HSPs & the Red Coat: Part 1

When something feels like yours, isn’t it yours? Remember the Bible story of “Joseph and the Coat of Many Colors”? In a nutshell, Joseph, his father’s favorite son, was gifted a magnificent coat, which made his brothers jealous. So jealous that they hatched a plot to sell him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver. In Egypt, Joseph’s his gift for telling the future helped him turn his fortunes. Let’s take a look at what happens when you’re around “someone else’s coat.”

HSPs & the Red Coat Questions:

• Is your “coat” like Joseph’s?
• Is it really yours?
• Does it really have your UES, your Unique Energetic Signature?

We’ve been talking about your Psychic Octopus for a while now, and have started to get into the nitty-gritty of how to apply that life-altering tool with the last couple of posts on your Psychic Sponge (Energetic Sponge). But which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

In other words, “wringing out” sponge energy that you may have soaked up from your environment is a great thing, but until you recognize you’ve taken it on, there’s not much you can do about it. Which brings us to the next critical bit of information to ensure your roadmap to amplifying your vibration and celebrating your sensitivities takes you where you want to go!

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Present Day

You’ve just arrived for dinner at your favorite restaurant, a small, intimate place you’ve been going to for years. You’re wearing your favorite coat, the one you wear as often as weather permits. It’s red, with a velvet collar. It fits you to a T. It’s comfortable and luxurious at the same time, which isn’t the case with too many clothes, so when you wear it you feel fantastic. You especially love that the pockets are nice and deep so you can store things like your wallet and cell phone. When you wear it you couldn’t possibly feel more like you.

Anyway, there you are at the restaurant. You remove your special coat and hand it to the waiter who’s been there forever and knows you by name. You ask for Guido’s family and he asks for yours. He takes your coat to the coat room for safekeeping.

You have a meal that’s as tasty as ever (probably eggplant parm) and are ready to leave. Guido brings you your gorg red coat and helps you into it. It’s begun to snow outside and you are glad for its warmth as you pass through the door to walk home.

3 Months Later: Whose Coat Is It???

Your phone rings. It’s an unidentified number, so you let it go to voicemail and forget about it for a couple of days. When the same number calls through again, you’re distracted and pick it up automatically and say hello. The voice on the other end of the phone sounds hesitant.

“Um, I know this will sound strange,” says the voice, “but I really think you have my coat.”

“Um, I know this will sound strange,” the voice goes on, “but I really think you have my coat.”

You look at the phone, shocked. What is this person talking about? “What do you mean, I have your coat?” you repeat. “What are you talking about?”

“I know,” the voice says again, “it sounds crazy. But you were at Antonio’s Ristorante three months ago, right?”

“Well, yes,” you say slowly, thinking back, “but how did you know that? Who are you? What do you want?” You’re beginning to get suspicious.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad,” continues the voice. “It’s just that I really think you went home with my coat . . . and I went home with yours.”

“That’s impossible,” you say.

“Nooo, I don’t think so,” says the voice, irritatingly self-assured.

“I have that coat right here with me,” you say, well on the way to peeved. “It can’t possibly be yours. It’s my red coat with the black velvet collar. It fits me perfectly. I love this coat. I’ve had it for a long time and I’d know if it weren’t mine.”

“I’m really sorry,” says the voice once again, not really sounding sorry at all, “it’s just that if you look in the pocket you’ll find something I left in the pocket that’s really special to me. I thought I’d lost it, but then, when I was at Antonio’s last night, Guido thought I was you at first, that there was another customer who always wore the same red coat. That’s when I realized we’d probably walked off with the wrong coats.”

You can’t believe it. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense.

You can’t believe it. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense. How could something that feels so right not belong to you? You’ve worn it forever; wouldn’t you know if it was not yours? Wouldn’t you know by its feel or its smell? Still, you hesitate. Finally, you say, “Okay, so what you’re saying is that you left something in the pocket that you want back, right?”

“That’s right,” says the voice. “Can you check for me?”

You sigh. This really feels like a very strange conversation. Although you are still not willing to admit the coat is not yours, if it were you, you know you’d want your coat back—or at least the thing in the coat that you thought you’d lost, so you slowly stick your hand in the left pocket and feel around. You remove a used tissue, a receipt, and a mint, but nothing else. You turn to the other pocket and, still feeling stupid, stick your hand in. Out comes another tissue and a stick of lip balm. You don’t feel much else. You’re relieved, much more relieved that you think the circumstances warrant, and you don’t know why.

“Nope, there’s nothing here,” you say, sounding a bit smug.

The voice sounds small this time. “Please,” it says, “could you check just once more? It’s really small, so it often slips way down into the corner of the pocket. It’s a little metal coin of an angel that my father gave me when I was little and before he died. It means a lot to me.”

You sigh an even bigger sign, but agree to check again when you hear the catch in their voice. This time, you make sure to delve deep down in the corner where you feel something that catches you up short. Sure enough, there’s something there, something small and thin and round. You almost don’t want to remove your hand to see what it is. Somehow you know this is the angel coin this person has lost.

Which is when the moment you realize that, if the coin in the pocket belongs to someone else, so does your coat. That it’s not your coat at all.

2 Days Later

You have just exchanged coats with the person who called you on the phone. You met at Antonio’s, which seemed appropriate. You looked at each other and took each other in. You’re about the same size, and have the same hair color, but other than that, you are not the same at all. When you offer back the angel coin to this person, you feel both uncomfortable and relieved. You cannot believe that all this time you were wearing a coat that you were convinced was yours, but belonged to someone else. You are thanked many times over by the person whose coat you were wearing and who was wearing your coat before they leave.

This is when you ask yourself the following questions:

• If wearing someone else’s coat can feel so right, can feel as if it’s mine without a shadow of a doubt, then what else could be going on here?
• What else am I believing is “mine” that really belongs to someone else?
• How do I know if/when I’m in my own Unique Energetic Signature or diddling around in someone else’s?
• What about all the feelings I feel and the thoughts that come into my head unbidden?
• When I feel sad or angry or upset, are those feelings really mine?
• Because if they’re not mine, I don’t really want them.
• If I know I don’t want them, how do I give them back—or not accept them at all?

These are questions you have never asked before, but realize in this moment of life-shattering brilliance that they could change your life.

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STAY TUNED FOR PART 2 of “HSPs and the Red Coat.”

The post Your you feel what you feel, they’re your feelings…right? first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

How do you become who you are? I’ve asked myself this question many times through the years, mostly because I’m so surprised at where I keep “ending up.” Especially since we all know that there is no “ending” until . . . well, there is.

No matter the length of the retrospective, it can be illuminating as a catalyst in moving forward. From the perspective of where I am now, I can understand a lot about how I got here. I grew up in an atmosphere of education and learning, equaled only by the ever-present churning inside me to comprehend the universe in a way that made sense. What a paradox it was! How do you live your life as a human when you feel like an alien species deposited in a strange land? When you’re sure you were left only with a wave and a vague suggestion to figure it out for yourself until the time comes for you to depart.

Low-functioning HSP-ism

I stumbled along. Sometimes severely low-functioning; often appearing high-functioning . . . the consummate HSP. That Highly Sensitive Person who felt everything 1000 times more than anyone else, could not understand the way the world worked or people behaved, or the way I was supposed to behave in it. A fish permanently out of water, gasping for breath every step of the way just to stay alive and moving from one day to the next, one crisis to the next.

The common traits of HSP-ism

I felt terrified, abused, ignored, overwhelmed. Over-protected, indulged, and loved–somewhat conditionally— based on my current level of handling whatever it was I was supposed to be handling. I was disillusioned by the world, but knew it was all my fault; blamed myself for being crazy, over-emotional, “too much.” I prayed to be understood, to feel accepted, yet only felt discouraged and unworthy. My life was guided by standards of achievement, which were expected to be met no matter the topic or goal. Loving intention in my environment, admittedly no small thing, could never be enough to mitigate how adrift I felt in my life.

Who were all these people around me who were so confident? How did they get that way? Why did I feel like crying all the damn time? What did they know that I didn’t know?

Death changes everything

Honestly, it was not until my husband Randy transitioned in 2012 that my life took the dramatic turn it apparently needed to clear the way for a true awakening. All the usual challenges—how to live without a beloved spouse, how to go about daily life when suddenly you are one, not a partnership of two, and so on—were enormous, yet it led to the emergent, deep-seated revelatory truth I’d been waiting for.

• Sure, I’d gone to Harvard University, yet never really understood how I got there or how I managed to graduate.
• Sure, I’d raised two children, much of the time as a single parent, yet felt terminally inadequate.
• Sure, I’d worked in some capacity for all these years—as a professional flautist, corporate trainer, counselor, medical transcriptionist, and longtime editor the owner of Harvard Girl Word Services—yet felt supremely unworthy of my own accomplishments.

The dark, dark night of the soul

Now, without my husband at my side, it was time to take a good, hard, long look at who I’d become—or hadn’t. I was 50+ years older, yet the same anxiety-ridden, prone-to-depression, fear-filled, tired person I had always been. Sometimes happier, sometimes sadder, sometimes more productive, sometimes less. But always, always, unsure of myself, my place in the world, my purpose.

On becoming high-functioning

High Sensitives like me—like us—can be really good at what we do. The thing is, we can be so filled with misgiving that we would rather stay anonymously in the background than stand out in the limelight. For example, I was happier to be praised for “channeling the messages” of others through writing than write material of my own—to put my name on the cover. To stay safe in a world where too much attention meant taking responsibility for the attention I might receive. The deep desire to be “seen” never surpasses our deeper need to stay hidden. Being discovered means being known for the fearful mess we can feel we are and are ashamed to be.

If any of this resonates with you, please know that the way ahead for you can be very different. You don’t have to wait until you’re 30 or 40 or 50 (the way I did) to feel inspired to live, and capable of living, a beautiful life.

What’s  your journey?

Of course, my journey is not yours. Writing a book with your dead husband after he’s transitioned about forming a relationship with those on the other side of the veil may not be in the stars for you. The only reason I am here now communicating with you, the HSPs of the world, is to share that you are so much more than you give yourself credit for. You have so much more to offer the world than the world might acknowledge. Your talents and abilities are not only valid and valuable, but the very talents and abilities that keep the world in balance, keep it from going over to the dark side, and are the saving grace of all humanity.

Sure, it’s a big statement, but I stand behind it.

Tools & techniques for the HSPs of the world–for YOU!

With the incredible realizations and tools and techniques I have acquired along the way, however, I am no longer that person. The kernel of who I was remains, but instead of rotting away from neglect, it has happily blossomed into something, someone, authentic and alive and full of life.

No, it doesn’t always happen all at once. It was more like the unraveling of a slow-moving epiphany than a Big Bang. Like the psychic octopus: Learning that Heidi hadn’t really existed at all, just the energy of other people who’d been invited in to take residence in her mind, body, and spirit.

Like the UES: Learning that I had a Unique Energetic Signature all my own—that all I had to do was identify it, feel it, know it . . . live in it.

That’s what I’m here to share with you. The ideas in Elevating Your HSP-ness will knock your socks off. They will change your life. They will support you through thick and thin. They will really, really, REALLY shift the way you see yourself and the world. They will invite you to realize that you are, and have always been, perfect and perfectly positioned to shine a light in a world that needs it more than ever. A combination of all I have learned and been in my life—the “professorial” element—and all I have ever experienced spiritually and emotionally—that has integrated into an identity I could never have imagined, into who I am today.

This bit of music from my healing guided collection should help you do the same.

The post When you feel lost, don’t give up. It’s the time for a change. first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

Negative self-talk

The body cannot distinguish between an actual event and a thought. When you think fearful thoughts, the emotions you feel are the emotions that are saying, “I am in danger; there is an actual danger here.” So what happens? You feel the emotion of agitation, fear, or anxiety, both emotionally and throughout your body. Unfortunately, this kind of useless, dysfunctional thinking has a long-term effect on the us, too,  and actually removes the body’s ability to recover from illness, to stay healthy.

What gets your attention?

Look at it this way. Do the nice things that happen in your life receive a lot of your attention? Maybe you share something good that’s happened today with someone, but after that it’s out of sight, out of mind. It’s the negative stuff that gets all the rehashing. First in your own head, and then outwardly when you share those things with others.

Self-talk is really the issue for HSPs because when the mind constantly generates thoughts of self-judgment and negativity, that’s the way life becomes. Externalizing that feeling about life only brings more of it to us. We talk to people who are happy to complain and whine along with us and get the justification we need to keep whining. We feel supported.

Negative self-talk causes a negative state of consciousness

But here’s the thing. Negative events cause a predominant state of consciousness that’s negative! You’ve probably heard this or similar statements a million times. The difference here is that we take that (not always immediately recognizable) correlation between your mental/emotional state and what happens to you, your associations, your work, etc., and cut that correlation. Sever the cord. Untie the binds. See what I mean?

Who do you judge?

Naturally, it’s easier to recognize negativity in others than it is in yourself. Much easier to judge others than yourself. Easier to want someone else to change so you don’t have to . . . so your discomfort or distaste or disregard will go away.

You wouldn’t be reading this if you were not motivated to awaken from the stupor of discomfort, dissatisfaction, disillusionment, or depression. Being motivated is the first step to conscious awareness. Motivation opens the mind, body, and spirit to a new way of thinking, which causes a new way of feeling, which causes a new way of being and living.

Why affirmations don’t work

It’s not enough to speak or think affirmations if you don’t feel their truth. You need to use tools like the Psychic Octopus to truly understand your HSP sensibilities to the degree that you can benefit from them.

You also need to learn who you are, inside and out, to stay present and aligned (the state of feeling good, of intimately knowing your Unique Energetic Signature), no matter what is going on around you.

Can you do it? Absolutely!!!

Do you have to understand it, know it, do it, have it, see it, live it all at once? Definitely not.

If you’re still wearing your suit of misery, it might be time to give it up

You just have to want it more than you want to stay in the place that feels uncomfortably comfortable—or maybe comfortably uncomfortable. That place where you’ve been wearing the Suit of Misery for so long that it’s the only item of clothing you ever wear. No matter how filthy it gets, no matter how ratty and holey it is, you’d rather keep wearing it than buy a new one because buying a new one comes with too many “problems.” Fit. Cost. Effort. The “breaking- in” factor. I mean, who wants to deal with all that, right?

If that’s your story, you are free to stick to it.

If you want to change your story, maybe it’s time to buy a new suit.

The post It’s time to exchange your old suit for a new one first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

Leaping was easy when you were a kid. It’s time to leap into being the brilliant HSP  you were created to be!

How do you get to be a BADASS . . .  the abundantly brilliant, consciously aware, amazingly dynamic, unapologetically adept, and unambiguously sensational being you were created to be?

First, you probably need to have a “psychic opening.”

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend doing it the way I did. You know, the whole dark-night-of-the-soul experience that takes you so far down into the morass of hell that you almost forget there’s any other place that ever exited. Yeah, that place. So, no, if you don’t need to go there, don’t.

On the other hand.

Sometimes that’s what it takes to have the psychic opening you need to crack wide the tightly wrapped egg-like structure (feels hard until it breaks at the slightest touch) of the depths of you.

What happened to me: My psychic opening

There I was, stuck in British Columbia, in a place I knew nothing about, with people I’d never met, working on a book with a medium I had just met, because my dead husband had told her to contact me.

I know. I thought it was nuts, too.

Randy had only died a few months earlier and I was in no condition to travel anywhere. I could barely get out of bed in the morning, let alone think about getting in my car and driving to Canada or to an airport to fly on an actual plane with actual crowds of people. My panic attacks were worsening. I woke up to my heart pounding and went to sleep—eventually and only after sheer exhaustion—with my heart pounding. The incessant, rapid thumping in my chest was telling me, “You’re in trouble. Your life has caught up to you. You’re dying. You’ll never make it–wherever that might be. Give up.”

Honestly, if it weren’t for this woman’s phone call (“Hello, my name is ____ and Randy told me to call you to say we have to work together on a book”) I may have opted out. The discomfort of living in my own body with my own thoughts and my own emotions was so great that shutting down once and for all felt like a viable option.

The Spirit World is on your side.

Without explaining herself with any specificity, this woman I didn’t know told me I was supposed to stay with her in Canada, work with her, and help her write her book. That Randy was guiding the process. Orchestrating on my (our) behalf.

Looking back, I know it was the lifeline I needed. I felt myself moving through the murky waters of grief to renew my passport, buy a suitcase, pack my bags, purchase a laptop for traveling until one day I arrived on Vancouver Island wondering how in heck I’d gotten there. It wasn’t until a couple of years later that I fully began to realize the way the Spirit World and my “gatekeeper,” Randy, was orchestrating so brilliantly to help me live a happier life.

She told me I was having a “psychic opening.”

It took a month for me to hear anything anyone was saying to me, even while I was writing and editing. It took another month for me to hear the words “psychic opening” and understand it had anything to do with me. That everything I knew, believed I knew; felt and believed I felt; thought and believed I thought was pretty much wrong. Or at least upside-down or something other than correct. The first time I heard it I went speechless. They were words, but words that could not possibly apply to me.

What if what you feel is not what you feel?

If you’re reading this, you probably know what it’s like to live life with anxiety and fear and emotional excess. The idea that someone would tell you that it’s because “you’re having a psychic opening” is just as probably not something you’ve ever heard before. But, when I tell you it’s what turned my life around, I’m not exaggerating. I’m not using hyperbole to make a point. I’m simply stating a fact.

When I share the news with clients that this is what is happening to them, most often they look at me like I’m crazy. They’ve been told their emotional states have been “over the top” and “too much” for so long that looking at them any other way seems completely unfathomable. Ridiculous even.

As “HSPs,” It’s time to embrace the concept that YOU can be highly intuitive and phenomenally strong at the same time. . . .

Be the Brilliant HSP You Were Created To Be!

As I said in my last post, it’s time to take the leap into your “BADASS-edness”: you abundantly brilliant, consciously aware, amazingly dynamic, unapologetically adept, and unambiguously sensational–being you were created to be!

It’s about going from unhappy to happy, unempowered to empowered. Into laughing and loving and generally feeling that life is more, not less, than it was cracked up to be. 

Will you feel this way all the time? Probably not. Neither do I. But the pauses in between are getting smaller.

Or you might say that I’m living in the pauses themselves.

Yeah…no. It’s much too far from anything they know, much too off the wall from anything they’ve ever heard, to consider.

And yet, it’s the truth.

Take the leap into your BADASS-edness!

And once you step into the truth and work within its brilliantly high-frequency resolution of competency and awareness, the release is stupendous. The relief is like the biggest breath you’ve ever taken. The renewal is as powerful as the strongest adrenaline surge.

But the best thing about being a brilliant HSP?

You’re one forever.

The post You can be the Brilliant HSP You Were Created To Be! first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

The Psychic Octopus: The Perfect Tool for High Sensitives

The psychic octopus is absolutely without a doubt the best tool I have ever come across for HSPs. It’s the single tool that changed my life. Applying it is not only easy, one you get the hang of it, but endlessly helpful, endlessly soothing, and endlessly effective.

Are you globbing onto someone else’s energy?

Learning to know the difference between your Unique Energetic Signature, your personal energy and other people’s energy is the basis for everything when you’re an HSP. Here’s why. When you’re highly sensitive, when you’re a “high sensitive,” as you now know you are and have probably always been told you are, you feel things that other people don’t seem to feel, and you feel them on a level that often feels overwhelming, even disturbing. Over time, your feelings can become so intense that you live a life of concern, fear, even anxiety and depression.

Controlling these reactions to your environment becomes a pervasive need. In order to save yourself from the pain and discomfort you feel, most people who are high sensitive learn to shut down, deny, or otherwise distract themselves from, or avoid, those feelings at all cost. The problem is, none of these options is helpful in the long run. They all rise out of fear, lack, and defensiveness, as opposed to acceptance, worthiness, and love for self…love for who we really are, and love for the world around us. This includes feeling hate, not love, for our own sensitivities and for the magnificent gifts they truly are.

We are spirit in biodegradable human suits!

We are all more than our physical selves; we are spirit in a human body, a human form that come into and leaves the physical world. Another way to say this is that we are simply all energetic beings. And if we’re all energetic beings, it’s only a short step to knowing that we are all connected energetically, through our energetic fields of vibration, in some way. When we realize this, we also realize that if we’re constantly open, constantly feeling all the energies around us, the good, the bad and the ugly feelings of the people and places in our environment, it’s all too easy to lose our own sense of self in the process. If we’re busy feeling what other people are feeling, how do we know what we are really feeling? How do we know if what we’re feeling is truly ours?

How do we know that we are living a life driven by our own thoughts and beliefs and sensations? That we’re being guided by connection with source and loving intention, as opposed to other people’s thoughts and other people’s intentions? Frankly, we don’t.

Be the octopus!

Here’s what to do. Start by picturing yourself as an octopus. That’s right, an octopus. You know, one with all its far-reaching tentacles, all those feelers that octopuses have. You are able to reach near and far, and curve around and into things you can go through and past in order to explore and probe and find and identify what’s around you. You are free to seek and react to all that’s out there.

Here’s the difference, though, between you and the octopus. You are doing this seeking and probing on an energetic level. You have your own personal psychic octopus. So what’s the problem? Well, the problem comes in when you’re not aware that you’re using your energetic tentacles to tap into other people’s energy bodies–their emotions and experiences.

You’re not aware that you have built your relationships on this ability to know how other people think and feel. And you do it to the extent that you are actually feeling what they think and feel might seem like a good thing. It might seem like it gives you a sense of empathy and compassion to know what they feel. But in actuality, it keeps you from knowing yourself.

You’re literally taking on the feelings of other people. So you lose the sense of who you really are. It keeps you from being centered and aligned. And then it’s all too easy to lose yourself in a relationship, to forget what you really want and to find yourself basically out of touch with who you really are in your essence. Did you ever say you felt “beside yourself”?

How to reel in your psychic tentacles (or wring out psychic sponge)

That’s probably because you were—energetically beside yourself, that is. But when your octopus is in, when you’ve reeled in your psychic tentacles, you’re no longer at the mercy of other people’s stuff. You’re no longer in constant reactive mode that keeps you off center, off kilter, because it’s only when you remain in your own energy that you have the ability to truly be a guiding, present, presence for anyone else.

Practice how it feels to pull in these psychic tentacles. When you pull in your tentacles, when you’re fully engaged in your own energetic pulse, you have no leftover strands of energy, so to speak, that are trolling around, seeking to tap into, or engage, or feel what’s inside anyone else. This not only allows you to have complete freedom to be who you are, but invites you to feel safe and protected wherever you are whoever is in your space, and whatever shows up in your sphere.

When your psychic octopus tentacles are “in,” you’re free!

Another reason this is so wonderful is because you begin to accept the person who you really are in your essence without feeling the need to put up a protective barrier against the world or against other people. You pull your tentacles in, as opposed to pushing away from and building a wall against.

Simply put, being aware of your psychic octopus is not only the gateway to freedom, but the first, most critical, leg of the journey on your roadmap to your own magnificence!

The post The Psychic Octopus: The Perfect Tool for High Sensitives first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.