I’m just back from two weeks in Italy and, as ever, time spent outside of my “normal” everyday experiences has reminded me, amply, that I am sensitive to a fault. Which means, though its been wonderful on so many levels, my nervous system has not only reacted to all the obvious stuff (for those with sensitivity) like labels or stitching inside new clothing,  the change in mattresses or the fact someone put refined sugar in a savoury sauce. I’m also left in no doubt that I have spent time shifting from one place to another, longitude and latitudinally speaking, that I’ve been at high altitude in a couple of ‘planes, that the diet and water I’ve been consuming, lovely as it all was, is different to my norm, setting off levels of IBS I hadn’t had for quite a while and, of course, I’ve had increased exposure to cellular technology on all my journeys or time spent in public spaces though, overall, rather less than normal (more on that below). Its simply a “given” that I have to factor all this in and mitigate any challenging transitions as best I can when I go anywhere, as I’ve written about before (search for “holidays”).

Now I’m back, I’ve been feeling all the increased electro-pollution of “Greater” London like a thwack from a sledgehammer, from the moment of arriving at the airport yesterday to now, where I feel quite obviously in a different place (more like planet…) to that of my last couple of weeks. Today, though I’m happy to be home to my own routines, my system is reacting like I’m having a whole series of sugar crashes…upright and doing things one minute, needing to curl up and just sleep the next. I feel the difference in where I’ve been and (having returned) oh-so profoundly today, like stepping into a different planetary atmosphere and having to quickly recalibrate my whole system, in a myriad of ways. It takes everything I’ve got. On my walk, mentioning this to my husband, I found myself use the phrase “the Princess and the Pea; that’s me” and it struck me how true that was; it doesn’t matter how many mattresses you give me, I could probably still tell you its under there.

Reminding myself what that story was about, I find myself smiling wryly at the connection with what I shared in my last post on my other blog Spinning the Light, “Being the Unpruned Tree“, in which I talk about sensitivity as a gift (being so relevant to many of the health topics I talk about here, I especially recommend this post if neurodiversity / autism, high sensitivity, synaesthesia and all those other interelated subjects are of interest to you).

I also, synchronistically, talk in that post about the importance of “old” stories, which often carry important messages to us, as I was newly reminded by Sharon Blackie, whose book “The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday” I took along as holiday reading. Princess and the Pea author, Hans Christian Andersen, was most probably a High Functioning Autistic; people who, in my view “see” things that others miss and who make connections between, you could say, dimensions or brain hemispheres…seeing the unseeable and bringing them into focus, in ways that other people can more readily grasp. He was also born very close to the 12th degree longitude, in Denmark, which is a notable synchronicity because, according to Dr Carl Johan Calleman, whose breakthrough book I refer to in “Being the Unpruned Tree“, this correlates with the hemispherical division of the planet or “global mind”…equivalent to the dividing line between left and right hemispheres of the human brain, which is exactly the place where neurodiversity seems to “happen”. In fact, I have just spent two weeks “on” that longitude and I always “know about it” when I do (having spent many, many, holidays along its length over the course of over 30 years), though trying to explain this to anyone else is the closest I ever get to witnessing myself sound like an incomprehensible mad woman in their eyes…

Andersen’s story, written in 1835 though with roots that go deeper than that (as with all fairy or “folk” tales), tells the story of a prince in search of an ideal princess and who, having not had much luck at finding a suitable candidate, devises a test involving a pea placed at the bottom of a pile of feather mattresses. Only when a young woman comes along who, though drenched with rain and presumably worn out with tiredness, still complains of an uncomfortable and disturbed night because of a lump in the bed does he know he’s found his bride. The message seems to be that high-sensitivity is a “royal” trait; the very arbiter of someone possessing all the most desirable qualities. Is it any wonder this story was always one of my childhood favourites? Those particular tales we gravitate towards or relate to the most can have so much to say to, or about, us long after our childhood days, as Blackie points out.

Yet our world is no longer like that; rather, we are considered fussy or hypochondriac, at the least, or faulty and in need of medication, at the worst end, when we own to these sensitivity traits, so many of us don’t any more. We bottle them up, we fear what they are telling us in silence, we try (very hard) to seem to ignore our warning signs and conform and yet, at times, we can’t do this or our health starts to speak for us; or we reach the point where we simply don’t want to keep it all locked away any more (the stuff of many more “fairytales”). Our truth must “out”; not least when we feel like the canary in the coal mine of a world spinning out of control.

Nothing strikes me as much, each time I return to the UK from some other country, as the fact that the very air here feels “thick” with cellular pollution in a way that those other countries (typically, Italy, the south of France or Scandinavia ) don’t…yet. Especially as I live near London, a situation which I am resigned to having to “fix” pretty soon as it is becoming so noticeable to me how much worse I feel just as soon as I am within 50 miles strike of its electro-smog (and population density; the second most noticeable thing, having been away, being how many housing developments are being thrown up in every pocket of land).

Today (apart from a totally blissed out hour when I felt beautifully transcendent of all body symptoms, first thing this morning; I’ve since found out the Schumann Resonance did a sharp spike of 69 HZ at 7 UTC) the relentless energy crashes that I spoke of earlier are just part of the story of what I’m noticing. The fact my skin is burning like an invisible sunburn, my tongue tingling, the first sign of an underlying headache for a fortnight, burning eyes, my whole system running fiery hot though its a so-so weather day, my knee joints hurting like a strangely acute arthritis from nowhere, though I had none of that in the mountains, are just typical of how I feel after every trip abroad or to somewhere more remote and then return; reminders of how grave our choice of place and lifestyle is in this ever-more (un)wired, invisibly tampered-with world. Comparisons are everyhwere across the boarderline of my recent experience. I had none of the most-particular reaction to spaceweather (the sun has been, particularly, active while I was away) nor any of the quite painful run-up to the ionising effect of the full moon that has become my norm back home while I was away. Though I took with me a big pot of the particular oat cream I slather on like some sort of after-sun lotion most days of my life, in England, especially on those frequent on days when even my softest clothes hurt to wear, I hardly needed to use it at all, though I was being active, swimming, carrying bags…

So, I’m right back…I am forced to resign myself to own…where I was a couple of weeks ago; feeling oddly leaden in my energy field, in a way that has steadily crept up on me over the last ten years but which varies with proximity to this beloved isle I call home. For some idea of what this now feels like for me, as someone who can detect the invisible wavelengths that are all around us in varying density, the sci-fi film “Lucy” (which I recommend for some thought-provoking ideas on how painful “embodied” higher-consciousness, including just tiny increments in our typical level of awareness, are in the world as it currently is…) captures it perfectly, as shown in the opening shots of this “Lucy” movie clip. For those of you that consider yourself sensitive but who aren’t feeling these effects yet, or perhaps so mildly you think you can live with them or brush your concerns asside, consider that where you live might not be as densely populated and wired as where I am; however, 5G will be pretty much everwhere, regardless of people numbers, so there will be no escaping its effects. We are waving goodbye to the world as it once was and yet pretty much no one is responding to this with the degree of concern that you would expect, given the gravity of the situation. For more on the inherent challenges of neurodiversity or any of the high-sensitivity traits, in the context of the current world paradigm and its skewed priorities, I refer you again to my post Being the Unpruned Tree.

It’s therefore a timely thing that I should arrive home to find Elizabeth Peru, to whom I subscribe, has blogged about “5G”, a topic that sends darts of anxiety into my heart (and I’m far from the only one). Concerns, more so than excitement, about this “new and exciting” technology leap is rife amongst high-sensitive folk and yet scoffed into silence by those who value far more the ability to download a film to their phone “in seconds” (though the thought of such a thing leaves me cold and bewildered as to the benefit). As the health concerns of more than a few respected individuals get shovelled aside by all those big corporates and other vested individuals with their fingers deeply in this pie, we of the Princess and the Pea sensibility try hard not to visualise a world where running away from such technology will be futile and all-too late, given it will be coming at us, relentlessly, from every third lamp post near our home and no longer the individual choice of our particular household to use or abstain. If you’re in the UK, I read this technology is being rolled out in 12 trial locations this summer, followed by several more, including mine, before the end of the year.

For more conversation on this technology, I refer you to Elizabeth’s new post 5D, 5G & High-Frequency Consciousness  (recommended) and a more typical summary of why all these technologies are a potential challenge to human health in Electropollution: the 21st century catastrophe. In this context, “catastrophe” is a choice word since I have long believed that my highly-strung nervous system is wired this way precisely because of my soul having had familiarity with similar “catastrophes” before, perhaps in other lifetimes (past or future?), possibly involving similar technologies. When we open our minds to the fact we have access to such experiences, we realise we are the early warning system to ourselves whenever we notice what feels “off” about something, repeatedly, compellingly or, very often, to the detriment of our health when there are no other matching causes. Above all, when we allow ourselves, we just know what we know…with every instinct in our body and soul and this is our gift; albeit it a typically double-edged one.

When we do this, rather than cower beneath all the stigma of being highly-sensitive (like we are some sort of overwrought Victorian crybaby clinging to our old-fashioned ways and our smelling salts) we owe it to ourselves, our skill-set and to everyone else to be prepared to speak frankly about what we notice; to join the conversation and not be the complicit bystander, this time around. Meanwhile, can we meditate our way out of this mess (perhaps with the help of the Schumann Resonance), raising our consciousness to an even higher frequency level than 5G, where we are not so affected by it, as Elizabeth Peru suggests? I certainly hope so (its my tireless work-in-progress) or I am out of ideas.