When I was young my father suffered a catastrophic stroke, later my parents got divorced and then I was sent off to boarding school. My response to all this, helped no doubt by a familial tendency to avoid talking about difficult things, was to shut down my feelings.
I did a good job of it.
It’s been a lifetime’s journey getting back into sensitivity. Indeed, I enjoyed learning to feel again so much that I dedicated the last decade to seeing what exactly a felt sense can communicate and exploring the limit of what can be felt. Based on my research of ancient cultures, these days we mostly only use a fraction of the power available to us.
Against this backdrop, it was poignant for me to chat with Tammy who is by her nature what is known as a highly sensitive person - the actual term is sensory processing sensitivity.
Starting life as highly sensitive has its own challenges. Perhaps never more so than in an increasingly complex and overstimulated world. For Tammy and the people she coaches, they process information more deeply. She explained, “It's like being a giant sponge without all the usual filters.” “There’s a lot of information coming in because we’re not as effective at picking out one thing.” And it’s not just the emotions, it’s the energy around you and even the food you eat - toxins can take a big toll on the body. The tendency is to give meaning to a lot of things all at once, which can be exhausting and overwhelming.
The flip side is that the highly sensitive notice everything, technicolour versus greyscale, and get moved deeply by the things that others pass by. Pleasurable experiences are heightened.
I know which I would prefer.
However, as with life, the middle way is usually the best. And, as is so often the case, connecting to the body is part of the solution. It struck me that at the two ends of the spectrum, the numbed at one end, and the hyper-sensitive at the other, the challenge is fundamentally the same. How should we deal with our feelings? Numbed is a reaction to too much emotional turbulence, overstimulation is much the same. The result tends to send us out of the body, which is to move in the wrong direction.
Interestingly Tammy learned massage therapy, which is a perfect and pleasurable way to come back into presence with the physicality of the body. It’s calming and a wonderful base from which we can start to accept our feelings as something that passes through (rather than that we are our emotions).
Each emotion carries a package of data and we can engage with it or allow it to move through. The problem comes when we do battle with it. What resists persists. It’s not so much the fear that gets us as the fear of the fear. Fear we’ll be overwhelmed. Fear we’ll unravel.
But emotions are just emotions and once we get that we can be more present, resilient and even curious.
Tammy teaches her clients to acknowledge and then honour their feelings, being aware of what they are, where they are, how they feel, “and then open to the idea like, oh, this is temporary and I can be in charge of releasing that and then paying attention to that.”
She explains how learning to manage your energy and create boundaries is especially important for the super-sensitive so that they're not bringing in anything that's not theirs. She teaches people to connect with their body and ask, “Is this mine?”, and being able to listen to that answer and recognize, oh, I'm bringing this in from someone else versus this is coming from me.
Breathing slowly is helpful, but the brain is usually not.
I would add that on my mission I’ve learned that when we’re calm and in a place where we can engage, it’s worth remembering that our feelings are the language of our subconscious which, as Dr Bruce Lipton estimates, is about a million times more powerful than the conscious mind.
As we face the challenges of life why would we not want to have that intelligence at our disposal? Why would we not want to get the data from that source? It’s constantly on tap. We just need to be present with what we feel and then engage directly with it. It takes practice, but in my experience, it’s a game-changer.
Tammy can be found at: coachtammygoen.com/
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