Dr. Jen Clifden
Mental Health Researcher | Professional Educator | Burnout Preventionist
Serving Those Who Serve Others
{so they don't lose their light}
Hi. My name is Jen, and I am former public school teacher, mother, and burnout survivor turned professional burnout researcher, preventionist, and mental & self health advocate.
I serve individuals called to human-service work who seek to
UNDO BURNOUT by getting back to the roots of BURNING BALANCED
though their calling in:
Education | Public Health | Healthcare | Parenting
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17,000+
Hours of engagement
in The Light You Cast™
ON-DEMAND curriculum
"There's no doubt in my mind that we've had healthier educators working with our students, which really impacts the overall student experience, and also helps those employees."
- District Curriculum Director
Your calling is not supposed to harm you.
It is here to bring you into greater harmony with yourself.
Mental health and well-being begins with bringing you back into balance with the heart and soul of who you are and ends with maintaining boundaries that protect you no matter where you are.
The Light You Cast™
is professional development that is personal (on purpose).
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The light you cast -- your presence, your energy -- is your greatest instrument of impact. When your light is bright, it fills spaces with warmth, safety, and security. This light is the catalyst that allows you and those in your care to feel connection.
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The Light You Cast™ is a human-science curriculum designed to support you, a human-service professional, in nurturing, developing, and protecting your MENTAL HEALTH, WELL-BEING, and RELATIONAL HEALTH so you burn balanced; not out.
Stress is ubiquitous. Left unprotected or under-nurtured, your light can dim under extreme distress. The Light You Cast™ provides a strategic pathway of research-backed perspectives, soothing trauma-responsive movement practices, and easy-to-follow mental and self health exercises to support you in reading your stress signals, responding to your body's cues for rest, and building out your toolkit of mind-body-self MENTAL HEALTH strategies to bring your back to your center-point and inner safety when surrounded by stress.
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Burnout is complex.
The solution to soothing the symptoms must be simple and sustainable.
We start by creating space and providing strategic support in revitalizing and reinforcing your root system of mental, emotional, and self health strategies and practices.
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Viewed over 26,000 times​ by over 6,000 human service professionals looking for an interdisciplinary, mind-body-self approach to healing and mental, emotional, and physical health maintenance, The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND provides easy, immediate, and equitable access to content and movement-based experiences that draw on the body's natural drive to heal and be healthy, the power of the mind to expand perception, and the perseverance of the heart and soul to ensure that stress and pressure do not cause constriction in the body, dis-ease in the mind, or a contraction of self.
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Where to Start
Start with creating and holding SPACE.
Mental, emotional, physical, and self-health are innate conditions within each of us. Burnout is not an indicator that these internal conditions are lacking or that we are not resilient enough. Rather, unrelenting demands, unrealistic expectations, and lack of professional agency, respect, and validation suppress the expression of these innate health capacities. Burnout is a protective signal to let us know that our individual system is out of balance and out of touch with our inner resources of power. Burnout is not the primary problem; it is a protective symptom that point us in the direction to healing it.
The Light You Cast™ is a human-centered curriculum designed to create systemic and systematic space to provide targeted support for individuals to reclaim and revitalize one's innate mental, emotional, physical, and psychological/self-health, vitality, and power within the systems in which they are called to serve.
Wether you are an individual looking for immediate, self-paced mental health and stress management education and support or a leader within an organization looking to support your staff through customized and comprehensive mental health professional education and development experiences, there are many levels of support:
Self-Paced & Sustaining
Individual and Institutional
[ON-DEMAND, Online]
Introductory Options
within Institutions
[In-Person or Online]
Deeper, Multi-Session Work within Institutions
[In-Person or Online]
The entire (8) module (4.5 hour)
The Light You Cast™ curriculum fully online and self-paced can be licensed for just you, a cohort or team, or your entire organization/staff either on its own or to deepen and extend any in-person offerings.
Includes keynote, half-day, full day, mutli-day professional learning and support sessions, and/or in-person mindful movement/workplace yoga experiences for your entire organization or staff.
Includes more targeted, multi-session systematic development trainings for specific groups, roles, and cohorts, and for leaders looking to create systemic change to work contexts. Also includes a "train the trainer" course for site-sustained healing-centered Communities of Practice (CoPs).
"In the Spring of 2022, I almost left the profession. This training helped launch me into a healthier school year of setting firm boundaries that created more balance for me. It allowed me to fight for positive perspectives and an inner peace throughout my day-to-day."
School Counselor
the Burnout Prevention Collaborative
Burnout is not the problem; it is the symptom of a system that has become unrooted and disconnected from core human values that are vitally necessary for health and well-being:
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Reverence | Trust | Respect | Recognition | Agency | Validation
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We are called to respond to the burnout crisis in our systems of care by providing a system of support for our leaders that creates space for interdisciplinary solutions to surface that are based on compassion, balance, kinship, consensus, and reverence. We begin by coming together to connect, communicate needs, and align our missions of care through identifying communal strengths that help us revitalize the root system of our systems of care.
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The Light We Cast is potent.
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The Burnout Prevention Collaborative is designed to create space, support, and provide mental health and well-being resources that sooth the symptoms of burnout. We must collectively respond the burnout crisis in systematic ways that promote communal wellbeing, interdependence, and healing-centered care for our human-service professionals.
Coming in 2025
For me, healing from and preventing burnout and compassion fatigue is both professional and deeply personal.
Burnout does not discriminate; it occurs in any context (work-related or not) where one's capacity and (internal and external) resources to cope are out of balance with the stress and pressure coming one's way. I also learned that burnout is not the problem; it is a sophisticated, protective, trauma-response that the mind, body, and psyche/soul send as smoke signals to alert you to the fact that your system is being over taxed to the point of exhaustion. These were two unexpected discoveries of my doctoral research on how to heal from burnout and prevent it from even beginning in the first place.
As a former elementary reading interventionist and middle school reading teacher, I assumed that feeling burnt out, professionally, meant I was a good teacher. I had little to no awareness about the phenomenon of burnout, so I just assumed that I was the only one who was incapable of coping. Worse yet, I blamed myself and my high-sensitivity to stress and other people's emotions and moods as the reason for my inability to cope. For a long time, I thought I was wired wrong and that was the reason I felt overwhelmed, anxious, and burnt out as a teacher even though I loved what I did.
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Then reality forced me to face the depths of burnout to an extent I was definitely not prepared for. I became a mother to three infants in the span of 17 months.
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Burnout and compassion fatigue set in hard and fast as a mom. I had never felt a caregiving force like I felt caring for my children, so before I even knew what hit me, I was mothering from stage three burnout and coping with postpartum depression (PPD) while attempting to care for three infants. *See the 2024 Surgeon General's Advisory on Parents' Mental Health and Well-Being.
The unrelenting and chronic demands on me as a mother disabled my capacity to care for my three girls and myself. The chronic stress was frying my nervous system and clouding my capacity to think or see clearly.
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The most severe impact the chronic stress had was that it negatively impaired my ability to create healthy attachment bonds with my babies, and I fell into a self-neglect spiral that atrophied my relationship to myself. The more disconnected I felt from my very self, the less I could feel, sense, and respond to the needs of my kids. And the more I disconnect from myself, the more stress and anxiety grew exponentially. It was a vicious cycle that overtook my capacity to cope with calm, compassion, and clarity.
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Every day, I felt less and less like myself. The less I felt like myself, the more I felt guilt, shame, anxiety, and fear. Burnout was a sophisticated signal that let me know that my heart and soul was sore. I was no longer able to love or care about the things that mattered to me most. That was soul-crushing to see and sense.
Then one sunny morning at 7am (with no sleep the night before because twin babies don't always sleep at exactly the same time), I broke. All I had the energy to think was -- "There are only two ways out of this."
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That one thought was the most terrifying and freeing thought that ever crossed my mind.
