How to get from point A to point B when you’re an HSP

From Highly Sensitive Person to Heroically, Inherently Bad-Ass

I’ll tell you what . . .

I got tired of being told I was too sensitive by the time I was about 5. That’s when I began to understand that I was being told in no uncertain terms that my feelings didn’t matter as much as other people’s and that in order to “get along” I needed to stop expressing them. Not that I was able to truly comprehend the magnitude of such an understanding. Over time, it simply seeped into my brain, soul, and heart. The constant message that it was risky, dangerous even, to express what I felt, what I felt I knew, what felt right, what my “gut” was telling me. Naturally, the more time that went by, the more my happy little joyful free child self became an introverted, terrified-I’d-be-discovered self. It’s taken me years (you don’t want to know how many) to unlearn that behavior. To discover that the fearful person I was, is not the confident person I started out as when I came into the world.

I meet people every day that are . . .

• Afraid to speak out/up
• Are afraid to be who they are
• Afraid to put forth their opinion
• Afraid to be “wrong” (according to the standards of others, whoever those others are in that moment)
• Afraid to “fail” (according to the standards of others, whoever those others are in that moment)

It could be the lovely, shy person behind the counter at the gym or the gas station attendant afraid to look you in the eye. The musicians who have  a hard time communicating other than on their instruments. The alcoholic or the drug addict who’s more comfortable hiding in those places and spaces than they are expression who they are.

Birth………..Life………….Death

Birth

The beginning of life as a human is birth, at least in terms of awareness as we know it. We come into the world, out of the womb, not only with the awareness our soul had while in that womb, but now with the awareness of all our senses that engage in a whole new way.

Death

We often consider the opposite of LIFE to be DEATH. But BIRTH is actually the opposite of DEATH. It is the beginning and the ending of our physical form in the 3-D world as we know it. Birth is the entry into life and death is the exit out of life. The inhale . . . and the exhale.

Life

LIFE, on the other hand, is what happens between birth and death. It’s all the stuff in between. It’s where we spend however many years breathing in . . . and out to perpetuate the life we’ve been given.

For most of us the fear of death is seen as the fear of the ending of life, but I think it’s much more than that. I think the fear of death starts at a very early age when all the other fears begin to manifest. All those fears listed above start the trend. The very act of breathing becomes difficult when you’re afraid, and breathing is everything. The shallow breath is representative of these fears that result in the biggest fear of all: death. The Biggest Ending of All. Yet, in my way of thinking, it is really the fear of letting go that has evolved into the fear of dying. Letting go of is another way to say “able to express.”

• If I let go of the fear of speaking up, I feel good about expressing myself.
• If I let go of the fear of being who I am, I feel capable of evolving as I move through life.
• If I let go of the fear of putting forth my opinion, I can also be unafraid of listening to the opinions of others.
• If I let go of the fear of being “wrong,” according to the standards of others which have now become my own beliefs and standards and values, I am free to develop my own definitions of what feels right for me.
• If I let go of the fear of “failure,” I not only let go of the tendency to self-sabotage, self-criticize, and potentially bully others, but step into the realm of creative, inspirational thought for no other reason than to see where my thoughts, sensations, and feelings might lead.

In other words . . . Be the Bad-Ass: Let go of the fears we have been taught into the freedom of being the BAD-ASSES we truly are.

Every day is about reminding myself to remember that the “Highly Sensitive Person” I thought and felt I was is actually the Heroically Inherently Bad-Ass being that I am.