I’m not being so emo on purpose—it’s just the way I am!

Yesterday I wrote about not being a victim by stepping into a new way of thinking. After further conversation with myself this morning during a meditation, I was reminded how resistant I myself was to this idea. I mean, who wants to admit that what happens to them might be due to something they are doing or thinking or being rather than charge it to someone else?

It’s like using someone else’s credit card. Sure, you’ve purchased the item, so now it’s yours, but who really did the deed?

Here’s what happened when my husband—many, many years ago (yes, while he was still in physical form, i.e., alive)—and I were having a—well, I’ll call it a discussion to be polite—knock-down-drag-out miserable-with-crying moment.

There’s a lot to unwrap here, so stay with me.

The whole thing started with Randy sharing something going on, something I’d apparently done, that was making him upset. At first I was sympathetic. I didn’t like seeing him upset or unhappy, and, being the empathetic, caring, HSP that I am, I expressed support and love and kindness.

At least that’s how I like to think it went. I guess Randy didn’t see it that way.

His take on it was that, after about a minute of “I’m sorry you feel that way,” I’d immediately launched into the “but” thing. You know.

• “I’m sorry you feel that way, but….”
• “But…it really wasn’t that big a deal….”
• “…I really didn’t mean it that way so you shouldn’t take it that way….”
• “…I can’t hear you when you raise your voice to me….” and
• “I don’t really care about how you feel because what really matters is that I defend myself against whatever accusations you’re making so that I turn the whole conversation around until you feel sorry for me.”

The defensive mode

My husband went on to say that playing the victim was not a viable option. That being in a relationship meant if one of the partners had an issue, the other one was to listen appropriately without jumping in to defend.

It was the first time in my life that I realized how that was exactly what I’d been doing. As soon as someone was triggered by something I’d said or done and told me about it, the only option I saw was to jump into defensive mode. To defend why I’d said it or done it or felt it or could excuse it.

He was right. And, honestly, it was mortifying.

There I was, crying my heart out, believing with all my heart, based on all the psychological baggage I’d brought with me into the marriage, that if my husband was unhappy it was all my fault, that I’d never fix it, and that he’d probably end up leaving me.

Um…yeah. So of course I’d get all defensive. What other choice was there?

The upshot

What happened? I got really, really quiet for a while. I realized I really didn’t know how to listen to “criticism” or “feedback” or whatever you want to call it without defending myself from what I thought the words meant or implied. They’d meant bad things were going to happen when I was a kid, so why wouldn’t bad things happen now?

From then on, my first question to myself when something came between us to work on was, “Am I listening or busy thinking of all the ways I’ll defend myself?” And I have never looked at potentially challenging conversations the same way again.

Before I end, I don’t want to leave you thinking that my husband’s insistence that something I did had “triggered him” was altogether in the clear relative to victimization either. Neither of us understood at the time that how we react and respond is our responsibility and no one else’s. While maliciousness is never excusable, if something occurs with good intention, isn’t it better to reflect on one’s own role first rather than leap into blaming the other?

In conclusion, whether we’re HSP, highly sensitive, or not, only we are responsible for ourselves, our triggers, and our responses.

The post I’m not being so emo on purpose—it’s just the way I am! first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.

It’s taken years to even begin to get accustomed to knowing the difference between acting on my thoughts and following guidance. What I now call my Intuitive Guidance System, or IGS. So when I ask a deliberate question and get—you guessed it—a whole lot of nuttin’, well, it feels like something’s gone awry. Like in a really big way.

This is what happened last night. I’d traveled to the Oregon Coast to do one of my metaphysical Afterlife Meetups, which had begun several years ago in the tiny coastal town where I lived with my husband and after he made his transition to the Great Beyond. After moving to Washington State a few months ago, it felt like it was time to head back, to see as many as I could in my beloved community, and maybe even put a little bit of a period at the end of that decade’s sentence. I asked my team in the Up There to support me in whatever way was in the best interest of everyone: me, all the participants, the friend with whom I was staying, Source, the drivers on the road…you get the picture. I also asked for some suggestions—a good solid download would be nice—on what to talk about. I mean, I assumed I’d be doing some mediumship because that was always in the cards (so to speak), but what would I talk about? What did I have to say that might be inspirational, that might get minds, bodies, and souls up and doing a little jig or maybe a two-step?

I asked the week before. Then every day up through my landing at my friend’s house the night before go time. At that point, only the tiniest of little red flags was only beginning to show up on the horizon. Yet, as I unpacked my suitcase, I wondered why a room full of people would show up (sans masks for the first gathering of its kind in over two years, I might add) if I had nothing to say?

Are you telling me I’m supposed to trust my gut? Me???

I was sharing that fact with my friend and expressing that I was still waiting—patiently, I thought, IMHO.  She only laughed and said, “It’ll come to you. It always does. You just have to trust it.”

Duh. Maybe it was a good time to send up a little white flag instead?

Cut to the next night. Library. Afterlife Meetup night. 5 PM. Turns out the person who was supposed to post my flyers in town had been busy with other things and forgotten. It occurred to me that maybe that’s why I had a basket so overflowing with nothing—because no one was going to show up. But then one person strolled in. And another…and another. Until every one of the 50 chairs was filled.

Suddenly, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. Because all I needed to do was be there and reflect and express gratitude for all the love that was being generated in that room. To talk about how, in the midst of nothing, everything gets a chance to surface. How validation that you’ve been listening to your IGS shows up when you least expect it, when you’ve reached the point where you’re pretty darn sure you’ve used up your allotted supply and your Intuitive Guidance ATM account tells you its pockets are empty.

The HSPs Intuitive Guidance System

It’s like the old Gerry Seinfeld series: the show about, you guessed it, nothing. How does a show about nothing end up running for a gazillion or so season end up to be one of the greatest shows ever? You guessed it. Because in the very nothingness there is also the everything.

It’s where you have “nothing” to talk about until the last minute and it reveals exactly what’s been on your mind and in your heart and in your soul.

It’s where your ego/shadow side decides to rear its snide little self and scream (or whine, as the case may be), “I’m not good enough. What am I doing here? And here I thought I had something worthwhile to share?”…and demands you take a good hard look at what’s driving you.

It’s when you realize, just as you do during meditation, that there’s more in the “nothingness” than you could ever have imagined.

Maybe it’s even where, if you settle in, your mind takes a break and your spirit gets to shine. Where, if you’re willing, you can find and trust—your true, highest, Self.

And where, if your IGS is invited to steer the car for you, you can actually relish the ride.

The post Is Nothing Really Nothing or is your gut telling you something? 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!.

For too many years our societies have undermined the value of “feeling.” By feeling, I don’t just mean the experiencing of emotions, either. I mean the value of intuition, too, and the value of “knowing” without seeing physical proof…and then receiving validation for it. In over-accentuating the belief that the only real truth is “fact,” that logic reigns supreme over all else. As if one could ever separate the human from the experience! And in my view, since human-ness is a constant, there will never be a time that human emotion is not involved on some level. Society’s paradoxical relationship with “sensitivity” is at the core of our misconceptions and underappreciation of the idea of “sensitivity.”

Society’s paradoxical relationship with “sensitivity”

On the other hand, we have religion existing alongside science in a painfully obvious paradoxical relationship. We have more and more people who can’t seem to tell the difference between truth and lies by the very people invested in the spin. We have sexual deviance running rampant in the same world run by people who are the perpetrators of such violence.

We have become insulated from who we really are and all the abilities we could be sharing to further the state of conscious awareness, love of the fellow members of our species (and all living creatures), and the nature of humanity at large.

It is not my intention to delve into politics—or science or religion. I am not an expert in any of those subjects. I am, however, pretty darn well versed in what it means to be a highly emotional, intuitively driven, fairly intelligent, and (hopefully) spiritually evolving human being, and an HSP.

The most recent book I’m reading on high sensitivity is Christian-based. In other words, if you are sensitive it’s okay, but you need Jesus’s help to deal with it productively. Without disparaging this philosophical approach, I would like to posit that, by and large, such advice is not all that helpful if or when you’re truly addressing the desire to know who you really are. At least not by other people’s standards based on religion or politics or socioeconomic status or anything else.

We are who we are

It is not possible to entirely cut the cord between ourselves and the environment in which we live, nor from the upbringing that we have had. It is possible, however, to consider our opportunities to live differently.

Love energy is the most powerful energy there is

As I continue to explore how high sensitives interact with the world (or avoid it) and how we feel like second-class citizens, I am reminded of what my husband used to tell me…almost every day. “Heidi,” he’d say, “You are not the weakest because you are the most loving, as people would have you believe, but the strongest.” It took me many years to begin to understand the truth in that statement.

In my way of thinking, love is the most powerful energy there is. Science cannot measure it necessarily, and religions cannot own it or call it theirs, yet most of us have felt it, experienced it, and desired it at some point in our lives. We might say that we can see a loving act, but the feeling of love is something else entirely. Furthermore, the heart, at least in the sense we might use the word to tap into sensitivity, is what balances out the mind. Without it, not much is left.

HSPs tap into what matters

All energy works the same way. High sensitives tap into energy, first and foremost. The telepathic ones tend to tap into people’s thoughts, the empathetic ones into people’s feelings, and so on. The key is not to stop being sensitive, but to start understanding that you can have it all. You can understand how people feel, for example, without actually feeling what they are feeling. It’s about respecting the “thought boundaries” of others without blocking them out, but rather by aligning yourself with your own energy…and staying there.

For everyone’s sake.

For the sake of humanity.

The post Why being an HSP feels a lot more like a curse than a blessing first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.