Reflections by Michael Overstreet
How can we reconcile our ideals of ambition and determination with those of self-compassion and mindfulness? How can we teach ourselves to balance “inner work,” managing our emotions and nervous systems, with the “outer work” of navigating professional spheres?
These questions were the bedrock of the Contemplative Sciences Center final Research Salon of 2025. On December 11, Lili Powell led the Salon to introduce us to her active book project. Lili is an associate professor in UVA’s School of Nursing and Darden School of Business and the director of UVA’s Compassionate Care Initiative. By connecting wisdom traditions with evidence-based research, Lili’s book project pursues research in “achieving a balance between holding space for both grit and grace in our lives.”
In the work-centered culture of the United States, we often have trouble “taking our foot off the gas pedal.” Ambition, perseverance, and resilience are the values we tend to celebrate most—in our personal relationships and communities as well as in the workplace. This constant focusing on hyperstimulation, effort, and what Lili refers to as “grit,” inevitably leads to a weakening of one’s relationship to their overall goals, or, in other terms, alienation, burnout, and “depersonalization.”
At the same time, focusing on the softer side of the coin—on calmness, compassion, and care—often receives a certain stigma in high-pressure workplaces such as executive leadership or nursing. One member of the Salon shared a piece of stark wisdom he’d come by, that, in the modern western world, empathy can be the enemy of success. Telling someone to focus more on self-compassion than on their ambitions or determination is, of course, an extreme in the other direction. An extreme that risks, for Lili, leading to a hypo-aroused state or crisis of inertia.
Lili’s dyad of grit and grace is a pedagogical model she proposes for students entering the workforce. While she noted that her work has focused specifically on nursing students in the past, this wisdom can make a difference for anyone who has a hard time balancing their professional demands with their wellbeing. Foregrounding this dialectic of relating to pressures in the workplace enables us to foster composure and stay grounded in what Lili calls modern society’s “hedonic treadmill”: a generalized obsession with production and celebrating Type A ways of being. To accomplish this grounding, rather than focusing on the virtues of staying true to one of grit or grace, ambition or rest—exclusively—Lili suggests we think more in terms of a mediating “zone of resilience.”
This “zone” is not static but fluid, manifesting much like a sine wave: an oscillation that constantly negotiates between hyper- and hypo-stimulated states to avoid being overly impacted by either. This pattern is the way Lili would like us to conceive of our relationship toward work. Namely, by reclaiming our relationship to it in a positive, wellbeing-centered paradigm, we may be able to achieve a healthier, more sustainable lifestyle. For Lili, yogic and ayurvedic schools articulate this oscillatory zone in a similar, albeit more embodied light. Both prana and apana are vital forces to fostering wellbeing in our lives. Prana is inhalation; it connotes expansion, a fanning of the flames, and climbing upward. Apana is exhalation; it involves contraction, releasement, and grounding. Much like the seasons of the year ask us to prepare for changes in light and temperature, Lili’s dialectic of grit and grace asks that we cultivate equanimity in the cycle inherent to our individual lives between acceleration and rest.
An example Lili gave from her work in the nursing school is the teaching of “the pause,” a practice of health care workers holding a silent moment of reflection after the death of a patient. When healthcare workers become overwhelmed—emotionally, cerebrally, or physically—especially following a death, the benefits that come from momentarily taking themselves out of their high-speed days have been found to be both physiologically and psychologically significant. The spirit of the pause can perhaps be taken as a general teaching for navigating high-stress work environments: slowing down from time to time to give honor to our being involved within each others’ lives can be a way to foster collective wellbeing in times that at first glance seem to only solicit individual resilience. This helps explain why nurses are now so often encouraged to lean on their co-workers for help, to cover for them if they need to take a breath and reset. In discussing this point, a Salon participant evoked a teaching of Thich Nat Han. If you pour a cup of salt into a pot of tea, there will always be a parching of our system. But if one expands and enlarges the source of tea, the salt becomes incidental, insignificant in the larger liquid body. By consciously honoring our involvement in each others’ lives—past, present, and future—the pause allows one’s reservoir to expand. A cup of salt in a running river isn’t a crisis; it’s just part of the flow of the stream’s direction.
To bring mindfulness into our relationship with work, then, isn’t asking that we turn off our engines—far from it. Lili reminds us that it’s a way of returning to the heart of the matter. Having a mindful relationship to our professional lives asks that we bring our engines and ambitions into close conversation with our bodies. The more we tap into life’s cyclicity—breathwork, seasonality, regrowth, and decay—the more we can begin living in harmony with not only ourselves, but with the greater forces we are part of.