Architecture of Meaning

Cultivating Meaningful Engagement for the Highly Sensitive Person

If you are compelled to evolution, there will most likely come a time where you feel kicked out of life. It is not merely that you have to change your diet, or give up drinking, or change careers, or give up exercise, or let go of a mate. You find that the world no longer holds any interest for you.

You will probably spend awhile trying to kick start yourself into wanting to want the old things - certain friends, or activities or life goals. However, at some point, you will realize it is not going to happen. Then you may spend a period of time frightened and afraid that you are going crazy. If you are lucky, during this time you will stumble across an author (if you have not given up reading) or meet someone who validates this disinclination to the culture as part of the evolution into a creative and authentic life.

We have inherited schools of thought and modes of teaching and instilling knowledge that may have worked in other cultures or other times. However, they do not fit the requirements of this age. Our commitment to learning - our belief that knowledge holds the key - leaves us vulnerable to avoidance of deep matters of the heart….

If the capacity to be present in one’s heart, to gain greater and greater depth in one’s ability to show up to oneself feels like the way to true presence- then the road home leads in, not out to some spiritual philosophy.

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?

…The more you own your own adequacy and wisdom, the more difficult many forms of interaction become. School systems, medical settings, religious institutions and governmental agencies are some of the places where the “helping systems” are founded upon our agreement to surrender our voices.

As you step back into your own knowing and your own enoughness- remember that most people you will meet are still inside of the paradigm of disempowerment. They have agreed to surrender their own knowing to be taken care of.

I remain surprised by the number of extraordinarily gifted clients who, even after reading on the topic of giftedness, will say - “Gifted? That’s not me!”. Who knew how loaded this word is in our culture?! To most of us over the age of 30, gifted means being a genius. We know we are not Einstein or Oppenheimer - so we could never be gifted.

It is not the label that has meaning. Rather, it is the predicament a highly engaged enthusiast finds him or herself in in a culture that is not operating at the level of engagement, enthusiasm, depth or intensity that is natural to the highly engaged enthusiast. This HEE can end up thinking something is wrong with them when the world does not meet beauty, complexity, challenge with the degree of engagement so natural to the HEE.