When extra intelligence, intensity and sensitivity cross over, they make quite the package...and it can be extremely challenging! Exploring what this looks like, and how to work positively with these traits. for ever-increasing fulfilment and joy.
What is maturity anyway; what constitutes adult behaviour...and who says so. This isn't a rebellion manifesto; its autism, the way it is already wired so how does that look as a parent or a child (and both put together)? Here's celebrating its many plus points from a personal perspective.
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.
Synesthesia has overlaps with heightened sensitivity and both have overlaps with chronic pain. All of these phenomenon overlap in me so you can see why I am so interested. It's as though chronic pain is the down side of the see-saw on which synaesthesia is the colourful gift at the highest end (I really wouldn't be without it and the sensory adventures it takes me on) and sensitivity is the mixing pot of both, made up of both pluses and minuses, depending on how challenging these heightened sensitivities make the experience of life. Exploring the sensory soup of these cross-over phenomenon, asking whether we are all born with synesthesia as science is now suggesting and looking into all the potential a deeper understanding of them holds for transforming human experience.
I've long toyed with the theory that there was a link between the death of my mother and the beginning of my most bizarre health challenges but also the awakening of a whole new layer of perception that feels tantamount to "an awakening". Around that time, age 28, everything started to change for me in my … Continue reading Death of a loved one and an awakened layer of perception: is there a link?
From today, I'm going to start sharing a whole load of resources for the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) on my Living Whole Facebook page, as well as creating a resource section on this website. This is a true area of expertise for me since I am one and owning this has felt like such a massive … Continue reading Highly Sensitive…and owning it
The many and varying, often uncomfortable, symptoms of a woman's mid-life transition are all versions of this metaphorical (you could even say, metaphysical) "itch". Really, its transformation underway...a metamophosis...and in making it mundane, by denying it or even making it seem like a problem, a curse, we fight back against what is really like a spreading of wings from the chrysalis; bewilderingly, disorientingly beautiful. Our culture has done terrible things to downplay the stage of her life that is all about female empowerment and there is a minefield of superstitious beliefs and misinformation around it; no wonder we hurt and struggle our way through it. When we welcome and encourage that transition, we allow for it to be smoother...and there a number of reasons why we might want to be doing that. These are, you could say, the times we have always been waiting for...
Maybe thats the thing about oestrogen – it buffers us from ourselves until – suddenly no longer there, there is nothing left to stand between us and the life we have embodied for years and we are left to face up to it all, in one almighty effort. The brick walls that kept away the view we didn’t want to see, the unholy mess we didn’t want to deal with, is suddenly crumbled away, the view exposed and no avoiding it and so we either sink or swim as life’s full tidal wave comes in for us to surf or get crashed by. Put simply, we have to get our shit together really quickly or it can be all too much for us, whatever’s waiting on the other side of the thick smokescreen we put up. That mess could consist of terrible, habitual, lifestyle habits or a thoroughly rotten marriage – or it may just mean we need to make some tweaks and do some straight talking – but, whatever it is, there’s no buffer any more and we feel it – oh how we feel it all...
Living whole 