Architecture of Meaning

Cultivating Meaningful Engagement for the Highly Sensitive Person

Either you have been on a path towards greater awareness for a long time, or more recent circumstances have initiated you onto a journey of discovery.

You may notice that some yoga masters and meditation gurus do not have the kind and complete presence you would expect. You are surprised by glaring gaps in their integrity. In fact, you can not help but notice that many people you meet whose lives revolve around yoga or meditation tend to have a kind of impenetrable shell. They say all the right things, but they seem less available, less fully present then some of your favorite people.

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.

What is your word for when you just know something? How do you “get it” when you get something?

Does your body become still? Do you experience an inner excitement? Do you see certain colors or hear a certain sound? Is there a different felt sense about the world around you?

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.

…Old notions of home may prevent you from defining: what belonging means to you, where you feel belonging and how you need to house yourself to feel home. How you relate to the rooms of your home, your yard, your neighborhood and the larger world need to be determined by what works for you, rather than by preconceived notions of what you “should” do.

It is unlikely that you will relate to home the way others do. For example - all those lovely photos in home magazines do not show: the noisy streets and loud neighbors, the barking dogs, the outgassing furniture and carpet, the hum of the appliances or the lights, or the low level electromagnetic buzz you hear. You feel, sense, respond to so much more than is ever depicted in a magazine, or than most people attend to.