Nafsi Ta'bani: When the Soul is Tired

Re-Imagine Success Podcast

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Nafsi Ta'bani: When the Soul is Tired

Burnout isn’t just an exhaustion of the mind, it's an exhaustion of the soul.

Nabeela

Jun 11, 2025

Transcript

"You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body."
— C.S. Lewis

A Sacred Phrase, A Deeper Ache

I recently coached a client who used a phrase that reached deeper than the normal language of burnout. Like me, she’s Lebanese, and her parents immigrated to Canada to offer her and her siblings a better future. And like many of us who carry the hopes of a generation on our backs, she did everything right. She got married, raised three remarkable children, earned an education, and built a successful business. As she sat across from me now, in her forties, having checked all the boxes in life, she wore a shroud of exhaustion. I asked her what was weighing on her heart and occupying her thoughts and she responded with heavy eyes and an ache in her voice. She paused, then said:

"نَفْسِي تَعْبَان (Nafsi Ta'bani)."
"My soul is tired."

What Has Exhausted Your Soul?

In many faith traditions, the soul is considered the eternal essence of one's being. Our bodies will return to the earth, but our souls will live on. And the soul has a right over us just as our bodies do. But in a world that measures worth by output, we rarely ask: What nourishes the soul, what replenishes it, what keeps it healthy and flourishing?

This phrase, "نَفْسِي تَعْبَان (Nafsi Ta'bani)" is an Arabic phrase that expresses a deep sense of exhaustion, one I’ve heard many times, especially from women.

But this time, it landed differently. It felt sacred. Weighty. I stopped her and myself. We both sat in silence, absorbing the truth of what she had said. Then I asked her the only question that mattered: “What is exhausting your soul?”

What followed was not a checklist of to-dos or stressors. It was a quiet unpeeling. The weariness wasn’t physical, though she was tired. It wasn’t mental, though her mind was always racing. It was something more profound, an aching that went to the root of her being.

She described her longing for stillness. For a slower life. A place where she could be. Not the business owner. Not the mother. Not the strong woman who holds it all together. Just herself. A person in a place where she could exhale, where her soul could blend into the fabric of life without constantly swimming upstream.

“But I am not the person to give up", she said. “I don’t want to be the type of person who gives up on something I have built. So many women give up. I don’t want to give up,”she said.

And here is a belief that many of us get entrapped by: the idea that letting go of something is quitting, and saying “no more” means we have failed.

My next questions were about how she could explore an alternative path without blaming herself. So I asked her:

What would it feel like if quitting were okay?
How do you explore the type of life you want without assigning yourself blame?
What feels blameworthy for saying NO to a life that is making you miserable? That is malnourishing your mind, body and soul?
What are you afraid of?

Throughout our excavation of the type of life she wanted, she talked about moving to a place where her family could live without struggling financially, where her identity as a visible minority wasn’t an exception but where she could live in anonymity, a place where she could explore the long list of things she loved but has given up along the way. A place where she could rekindle her spiritual identity.

And then she said something that I hear so often from people who dream of this alternative existence: “But that life feels like a Pinterest board,” she said. Not something I could actually build.”

I reminded her that our parents crossed oceans for the dream of something better. Why do we believe we can’t do the same? What would it take to move closer to the life she quietly dreamed about? Sell the business. Rent the house. Sell her stuff, move abroad. What feels impossible about that?

She blinked at me. For the first time, someone was treating her dream not as a fantasy, but as a real, viable possibility, and a sparkle of hope filled her eyes as the idea of living a life where peace and stillness weren’t buried beneath an exhausted soul could become a reality.

It’s Not Logistical. It’s Spiritual

Because what she was really asking wasn’t logistical, it was multi-dimensional, it was about how to reposition her life so she could nourish herself socially, environmentally, spiritually, financially, mentally and physically.

Because for so many people, the exhaustion runs past the fake smiles, the curated profiles, past the autopilot of life, and sits buried in a heart and soul that are malnourished. And for most people, we don’t even know it. This is why the occasional massage, vacation, or yoga doesn't ever do the trick.

We are sleep-deprived, overstimulated, overconnected and undernourished spiritually and socially. We live in a state of subtle torture, numbing ourselves with dopamine and distraction, but still waking up empty. We scroll but don’t connect. We sleep but don’t rest. We succeed, but don’t feel whole. Our days are so full, yet our hearts are vacant and aching.

Every limb is a tunnel into the soul. What we eat, what we see, what we hear, what we do, it all passes through to the soul. So when we binge on screens, consume empty words, chase validation, or force our bodies into punishing routines, we are not just harming our minds. We are bruising our souls.

The soul has a right to quiet. To beauty. To connection. To stillness. To remembrance. It has a right not to be overloaded with images, noise, anxiety, and pressure. Because the soul is the ultimate dream catcher, it catches everything we subject our minds and bodies to.

And we’ve forgotten that attention is worship. That what we give our gaze to shapes us. That which we allow into our ears seeps into our hearts. That the foods we eat affect not just our bodies, but also our clarity. That the hands we shake, the places we walk, and the things we type all flow into the soul.

Nothing is neutral.

So what happens when we ignore this?

We begin to feed our souls in the same way we fuel machines: with caffeine, content, and cortisol. But the soul was never meant to run like a machine. The soul needs something else entirely. It needs meaning. It needs rhythm. It needs beauty and connection and love and nature and poetry and prayer. It needs time to be, not just time to do.

The soul also needs to be tempered, trained, and refined.

When the soul is underfed, we begin to feel it on a spectrum.

It might start with low energy, short tempers, and foggy thoughts. Then comes the dread, even when nothing is wrong. The sadness even when everything looks right. The craving to disappear. The emptiness after achievement. The inability to feel joy in moments that used to be fulfilling. Eventually, even rest doesn’t restore us. Because what’s tired is not just the body, it’s the soul.

The Soul’s Quiet Reclamation

And yet, there’s hope. Because the soul is resilient, so imagine what would happen if we treated ourselves and all of creation as something sacred? As a trust? As a being to be invested in for the long term. Imagine if we stopped discounting our future selves for the sake of the present.

But to do that, we need to resist the anthem of modern existence. The pressure to try to outrun our minds, our bodies and our souls- as if such a thing were possible. But it’s not.

So, maybe we should stop running and start tearing down the false barriers that keep us trapped in the status quo. Remember, you built the life you have today; you can redirect it, reshape it, uproot it, mould it and change it. Everything in this life is temporary and temporal- none of it is as permanent and as fixed as we make it out to be.

One of my teachers once told me: “If you knew you were only going to stay in a hotel for the weekend, would you spend all your time and money redecorating it?”

Would you repaint the walls, replace the furniture, obsess over the curtains, and invest every ounce of your energy making that room perfect, knowing you’d be checking out in two days?

Of course not. It sounds absurd.

And yet, that’s exactly what so many of us do with this life.

We know it’s temporary. We know, deep down, that none of this is ours to keep. And still, we pour our lifeblood into curating the ideal lifestyle, chasing the perfect version of success, designing lives we’ll inevitably leave behind. We lose ourselves furnishing the hotel room, forgetting we’re just passing through.

What’s permanent, what will live on, is not the curated feed or the corner office or even the legacy brand. It’s the soul. And somehow, tragically, that is the one thing we so often forget to nurture.

So maybe today is your invitation to flip the script.

Stop furnishing the hotel room.

Start furnishing your soul.

What would change if you woke up each day with the perspective that your soul is the most permanent thing about you? That this life is not the destination, but the transit lounge?

How would you spend your time, your energy, your heart?

What would you stop obsessing over, and what would you finally start tending to?

My client is still in discernment. She may sell the business, or she may not. But now she sees her dream as valid, not as a retreat from ambition, but as a reclamation of life.

We are souls, housed in human bodies. Our lives are not defined by where we start, but by what we make sacred. And the soul? It’s asking us to make different things sacred again.

We can nourish our souls to be wolves forever on the hunt, tense, territorial, ready to conquer.

Or we can nourish our souls to be gardens, resilient to the different seasons of life, rooted, alive, generous in bloom.

The choice, as always, is ours.

Until next time. Take care of yourself and those around you.

In Partnership,

Nabeela

Want to learn more?

If you would like to learn more about the world's unhealthy relationship with work, success, and achievement and discover ways to escape the burnout loop, check out some of my other posts below: