Architecture of Meaning

Cultivating Meaningful Engagement for the Highly Sensitive Person

…While I do not begin to suggest that sensitives and visionaries know how climate change is going to play out, I would say that many sensitives and visionaries live with a sense of how large events will play out or come to pass that surpasses all logical explanation. In some ways it is as if they lack the filter that limits the ability of most people to see beyond the present….

If a pebble is dropped in the pond, it is as if the sensitive or visionary feels or sees as far out as the 100th ripple….As crises spread, deep change is mandatory. Someone aware of the ripples can be confused as to why it takes such crisis for most citizens to even begin to consider the need for change. This is part of the pain of carrying a capacity for vision - or for the awareness of the exponential.

In a culture that puts a premium on production, mastery and outward engagement, an introverted, sensitive or evolving man has no model for his journey. There is no commonly shared vocabulary for his experience. In a dieing culture, any man moved to untangle himself from the crumbling infrastructure is at a loss when it comes to understanding the process of disengagement.

Whether it is the high functioning attorney who has a stroke at age 35 and must learn to walk and talk all over again, the financial advisor that must relinquish the notion of making clients money in a falling market, the entrepeneur committed to sustainability who comes to understand there is no saving the planet or the management consultant who must watch his wife die of breast cancer - when these men face the abyss, there is no philosophy, book or cultural movement to support them.

“Community” is a phrase we hear everywhere these days. Unfortunately, the tools necessary to create and sustain healthy community are often less available than the numerous efforts towards community. Often, a group can get bogged down by a member who does not share the goals of the group. The absence of a commitment to self reflection or capacity for clear communication limit the potential of any group.

As we go forward with an intention to reestablish bonds of community in every sphere of our lives, it is helpful to have concepts and tools to nurture and encourage healthy and authentic interaction. In a healthy group setting, it is the capacity of each individual for responsible and honest interaction that becomes the glue of structural integrity.

Just as we orient ourselves by the dependable rising and setting of the sun, or the geology of the place we call home, we used to orient ourselves by the rhythms of seasons and the patterns of rain, winds and annual cycles. We have lost one of our compass bearings. As the needle spins more and more wildly, and weird is the only thing we can depend upon, how do we orient? What is it in the human psyche that is being fractured as we are forced to surrender notions of external stability? How deep do those fracture lines run and what do those subterranean reverberations invite us to open to?

The image of the towers falling was the visual image that broke something in our collective psyche and opened us up to this next phase of evolution. Each new, impossible to digest reality - be it the collapse of our economic system, the loss of environmental stability or the failure to be able to imagine our futures, requires a kind of dieing to our concept of what is so, of the world we live in, of what we can count on.

Many are reacting to the sudden accumulation of never before experienced realities by jumping on the bandwagon of green building, or carbon footprint reduction. While all these efforts are commendable, the problems and realities are much bigger than all our actions. Governments, economies and climate responses we can not even envision are shaping our futures.