Ever wondered if your heightened emotional responses and sensory sensitivities are more than just quirks? Discover the profound world of highly sensitive people (HSPs) as I share my transformative journey sparked by Dr. Elaine Aron's groundbreaking book, "The Highly Sensitive Person." This week on Journey to the Soul, we break down the misconceptions surrounding sensitivity and explore its many facets, from the need for withdrawal and recovery to the unique depth of processing that distinguishes HSPs, whether introverted or extroverted. With 15-20% of the population identified as HSPs, this episode aims to bring understanding, acceptance, and empowerment to all who navigate life with heightened sensitivity.
We'll also take a fascinating look at sensitivity through the lens of human design, uncovering gifts like sensing others' needs, nurturing, intuition, and claircognizance. Learn about the significance of right- and left-facing arrows in your chart and how they indicate receptivity and active focus, respectively. Additionally, we'll discuss the importance of engaging in activities that bring joy and peace, allowing you to embrace the beauty of feeling and processing emotions deeply. Join me in this heartfelt exploration and share your reflections with me on Instagram.
Get Dr. Aron’s Book HERE Discover if you are a Highly Sensitive Person HERE Generate your Human Design Chart HERE
Ever wondered if your heightened emotional responses and sensory sensitivities are more than just quirks? Discover the profound world of highly sensitive people (HSPs) as I share my transformative journey sparked by Dr. Elaine Aron's groundbreaking book, "The Highly Sensitive Person." This week on Journey to the Soul, we break down the misconceptions surrounding sensitivity and explore its many facets, from the need for withdrawal and recovery to the unique depth of processing that distinguishes HSPs, whether introverted or extroverted. With 15-20% of the population identified as HSPs, this episode aims to bring understanding, acceptance, and empowerment to all who navigate life with heightened sensitivity.
We'll also take a fascinating look at sensitivity through the lens of human design, uncovering gifts like sensing others' needs, nurturing, intuition, and claircognizance. Learn about the significance of right- and left-facing arrows in your chart and how they indicate receptivity and active focus, respectively. Additionally, we'll discuss the importance of engaging in activities that bring joy and peace, allowing you to embrace the beauty of feeling and processing emotions deeply. Join me in this heartfelt exploration and share your reflections with me on Instagram.
Get Dr. Aron’s Book HERE Discover if you are a Highly Sensitive Person HERE Generate your Human Design Chart HERE
Instagram: @jacendamarie
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Hi loves, welcome to the Journey to the Soul podcast. I am your host, jacinda Villa, a spiritual life coach and holistic health coach. Every week, we will be diving deep into all things purpose, wellness, spirituality and creating the life that you dream of. This space is meant to be safe and transformative for you to dive into the deepest parts of yourself. I will share what I have learned from my journey along this path years of research and mentors along the way. Having spent many years living life out of alignment and afraid to go after my dreams, I know firsthand what it means to take the first step down, living a life authentic to you. We are on this road of self-discovery together. It is time for you to live the life you imagined. Hi, everyone, welcome to this week's podcast episode.
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Today we are going to be having a conversation for the sensitive souls in this world and dealing with that how you may feel everything more deeply than the world around you, and I want to start this conversation with sharing a little bit about my journey with that as well, because I never thought that I was more sensitive to the people around me. That was never something that I identified with, and it actually wasn't until I read the book the Highly Sensitive Person and realized how I really was sensitive to the world around me. I was like wow, not everyone thinks and feels in this way or as deeply. It was really eye-opening for me. Before I ran across this book as well, I had a really negative connotation about sensitivity, about being a sensitive person in this world. I saw it as a negative thing, a form of weakness. I was also very much in my masculine energy in that chapter of life, so being seen as weak or sensitive was not how I wanted to be seen in the world. It was not the way that I wanted the world to take me in. This book truly opened me up to learn more deeply about what it means to be a sensitive soul in this world. It brought me a step closer to accepting and understanding myself, my true self that I had diminished.
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And I feel like the word sensitive also fails us sometimes, as it can really encompass so many different things, and that is why being sensitive does get such a bad rap. We use the same word to talk about many different forms of sensitivity and it can be very limiting to those of us who are sensitive in some way and to those of us who are trying to understand us, because it creates this umbrella where, in reality, there are so many versions of sensitivity that we are discussing, so it's just an umbrella term for everything else. In essence, when we are talking about being a sensitive soul in this world, I'm talking to those of us who are empaths, who feel the emotions of others deeply, where they can go as far as taking them on as their own. Those of us who are more sensitive to our surroundings and what is going on in them. We are hyper aware. We can be more sensitive to pain and beauty, and you can feel both of these so much more deeply. Art and music can move you. Pain and discomfort can be felt tenfold.
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Those of us who are overwhelmed by strong sensory input and intense stimuli this can be very overwhelming for you. Loud noises going on in the background can make it hard to concentrate. Harsh lights you are much more conscious of your surroundings and when these things are off it can really affect your focus because you can feel everything that is going on in the background much more. Perhaps you find that you need to withdraw when you are overstimulated, sometimes needing more time than others to recoup, when you have perhaps been with people who can be challenging to be with. You find yourself depleted of energy. You feel the need to be alone when you're overstimulated for you to create space, and it's possible it can take you hours, if not days, for you to fill your cup back up after overstimulation. Your inner world is a very rich and active place. You process feelings, emotions, experiences at great depth, and this contributes to a very vibrant inner world. These are just a few of the things that may highlight if you are a highly sensitive person.
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I will be linking down below where you can take a self-assessment if you are interested in knowing if you are. It takes less than five minutes, but you can also feel free to pause the episode now and do it before we continue on and I'm tying the book the Highly Sensitive Person to this because there have always been sensitive souls in this world, but up until a couple of years ago, more recently, we haven't really had any research or words to describe this. So Dr Elaine Aron, who is the author, has done a lot of research regarding people who are highly sensitive, and it is estimated that 15 to 20% of the population are highly sensitive people, and the acronym that we use for that is HSPs. But Dr Aaron has been doing research regarding HSPs for over 30 years and to this date she continues to devote herself to that, and it's estimated that from those 15 to 20% of the population, about 30% of HSPs are extroverted and 70% are introverted. And since this newfound knowledge and research coming in, hsps have been misunderstood and mislabeled many different things over time, such as shy or fearfulness, or introverted. Even when we talk about introversion and extroversion, there is a introvert and the HSP extrovert, and the latter two make up about 17% of the population. So HSPs create their own subcategory even within this, their own subcategory even within this, and the reason for this is that HSPs are distinguished by their depth of processing, which is different than just being an introvert or extrovert. This is what makes a highly sensitive person an HSP.
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This trait of having depth of processing is actually innate. It is an evolutionary trait and it is a survival strategy for us being able to observe before acting. We are more aware of our surroundings and all the small details that encompass it, but the way we take that in and process it is also at a much deeper level. Another way of thinking about it is simply being more open to our environment. This includes both the good and the bad. We are simply more susceptible to it, and from Dr Aaron's work I want to quote this as well to give a deeper understanding of the highly sensitive person. The trait of high sensitivity is, in essence, all about processing information more deeply. This noticing of details and their meaning is a basic survival trait inherited by a minority of individuals within many species, humans included. This trait allows sensitive individuals to notice opportunities and threats that others miss, and threats that others miss. So Dr Aaron's work has actually been able to show us that there is a percent of a population, even among animals, that are more sensitized to their environment, more open, as she calls it.
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There is nothing wrong with you if you are a highly sensitive person. This is simply how you are meant to be in the world. And I really wanted to have this conversation today because it can be very overwhelming in today's world to be an HSP. In today's world to be an HSP. Some cultures value sensitivity more than others, but here in the US it is not highly valued. It can be a detriment in the highly masculine world we have built for ourselves, where feeling, and feeling deeply, has very little place in it. We could have been told not to be so sensitive as a child growing up, or even in adulthood. Because of this, you can feel bad about being who you are and can struggle with lower self-esteem. It can make it hard for you to accept this part of yourself.
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When we look at things from the lens of spirituality, this is not something that has ever been seen in a negative way, at least when we are referring and thinking about Eastern philosophies and religions. It has always existed and there are people who can see and feel things more deeply. Many times it can be tied to other spiritual gifts that they may have. They are typically what we call sages, mediums, sidekicks or intuitives. It's because they can tune into these other realms and pick up that frequency, and the way that I like to think about these people is that they can simply tune into another radio station. While all of us are listening to the FM radio, they are listening to the AM radio, but we all have the ability to pick up on the AM too, if we knew how, and the truth of the matter is that we all have our own intuition and what that sounds like and feels like for us. This is not something that we're going to dive into in this particular episode, but in one soon about how we are all intuitive. Some of us are just simply more tuned into it than others. We each have our own intuitive language.
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Through the lens of human design, we can also see the nuances of how sensitivity can show up for each of us, and this is a wonderful tool to bring into this conversation, because human design is essentially a blueprint of your soul. It can help yourself, see yourself for who you are, and if you are new to human design, I suggest that you listen to the episode that I made. It's called Unlocking your True Potential with Human Design. For more of an introduction on human design, I walk you through how you can generate your chart as well, which could be helpful to reference to after this episode. If you are familiar with it, I am going to link in the show notes where you can pull up your chart to look at some of these things that we're going to touch on and see if any of them may apply to you. Human design also gives us more specific verbiage and understanding. Rather than categorizing everything under the umbrella of sensitive, we can be more sensitized, hyper aware or open, hyper-aware or open. These are more specific things that we can look at.
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So we'll discuss a few of them now, and the first thing is emotionals and their emotional wave. So I am speaking about if this is your authority in human design and it will tell you once you pull up your chart what your authority is and if your authority is emotional, this is how you make decisions. So, with the emotional wave, you need to feel into what feels good to you in the moment, what is energetically aligned. How you are feeling will affect if you feel up to doing something or not. So if you are in a low, an emotional low, you may choose to not do something. Low, you may choose to not do something. It can be seen as being more sensitive to your own emotions and the highs and lows that you go through within yourself. As an example, if you choose to stay home rather than go out and see your friends, even though you might have already chosen to make plans to go see them, but right now you are not in the best place energetically, you might be depleted or feeling low and it just doesn't feel energetically aligned, this can also be an open emotional center. So if you don't have what we call an emotional authority. That means that your emotional center will be not colored in and your emotional center in human design is going to be your solar plexus, and that's a little triangle on the bottom right-hand side of the chart. So if it's colored in, you have emotional authority and if it's open, you don't have emotional authority and you have a different way of making decisions. But what we're looking at now is having an emotional center. Because you have an open emotional center, it's easier for you to take in the emotions of others, more you are more aware of them and we will discuss open centers more in a moment so you could be more of an empath.
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Another way that sensitivity can show up in human design is gift 19,. If you have that gift the sensitive soul and this is all about sensing people's needs but it begins with you and you being more sensitized to the world around you you know what other people need. It can be more basic needs such as food or shelter, or something greater like a need for inspiration or connection. Another gift that I want to highlight is gift 27, which is all about nurturing those around you. This is different than gift 19 in that it is more about nurturing and caring, but still being able to sense others' needs in order to do this effectively. You can get inclinations of how you might want to do this. You might feel the need to do something for someone In human design. This is more about knowing the needs of the tribe in order to survive, so the needs of the greater community in order to survive. In other words, gift 57,. This gift is all about intuition, instinct, clarity and inner knowing. It's about trusting your intuitive knowing. By being present in the moment, you are able to tune into your body and everything that you need to know will come to you. So this is deeply tied to your intuition and inner knowing, your instinct.
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Gift 61 is the last gift that I want to highlight here, and this gift is about knowing the unknowable and understanding the mysteries of life. It's about inner truth and seeking. These are people who simply just know the truth. They can feel it when they center their mind and their heart. They can feel it when they center their mind and their heart and when we talk about the intuitive languages, which I will touch on in another episode. But we know about clairvoyance. There's clairaudience. This is more claircognizance. You just know. It is a feeling that you get.
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The next aspect that we're going to look at is having more rightness in what we call your variables. So if you have your chart pulled up, you may have noticed that you have four arrows around the top two triangles of your chart. This is an even deeper layer of human design. That's called the primary health system, and this system is a process that allows you to be more present with your body and really tune into its needs. And what I want us to look at is the variables and notice how many of those arrows are facing to the right. It's possible you could have one, two more, all of them. If you have any of them pointing to the right, you have some rightness in you, and all of these arrows have a much, much deeper meaning. They really have so much information for us to unfold there, but I just want to do a very generalized highlight on them, because right-facing arrows in human design are tied to receptivity, while left-facing arrows are what we call active and focus. So if you have any right-facing arrows in your chart, it will be tied to flow, feminine energy, fluid energy, a more passive way of thinking and moving through the world, variability and openness and, like I mentioned, this all depends on which arrows are pointing right, because they all give insight into different things, but I will just mention what the four arrows do stand for.
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So we'll start with the top left arrow, and that's going to be your digestion, and the one below it. So the bottom left arrow arrow is about your environment. The top right arrow is about your awareness, and the are shifting into a new paradigm where this energy will become more and more prominent, but as a collective, we are moving into a more feminine and intuitive way of being, more feminine energy that you. Having any left-facing arrows does not mean anything bad at all, but we are going through a shift right now. So, as time goes on, more and more people will come into this world with more right-facing arrows. Come into this world with more right-facing arrows.
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The last thing that we will highlight with your chart while it's pulled up is any open centers that you may have. So the centers are going to be the shapes that are there. You have squares and you have triangles, and they're either colored in or they're not. If they're colored in, they are what we call defined, so you have consistent energy here. If they are open, they are undefined and these are areas where you can take in the world around you. You are more aware and sensitized to people, places, things, wherever you don't have a center defined I discuss the emotional center as an example. So all centers you have open are places where you can take energy in more prominently.
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I know that in my anxiety video I talked about the open root center, which is the bottom square in your chart. It's the very bottom, but I mentioned that if you have it open, a lot of the times you can feel the anxieties and the timelines of those around you and you don't always have a consistent energy there when it comes to doing things on a certain timeline. So you can easily take the perceived timelines of people around you, the perceived timelines of people around you, so what everyone else is doing and you could take in their rushing and moving through the world as your own. So this is how those open centers can play a role in all of this Because, again, being open is a way that we could be more sensitive to our surroundings or to people, especially from the lens of human design. So it's a wonderful thing to be able to look at and there is no one single way that sensitivity can show up in a chart. It can show up in countless ways. It can be a combination of things, so if any of these things showed up in your chart, it's simply highlighting where perhaps you are just more susceptible.
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It's so important for us to have rituals and activities that we can come back to when we do feel overwhelmed, things that ground you and bring you back into the present. In order to really be able to honor ourselves, we need to know how to manage our sensitivity, especially in this world. Because of it, you are able to take in what goes on around you at a level that many don't. The human species needs these people as much as the ones who are more resilient to their environmental stimulus. Each of us has a role to play as a highly sensitive person, play as a highly sensitive person. What we do every day has meaning, and because we can feel so deeply, we will usually focus on living an intentional life in some way, being there for others, making a positive change in the world, bringing things to life from our inner world.
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This is where self-care is vitally important the boundaries we create, the rituals we have to support us when we are overstimulated or to keep us from burning out, stimulated, or to keep us from burning out. And if you are listening to this and you have discovered that you are a sensitive soul, you need to nurture yourself before you can nurture others, which is something most of us want to do innately. It is okay to do so and it is so, so necessary. It is okay to do so and it is so, so necessary. It's about you being in integrity with yourself above anyone else. I recently made a podcast episode discussing boundaries, so if you struggle with that, tune into that episode.
Speaker 1:
I want to share a little anecdote with you, because even myself, knowing and understanding myself as I am, struggle with this still as well. And over 4th of July weekend I was feeling bad for being more sensitive sometimes, and it's because this year I haven't been in the best place emotionally, mentally and physically. My capacity in those regards has been a bit lower and it's because I've been healing my body through some things that have been very necessary for me to focus on. I've been doing a lot of inner work. There's been so many big changes going on in life. I have felt like there has been a storm within myself, but also a storm when I look outside of myself, in the world around me and I know that a lot of people have felt that way this year as well and this all takes up energy when you are focusing on yourself or you don't have as much energy to give. What you give energy to is vitally important, and it's been very hard for me to accept this year that I've been less there for those around me because of this, because I haven't been in the best mental or emotional space to be there for people, and it's so hard to accept that at times. But I know that this is a season that I am in. It is a season to be inward and truly heal some of the things that have showed up.
Speaker 1:
And there was a day that I just really needed to myself and everyone was going to go and spend the day on the boat and I knew that I needed to create some time to myself because I felt so depleted, so tired in every way, shape or form, and I was no longer showing up as the best version of me. I could feel it, I sensed it, so I decided to stay back and spend a whole day to myself while everyone was away. I did things to help me move through the overwhelm to fill my cup up again. I did some yoga. I went for a walk outside and just felt the sun on my skin and hearing the birds sing around me. I walked in silence. I came back and I sat and I read most of the day, just a novel to feed my soul.
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And while, yes, a few people would have wished that I would have gone in the boat and hung out with everyone because they were visiting and stuff like that, I knew that this is what I needed to do. It was a loving boundary, it was an act of self-love for myself, because I would not have been my best self had I gone out and done what everyone expected of me. And when everyone came back, I was ready to spend time with my family again, to be there for those that I love and hold space for them as the best version of me. This is because I did what I needed to do and what I knew was right for me, and I think this is going to be the forever process of being a sensitive soul in this world is knowing when you need to break away and nurture yourself and fill yourself up, and there's so many things that you can do to do that. I shared a few of mine.
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But go into your space or get lost in a hobby. Do something that brings you joy. It can be writing, reading, drawing, painting, sleeping, going on a walk, listening to music or dancing, watching a cozy movie or tv show, or simply learning something new that you've been wanting to learn. I hope that through this episode, you can see how this is a beautiful gift that you have been given, that you have the ability to feel and process things in a way that not everyone can, that you can feel and understand those around you at a deeper level. You can live this life in such a profound way, and that is truly amazing. Let me know what your biggest takeaway was from today's episode. I look forward to talking to you all next week in the next episode. I'm sending you so so much love Until then, with any friends and family. I'd love to hear your takeaways, so share them with me by leaving a comment below or heading over to my Instagram at Jacinda Marie. I am sending you all so much love.
