*Content warning: Moments of angst.
In the 17+ years I've been a licensed massage therapist, I sense time and again that I'm holding space for so much more than physical pain and general stress and tension.
I just couldn't ignore it anymore. Trauma became the elephant in the room.
Trauma lives IN THE BODY. The body holds memories. The body holds emotions and feelings and thoughts and just really, ALL OF THE THINGS. It's our vehicle for moving through this world.
We're not just pushing on muscle and skin and bones. There's a real, live HUMAN in there. There's consciousness running through your fascia. We're animated by a life force, our qi, our prana.
We're not educated about this enough in massage school or at least I wasn't in my program. And what you learn in general continuing education is about "scope of practice" and palpation skills and techniques... modalities, etc.
You're required to take Ethics and Boundaries courses as a licensed practitioner, but does anyone teach Emotional Intelligence? Relational Intelligence? Heart Intelligence? Not in detail. You learn these things on the job. And as a highly intuitive empath touching into this, it can be overwhelming and lead to burnout.
Honest to g-d, the thing that saved my career was learning about energetic boundaries during the pandemic.
I cannot stress this enough! You can learn how to ground yourself. You can learn how to stay "neutral." You can learn how to have healthy relationship boundaries, but you'll still be missing the secret sauce to sustainability: knowing how your auric fields impact you in your everyday life as a highly sensitive person (HSP)!
When you tell anyone that the antidote to everything is to "feel it," you're not attuning to the person in front of you.
And even inviting folks to be present with sensations in the body can feel threatening. There are valid reasons why folks have turned this shit OFF.
The thing about "feeling your feelings" or "feel to heal" for empaths is that you're inundated by EVERYONE ELSE'S energy and emotions and thoughts, etc. This has been happening to you nonstop since the day you were born. NO JOKE!
YOU get lost in the mix.
Your feelings? What are those? It's your job to process for the whole f*cking room. There's no space for YOU to feel YOUR feelings. That's not your purpose when you're an empath kid. You're just open.
And when you DO feel those feelings, the intensity is painful. It's freaking overwhelming. It hurts to be you. And it can be scary as a kid who has no idea what the eff is going on internally. It's frightening AS AN ADULT.
Most of us didn't have parents who were attuned enough to us to be able to help us navigate life as highly sensitive.
I remember having crying fits where I COULD NOT STOP crying for hours. I think I was in the second grade.
My high sensitivity was compounded by childhood shyness. I was literally afraid to talk to people. I did not want to be noticed. It felt so much safer to be in my room making art, reading books, writing, just being in my own world so I didn't have to deal with the intensity of my environment.
You can see how easily this morphed into social anxiety. This is not uncommon, right? I'm hearing so many stories from moms right now, knowing that they're kid is a super feeler and being concerned about them. Right on, parents. Stay attuned. Get them the support that's right for them and don't stop trying until your kids are flourishing. It can take a lot of trial and error. Don't settle for unexperienced therapists. It's a wonder to me that I've actually thrived and developed resilience over the years. College was really rough. My 20s were turbulent and my 30s were nutty too. It took me a very, very, very long time to understand my emotions and how to regulate them.
If you're not quite there yet in knowing how to manage your emotions, you're not alone in this. I'm here to help if you'd like to explore how things can be different.
When I learned how to build capacity to hold ALL of the emotions, life opened up in a truly beautiful way. When I opened my heart back up to the tenderness of the whole spectrum, not just the high highs and the low lows, but ALL OF IT, the mundane became magical.
This is the juiciness that so many sensitives have cut themselves off from.
Once my nervous system was able to regulate with much more depth than it ever had in the past, a whole new world of actually experiencing the wave of my emotions in real time appeared.
But it's not always like that. Sometimes I can't be with the emotion because it takes over everything. My rage and me have been on this wild journey for so long. For my lifetime. What's so rad about traditions like mindfulness is the open invitations to be with WHAT IS.
And when you open to that, you're inclined to keep exploring deeper into a world of possibilities.
You absolutely are amazing just as you are AND if you'd like to expand and transform, you one thousand percent CAN. Your high sensitivity is not a death sentence.
I get it it. I've been there. I still go there where you notice every "off" thing in the environment and with people. It sucks to feel every irritation on your skin with so much intensity.
You don't have to stay in your default mode where everything is just constantly raw or NUMB. You're there because that's what you had to do to survive. Now you have a choice as an adult with full agency to learn NEW SKILLS.
Self-regulation. Co-regulation. Energetic Boundaries. We don't learn about these things soon enough. We don't even realize we're HSPs until way later in life and by then we've been traumatized.
So what do we do? How do we pick up the pieces and feel our OWN FEELINGS? How do we manage overwhelm? How do we teach kids how to regulate their emotions?
We have tools we've learned through trial and error. We pick up things like energy clearing and mindfulness. We process somatically. We become f*cking pros at nervous system regulation out of necessity. These are the things that have worked for me. Let's see what lands FOR YOU!
This is my hokey reminder to nudge you to feel safe enough to turn things back on. Feeling your feelings can be something different than what you experienced in childhood or even the old days of being super codependent.
You might like to return to the joy of all things sensory! We can reclaim our intensity and turn it into JOY. PURE JOY. No ick. No hurt. Bye-bye wounds. We call in healing and integration and stepping into choosing how we want to feel because we are worthy of being in alignment with self and the world.
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