Being highly sensitive is often misunderstood, but as you know, it is my mission and my passion to help you embrace this gift and bring it into the world at your highest potential.
I believe highly sensitive people are coming into the world at a rapid pace right now because it’s what the world truly needs. We need more feelers and healers. We need more people that are gonna feel the collective unconscious and react to it and speak about it in a way that will facilitate positive change. At the moment, so many of us have grown up feeling totally misunderstood, and by feeling misunderstood, we have then misunderstood ourselves.
My mission and purpose for a lot of my videos are to help you not only understand yourself more but to help empower yourself to come into the world more in a bigger way. So, I’m going to answer some of the questions that you’ve emailed me about highly sensitive people. But I’m also going to offer some tips on how to have structure and boundaries and meet the needs of being highly sensitive so that we can live at our highest potential and thrive with this amazing aspect and characteristic of ourselves.
The first thing is understanding there’s nothing wrong with you, understanding that you’re highly sensitive and you experience life and situations with more intensity. You have a highly sensitive nervous system.
It’s interesting because most of the highly sensitive people I know or have worked with have very attuned intuition. We are attuned to the subtle sort of things – let’s say things because there are subtle aspects of other people who are attuned to the subtle eye movements. We’re attuned to lights flickering. We’re attuned to so many stimuli at once… so I can call it multidimensional.
I know this affected me in school a lot. I’ve mentioned it in my other videos where my clothes were uncomfortable, so I couldn’t focus, or the lights in the room where I’d hear the buzzing, or I see someone or feel someone’s emotion and not be able to block it or decipher it. So, we’re really highly attuned to things in our environment, people, and other people’s emotions.
I like to call it environmental sensitivity, energetically sensitive, and emotionally sensitive. Some of us have some of those, and a lot of us have all of those. The first thing to understand is there’s nothing wrong with you. You have a highly attuned nervous system. You are stimulated in a very strong way by a lot of things usually all at the same time.
A lot of emails come through asking me if highly sensitive people can be extroverts or if they’re just introverted and my answer is – both. But what I find for myself, I’m what I would say… extroverted introvert where I’m very social and I love connecting – it makes me feel alive, it makes me feel at one, but I need my super alone time and I need that every single day. I need daily alone time and I see that with almost every highly sensitive person I’ve ever worked with.
You need your highly sensitive alone time, I call it where a lot of us are until we learn that this is who we are and it’s a gift. We tend to shy away from the things we actually need. If you guys have watched a lot of my videos, you’ve seen me talk about this and this is why I actually designed “SOUL LAB”, my six-week course to empower the feelers and healers of the world.
We think our gift is a detriment and so we push away our authentic needs and a lot of those are the boundaries we need, the balance we need, such as alone time to rejuvenate to allow our bodies the time it needs to process and download all the information we’re getting from all the different sources at once. If we don’t do that we can feel scattered; we can feel overwhelmed; we can feel confused; we can feel foggy; we feel worried and emotional because it’s just so much stuff.
So, the first thing we need is alone time to process. If you need processing and help to process your emotions, check out my workbook, Spiritual Fitness which is about mastering your emotion. We need this balance in our environment, but one of the biggest ways to accomplish both is our alone time.
The second thing that changes the lives of every highly sensitive person I talk to or work with is starting a dialogue with my emotional self. So many highly sensitive people think that we are our emotions because they feel so strong and they’re super overwhelming at times, but when we start an almost daily dialogue with our own emotion, we start to see that our emotion is not us but has a message for us. And we can start to master it and train it and parent what we’re feeling and create boundaries around what we’re feeling.
Yes, our emotions need to be validated and they need to be acknowledged, but they don’t need to be given all the power that they sometimes take from us. Instead, we can use it as super insight and see that this is what’s happening on a far smaller scale, but we get to experience it on a bigger scale so that we can process it and come to new insights about what people might be feeling and what we feel ourselves because we feel it more so that’s where the feeling it to heal it comes in.
The other thing I want to mention that a lot of people don’t talk about is food – our food and what we eat can really affect how we process. So, really for me, I get tuned in to where I’m at emotionally and I cater my diet per day towards that. Do I need more of this or less of that? Really cater to your body and your needs.
Another thing that highly sensitive people can benefit from extremely is journaling. I’ve been journaling since I was 7 years old on the regular. But I noticed a year ago, I started journaling on my computer. I thought it’d be cool to log things online, to not worry about where my journals are because I have a million at this point and I lost something in that.
So, this is personal, take it or leave it, but when I put my hand to the paper, I feel a mind-body connection that’s different than the computer. I feel the flow. I feel a depth and I feel an ability to clear far greater than I do with my computer. Something to think about. Also, if you’re not journaling and you’re just writing to have an emotional release, make sure you burn it or tear it up and get rid of it to really release it because energetically it still is something we feel if we don’t fully release it. Allow yourself to fully release.
Another life-changing thing for highly sensitive people is connecting with other highly sensitive people. I get this email all the time asking me if I have to be in a relationship with another highly sensitive person. Is that good or is that bad? And this is what I say. It’s personal, but from my experience, I find it to be very successful to be in a relationship with someone that has sensitivity but is not highly sensitive. And for me that works, because if there are too many highly sensitive people, things get too overwhelming and it’s not very grounding. What I found is being in a relationship that can hold my kite string and be my rock in the world allows me to fly into my spiritual zone and anchor my spirituality in the world. So, for me, it helps to have a partner that’s a little bit of both.
Another really important thing is your home life and your environment to make sure you’re clearing. I have sage around me when I coach all day long literally to bring darkness into the light, to clear whatever’s happening, to clear your own emotional space, to Sage to Palo Santo, to do whatever regular clearings in your space to create a home within your body.
HSPs need to feel secure and safe and when we can do the things that I just mentioned and feel safe from it within our own emotions, safe within our own body… what we’re eating, what we’re wearing, what we’re doing, we can also feel safe with whose energy you let in and let out. A lot of highly sensitive people email me daily asking me how I do this.
How do I feel balanced in an environment with a lot of people, a lot of people who aren’t in tune with their emotions, a lot of people who aren’t highly sensitive, how do I do it? And I say, have boundaries about how much time you spend there and have boundaries around what you need when you’re there.
Do you put a white bubble of light around you? Do you say a prayer before you walk in? I have a friend that constantly clears as well… she’s in a big group space. So, you’re constantly doing your light work around big groups of people. I find that a lot of highly sensitive people don’t find it fun to be at bars or big parties on a regular basis and instead your fun is more purpose-driven and more deeply connected.
Having deep talks with friends who get it or like you having deep talks with friends that don’t get it to kind of inform them around that part of themselves that could go deeper. This is what highly sensitive people love doing. We love being philosophical, deep meditative yoga… these are the things we love a lot of the time. It’s knowing yourself and honoring those parts of yourself.
So, continue to email me your questions and comments. I’ll be sure to add them in my next video.
Namaste.
