Reflect, Realign, Renew: Manage stress and keep burnout away

Through ‘Reflect, Realign, Renew: Manage stress and keep burnout away’  we hope to help learners conceptually and experientially understand stress and burnout, and locate their unique causes of stress at the individual, institutional and systemic levels. The course helps the learner understand how one’s Gender, Sexuality and other identities can influence stress and burnout, because understanding that each person experiences stress in unique ways will help the learner broaden their perspective of stress and its implications. The course looks at stress not just as an individual concern, but also as a result of the institutions and systems one is a part of. It highlights issues of stress and burnout among people doing people work, whether paid or unpaid, such as caregiving, counselling and activism. 

The course presents various techniques and tools that are simple and applicable in learners’ self-care and collective care practices. At the end of the course learners will also be able to create or renew their menu of practices to nurture their Wellbeing. 

The course encourages learners to understand related concepts, reflect on their thoughts, and create their menu of practices through:

The course is expected to take learners 3 to 3.5 hours to complete (excluding the worksheets).

This course is not a substitute for therapy or further help that one may require.

• Understanding what stress is and its causes and impact; and how each of us experience stressors and stress differently     
• Learning what burnout is, how it is caused, and how it affects our day-to-day life, especially if we do ‘people work’ 
• Understanding the terms ‘self-care’ and ‘collective care’ and their importance in managing stress and preventing burnout
• Designing a personalised menu of practices or an action plan to manage or reduce stress, prevent burnout, and further wellbeing

This new online course from TARSHI takes forward our 25 years of experience in stress management and burnout prevention towards nurturing safe, inclusive, and self-affirming spaces. 

Stress management and burnout prevention have been an integral part of TARSHI’s work since our inception as a helpline offering information, counselling and referrals on issues related to sexuality. In TARSHI’s many years of work in this area, we know that stress, burnout and wellbeing are important topics that usually take a back seat with activists, case workers and members of marginalised communities. This led us to take this work to organisations working on issues of women’s health and rights, those who are from communities marginalised due to their gender and/or sexual identities and expression, and other aspects of sexuality. We have also engaged organisations that involve people work of different kinds, such as with refugees.

In 2020, TARSHI launched the website Self-care Essentials, a curation of resources and ideas on self-care, stress management and burnout prevention. It is based on our work in this area, the experiences of TARSHI members over the years, but most importantly, based on the experiences shared by participants of our workshops on sexuality as well as on stress management and burnout prevention.

This course was possible due to the effort of many people, especially Nalini Sharma, Ramya Anand, and Vani Viswanathan from TARSHI, and Vinita Saxena from Slow Made India. We thank Prabha Nagaraja from TARSHI for her enthusiasm, ideation, and reviews at all stages, and thank Anjali Hans for her tireless reviewing and making the language of the course simple and Accessible.

We thank the TARSHI team for their time and patience in testing the course and providing feedback and observations.

We finally thank Amplify Change for their funds, which made this course possible.

Your use of this site and the course, including copyright of all content in this course, is subject to these terms and conditions. Please also read the privacy policy to understand what information we collect and how it will be used. 

We request learners not to share the content of the course with others; if you find the course useful, we would be grateful if you could send a link to it to those you think would benefit from it, so that they can register and enjoy the complete course content.