher training and I started seeing a residential retreat on a farm with familiar faces from the food industry and integrating mindfulness and that was the biggest seed and there was so much momentum building and thinking about the investor community and I want them to leapfrog their own paradigm shift to the regenerative. That led to the first retreat in the UK that we held a few weeks ago. Nature by Nurture was a name we came up with for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation's Big Food Redesign.
Incredible! So thinking about reimagining what’s possible for people looking to regenerate in their lives, what do you think can help support a mindset shift within ourselves?
Rest. Especially in Western society, we’re suffering from such a major rest deficit. Our nervous systems are in a constant elevated fight or flight mode. That’s why we only tend to breathe out of our chests. We literally cannot try and contemplate the shifting paradigms until we start downshifting our nervous systems, but often times we’re so sleep deprived that it starts with something so simple: just getting enough sleep so that our brains and our cells can be repaired to be in a state of learning and receptivity and move from a place of fear and scarcity and lack to strength and hope and resilience. That’s why it comes back to embodiment: sleep and breathing into our bellies and taking a breath before going into that next zoom call and processing the stress that’s invisible in our digital era and we’re not metabolizing that in a healthy way today. As you mentioned around covid, there’s so much collective healing and trauma that’s being lodged in the body and until we feel safe, we can’t upgrade, and we are in survival mode.
Amen. What do you want people to take away from our convo?
Reflecting on your relationship with nature. It’s easy to have this excuse that “I live in the city” but even in a concrete jungle, is there a place on your walk where you see a leaf? Because if you pause and do that with a certain level of awareness, you can connect with that leaf and nature and the power and muscle of awareness that you’re flexing. It’s an invitation for everyone to ask: “What’s my relationship today been with the natural world?” And if it’s been completely separate, what can I do that will take one minute? Even drinking a glass of water and realizing it came from a stream, a river, the clouds, somewhere. That is nature.
Thanks for speaking with me.
To learn more or participate in one of Emma’s upcoming workshops, pitch an idea or collaborate with Emma, reach out to her via the Nature X Nurture site.
Oh hey! You’re still reading this? If you have future topics, smart humans, or concepts you’d like to see featured, respond to this newsletter or drop me a line and say hey: Helen@HelenHollyman.com.