Architecture of Meaning

Cultivating Meaningful Engagement for the Highly Sensitive Person

Hearing the radio station when the radio is turned off. Sensing something is wrong far before allopathic medicine can even detect a malignancy, though the biopsy proves there is cancer in the spot where something has felt “wrong”. An art expert who gets a ringing in his ears or feels sick to his stomach when he is presented with a fake work of art. People in certain parts of the country who hear the earth humming.

Clearly, there are levels of sensory attunement far subtler than anything western medicine or science can yet measure. Once one moves beyond thoughts like: ‘how can this be’ or ‘this is impossible’ or ‘I must be crazy’, the ability to accept and attend to the information one picks up begins.

For someone who is gifted and sensitive, there is often no rest from perceptiveness, complex thoughts and a feeling of overwhelm. Until the gifted and sensitive person gains a vocabulary for inner experiences, their qualities of experience are often assumed to be “just the way people are”. It is often surprising for the gifted person to realize other people’s minds are not always responding to things in multiple ways at once, or that for many - a rose is just a rose.

In order to understand this notion of intensity - imagine a pot of water at a low simmer and a pot of water on high boil. Most people’s nervous systems operate at the low simmer level - needing a high flame (a great deal of stimulus of any kind) to produce a high boil. For you, being on a low flame still feels like a high boil.