Getting to know yourself is, in my opinon, the single most important thing you ever get to do in your life...and its often a golden key to all those other unfathomables that may be "going on", such as persistent health issues. Above all, depathologising the way you were made is an essential step to discovering the sense of wholeness and peace in your life that may have so far eluded you.
"Without pain, I would be a neurodiverse hypermobile person (which is both to think and move outside the box…) with exceptional skills of insight and sensitivity, who knows how she likes to be and work and with whom and how to follow her best, most balanced, guidance through life." Excavating the gifts of diversity beyond a paradigm of struggle.
Dr Elaine Aron’s work on this topic has been a life-changer for so many people with high-sensitivity since the phrase was not even coined until she came along and gave it this label. Her book, film and website resources are some of the most useful tools I have ever come across and she is cited by pretty-much everyone who speaks out about high sensitivity which, thanks to her, people now do; quite unheard of a couple of decades ago. More and more, high-sensitivity has become a buzz-word and not because its trendy to jump onto its bandwagon but because many of us had very little concept of what made us so different until this point; which allowed everyone else’s opinion of us, that we are “wierd”, “weak”, “neurotic” highly-strung” and so on, to stick. With more interest garnered in it than ever, it's now been shown by studies to be a genetic trait; something a fifth of us are born with…so, not an illness, timidness, weirdness, personality flaw, mental health issue, handicap or lack of backbone (as so often referred to in our families, schools and workplaces). When we turn this around to see High Sensitivity and its traits as a bundle of gifts, we start to live much closer to our personal blueprint.
Introversion is a topic very close to my own heart, as I've written about before, especially at the end of a year in which I have finally owned my very own version of it, with more than a small sigh of whole-body relief. In fact, its been one of my crowning glories of 2017 to achieve this degree of self-acceptance and, yes, appreciation, understanding and respect, at last; which comes with huge health benefits. Having just realised that I have now spent twelve continuous years being home-based with almost no regular people-contact outside of immediate family members and, prior to the two years in an office that led to that, a further nine years running a small business from home, I am forced to admit that twenty-one years of near solitude marks a defining trait more so than an accident. Yet it is incredibly hard to explain such a preference or, rather, need to others; especially when you can be as sociable and, yes, fun-loving and conversational as the next person on the rare times that you go anywhere. So as I start to visualise a year of "getting out there" somewhat more than I have for a while, in 2018 (on my own terms), I feel it is just as important to extoll the positives of introversion and to help others understand that it is a valid and powerful way to be, not an illness or problem to be solved.
When we focus on doing exactly what we are capable of doing, right here and right now, we let go of the self-torture of "oughts" and "have to"s and we become more compassionate towards everyone else, too. Its the ultimate couldron of creation to act out of what is available to you right here and now...not some projection that has you over-reaching yourself until you topple over. On so many levels, its the ultimate self-loving act.
Is this you? INFJ personality types can feel like they have the whole weight of the world on their shoulders though no one else around them seems to care quite as much about what is going on. People around them don’t even realise how alone or burdened they are feeling since they give the impression of being far more gregarious, up-beat and outwardly focussed than they really are. Rather, people love being around them and feel relaxed in their company as they have a knack of putting people at ease and uplifting their mood. The fact that they tend to process their deep-and-innermosts outwardly, even publically, seems to contradict their deep introversion (my blog-writing is point in case) and it sends people off track when they think they are getting to know someone far more extroverted than they really are. This can leave the INFJ feeling even more isolated because even their friends don’t truly “get them” and there is always that nagging feeling that they would be dropped like a hot brick if the extent of their introversion ever “came out”, like people would think they were a fraud (they’re not…they’re just a paradox).
Living whole 