Architecture of Meaning

Cultivating Meaningful Engagement for the Highly Sensitive Person

Your journey is not about being understood by others. It is about valuing your experience. You can be assured that most people will never have a true sense of your suffering, your disorientation, your perseverance, your loneliness or your triumphs. That is not what matters….

It is also demanding to understand that, most likely, you will have nothing “to show” for your months or years of pain and suffering. There will be no diploma, no party, no raise, no recognition. Of course, how could it be otherwise for an independent agent, bound only by the calling of the spirit?

One never comes back to the same material in the same way twice. It can be helpful to ask - how is this different? This material may feel the same- but how is this coming up in a new way? What piece of work have I already done that is making this work possible to do? Finding ways to help yourself know that it is a process - that you are not at the same place again - can alleviate some of the dismay.

If you have taken the leap and begun to explore the world of healing and healers- congratulations! While I understand that it is pain and discomfort that most likely drive you to this unfolding - it is an incredible journey upon which you are embarking. Much of what you will learn will come out of the requirement that you be your own advocate with the people who help you. Learning to trust yourself throughout the process is the greatest learning of all.

…There is no protocol or philosophy that will ever matter more than your own internal knowing, internal timing and needs for processing. If any practitioner has a “way” they work - always make sure this person has flexibility to allow for your unique path through the work.

…Many clients need assistance in finding and naming their experiences so that they can participate in the healing process and tell practitioners what they need. The gesture on the part of the practitioner to include clients as active participants in their own healing is only a gesture if clients do not have the tools to name, or the awareness to sense their own physical or energetic experiences.

Few clients trust their instincts when they see a practitioner. That gut hit of trust or reticence is often ignored in order to comply with the “helper”. Then the emotional, energetic and physical body are in a predicament of being “helped”, while they have not give their permission for the intervention.

It is rare to find a book on depression that touches upon the causal elements and dynamics of the depression itself. It is as if the writer - still suffering under the veil of depression’s shadow - is writing from within the condition. Unfortunately, by the very nature of depression, if you are in it - you can only write about what it is like - you can not write about what it is.

Depression is like a fever or a hallucinatory state. It prevents one from:

~seeing clearly
~accessing the core self
~being proactive
~freedom from disempowering influences.

We use terms like - being in a fog, or the light being dim because depression is very much a condition where the individual’s own energetic self is compromised. In my personal and professional work I would say that I have never encountered a depression that did not have spiritual, emotional and energetic dimensions to it.