Osha Hayden & Courtney Marchesani discuss Courtney’s work with highly sensitive people, HSP’s, and her new book, Four Gifts of the Highly Sensitive: Embrace the Science of Sensitivity, Heal Anxiety and Relationships, and Connect Deeply With Your World. Courtney de-stigmatizes the term "sensitive," illustrating how "sensitivity" is a powerful advantage, and provides a pathway to an effective balancing act between being highly aware and participating fully in the world without feeling the need to shut down or self-anesthetize to avoid pain, people or environmental stimulation.
 
Courtney first became aware of her own gifts when her intuition prevented a fire in a Seattle brownstone. A "raw gut feeling" made her insist she and a friend return to the friend's apartment just in time to find a candle about to alight a bamboo shade.
 
Now a coach, teacher and health advocate with a master's degree in mind-body medicine, she has spent the last 20 years passionately exploring the research gap that exists between what medical science believes and what the gifted HSP feels. She provides an enlightening ride through early to now-emerging science on sensitivity and the abilities of the highly sensitive and interprets what this means for HSP’s.
 
Courtney paints a clear picture of how HSP’s can claim their ”specialness," for themselves and the good of mankind. But also how to live with and adapt for their tendencies, so that they can embrace their gifts and thrive at peak quality of life.
 
Osha and Courtney discuss Courtney’s analysis of the four types of highly sensitive people - what Courtney calls the four gifts:
•Sensitive-empaths (feeling others, sensing physical responses, attuning to environmental stimuli, animals, plants and others)
•Sensitive-intuitives (acquiring knowledge through higher consciousness)
•Sensitive-visionaries (perceiving or constructing a future though inner vision)
•Sensitive-expressives (expressing emotions and perceptions through artistic endeavors on any medium or performance platform)   

Having worked with hundreds of "sensitive" clients and patients, Courtney has clearly delineated the strengths and the drawbacks of having each of these types of gifts. She sites case histories from her experience and also denotes famous sensitives within each of these categories of distinction.

Most importantly, Courtney provides specific strategies for playing up your strengths and limiting, countering, overcoming or effectively transforming the "perceived" drawbacks. The second half of the Four Gifts of the Highly Sensitive provides an array of exercises and strategies for each of the specific sensitive-types to adapt in a world that may cause sensory overload.

With Four Gifts of the Highly Sensitive the stigma of being “sensitive” is lifted.  We all have some of these abilities to some degree, but the highly sensitive have them to a much higher degree.
 
Courtney's research reveals:
•Early childhood trauma appears to contribute to the heightening or creation of sensitivity-for better or worse.
•20% of the world population has a genetically inherited trait of high sensitivity.
•Sensitives feel an emotional response faster and more intensely than others.
•Some sensitives are known for experiencing a supra-sensing transcendent ability to see or experience beyond the local or physical.
•The highly sensitive may well be the bellweathers and cutting-edge leaders for a kinder, gentler, more harmonized and compassionate world.  

Learn more:  https://www.inspiredpotentials.com/

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