I was once told that it wasn't important if I understood my dreams. What was important was that the dreams understood me. My attitude toward my dreams would determine their attitude toward me. It's a living dialogue. When we listen to dreams, we change, and when dreams are heard, they change.
I came across this quote from Fraser Boa's book The Way of the Dream and it resonates with me deeply. Dreams can be hard to interpret, and they all have multiple meanings. But just like listening to a person deeply shows our interest in them, listening to our dreams, exploring what they might mean shows our dreams that we are interested in them. We change because we are paying attention to the subtle. They change because we are paying attention to them and they are being heard.
In her wonderfully evocative and imaginative book, What It Is, the multi-talented Lynda Barry maps her own journey as a creative person using drawings and words. She tells us things about her own explorations. She asks us questions about our own journey.
On a page brimming with her drawings -- a little girl crying near the fire with a mouse looking at her, a bear scratching its way out of the page and patterns of birds on branches -- she tells us about the child that she once was.
"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together, you get a fairy tale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it."
A kind of story with hopelessness. A story that points to where you are in its unfolding. A story that has been played out before and that is spreading its wings in your own life right now.
Barry tells us how immensely helpful this can be, how recognizing the myths we are living can help us transform our feelings.
"They can't transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable."
We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality. We create it to be able to stay. I love that she says this, that imagination can be used not as an escape, but as a way to engage with reality, a way to be in reality without going mad. When we give up our connection to a larger story, when we give up our imagination and just bow down to the clunky reality and rationality, we are crumbling our soul.
We forget that we bring our own way of looking to the experience. We can think of ourselves as bobbing away helplessly in a sea of experiences or we can bring our own meaning, our own imagination into them and make them liveable.
Without the essence of the meaning, without the spark that our imagination gives them, our experiences are meaningless, random things happening to us.
Of course, sometimes we can use our imagination to our detriment. We can become ungrounded. But what Barry is telling us is the positive use of imagination. It gives the golden thread to our life. We don't throw ourselves on the rocks of so-called reality that can sometimes be hard and cold.
We have this instinct to spin stories and meanings right from the time we are little.
Think about a child reading books that makes them cry, Barry tells us. Think about what these stories mean. They tell the little child about who he or she is. They hold up a mirror. Something in them connects to their essence. They provide a shelter for their growing self. Remember how as children we curled inside our stories for comfort?
What would happen to this child if they couldn't imagine, couldn't find their place in the story?
"It seems that human beings everywhere understand that a child who is never allowed to play will eventually go mad. But how do we know this? And why do we know this? And what happens when we forget?"
What happens when we forget?
We do forget as we grow up. Maybe, we give up our playing, our pretending, our imagining ourselves into our stories because we think that that is what grown ups do. But maybe we need to make up our own stories, look for stories that seem like our own and settle down in them to be really comfortable with reality.
We need this to connect to something bigger when things are hard. We need this to steer clear of the harsh edges of things that don't make sense. Our stories lead our way forward through dangerous terrains. They tell us that our answers are made inside of us. We can't find them outside.
What would happen if you again became friends with your imagination? That is what I am trying to imagine. Maybe things will again seem softer, more fluid. Maybe things again will have a shine in them, a reason for their happening, a reason for our going through them. Maybe, the wild imagination that looks "unreasonable" to others is exactly what clears the way for walking on solid ground.
In Julia Cameron's lovely book Walking in This World, I recently re-read something about worry and negative imagination that stood out to me. If you are a sensitive person who worries a lot and finds themselves tripping over unruly fears, then this might resonate with you too.
Julia begins by telling us that we need working definitions for the mishmash of fears, anxieties and doubts that ail us. Only when we know what exactly we are dealing with can we start to work through it.
This is what Julia says about worry:
"Worry has an anxious and unfocused quality. It skitters subject to subject, fixating first on one thing, then on another. Like a noisy vacuum cleaner, its chief function is to distract us from what we really are afraid of. "
Its chief function is to distract us from what we are really afraid of. Even though it leaches all the fluidity and joy out of our lives, worry serves as a distraction. It leads our eyes away from our spaces of deep discomfort.
How is worry different from fear?
"Fear is not obsessive like worry and not escalating like panic. Fear is more reality based. It asks us to check something out. Unpleasant as it is, fear is our ally. Ignore it and the fear escalates. A sense of loneliness joins its clamor. At its root, fear is based in a sense of isolation. We feel like David facing Goliath with no help from his cronies and a concern that this time, his trusty slingshot might not work."
Fear is healthy when it points to something that needs to be turned over, needs to be double-checked. But fear is also amorphous. We add to the drama when we let the fear fester. We don't pay attention to the kernel of true concern, and our fear becomes the monster that scares us.
Unlike fear, worry is obsessive. It's a thought we pick up and smoke at. Today, we are worried about this one thing. Tomorrow, it is something else. We are hooked into this way of behaving. We might have little trust in the world around us. Maybe, we suffered from trauma at an earlier time and now worrying is our way of projecting into the future, trying to control it from hurting us.
When we worry, what are are effectively doing is channel our creative energies into something that is not constructive. This is what Julia has to stay about an imagination that has gone haywire.
"The more active--and even more negative--your imagination is, the more it is a sign of creative energy. Think of yourself as a racehorse--all that agitated animation as you prance from paddock to track bodes well for your ability to actually run.
In both my teaching and collaborative experience, I have often found that the most "fearful" and "neurotic" people are actually those with the best imaginations. They have simply channeled their imaginations down the routes of their cultural conditioning."
Culturally, we are trained to worry about certain things. We are trained to prepare for any negative possibility. And we might have had experiences that cause us to always be on the defensive, that cause us to worry. But worrying about what can't be controlled obviously doesn't help us. It just casts a film on our experience. It muddies our world today.
As someone who is prone to worrying, I know how insidious worry is, how it curls and hisses around you. It comes cloaked in reasonableness. It takes our energy and warps it into something that doesn't serve us.
We could take that energy and start doing something with it actively. We could start channeling it by moving it from our bodies. We could distract ourselves by gardening or going for a walk or making something. We can see that the same imagination that brings us our gloom and doom predictions can be channeled so it becomes full and free.
We can start seeing that worry really is, as Julia calls it, "imagination's negative stepsister." If that is the case, we are just a few steps away from dealing with it. We can have our arsenal of tools ready - our paints or our walking shoes or our camera. We can choose what we do with our attention and our imagination.
What do you think? What are your tools for dealing with negative imagination? How can you step away from worry and into the expansive possibilities on the other side?
As a recovering perfectionist and also as an HSP, I don't like making mistakes. Deciding is a long-winded, arduous process. Like everyone, I have my share of regrets about paths not taken, about all the times when I made decisions that caused my life to contract.
And so, decision-making feels like a process fraught with challenges. It feels heavy.
There are so many options that I often spend my frenetic energy trying to make the "best" decision.
Today, while driving to the library, I heard a conversation that puts this dilemma into perspective. The program that was on talked about whether parents should send their child to a private school that was expensive or whether they should opt for public school.
The private school might or might not contribute to the child's future. Should the parents try to get the best that money can buy for their child? Should they stretch and go for the private school? Should they consider the cost and opt for the public school?
This is the kind of decision that involves many factors. There are no simple answers.
How do we make such decisions?
The financial adviser said something that struck me as approaching decision-making from a different psychological space. Don't decide based on what might happen in the future, he said. Decide based on what the situation is right now. Then, you will have the assurance that you made the best decision that you could.
Don't decide based on what might happen in the future.
What an interesting way of approaching this process. As someone who splits hair while making decisions, trying to factor in each and every thing that might happen (which in reality might or might not), this approach seemed so honoring of the present truth to me.
The future is unpredictable. If we try to reach too far into the future, and try to factor in what really is ambiguous right now, we can paralyze ourselves. Accepting that the future is unpredictable and deciding based on our situation now means that we make the best decision that we can right now.
What is the best thing to do based on the situation right now. This idea struck me as so different from what I normally do, and it gives me a different way of deciding. I want to experiment with this.
What do you think? Is this something that makes sense to you?
At the beginning of this year, I slipped through the fissures of my changing life and into my dream world. I have always had vivid dreams, especially at times of major changes. When I shifted from India to the States a few years back, my dreams were filled with symbolic images. One of them was of weddings taking place. While I was newly-married myself, these images continued to appear over the next three years. This was a time of change for me, a time when different parts of my psyche were coming together and something new was coming into being.
Then, in the course of the last year and a half, I stumbled upon Dream Work, the process of paying attention to our dreams and working to understand their deeper meaning. An essay that I was writing at that time led me deeper into Carl Jung's work. There they were again -- dreams and their meanings.
Dreams are extremely important in Jungian psychology. They are the gateway to the unconscious, a space that contains not just our repressed aspects but also the underlying matrix of what it means to be human. It is from this space that sparks of creativity shoot up. The image that comes to my mind is of a deep, dark well. You can't see what's down below. But when you draw the rope and send a bucket down its depths, you can hear the splash of water. When you pull the bucket up, you have something that nourishes you. You still can't map out the depths that lie below, but you have an idea of what they contain.
One of the dream images that has appeared in my dreams are houses. They look like they are either breaking down or are in the process of being constructed. We could all hazard a guess at what this means. The metaphor is clear. Something new is being built in the psyche. Some new change is afoot.
Recently, I came across an article by Thomas Moore in the July/Aug issue of Spirituality & Health magazine that instantly interested me because Moore was talking about houses in dreams. Moore is a psychotherapist who is best know for his wonderful book Care of the Soul, and he practices depth psychotherapy that is largely centered on dreams. This means that he knows a lot about them!
Moore talks of the symbolic meaning of houses under construction in both his own dreams and those of his clients.
"I remember a dream I had in my late thirties. I was walking through a house in the early stages of construction. I had to be careful because it was so unfinished and fragile. I remember walking on a bouncy two-by-four and knew I could easily fall and get hurt. This was an intense period in my life. I had just been denied tenure at the university where I had hoped to spend my life teaching. I wasn't sure where to go from there and was trying to become a good psychotherapist. I had had considerable training for this work, but it's the kind of profession where the necessary skills are personal. You may have to go through several emotional trials and deep changes to be good at it. It was at this point that I had my house-under-construction dream."
He tells us that it is helpful to know when something in us is being built.
"You can then better understand the unusual feelings of being incomplete and going through unintended changes. You may feel your world shifting and not yet ready for projects and developments in your life. You may need to prepare for the arrival of a relatively new self."
He talks of the specific meaning inherent in images of houses as compared to other images that depict change.
"In similar situations you may have dreams that have general feeling of change: waiting for a train to depart or a plane to take off. But these images are quite different. Construction is the specific condition of something being built. You're not on a journey; you're being remodeled or fabricated."
Moore talks of how writers on the soul often quote John Keats who said: "Call the world, if you please, "the vale of soul-making."
"The word is "make," rather than "journey" or "discover." It's in the spirit of Keats to say that our souls are constructed, like a house being built. Piece by piece, nail by nail, the structure of our being goes up and makes a space in which our lives can play out and find meaning."
We need to have patience during this process. We are under construction. We have to wait to see what's being built. In Moore's dream of the two-by-four, that construction was ongoing. Some things were ending, while a new structure was being created from the ground up. He says that naturally, like any other person, he was more aware of the endings than the beginnings.
What getting intimate with the inner recesses of our psyches gives us is an understanding of where we are in the process. We realize that these are tender times. These are times when we have to let the forces that are working in us build us. We can be idle for a while "so the crew can do its work." The creative force is moving through us and creating a shape and a form.
We might feel fragile during these times, but as Moore tells us, this is also a period full of promise and hope. The new is opening up like petals. We are alive, humming with life. We might feel incomplete, but our full possibilities are being drawn out.
Engaging with our dreams can give us this awareness of our psyches. We are starting to listen to the language of symbols and images, and in turn, it is giving us signs and guideposts to tell us where we are and where we are headed.
Does working with dreams interest you? You can start engaging with your dreams by keeping a diary beside your bedside and writing down the dreams as soon as you wake up. Even minutes after waking up, dreams tend to disappear into thin air, so writing them down as soon as possible is essential.
I read Elizabeth Gilbert's book on the creative process, Big Magic, yesterday. She writes simply and directly, but sparks shoot up at certain points. There is a lightning-quick energy in the book, the energy that belongs to the author and that magically dissolves in the gooey innards of the book.
The book is like a shaking-up of all the used, rusted beliefs that we might be carrying as creative people. It asks us to lighten up. It talks about how "creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred." It tells us that "what we make matters enormously, and it doesn't matter at all." It tells us to lighten up and to ride the magical steed of creativity, to surrender to its will, to understand that starting a conversation with our creativity has no guarantees except the full aliveness it brings to our lives.
Gilbert tells us her own unique perspective on that age-old struggle of the artiste: feeling that he or she is just making the same things that have always been made.
"Maybe you fear that you are not original enough. Maybe that's the problem--you're worried that your ideas are commonplace and pedestrian, and therefore unworthy of creation. Aspiring writers will often tell me, "I have an idea, but I'm afraid it's already been done."
She goes on to say: "Well, yes, it probably has already been done. Most things have already been done--but they have not yet been done by you.
By the time Shakespeare was finished with his run on life, he'd pretty much covered every story line there is, but that hasn't stopped nearly five centuries of writers from exploring the same story lines all over again. (And remember, many of those stories were already cliches long before even Shakespeare got his hands on them.) When Picasso saw the ancient cave paintings at Lascaux, he reportedly said, "We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years"--which is probably true, but so what?"
I remember reading this quote by Picasso a long time back, and at that time it had struck me as sad and as if there was nothing left in the world to do. I was a child then who had barely started a conversation with her creativity, and something in the quote had shut me down. Over the years, I think I have often made this excuse to stop myself from wading in the mud to get to the lotus.
Yes, everything has been done before. Most things, in countless fields, have been done already. But what does that mean if you are a creative person? Elizabeth gives us her answer:
"So what if we repeat the same themes? So what if we circle around the same ideas, again and again, generation after generation? So what if every new generation feels the same urges and asks the same questions that human beings have been feeling and asking for years? We're all related, after all, so there's going to be some repetition of creative instinct. Everything reminds us of something. But once you put your own expression and passion behind an idea, that idea becomes yours."
She goes on to say that authenticity impresses her much more than originality as she gets older.
"Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share. If it's authentic enough, believe me--it will feel original."
So, if you want to make something, make it. If you want to try your hand at something new, whether it is creative with a capital C or a creative expression that feeds the rest of your life, do it. Maybe you want to do something silly or something that others might consider silly. A silly thing I did some months ago was buy an adult coloring book and color away. Someone made an off-hand comment about it when I shared it. Well actually it was more like an off-hand, non-understanding "I don't get this" look and complete non-interest. Although I continued coloring after that for some time, something in me seemed to curl around this look and loosened its grip on this creative, playful activity.
I dropped it. I abandoned it. It looked silly, but it was far from silly. It was one of the most heart-nourishing activities I have ever done. In the months previously, my heart had felt curdled. I think it was the creative child in me that was out of sorts. It had checked out. But with the coloring book, I had tools that this little child could play in. It delighted in the choosing of the colors. It knew there was nothing to achieve, just an engagement with the colors blooming on the page. My mind slowed down. In fact, it retreated to the back and stopped its incessant chatter almost as soon as I started coloring.
For those few weeks, I had a tool to quiet my automatic mind, to drop down from it into my heart. I felt like I was pouring the colors back into my own heart. And yet, I gave it up because of a look.
We give up such important things because someone else doesn't understand. But I will pick up my coloring book again and color in my lovely mandalas. I have found something, however small, that nourishes my being. It bypasses my mind and goes to my essence, the artiste who loves to play with colors, who likes making lines on the page, who feels like this little task is stringing up the pieces of disjointed time and making it flow smoothly again.
Why would I give up something that makes me feel alive? Why would you?
Sometime last year, I was lucky enough to attend a concert by Steven Halpern, a Grammy-nominated musician who is considered to be one of the founding fathers of New Age music. It was the first time that I was introduced to brainwave entrainment music - music that alters brainwave frequencies, which results in an altered state of consciousness.
The state of consciousness that this music induced was the Alpha State.
So, what exactly is this state, and why is it helpful? Specific brain waves occur for specific states of consciousness and specific activities. For example: Beta brain waves are associated with normal waking consciousness and a state of high alertness, logic and critical reasoning. Beta brainwaves are associated with processes that help us function in our day-to-day lives. But on the flip side, always being in the Beta state means stress and anxiety.
Alpha brain waves are the waves associated with a state of deep relaxation. Think back to a time when you were daydreaming. How did you feel then? When we are in the Alpha state, we are in a state of deep relaxation. Our imagination, creative abilities and ability to visualize are heightened. This is the state in which intuition becomes accessible. Instead of the constant churning of the mind, we have access to a deeper state of being. We feel connected to ourselves. We feel connected to a well of deep wisdom that is inaccessible to our automatic mind.
The wonderful news is that just listening to certain sounds and music can put you in the Alpha state. You have an escape hatch from your overactive mind, into a space that you probably remember from an earlier time in your life when daydreaming and the imagination were your friends. Now, you might be caught in the Beta state, like many of us.
In Beta, we are cut off from our intuition. We are cut off from the flow that gives us a sense of connection to something that is bigger than us.
I have started listening to brainwave entrainment music again. It is the best part of my week. I feel images swirling, coming up. I feel like my tightfisted mind relaxing its grip. There is imagination in Alpha. There is a space that feels part of the whole, connected and not fragmented.
If you would like to try this, and I hope you do, then Steven Halpern's Deep Alpha is a lovely album to start with. I hope it connects you to the stars and the moon and the many colors that live beneath the rubble of our conscious minds.
An interesting thing has happened from the time I started using the word empath in my writing. It's a word that I had resisted identifying with, and yet, it describes some core aspects of my sensitivity. Or rather, the core aspect, the ability to experience other people's feelings as if they were my own.
Almost instantly, as I claimed the word empath, it felt like numb spaces in my life awoke. Watching T.V., I felt pain shoot up as someone fell off a building. It was as if the debris that had fallen on my sensitivity or maybe the clutter I had buried it under was again free to roam around.
While reading other people's posts on empath forums some months back, I had congratulated myself that I didn't feel like that any longer. I didn't feel so drowned in other people's feelings. I didn't feel the physical sensations of someone else's pain. But as I am wiping the dirt off my own perception, I am feeling like I was congratulating myself for the wrong thing, for numbing out and becoming denser.
I do want to have strong boundaries. I also want to have more sensitivity, instead of pushing it aside.
I have an image of plaster cracking come up.
I have also been remembering things from long ago. When I was a child, in the lane leading up to my grandparents' house in a village in India, there used to lie a drunk man on the kind of wooden cart that is used to cart groceries around in that part of the world. He was never scary. I was never afraid of him.
It seemed like he was so washed over with all the things around him that the only way he could live was by numbing himself out. I don't know whether he was an empath or not. But I had a feeling that he was a good man, someone who felt the world around him.
And that feeling of the world toppling on top of you - of drowning in its pain and sorrows -- that might be the terrible space in which you can fall if you feel so much. So, sometimes, we construct our dams and numb ourselves so at least we wouldn't dissolve in this too much feeling.
We cope in so many ways. I have coped in so many ways. Being less me, being more like others, being overwhelmed and not doing even the little that I could do.
But on this tricky path of empathy - of feeling too much or adopting numbness - there must be a bend in the road that we are all walking towards. Will I fall? Will you fall? Will we find new ways? Will we get lost for a long time? Will we find the harmony and balance we are looking for?
In Penney Peirce's' book The Intuitive Way, there is a section called "The Language of the Body." The body is constantly talking to us, but we've been so schooled in the language of the mind that we don't know how to listen to it. We ride rough-shod over what our body is trying to tell us, and instead vote in favor of our mind. Or at least, I do.
But the body's wisdom has always been there for me, even though I have often chosen to ignore it. It's been there for you too, even though you might not have recognized it as wisdom.
Penney talks about the unfailing messages that our body gives us: "The body's language is a binary one -- yes and no. You will recognize these messages through feelings of expansion and contraction in your body. When a choice or action is appropriate, safe, and on-target for you, you will experience expanding energy: you may sense energy rising and become active or bouncy. Perhaps you'll warm to an idea, get lightheaded, or feel flushed with enthusiasm. Have you ever had the hots for someone, or had butterflies of anticipation, or been up for a new adventure? Have you ever said, "I'm leaning toward this option? The body's yes often feels like health and vitality, even good luck: "I'm rarin' to go; let me at it!"
Most often, Penney says, we recognize our personal truth by a feeling of deep comfort.
But what happens when something is not right for you? The body's No is as distinct and recognizable as its Yes. "In fact, most people are more aware of their anxiety signal than their truth signal. When an option or action is unsafe, inappropriate, or off-target for you, you will experience contracting energy: you may feel energy drop, recoil, darken, or tighten. Maybe you'll act coolly, even coldly, to someone or feel a sinking in the pit of your stomach."
Learning to tune in to whether the body constricts or expands is a direct way to know whether something is right for us. The mind takes us around in circles but the body focuses in on our only choice. Is it a Yes or a No?
Penney talks about the different ways in which our Truth and Anxiety signals can show up. When something is right for you, you may feel a warm, spreading sensation across your chest. You may feel tears of happiness. You might sense that things are falling in place - a series of "clicks and clunks" as if something is coming together. Another common truth signal is the sudden movement of energy up the spine or along the arms and shoulders, giving the sensation of chills or goose-flesh.
What are the common Anxiety signals? It might be that your energy level drops. You may feel pain in a certain part of your body. Common anxiety signals are a stomachache or nausea, a "pain in the neck," chest pain, or headaches. You might feel the hair rising along your upper spine and neck.
Listening to your body's signals is a way to discover what is on-purpose, right and true for you.
For me, I think listening to Truth signals is as important as listening to Anxiety signals. While anxiety signals are valuable, sometimes they can be tricky because our fear might be creating them. We have to dig a little deeper to see what they are all about.
But Truth signals are unadulterated in the sense that they point directly to what feels right, expansive and authentic. Whether it is something big or small, it would be worthwhile following our Truth signals. Like a lotus opening, we are becoming larger and unfolding what has till now remained dormant within us.
What are your Truth and Anxiety signals? Have you noticed them recently?
When we think about big questions like Who am I? or What is my purpose, something from our innermost recesses is calling out. We can start figuring out the answers to these questions by exploring our archetypes, those patterns of thoughts and images that are universally present in our individual psyches. I resonate with The Artiste/Creative archetype apart from some others. What's interesting is that there was a time when the word artiste felt like something I did not want to identify with.
There were too many myths about bohemian artistes or starving artistes that made me feel uncomfortable with the idea of calling myself an artiste. But as I have grown older, I have seen that I was rejecting myself because I did not have a real idea of what my own artistic self would look like. There were no real models, and I did not have enough faith in my then brittle self to go and find my real self.
I have been dipping through the book Archetypes by Caroline Myss in which she talks about the different archetypes that are rising in us. She talks about their gifts, their challenges, the myths that hold us back from realizing our true selves, the traps we can fall into, and the true nature of our individual power. We could be The Intellectual, The Rebel, The Spiritual Seeker, The Caregiver or The Athlete, but if we don't confront our own specific questions, we won't make our way forward.
For the Artiste, the unique challenge is to overcome the fear of not being original. This is something I find myself struggling with again and again, how to let myself practice enough so that I can become truly original, how to not feel dejected because I can only see the things that need to be corrected and not the level of skill I already have.
Being aware of our main challenge, the question that comes up for us again and again can help us understand who we are, what we value and what we are really aspiring to. It can help us see that the patterns in our being resonates with a universal, yet specific pattern. Not all of us are The Athlete. Not all of us are The Caregiver. We all have unique questions and challenges that people like us - other athletes, other caregivers, other seekers - have grappled with. Just understanding where we belong can help us understand and frame our own experiences.
If you a Creative/Artiste like me, this story that Myss tells will resonate with you, like it resonated with me:
"A woman once told me, "I need to go away and find my Self." I knew when she said it that she didn't mean "find myself ," but "my Self," with a capital S. She had awakened to her inner nature, to that part of her that was more than her personality, more than her daily routines. She had discovered the inner voice that is separate from the ordinary self that organized her life by rules and expectations."
I asked her, "What do you think you'll find on this quest for your inner Self?"
"I have always wanted to be an artist," she said. "I know I am an artist. I have never given my Self a chance to do my art because I told "myself" that no one took me seriously, so how could I take me seriously? But I feel as if I am living a false life, a lie. I can't stand it anymore. I don't care if I starve. I would rather live a hungry authentic life than an abundant lie."
In meeting her Self, this woman had encountered her Artist archetype. She could no longer continue to live a life blaming others for her choice not to fulfill her archetypal destiny."
I can understand this woman's hunger for her true life. I can also understand why it might have taken her so long to find her Self. There are so many injunctions against being an artist that it is understandable that many of us don't want to claim who we are.
But just as this woman recognized who she was at last, we come to a place where we recognize that the soul-starvation we were feeling was because we had denied ourselves something essential to our very natures.
What is it that you need? Which universal pattern reverberates inside you? Are you The Advocate looking for a cause that engages your strength? You might find getting trapped in causes that lock into your anger or personal agenda. Are you The Caregiver whose challenge is to become discerning when giving instead of burning out by giving indiscriminately?
Which image leads you home to yourself?
Like countless other people, I tuned in last week to see the premiere of Sensitive - The Untold Story on Livestream. The trailer for the documentary had felt loud, so I wasn't sure what to expect. But overall, I liked the content. In fact, I got very emotional at certain points.
While there are many vibrant online communities for HSPs, being able to see and hear other HSPs talk is not something I get to do often. That felt very affirming, and I am so happy that the next generation of sensitive people will have this resource to turn to.
I especially liked that they covered a wide range of HSP stories. They talked about HSP relationships, including interviews with some wonderful non-HSP parents working to understand their HSP children. They talked about extroverted HSPs. They featured an HSP basketball player, an HSP entrepreneur, an HSP working with sensitive dogs (every species has both sensitive and non-sensitive members in roughly the same percentages).
They covered different HSP voices in different places in the world. And of course, they talked about Dr Elaine Aron's seminal work. Her work was the main thread binding it all together. Her perspective and the stories shared by different HSPs helped present a balanced view of the HSP trait.
On one hand, the documentary talked about the wonderful responsiveness that HSPs have. On the other, they also talked about differential susceptibility - the idea that different people vary in their responsiveness to qualities of the environment. So, while HSPs benefit even more than non-HSPs from a wonderful environment, the opposite is also true. Bad experiences seep deeper into sensitive people. If you are an HSP who has had a traumatic experience, you will have to fight harder to get out of it. It will leave an indelible impression on you. And yet, the good news about being highly responsive is that once you get help to deal with what has been holding you back, that good energy and effort will also go deep inside.
Both good and bad affects HSPs, and to me that is the balanced perspective on being a sensitive person. Depending on the situation and so many different things, being an HSP can be many different things. I think this is also a reminder for us to pull the right things towards us, the things that nourish us deeply, the things that we often don't give ourselves because other non-HSPs don't seem to need it or give it importance.
Another thing that stood out for me was the discussion that parts of the brain associated with fear are not triggered when sensitive people enter a new environment. We are approaching the new situation with caution, not fear. At some point, for many of us, the caution gets overlaid with the label of fear that other people give it. Sometimes, a real fear gets added in to the mix.
But it is important to remember that pausing before acting is a way of approaching the world. It is not fear. It is consideration. But many of us may have gotten such mixed messages about our style that we might have started discounting it ourselves. For me, there have been a lot of times when I have tried to make myself act before I have considered things. That seemed to be the respected, proactive way. But that meant that I did not consider and then fell flat because that was just not my style, just not my way of being.
Are there ways in which you try to act like non-HSPs? How would owning your trait help you? How could it help you nourish yourself?
This caution also reminded me of some sensitive children I know who are cautious when they interact with strangers and people they don't know. Once they have determined that the place or the person is safe, they are not shy about interacting. But that reminds me of how easily the label of "shy" can be applied to a child who is simply considering, observing and looking before opening up or joining in.
For parents, I think it is so important to see that their HSP children often don't start off "shy." They might become shy if their way of being is not understood or appreciated.
There were other things that came to my mind when I watched Sensitive. Maybe, I will write about it in some other posts.
There were some stylistic things that I didn't like about the documentary. For example, the way the logo appeared or the camera-work that felt frantic at certain times. I hope the dissonance with the aesthetic elements does not discourage HSPs from seeing or appreciating the documentary.
It has a lot of good stuff. It wipes the mirror and helps us connect with other people, somewhere out there, that see and experience the world as we do. It takes us home to a space we often don't find in the environment around us, a space that "gets" us, a space where we don't have to explain who we are or feel misunderstood.
It gives us a sense of connection and community, and for that and many other reasons, I think this pioneering documentary is a wonderful leap forward for all of us.
Did you see the documentary? What did you think of Sensitive - The Untold Story?
If you are an empath, there are times when you might feel caught up in an emotional maelstrom. People's energy seems to come rushing towards you, and you lose your footing and are swept off by the current.
For me, I have started noticing how and when this happens because this doesn't happen all the time. There are times when I am centred in myself and when I don't absorb the rush of energy as much. There are also those times when I am overstimulated and one additional thing pushes me over the edge.
I have also been finding new ideas and perspectives that point out all the little things I had been doing for years and that were making me more susceptible to other people's energies. One of them was a habit I had developed where I almost never crossed my arms in front of me.
I remember reading as a teenager that crossing your arms was body language that indicated that you were on the defensive. I didn't want to be defensive at all. I wanted to be open, and I got into the habit of always keeping an open posture.
Recently, I read something in Sonia Choquette's book Trust Your Vibes that really stood out to me because what she said is almost the opposite of what I had practiced many years back.
Sonia talks about how, when we are sensitive and tuned in, we can absorb energy that we don't really want. We have to learn to observe, and not absorb as much. This is what she says about protecting ourselves in an emotionally charged situation when we can feel the onslaught of someone else's energy coming at us:
"One of the best ways to remain grounded in your own energy whenever exposed to an intense emotional outburst is to cover your solar plexus (the area around your belly button) with your arms folded, which is something we tend to do anyway. Notice how natural it is to cross your arms over your stomach whenever you feel defensive. I was reminded of this instinctive protective maneuver in an airport recently while I waited for my flight. I saw a child of about two being reprimanded by his overwrought mother, and as she scolded him, he looked directly at her with his arms folded defiantly across his chest, unfazed by her outburst. He was so effective in blocking her tirade that I had to laugh.
As that child demonstrated, folding your arms across your chest or belly button blocks negative energy from entering your body and protects you from its debilitating effects. Breathing as you do this also keeps foreign energy from invading your aura, and the more slowly you breathe, the more grounded and protected you are."
Sometimes, simple things like these, which are also significant things because they help us own our space, can help us feel protected and centred. Always being open to anything, like I used to be when I was younger, doesn't help because we want to be open to the right thing and closed off to what is intrusive or overwhelming. In fact, being indiscriminately open does us harm, especially for people like us who absorb energy so readily.
Does this make you think about where and how you are open?
If this resonated with you and you know someone who would relate, do share this with them. Thank you!
I came across this quote by the British novelist A.S.Byatt recently. It is so honest and true, and it says what is so often unspoken. I haven't read anything by Byatt, but this quote makes me feel like I want to know her better:
"I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things. Much as I love my husband and my children, I can love them only because I am the person who makes these things. I, who I am, is the person who has the project of making a thing. And because that person does that, all the time, that person is able to love all these people."
For me, this quote gets to the heart of things, the heart of all conversations about the conflict women feel when they spend time nurturing their creativity when they are also wives and mothers. I am a wife, and I am not a mother, and I feel that this is the truth.
Who is the person doing the loving if they are not also nurturing and affirming their own being?
Lately, I have been coming across ideas that are telling me a little more about myself, and wiping down the mirror so I can see more of my true self. Something I read recently might resonate with you as well. It's about what some people call clairsentience, or the ability to know something through our sense of touch.
In her book Aura Reading, Rose Rosetree talks about clairsentience using this example:
"With clairsentience, information comes along with touch. Rosa, for instance, is a massage therapist. When starting a session, Rosa holds the client by the ankles. Information comes to her about what needs work. It's as though the whole body reveals its secrets to her hands."
Rosetree goes on to say that while some people who are clairsentient are very tuned in to their physicality but might not realize how much subtle information comes in through physical touching, there are other clairsentients who are subtle touchers and unconcerned with their own physicality. To them, "subtle perception is so much more interesting than staying in touch with reality."
And then, Rosetree goes on to say something that really struck me and might put clairsentience in perspective for you too:
"Here's another paradox. Clairsentient people work especially well with their hands, for example, in writing, cooking, or gardening. But ask them if they would like to work with their hands and they may well say "No." How come?
It's one of those mind-stopping Zen trains of thought, like explaining the sound of one hand clapping. Why don't some clairsentients notice their hands? The process of creating through the hands is so charming it totally absorbs their attention. Therefore, what part of the mind is left to notice the hands?"
I have always thought of myself as someone who does not like to work with their hands. I hate doing repetitive things, and I love the world of ideas and possibilities as compared to what I sometimes think of as purely sensory and physical things. And yet, physical touch is important to me. I, too, can often sense where pain in someone's body is going to be when I touch them.
Recently, I have started writing more by hand instead of working on the laptop. The visceral connection to the paper feels stronger, and things seem to come out in a different way. Like Rose Rosetree says, at these moments, I am in the flow and the thought that I am making something with my hands does not even cross my mind. And yet, my hands feel alive and I sense things in a way that seems organic. It's as if my hands are pulling out something that some part of me has always known.
Just like writing, when I cook, I am so absorbed in the process that my attention never goes to my hands. Till I read what Rosetree says, I hadn't considered how much I sense things through touch. What a thing to learn after so many years of knowing (not knowing?) myself.
Maybe, what Rosetree says connected with you as well, regardless of whether you believe in auras or not. Our bodies are the means through which we make our way through the world, so it feels logical that they are equipped with ways of knowing that go beyond thinking and the intellect.
Here's something that Rosetree says that might resonate with you as well:
"As a clairsentient, whether you come across as grounded or more of an absent-minded professor, you know the value of hugging and touching. That's how you feel you have made genuine contact with people. And if your clairsentience goes along with a gift for physical healing, your hands may radiate a special spiritual beauty."
Does what Rosetree say about clairsentience resonate with you? Does it make you think differently about the different ways in which you know and sense things? Is there some way in which you can apply this in your life?
For me, it feels like this is another way in which intuition and knowing works in and through me. While sometimes, intuition is the little voice that I hear in my center, at other times, what I know comes to me as a result of physical contact and touch.
My body can sense and know things in a way that I am not often aware of, and starting to become aware of this feels enlarging.
In the past several months, I have been learning more about what it means to be an empath. It's the part of my sensitivity that is most troublesome for me. Unlike crowded places and loud noises, things that I can often avoid, I am still learning about this aspect of my sensitivity - how to not get thrown off constantly by other people's energy.
There was a time when I used to be constantly absorbing emotional energy -- feeling curiosity, anger, or anxiety jumping out at me and wrestling me down to the ground. It was exhausting and enervating.
Now that I am in a space where I am more consciously aware of being an empath, I have started to discover people and ideas that might help you, if you are an empath too.
One of them is Anna Sayce, whose blog I recently stumbled upon. She reads Akashic records and does intuitive work, and even if you don't believe in "alternative stuff," what she says in this post about the connection between our struggles and our soul gifts will likely resonate with you.
It gave me food for thought and shifted things a little for me.
Anna says that "our biggest soul gift and biggest struggle in life will usually spring from the same source." She talks about how she often sees this with her clients, this idea that our struggles and our gifts are two sides of the same coin.
For people who have the empath gift, this is how it often plays out:
"On the upside, these people were born with the ability to experience what life is like for another person. They make great mediators because they can see two sides of a story and can switch their point of view easily. They are the ones who are good at caring for and looking out for others. But they can sometimes have so much compassion and understanding that they might not always look out for their own interests sufficiently. Or they might be easy to exploit. They may fail to take care of themselves while taking care of everyone around them. Most often, they may feel like their sensitivity is a burden."
You might feel this acutely. The same thing that makes up your essence also creates problems and difficulties. It is as if we can't have the gift without also being handed its shadow side. The challenge is to fight the monsters before you can really enjoy and utilize the gift.
If you have been struggling with your empathic abilities, this connection might give you some relief. The reason that being empathic feels like a double-edged sword is because it is double-sided and tricky. Like me, you might deeply value being empathic when you can mediate in a stressful situation and contribute something of value. And yet, the blurring of boundaries, the taking on of other people's stuff might leave you feeling as if you are caught between a rock and a hard place.
I want to explore this dynamic and what being empathic means in more posts. In the meanwhile, do check out Anna's blog. She has some great stuff there, and it could help answer some of the questions you might be struggling with.
When I hear music, I dive down into its depths. It curls around my being like wisps of sweet-smelling smoke. Sometimes, I lie down under it, and it falls over me like a waterfall. I feel its enchantment, and I become a part of it. Like colors being dissolved in water, who I am becomes brighter when it dissolves in something bigger. It is carried onwards on waves of notes and extends out into the universe.
That's one of the wonderful things about being an empath, of being able to feel so much. My valleys have been deep and dark, and now the mountains I am climbing are majestic. There is no dearth of drama, no shortage of adventures of the soul. Maybe this is what I signed up for.
Sometimes, when I look at other people, people whose lives go forth in a more stable, straight line, I envy them that stability, that straightness. It would be so much easier to live like that. And yet, that hasn't been my life, and it probably won't be. It's a different movement, a different wave that I am calling forth from inside me. It's something I don't have a model for, and like you, I am picking up pieces as I go along.
What does it mean to be an empath? Sometimes, people's energy jumps out at me with such force that I want to hold up my hand and shield myself from it. When I travel in the train, I can sometimes feel curiosity jumping out at me. Many times, I can say exactly what someone is going to say to me, even before they have said it. There have been many heavy years where the cloak of all the sadness I could feel made me want to barricade myself in my room. And that's exactly what I did.
And yet, it is this same sensitivity that attunes to all that is beautiful, and chimes in with it. In a room full of people waiting to attend a lecture by an energy worker, I absorb all the wonderful energy just as quickly. I am swaying in it like a bell. At times like these, I think to myself: These are the kind of places I need to be.
I pick up everything, although I am often confused as well. How do I separate my "real knowings" from projections about the other person that we all make? And yet, as I trust some of my knowings, some of the things that I am sensing, my faith in my ability to know deepens.
One thing I have been learning is that what I give my attention to does become bigger. It grows in size and density and so, now, I have turned my attention away from the overwhelm that I often find lurking just outside my field, and instead am looking at all the gifts that I haven't yet mined.
Now is the time to go down the shaft of the cave, and look at all the sparkling, beautiful things that have been growing inside the cave. They have been becoming larger as the pressure outside grew, and it's time for them to come to light.
Maybe, you are here too, in this space between light and dark, finding your way to your own treasure. Maybe, we can listen to each other and learn something before we go even deeper.
Today, I read something on Jeff Goins' lovely blog that stood out for me. In his post, he talks about how after the release of his new book, The Art of Work, he has spent a lot of time and attention replying to the negative comments, engaging with people who "want to argue, fight, or call me names" and not enough time replying to those who have positively reviewed his book.
We all can relate to this on some level. We all pay attention to the naysayer or a single negative remark instead of focusing on the positive. That's part of human nature.
Goins talks about how this process has been for him and how he is shifting his attention away from detractors. He mentions one interaction in particular that gave him some insight into why people criticize so harshly. He says: "Not too long ago, I replied to a one-star review of my book and offered a refund to that person (as is my practice), and he sent me an email saying something that surprised me."
He said: "I had no idea authors read their reviews...If I knew you were listening, I would have been nicer."
Goins continues: "Wow. I appreciate the honesty, but isn't that indictment of society today? I would have been nicer to you, if I knew you'd hear what I was saying. This is not the kind of world that I want to be a part of." So, what is the solution? "Reward the givers, ignore the haters. Don't feed the trolls. You've heard this stuff before. So have I. So why do we ignore it? Because it's easier to argue than it is to appreciate."
It's easier to argue than it is to appreciate.
Goins continues: "Give your best stuff, including your attention, to the people who appreciate it." This does not mean that you are not open to constructive feedback. It does mean that you are not trying to convince everyone of the validity of your opinions. You are not trying to win everyone over.
There are people who simply don't connect with what we are doing. There are those that are actively discounting our work or our intentions. There are also those who, like Goins' detractor, might be expressing a casual, not-very-considered opinion. When we focus on these people, we magnify their effects on our lives.
Shifting our attention away is something we all need to learn. If you are a sensitive person, the criticism will, of course, sting for you. It might leave you reeling for some time. You might also feel like you have made a mistake and your conscientiousness can work against you in this case. You want to do things correctly, and someone is now effectively saying that you haven't.
Goins' experience also made me think of something else, how we often pay attention to the people who scream the loudest, overlooking people who don't shout out for attention. Again, we are directing our attention by default. Just like we get hooked by criticism, we get hooked by the loudest voice. In both cases, we need to become more discerning.
Who is it that we are spending our energy on? Who are we engaging with? Who are we rewarding?
Are we maybe reinforcing behaviors that we shouldn't support? If we discount the givers, the people who give to us, what are we saying to them? What are we saying to ourselves? Are we saying that the giving behavior does not deserve acknowledgement? Are we, in effect, taking the givers for granted because we have some unexamined beliefs about our own giving? Do we give without discernment, without seeing the cost involved? Do we give to the detriment of our own self?
These are all questions we need to ask. I don't think it works, giving indiscriminately. Everyone does not have the same intentions or will honor your boundaries. I don't think it works, to focus so much attention on people who are not getting what you are trying to do. We need to focus our attention on achieving a balance between giving and receiving, and pulling in the gifts of giving that are being offered to us, instead of getting hooked into negativity.
