And that does in some ways make us kind of touchy and wincey. If you have highly sensitive hearing, it’s really hard when things are loud. If you have highly sensitive, if you pick up chemicals, you’re sensitive to chemicals, ooh, you can’t really handle a lot of intense toxins around you or even slight amounts of toxins. So sensitivity by definition has to do with reacting strongly to slight, slight stimuli. And so I think as a result, I had come to see it kind of as not weakness, but something that is a person who’s super sensitive is sort of fragile and has to be handled specially, and it’s not a strong position to be highly sensitive.

But today we were all communing in our family as we are wont to do, and I started to think I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong because we have a bunch of highly sensitive people in our family and it’s not always a gentle, soft, delicate thing. Sometimes sensitivity is powerful, and it comes on powerfully. And people who are highly sensitive feel its power before other people might.

So for example, if you’re feeling anxious, one of the things I’ve learned is that sensitivity can be an elation. If you feel something wonderful and you’re highly sensitive, you actually have a strong uptick in your mood. You feel wonderful, more wonderful than someone with lower sensitivities, right? So we’ve got to be aware of the fact that we’re picking up good things more than people with lower sensitivities might.

But also if you’re highly sensitive and an impulse comes in that you don’t understand, this is where I come back to the research I did for the book Beyond Anxiety that’s almost here—I will start talking about it in the present tense instead of the future tense very soon here. But anxiety is often a response to something that is just unfamiliar. It doesn’t have to be something dangerous. Our brains are pre-programmed to see anything unfamiliar as a potential threat. And as soon as that happens, the part of the brain that does anxiety will grab a sensation we don’t quite understand and make it into something to be scared about. It makes it into anxiety.

So there was a feeling, we collectively had this feeling in our family that there was a lot of just energy around us today. And I was thinking, “I just need to crawl under my bed and live that way.” But then we started talking about, wait, what if we see a strong energy coming in that we’re not familiar with as something to investigate rather than as something to just try to damp it down? Because it’s annoying. It really gets your attention when you’re feeling a strong energy and you don’t know what it is. And you’re almost always going to feel anxious about that. But we were all feeling that way and we started to dig into it and we started to ask, all right, we’re very sensitive, which means we can kind of tell one flavor of feeling from another.

So the first thing, I said let’s check first, we all checked, to say, is this physical? Is this—because we’ve been super busy and we’ve all had whooping cough—we’re over it and touch wood—and we’re all like, it’s winter or whatever. Is this our bodies just acting up? Nope, it just didn’t feel like that. All right, so is it the mind? Are we just talking to ourselves about how the world is dangerous and things are problematic and generating anxiety from a mental place? Nope, didn’t feel like that. It had no words around it. All right, okay, so are we generating this from an emotion which is slightly different from other stimuli? I’m going to have to cough. It’s because I said I was over my cough. Excuse me. That was nothing compared to the way I’ve been coughing for the last five weeks. 

So if you’ve checked with body, mind, and heart, then you can realistically ground the sensation. If it’s not any of those and your sensitivity is telling you no, that’s not the source of it, then we can safely say it’s coming from a spiritual place.

And I always go there last because our culture always goes there last. So I like to rule everything else so that we don’t look like idiots. Plus taking every little twinge as a spiritual sign, I’ve known many people who do that. They’re just getting into sort of like, whoa, maybe I want to be spiritual. And then they eat a bad egg or something and they’re like, “I feel we are all doomed!” and it’s just digestive. So you do want to rule out more prosaic causes, but once you’ve really come down with, okay, I’m feeling something energetically, this is something metaphysical and it’s unfamiliar, so it’s making me anxious, but it’s really just energy.

So I always go to this riding lesson that I received with great appreciation and gratitude from my wonderful friend Katja Elk, who is an absolutely astonishing horse person and rider of horses and trainer of horses. And she had me on a stable, friendly horse—the only kind I could possibly deal with—and she was teaching me how to let this horse know, his name was Buddy, so I was going to teach Buddy to do something he’d never done before. First of all, I could make him go forward by pressing gently in a certain way and leaning slightly forward because he knew he’d been trained to do that. So he’d go forward, I could get him to go backward by tilting slightly backward, touching him in a different way with my feet.

And she said, “Now I want you to make him go sideways.” I’m up on this 2000-pound animal, 1500, I don’t know how much he weighed, but a lot more than I do. And I’m like on him. It’s not like I can pull him or push him around, I’m just like there. If he doesn’t want to do something, how am I going to get him to do it? So Katja said, “What I want you to do is make a sensation he’s never had before. I want you to flutter your foot against his side on one side, like your right foot.” So I did and Buddy became concerned. It was an unfamiliar stimulus and horses are extremely sensitive, which is why they’re a perfect metaphor for everything I’ve ever done. And he didn’t know what to do. So he was like, go forward? He went back, he twisted around a little and then he stepped to the side and she said, “Now stop.” And I took my feet off him and he was like, what did I do? What did I do? She said, “Now repeat.” So I fluttered my foot and he tried a few things and then he stepped to the side: “Stop.”

Then we started again, flutter a few times, step to the side, stop. Now I flutter my foot. He goes right to the side, stop. Now he’s got it. And Buddy would go, and I had to do it with my other foot on the other side. And just by putting on some pressure that felt a little bit weird to him because he’s so sensitive and then stopping it when he did the right thing or the thing I wanted him to do, I trained him to do something he had never done before.

Now I put it to you, folks, I believe that we are all going to have to be trained to do things we have never done before in the upcoming hours, days, weeks, and months. I think we’re in a really interesting, unprecedented landscape—politically, biologically, ecologically—and we need to be guided. And the way guidance comes, especially to sensitive people, is through this unfamiliar stimulus that may feel weird and unfamiliar and it scares us and it can be very, very strong.

But what we did today in my family is we said, as we started investigating, “Is it physical? Is it mental? Is it emotional? No, no, no, it’s just energetic. What is it? Is it something that happened that just has to do with our family? No. Is it something that has to do with the whole world? Kind of. But it’s sort of in the middle.” And so as we started exploring what felt true, then the magic of the brain kicked in because when you go from fear to curiosity, you have stopped the mechanism that spins anxiety and you have started the mechanism that takes you into creativity. Curiosity is what I call the secret door between anxiety and creativity in the brain. 

So when we started investigating in this way, we stopped feeling anxious and started feeling, ah, it’s kind of calm. The pressure went off and then we would dig in and each of us, it was like I had my own assignment. And when I came to it I was like, “Oh, I’ve got to really do that today.” And Ro did that and we were all focusing on what are we being guided to do today? And it was very strong.

So I’d really love all of us in the future from here on out, I’d love us all on this broadcast and anybody hearing it in the future to check every day to see what you’re feeling with your strong sensitivity. What is the sensation coming through to you? Is there peace and calm that says just spend the day relaxing? Is there a weird signal you don’t understand? If there is, then you start to examine it. Is it body, heart, mind, or is it spirit? And as you do that and you begin to explore what it feels like, your curiosity will bring you out of the anxiety and it will start to lead you to the thing you’re meant to do.

Will it give you a plan for the rest of your life? No. I couldn’t give Buddy a plan for the rest of his life. I could just get him to step to the side and then I’d take the pressure off. And I think our higher selves or our spirit guides or what the hell ever is there, that’s how it guides us. It puts on pressure and then it stops. And I think that one of the things, it’s sensitivity, just final word, sensitivity is often associated with femininity and both of them are seen as weak. But I would say the strength of sensitivity and the feminine, the divine feminine, which can be possessed by people of all genders—that is, in fact, stronger than other types of energy. Like the masculine energy of our recorded history is the story of a bunch of people killing each other. And the unrecorded story that goes behind that story is of millions and millions of hours of people being kept alive and created by the power of nourishment, by the power of the feminine and the masculine combined, of course, the whole thing. And by the presence of spirit.

I have an Ani DiFranco lyric for you provided by, you will not guess this, yes, Rowan Mangan, the Gracious Badger, the biggest Ani fan in our house, which is saying a lot. She says, and it’s pretty gross for a lot of—all of you out there who are going to be grossed out: trigger warning. It’s a song that Ani DiFranco wrote about being in a business meeting when her “monthly visitor” showed up unexpectedly, if you know what I mean— the symbol of femininity and often seen as part of its weakness. And Ani wrote, “Ain’t no hassle, no, it ain’t no mess. Right now it’s the only power I possess. These businessmen got the money, they’ve got the instruments of death, but I can make life, I can make breath.”

So the power to bring things to life is coming to us and the messages come in strong bolts of energy to our sensitive selves. And a lot of the other people in the world, Glennon Doyle says we’re the canaries in the coal mine, we’re the ones who feel it first. And we are the ones who can start to lead our lives this way in the direction that our higher selves are signaling to us to go and potentially help a lot of other people whose sensitivities may not be quite as strong. And in this way we serve the world. And it is not a small thing. It is not small. It is huge. So I’m going over to look at questions. No questions yet, okay. Well, ask some questions if you want to.

Can you remember a time when you just felt sort of out of sorts or if you can find an area in your life where it just feels like, oh, I’m not sure what to do, I feel some anxiety. Instead of just trying to drop that out of your consciousness, allow it to come into your strong sensitivities and allow yourself to explore it. See if you can relax your body as you explore something that feels anxious and start to feel, is it just for you? Is it for the people around you? Is it for the whole world? Does it even belong to you? Or is it energy coming from somebody else? When does it feel more? When does it feel less? Start to read the energy. 

Long, long ago, my then-husband and I decided we were going to live like leaves in the stream. This was after Adam was born and we’d both just taken a running jump off a cliff in terms of our whole lives, and we decided we were just going to drift in the stream. And I was telling my family today that that felt like a little creek. And right now being a leaf in the stream feels like, maybe not being on the Amazon, but definitely a strong tributary. There’s a lot of power flowing right now. And if we could all just relax into the current of that, as the Daoists say, then our sensitivities will guide us exactly where we’re meant to go because the river itself is made of the energy that we sense with our strong sensitivities.

Okay, so Jesse says, “How to be with or process sensitivity while in deep grief?”

All right, so the first thing you have to do is make sure that you are completely relaxed into what you are feeling physically and emotionally and be aware of what you’re thinking. So physically and emotionally. Emotion—of course, the emotion of grief is deep, deep sadness and sometimes anger. It’s the grieving process and it is intense. As you go into it, your body will naturally want to rest more because grief work is heavy. Actually it’s changing your brain, it’s changing your biology, it’s intense, and it requires rest. Just like growing a baby requires rest, or recovering from whooping cough requires rest. I had to finally just lie down for a weekend to get over that thing. So once you’ve done that and you’ve totally surrendered to the emotion, make sure you’re not thinking thoughts that are exacerbating the pain.

So if I’m grieving, I don’t know, the loss of a friend and then I start to think, “I’m going to lose everyone, everyone’s going to die and I’m going to be alone,” my thoughts are going to add a level of anxiety that is not just grief. If fear comes into it, you want to look and make sure you’re not making things up in your mind and then reacting to what? Not to events, but to thoughts about events, which that’s unnecessary. Pain is inevitable; that’s grieving. Suffering is optional; that’s reacting to thoughts that scare us or make us sad. So once you’ve got that and you’re sitting in a full surrender with your feelings and letting go of all your thoughts, then the sensitivities can become very, very powerful. 

Often it’s when you’re in the dark night of the soul that the greatest illumination comes because your boundaries are down, you’re using all your strength to process the emotion, and your sensitivity to spiritual messages is going to be much higher. So both the memoirs I wrote, most memoirs I’ve ever read are about people going through dark nights of the soul and having epiphanies because of it. So it’s not easy. It is not easy, but you can do it. And in fact, you’re actually going to get more sensitive, more specific and more accurate because you’re in the grief process.

All right, Catherine says, “So then you acknowledge that it’s a spiritual sensitivity and then how do you release it?”

You don’t release it. It has to release you. That’s like I’m in the arms of a bear, how do I let it go? Well, it has to let you go. The forces of the metaphysical universe are bigger than any one person. So instead of releasing it, you allow yourself to go where it’s asking you to go. And at first you won’t know what you’re supposed to do. Today after this anxiety, we sort of drilled it down and I thought, “Oh, I really want to make a post in the Wilder Community today.” And it’s kind of an odd post. It’s one of my little ADHD special-interest things, but I really, really want to post it in the Wilder Community. So I spent like half an hour, and I did that and I had a blast. And then the pressure of the energy, that “do something, do something,” totally relaxed when I said that’s what I’m going to do. So that’s what happens. The pressure comes off when you’re headed in the right direction, and that’s how you get trained by the force.

EllaEtoile says, “I know I need to rest but have a lot of work. My mind is very, very concerned about it and, it does need to be done. How to placate the mind?”

Well, you have to do this with Kind Internal Self-Talk: KIST. I’ve talked about it before in the Gathering Room. You just say to yourself, “Yeah, that’s a lot of work and it’s important, but little by little we’ll get through it.” Look, we’ll take turtle steps. We will call upon the powers of Ganesha, the elephant god, the remover of obstacles, and together they make up Goethe’s admonition to a young poet. “Never hurry,” says the turtle. “Never cease,” says the elephant. And then you just put your head down and take a step forward. And it all gets done. Or it doesn’t and that’s fine, you’ll figure it out. But if you put your head down and do the work, you will be moving your brain into that creative space where you’re actually doing something, and the anxiety has to go away when you’re in that generative state, creative state where you’re connecting things you’ve never connected before, which is handled by a different hemisphere of the brain than anxiety. Okay?

And Elle is a Cahootnik. I would love to hear what you think of my post. Okay, anyway, sorry, that’s for our Wilder people. So Bjorn Baby Bjorn, I love that name. I hope I pronounced it right, I don’t know, maybe it’s in Australian. 

Anyway, they say, “Feeling frustrated and behind despite major effort. How do you feel unstuck and keep faith while hurting and feel like you’ve been manifesting for a long time?”

You come into the present moment and you find gratitude and appreciation for whatever is here right now. And we can do it absolutely, this moment. So if you’re watching this, Bjurn Baby Bjurn, just take a deep breath, let go, oh, I’m so tired. Be tired, be frustrated. Be all the things you are. You don’t have to change what you’re actually feeling at all. But then find something around you that’s a glimmer that reminds you of something positive: I have my special crystal that someone found in the desert for me and I dug it out of a rock using dental tools my own self. And I mean I looked around my desk and picked up something that made me happy. And then I go into deep appreciation for this object. Or my turtle and my elephant. They’re so squishy. And I can just be so, I mean, good lord there are people talking to me, listening to me right now from around this planet! 

Just be in gratitude and appreciation. And then as Anita Moorjani says, you go from surrender to acceptance, from acceptance to gratitude, from gratitude to appreciation, from appreciation to joy, and from joy to peace. Just the gratitude and appreciation. Just put ’em on with a trowel, put ’em thick. They always work. And then the big things happen in their own time. Be a leaf in the stream. The stream will do it.

Ariel Friedel says, “How do I foster and show respect towards sensitivity in my child? He’s only a toddler, but I find myself in my programming trying to shut down big feelings.” 

Oh my gosh, this is so true. But sorry to go on and on about Wilder, but it’s become this major thing in my life, and we have these things called Arty Friday Hangs. And in our last Arty Friday, Hang, the discussion, we had a discussion about parenting that absolutely shifted the way I parent. And what we realized is that our kid Lila is afraid she can’t draw. And none of us has ever said to her that she’s done a bad job on a drawing. But then we realized that Karen and Ro—she’ll say, “Draw a dog,” and they’ll say, “No, I can’t draw well. Take it to Marty. She’s the one who draws, to Muffy.” That’s how Lila knows me. And we realized, “Oh, we’re making categories of someone who’s been drawing for 60 years and saying she’s good. And then people who haven’t drawn for 60 years, no, that’s bad.” 

So I said [this to the Wilder Community] and somebody said, “Just make it about mark making.” So one of our Wildniks said this. So the next morning I go down and I’m with Lila and she wanted to draw, and I drew a Christmas tree and I made jagged marks for the needles and I said, “Look, can you make jagged marks like this? Just little ones?” And she started doing it. And then I made ornaments and I left spaces for her and I said, “Can you make a mark like this?” Because I was starting to realize how freaking sensitive this child is. 

And then I was like, “Oh my God, you did it!” And she saw that she had done it. It was not somebody just blowing smoke up her behind. And the joy that came up in her as I was able to help her drop her fear of failure because she’s so sensitive, even without telling it to her, we told it to her without meaning to. So I became so much more aware. Our children are so sensitive. I really believe that. This is a sensitive group, y’all watching me right now. Our kids are way sensitive because they’re coming into an even more dangerous time. So yeah, pay attention to your own, the flutterings that are helping guide you as a parent and talk to your friends about it because they can really help you. That’s what I’ve found out.

Tracy says, “Sometimes I wake up with a deep funk that I know isn’t mine. Even if it feels sad or grief, do you think curiosity will take off the pressure? That would be much faster than hiding under the covers.”

Well, first I would hide under the covers. I think that’s a jolly good idea. But then I would say, “Whose is this?” And I would say, “Can I find compassion?” And it’s like Kind Internal Self-Talk (KIST), but to another person. Just start: “May you be well, may you be happy, may you feel safe and protected, may you have ease of wellbeing.” You just start loving and you project loving and you think of ways to communicate compassion. Think of things you can make to communicate compassion, something, a post online, a letter to a friend, a holiday card, anything. If it brings you joy, do it. Do it, do it. If you can’t think of anything that works, let go, surrender it. It’s not your business. It’s somebody else’s business. As Byron Katie says, “The thing I love about separate bodies is that when you hurt, I don’t. It’s not my turn.” Will be, but it’s not now.

Lori says, “Can a physical twinge have a spiritual source?” Yes. “As opposed to a repressed emotion or physical injury, et cetera.?”

Yeah, it gets very mingled in there. And sometimes you can have all four of those components working together to create a physical sensation. For me, my body has always been, always gets symptoms when I ignore spiritual sensitivities. So if something’s coming in spiritually and I’m pushing it away because it’s not logical, it immediately shows up as a symptom in my body. And I was so far out of integrity with my body because I’ve been so busy lately promoting this book, all things that will drop after January starts. But I thought I could get over whooping cough or whatever that was with just a course of antibiotics and keep pushing myself hard. Out of integrity, I just kept getting sicker until I finally decided I wasn’t going to get up and walk six miles in the morning. I was going to lie there and feel what my body needed and what my spirit was suggesting. And it said, “Marty, lie down, sleep a lot. And not only will your body heal, but you’ll start to receive more information, more exciting, joyful ideas from the force once you just let go and float down that river.” And it was wonderful. Yeah, physical twinges are great gifts.

Couple more questions. “How can highly sensitive people recover,” says Jamie, “after being with very insensitive family members or groups of people in general?”

Sorry, I had a bolt of anxiety just reading that. Go find a family of choice. This is what Wilder is becoming to me. I mean, I have other dear friends, but it’s a place I can go anytime. And there are lots of places to go online where you can meet with people who share your sensibilities and sensitivities, and often just knowing you’re going to go and report back is enough to get you through. You can just sit there while somebody’s just being unbelievable and go, “All right, I’m going to tell this to my friends and I’m going to make it a really good story and we’re going to have a blast.” And the weirder and more awful they get, the better the story later. So that is a really good—because highly sensitive people can spin a story too. We kind of can sense, we can read rooms, we know what kind of is going to work.

Okay, and finally, Selma, also a Cahootnik from Wilder says, “In what ways do you get answers or ways of moving forward when you tune into your sensitivity? At first, the energy will get so intense when you tune in.”

Yeah, it can be quite like, “Whoa!” You kind of have to relax the body, allow the emotions, let go of the thoughts. You’re fine. It’s like you’re on the river and the river hits rapids and it’s like, “Oh no!” Don’t tense up. Yeah, you’re going to tense up, but then relax and float. If you know how to float on water, instead of fighting and thrashing and tensing, you go limp and you lie back and you trust the water. And that’s what you do with your sensitivity when you lie back and stop fighting and trust the force, trust the source. Trust your sensitivity and the river of consciousness that helps it float.

I almost forgot about our meditation, so I’m going to do it now at the end of this fun time. If you have to hop off, I love you so much. If you can stay for a couple minutes, let’s do our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. Okay. Get comfortable, all you sensitive people. Relax into whatever you’re feeling. Don’t fight it. Release thought and ask yourself the wonderful question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the screen or anything else that I may be looking at? Can I imagine the space inside the whole volume of my head? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my torso? Can I imagine the space that opens in all the places where those tiny bits of matter just float? Can I imagine the stillness in which all the activities of my body are taking place? Can I imagine the stillness of the universe where the planets are rotating and the galaxies are spinning? Can I imagine the space inside my own body continuous with the space that holds the galaxies? Can I hear or listen or imagine the silence beneath all sound, the silence that holds it all with warmth and love and consciousness? Can I imagine that space is alive and that it loves us back and that it wants us to be happy?

Thank you so much for coming to the Gathering Room today. I love you so, so, so much. And I know you are very sensitive people, and that means that you are very strong. Rock on! See you later.