Unnecessary exposures to sadness, negativity and grief suck vital life force out of people; take this from a hypersensitive person who knows all too well the cost to health. Learning how to fiercely curate the amount of exposure to negativity that we can cope with as an exercise in self-compassion.
As an autistic person, I find there is a definite link here between my particular wiring for high sensory processing, which can make me feel more overwhelmed than some other people might be in the same situation, along with a tendency to live in my thoughts way too much, plus also the need to actively process those senses though my body in such a way that the body fully registers them, but without overwhelm, on the way through…because, otherwise, I can tend to bypass the body altogether. Not least because of issues with chronic pain, learning to bypass the body can become a really big issue. What I need is exuberance, joie de vivre, activities that ground joy in the very cells of the body...and I suspect a lot of people (not least those who live too much in their heads) are needing that right now too!
Stress has been the modern pandemic since long before covid-19 came along, which is why so many people and systems have been wrong-footed by it...but therein lies the opportunity to evolve. individually and collectively.
So honour that, own it, work with it too. We’re all feeling rattled, thrown around and turned inside out at the moment but, if you’re an empath, you’re likely to be feeling it at a whole other level. You may well have felt all this global chaos and overwhelm coming our way even before it … Continue reading If you’re an empath, you’re probably feeling all this at a whole other level…
We all need some sort of containment, a reliable edge to our experiences, to enable us feel held and supported in life...and belief systems can do this for the majority of people (to a point). My neurodiverse way seems to have required that I build by own edges from scratch, plucked from a cacophony of sensory experiences and turned into the life supporting routines, rituals and focal points of my life; some distinctly more supportive than others (but getting there). Exploring the need for edges and how to make them better - Asperger's style.
Hard science has uncovered a mechanism whereby the same collagen abnormalities in EDS that make joints especially flexible seem to affect blood vessels, making those with it prone to accumulation of blood in the veins of the legs, an effect that may lead to exaggerated cardiovascular responses to maintain the output of blood from the heart. This and other foibles, which I feel are versions of the same response, put those of us with this issue under immense pressure and strain, all the time, as our version of "normal" so just imagine how much we then react to any additional triggers, to which we tend to be hypersensitive (I share my about theory about that too...), setting off our nervous system at regular intervals in a way that has nothing inherently to do with mental health...although, no surprise, it can start to manifest as anxiety over time. Joining some dots and celebrating just how much people with hypermobility type EDS deal with as their daily benchmark...plus some practical ways of making it better.
Some people, and I count myself among them, are prone to experiencing anomalous experiences; that is, experiences that lie outside the so-called "norm", from high-frequency "tones" ay and night to flashing "lights" and many more special effects. These count as some of the most disturbing and supposedly detrimental to quality of life of all experiences people are said to be encountering in their health today; alarming and even depressing them into states of hopelessness in many cases. Yet what if these sensations are not what they seem, via the rundamentory five-senses system we currently rely upon. What if, like the artist scrabbling for the right colour to express a brand new hue that seeks expression and having to draw on many pigments, textures, all kinds of materials mixed torgether just to get even close to an aproximation of this new "message" that is coming through, our bodies are forced to mix up all our sensory messages...yes, like synesthesia...to try and get through to us something that is just so very important...and its all for us to hear.
An INFJ (Myers-Briggs) personality type can make an entire life's career out of researching themselves. Yes, you heard me...a full-time job. And not in the way you think, not as self-obsession or run-amok ego or hypochondria or anything else like that but because, in our view, why would we need any other interface; an alternate, … Continue reading That INFJ foible: making a full-time study of ourselves
Top of the most interesting topics to write about this week, and not for the first time, is the subject of synesthesia which is something I’ve been aware of having all my life, though I only discovered the word used to label the phenomenon when I was in my twenties. My original post, called Walking … Continue reading Colours passing through – the fibromyalgia synesthesia link
The same should apply to us all really; if you get to know your triggers in life you can smartly side-step them or at least minimise the impact they have on you. If fibromyalgia is part of your picture, you very likely have multiple triggers that can set off a flare-up of symptoms. So my … Continue reading Know your triggers
Living whole 