Part 1

We’ve talked about the Psychic Octopus. The Psychic Sponge is really the precursor to that whole topic.

I love the analogy of the Psychic Sponge because it’s so easy to visualize and understand. Particularly for all of us good ol’ HSPs looking for transformative tools and techniques. No! Not to transform into someone different. To transform into who we really are!

You’ve got to start somewhere, right? Well, the psychic sponge is the perfect place.

Transformation starts with transference and transcendence. Today we’re hitting up the “transference” part of the equation.

As you know, being an HSP makes you seem/feel different from a lot of other people. At least that’s what they’d like you to think. More people are highly sensitive than anyone realizes because so many of us try—and often manage—to hide it so well behind their shields of logic. We hide our fears, our loneliness, our anxiety, our worry, our feelings of overwhelm, and our generalized belief that we’re simultaneously too much and not enough, whatever the context. In my world, even scientists, statisticians, and engineers, and those who stress objectivity and facts are not capable of separating out their human natures from their work. In fact, from what I’ve seen, these people are often on the HSP spectrum . . . big time!

Ever notice their tendency toward antisocial behavior, bluntness, abruptness, isolation, lack of empathy? It may not look like our own specific HSP-isms, but they are just as powerful in the effect they have. Because the more discomfort experienced, the more shutting down occurs. Work in the lab alone all day instead of visiting with friends? Easy choice! Focus on what I do best rather than feel constantly out of place? Why bother asking!

No matter who you are or what you do, your level of discomfort starts and ends with the level of discomfort or comfort you have within yourself. But it also has to do with the discomfort that comes from being a psychic sponge.

“AAARRRGGGHHH! Not that word!”

I know, I know. If you’re an engineer or a scientist, you’re not gonna like my use of the word “psychic.” Even if you admit to sensitivity, you’re might be squirming in your seat at the use of a word that yells out “Whacko! Occult! Stop now! Don’t take another step forward!” So, for now, let’s just call it an Energetic Sponge instead.

Which simply means that, again, no matter who you are or what you do, you pick up signals from the world around you. You can try to ignore them, resist them, shut them out, but you still have to engage with them, whether you’re in traffic or on the telephone ordering a pizza. Your experience will always include the outpouring of energetic data supplied by whatever and whoever is in your field of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Trying too hard is just more resistance–and isn’t worth it.

My suggestion? Stop trying. Instead, work it. Play with it. Stop resisting it. Use it to create a whole new range of colors on your palette of life. Just as you might have played with Play-Doh when you were in nursery school. (I know, awesome stuff, smelled crazy good.)

Here’s what you do.

• Step 1. First, go get a dry sponge and put it down in front of you. (Note: you probably want to do this by the sink.) Notice how dry it is, how hard it might be around the edges, perhaps how it’s shrunken a bit because it’s so dry. This sponge can be any kind, shape, any size. The only thing that matters is that it’s dry.
• Step 2. Next, get a bowl of water. Drop the sponge in the water. Watch  as it slowly comes alive. How it soaks up the water in the bowl, grows bigger with the moisture, and bigger still, until it can’t absorb any more because it’s so full.
• Step 3. Take the sponge out of the water. It’s dripping, right? It can’t hold all that water so, now that it’s out of the bowl, it’s dripping everywhere. (Hence, standing over your sink, as advised.)
• Step 4. Now, slowly wring out the sponge. Wring it and wring it until you’ve gotten as much moisture as possible out of it. The sponge is still damp, right? It’s still the size it always is when wet, a noticeably  different size from when it’s dry.
• Step 5. This is the really important one. See yourself as the sponge. A sponge that was all nice and comfy sitting alone with your book and waiting for your pizza to arrive. And then, suddenly, 20 people burst into the room with beer and pizza and noise and confusion and laughter and…and…and….

Not helpful. Your good ol’ HSP sponge-body has now gone from damply comfortable to miserable flooded by all the energies that have entered your space. You panic. You leave. Without your beer, without your pizza, but hoping you’ve escaped with your sanity somewhat intact.

**** TO BE CONTINUED! STAY TUNED for Part 2 of HSPs and the Psychic Sponge: Transcendence ****

Don’t worry, I’m only gonna leave you hanging until tomorrow when I’ll be talking about how fantastic it is to know you’re an Energetic Sponge and how it’s easy to something about it. Something that will inevitably change the way you see yourself and handle your interaction with the world.

The post The technique HSPs need to wring out their psychic sponge 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!.

Lots of people talk about what’s wrong, even if it’s to set the premise for getting something right. Fighting the war against drugs. Moms against drunk driving. Anti-terrorism. Anti-lots of things. All throughout the spectrum of society. We’re constantly fighting against whatever it is we decide we don’t like, we don’t want, we don’t agree with, or we find offensive.

I really don’t want to do that. I really, really, really want to talk about what’s right, what feels right, and how to feel that rightness so deeply that it leads to a more joy-filled life.

On the other hand, how do you talk about the light without mentioning the pitfalls and shadows, the potholes and stumbling blocks? I’d like to say I have it down pat, but I’m on the same path you are. Putting one foot in front of the other every single day and using my LED flashlight to guide the way.

What I know

Still, here are some of the things I know. Things that help me stay on the path without falling too far into the sinkhole of despair before remembering, rebounding, and re-emerging. Something like taking a quick dose of Emergen-C before a cold takes hold.

1. I remind myself that I have the capacity to expand my senses at any moment in time to welcome in an alertness that immediately broadens my outlook and perceptions.
2. I remind myself that I have the ability to fall into a natural state of love, no matter where I am doing or where I am.
3. I remind myself to see the beloved (and the “to-be-loved”) in everything. Even if I don’t feel it in the moment, this reminder helps if I’m tottering on the edge.
4. I remind myself to, as Michael Singer would say, “remove the inner thorn.”
5. I remind myself that I can become the wound or heal the wound.
6. I remind myself of a quote I once heard, that “one alone in consciousness with the infinite is the majority.”

These steps are all part of opening and living with an open heart—and doing it without fear of risk to oneself.

The comment I usually get here is, “It’s fine to say to open your heart, but that just means getting hurt more often.”

Which might be true…if you’re going around putting out an energetic message that says, “Hey, world, look at me. I’m vulnerable. I care about everything to the point where I don’t take care of myself. I’m here, open to hurt because I have an open heart.”

In HSPs: Hide or Seek I talked about reeling in your psychic octopus. This is exactly why that’s the foundation for living with an open heart without risk. Your heart remains open, but your psychic tentacles remain in. Sure, they swim around a bit, picking up bits and pieces here and there, exploring. But within the unique energetic field that is yours and yours alone. The Unique Energetic Signature you have identified. The realm in which you feel aligned, comfortable, stable, and capable…

…and openhearted.

The post Opening the Universal Heart: Risky or Risk-free for the HSP? first appeared on Elevate Your HSP-ness!.