On Sensitivity
Today is my birthday, so I wanted to write a little about myself.
I've always been a sensitive person. Maybe it's being a double Pisces, sun and moon both in the twelfth house. Maybe it's an INFP thing. Maybe it's the ADHD, which turns up the amygdala's gain on emotional stimuli at a hardware level. Or maybe it's the fact that home life was chaotic growing up, which calibrated my developing nervous system toward hypervigilance.
But there was another kind of sensitivity too. My parents were hippies, born in the 1950s and shaped by the counterculture of the late 60s and 70s. Life sometimes lacked structure, but it also gave me access to nature and art. We'd pack the car and drive for weeks, camping our way to the Pacific coast of Mexico or British Columbia, Canada. Each night, a new fire in a new beautiful place. Our boredom was met with watercolors, sketchbooks, embroidery floss, beads, and knives for whittling. Weeks spent outside trained my attention toward the quiet and gradual: the color draining from the landscape at dusk, the drop in temperature as evening settled, the soundscape shifting from birdsong to crickets.
Growing up sensitive isn't easy. School doesn't teach you how to manage feeling a lot. Somatic work in my mid-twenties is what helped me hone that sensitivity into something useful, for myself and for others. Somatic practice works with the body directly, using the breath, physical sensation, and movement to locate emotion in the body rather than the mind. Instead of analyzing a feeling, you learn to find it in the body and stay with it. What it taught me, most essentially, was how not to be afraid of the depth of my own feelings.
That wasn't simple. I spent years working with the self-criticism that lived in my chest, the intensity I felt every time I believed I'd done something wrong. I learned, held in a safe container with my somatic coach, to use awareness, touch, movement, and breath to meet those feelings rather than avoid them. Not chasing them, just meeting them with curiosity when they came. Over time, feelings that had felt unbearable became something I could simply be with.
I feel as much as ever, maybe more. But now I know how to ride the waves. And because I've mapped my own terrain so precisely, I can notice how my psycho-emotional body responds to my clients' and use that as data. The sensitivity I once found overwhelming became something I could offer.
I now love my sensitivity. I think it takes courage to feel deeply and show up fully in this world. Today I'm celebrating that.
If any of this resonates, I offer a three-session somatic package focused specifically on anxiety and overwhelm. It's a good place to start building a relationship with your own feelings.
