Can You Be Too Sensitive?

How to protect myself psychically? How to stop picking up people energies or to be neutral to them? Is possible to reduce empathy or hypersensitivity?

Thank you for listening. More talks and courses with Sananda and Christopher at www.heaven-on-earth.co.uk.

Transcript

Welcome, this is Sananda. Let's start with sensitivity. You are sensitive because you are human. It is natural to have a sensitivity to you and certainly it can feel as if there is quite a range of sensitivity across all of the human species; that you can encounter people who seem to you not very sensitive, others who feel very sensitive to you and you will place yourself on that spectrum, and have your own sense of the level of sensitivity that is yours. But fundamentally, I would maintain that all human beings are highly sensitive. I'll come back to that subject, but keep in mind that sense of an equality that if it is the case that you feel sensitive or hypersensitive, that you may be less out of the general order of people than you have sometimes felt. If your sensitivity is difficult for you, if you find it difficult to handle your sensitivity in the company of others or in the world in which you find yourself, there can of course be a temptation to consider reducing your sensitivity, and that can be done. But the analogy I would use is something like jogging yourself or anaesthetising yourself, rendering yourself less conscious essentially. And I would suggest that for anyone that's a not particularly helpful direction to travel in. 

02:03

Far more fruitful, far more beneficial - it’s going to help you grow - is to look at how you can use that sensitivity. We might make a simple division. There is your sensitivity as a human being and there is how you use that sensitivity, what's going on within you in response to all that your many senses actually are picking up on and alerting you to. And it's that area of response that I'll focus on. 

02:42

But before we do that, let's look at the area of protection. That's not quite the same area that we'll be addressing in the main, but it has a relevance and a connection obviously. So another approach, if you feel yourself to be too sensitive for the world in which you're living or too sensitive for certain situations within your life; that there is a feeling, the strength of the energy that you are experiencing is reaching a pitch that you experience as attack, then there can be a temptation, not now to drug yourself or anaesthetise yourself, but to protect yourself, to in some way push back actively or passively against that energy you experience as being invasive or attacking. 

03:37

Here I would use a simple analogy. Take yourself back to the days of mediaeval knights. Imagine yourself preparing for a battle. You know that your enemies will be carrying sharp swords and be willing to use them. So what do you do? You invent armour. It becomes more and more sophisticated over the decades and it works quite well. It will ward off at least some of the attack that comes your way. So you may feel, 'This is worth it, this is saving my life.’

04:16

However, consider what it must have been like to wear that suit of armour. Cumbersome, heavy. You get very hot inside, you couldn't see very well. Your sense of aliveness in a way is reduced. It's almost as if there's a direct correlation between the strength of your protection and the diminution of your aliveness. So while to a certain degree it works and on occasion you may feel that it is an appropriate response to something that you experience as being more than you can cope with right now, that you need to put up some kind of barrier to put in place some sort of delaying tactic - you may feel that you need to do that on occasion; if you do, you do - but as much as you can, I would always encourage letting go of a need to defend yourself. Let's return to the attack of that sword. The armour will give some protection, but there's still of course a degree of vulnerability. You're not completely immune to attack in that suit of armour. 

05:33

Consider yourself, however, taking on a different kind of mode of being altogether, being now not a solid human being clad in this even more solid armour, but a being of water. Imagine yourself having that degree of fluidity to your energy that whatever attacks you, that sword, may cut right through you over and over and over again. How frustrating for the sword, it can do absolutely nothing with water. Indeed water is a danger to it. It will rust the sword ultimately away. And so using this simple analogy, my encouragement always is to develop the quality of water, that is to say flow in your response to the world around you. 

06:35

So now we can take that back into the central area. What do you do with your sensitivity? How you use it, indeed what it's for. Let's begin with that. Your sensitivity is there as a wonderful gift, a gift that you've given yourself. You have of course your physical senses, but you have, as I have suggested, many other senses as well. And often it will be those subtle senses that can feel challenging or problematic for you. For as yet, in general, though of course this varies a lot from individual to individual, the ability to interpret what you're sensing can be limited, a little basic. That's okay. This is the direction in which you're evolving as human beings. 

07:32

And so part of what can happen with a feeling of being too sensitive or feeling of being overwhelmed by the sensing that is yours in the world in the moment, part of that is telling yourself that you don't really know what's going on. Is this attack, is this random noise? Is it something that's not attack but I haven't yet understood? And so on. So a very useful tool, shall we say, to assist you in working with your own sensitivity, is to be increasingly comfortable with not knowing. Let go of the need to understand immediately in terms of your thought structures and belief systems, what it is you're exploring. 

08:30

Look too at some of your fundamental ideas while we're on the subject of ideas and beliefs. You come out of a world which has a great deal of antagonism in its history. It's not by chance that I use the example of mediaeval knights. You come from generations who not invariably but very often have experienced conflict and have an expectation that conflict is there awaiting them. And so it's not at all improbable that when you look into the ideas bank, the library of belief systems that you've inherited, that you will find a belief that the unknown is dangerous to you, that you need to be on your guard in this world. So you become then like the person who takes on the challenge to sleep in the haunted house and every little noise, you're not quite sure, but it might be a ghost, it might be something frightening. It's very easy when you're human to stir up your fears. As I've suggested, you tend to have quite a comprehensive library of fears. Often they're not particularly your own, just fears that you've inherited from your ancestors, from your society and so on. 

10:10

And so learn to shift your perception of the nature of the Universe to understanding it to be fundamentally friendly, fundamentally on your side. Indeed, we might suggest as we often do that ultimately there's not really a distinction between what is you and what you experience as not you, that is to say the Universe. The Universe in some fundamental ways is merely an outworking of your own consciousness, a creation of an amazing stage set, a play, a drama in which you are of course the principal character. But you're also the author, the director, the stage manager and so on. This is not done in isolation. You don't put on a play merely for your own amusement. It's also there to entertain others. I simply mean by that, that your experience of being in this Universe is a co-creation. It's not wholly down to you. There is a perspective from which we can say that yes, actually it is all you. But if that is to be true, then the sense of what you is needs to change somewhat from your more familiar idea. 

11:40

So being willing not to know and being comfortable and letting that accompany an increasing movement towards a sense of existing in a friendly Universe is helpful. One of the gifts that brings is that it helps you to appreciate that whatever you are experiencing, whatever energies you're experiencing have come into your life at some level by invitation. So that what you experience as attack, even if it's in its most threatening form, its most alarming, its most life-threatening form, has come at some way, in some way, at some level, at your behest. You requested it, you drew it in, you created it. And this is never because you're stupid. It's always because you at that higher level where you're operating these mechanisms of universal understanding that you recognise that whatever it is you're drawing into your life helps you in some way to grow. 

12:50

Your experience has been that some growing is easy and fun and almost certainly you've also experienced times when you've grown through a considerable degree of struggle, grief, pain and so on. But here too our encouragement is very much to appreciate a simple truth that you are a being who is growing and those experiences that are for you joyful help you to grow every bit as much if not more than those you experience as painful. And in addition, you can choose. This choosing the joyful experience is still something that collectively, as humanity, you are learning. As an individual, you're contributing to that through your own endeavours, through your own explorations. And one of the absolutely fundamental ways in which you are growing is by using your sensitivity. You send, figuratively speaking, antenna out into the Universe all around you, the immediate Universe, but not only the immediate Universe, far beyond the immediate, you are registering dynamic shifts in the nature of the Universe, moment by moment far more than you currently appreciate. 

14:24

So a lot of your sensitivity is absolutely in place and very beautiful. It will increase, but it's already amazing. The challenge we come back to, for you, is what you do with that sensitivity and so, as has been evident in what I've just said, part of that challenge is actually recognising not less of your sensitivity but more of it. So there is these steps, these options that are there for you: to recognise that you are in a friendly Universe, that you are fluid in your responses to that Universe, to whatever degree you choose, that you have choice, that you are a creator, that nothing actually happens in your life randomly. Everything has an underlying purpose. It's often truer to say everything has a multitude of underlying purposes. You live in a multidimensional Universe and you're a multidimensional being. 

15:43

So whilst there is a movement towards understanding more as a way of making peace with your own sensitivity, again I encourage you to recognise that not knowing is very valuable. Every time you acknowledge you don't know, you are opening up a space for fresh understanding. Every time you claim to know you're getting into a fixed relationship with your experience. So, when we then come to look at common sources of that feeling of being too sensitive, your interactions with other people, other people you find difficult, whose energy you might find overbearing or aggressive or unpleasant in some way, first of all, understand you invited this person into your life. They've got a gift for you, the gift of their presence. 

16:40

Then recognise that you may not know what that gift is right now and that's not a failure on your part, but an acknowledgement that you are growing, that is to say there is that within the Universe, that within the realm of your experience that is not yet known to you, but you're moving towards it, you’re opening to that greater understanding, and this person you find unpleasant or awkward or whatever is assisting you in that. So often when you look at what gives you pain from your sense of being too sensitive, what you'll find is that there is an entanglement between the emotional body and the mental body. There can be other things that happen as well, but this is very common. There can be a feeling that, a belief that, you are powerless, you don't know how to deal with this awkward person, doesn't seem any way of politely brushing them off or making peace with them or whatever your idea of what would be useful to you might be. You are, so to speak, stuck with this person for the time being and your patience is being sorely tested and because you feel stuck, you feel powerless. And so we've got a whole bundle of ideas about what's going on there and one of those ideas is ‘if I can't change things in the way that I want them to change, then I'm insufficiently powerful and I'm probably in this situation actually powerless.’

18:30

This is never ever true. That's a false idea. But as long as you attach your sensitivity to a sense of powerlessness, then you've got trouble, you've got a problem. So here too is an area to look at. You are never ever powerless. It can often be the case that that which your personality desires is not within your realm to achieve right now, but that's not being powerless. That's a mismatch between your highest good and your personality's ideas and beliefs. And it may be extremely beneficial for you to have that mismatch, in the sense that your personalities desires and beliefs may be not really compatible, even if they were in the past, with who you are now and who you are becoming. 

19:32

So let's return to that image of the sword attacking the water, this awkward person, what's going on. Of course there may be direct interaction between you and him or her -  words spoken, for example. But if you look behind or beneath the surface of those words spoken, what you find is an exchange of energy. There’s interaction, two energy beings relating to each other: that other person's energy, your energy, they're meeting, they're interacting. Some part of you is saying, ‘I'm not in control here. I haven't got the power I need or want. Maybe I'm even completely powerless. I'm not happy with that’. As I've said, this is you deceiving yourself - an understandable deception - but it's not what's happening. If you look at yourself in relationship to any other living being, you'll always find there is an interaction of your energy with that being. You only have to think of someone, perhaps someone you met briefly years ago, and in the moment of that thinking, your energy is interacting with that person. And it's not a battle, it's not push or pull, it is simply interaction. 

21:01

You are allowing yourself, when you acknowledge this, when you know this is what is going on, you are in that state of flow like water and what you experience as attack or some part of your mental computation experiences as attack is recognised simply as interaction and you shift from a place of feeling, ‘this is too much, I'm oversensitive’ or whatever might be happening to you to a sense of, ‘okay, this is interesting. I'm engaged in an interaction with this being. How can I use my energy in ways that are helpful to us both?’ 

21:48

You don't need to change the other person. They may change, they may choose not to change right now. So here is another very important pointer. If you feel that you are oversensitive and you're dealing with someone whose energy you find distasteful, unpleasant, aggressive, whatever, let go of any idea that you need to change that person. It's a waste of your energy and it's unkind to the other person. You can help them, if they're willing to receive help, for sure, but trying to win over this situation, to conquer your sensitivity by imposing change on another person, even if that imposition is merely a wish that is in your head, it's not going to help. Instead learn to respond to the energy of that person as it is. Now you've got a wonderful use for your sensitivity because your sensitivity can open up to say, okay, well what is the energy in this moment of this person? And very soon you'll find that it's not the presenting aggression or whatever it is had been upsetting you, but there is much, much more to that person than that presenting behaviour; that there is an astonishing richness and depth to every individual being and that you can begin to use your sensitivity to find that limitless beauty that is there within every human being, every creature, every living being. And let yourself learn to enjoy that. 

23:43

This does not mean that I'm saying to you if you find yourself in a situation where you're feeling oversensitive because of what's going on around you, it's not that I'm saying, ‘Okay, you created this, you've got to stop there. You've got to beam out benign energies or use all your subtle senses to find the beauty in the other being, and you ought to keep on doing it until something changes. You can't go from there until you've got it right.’ That's not what I'm saying at all. You are a being of choices. You make choices over and over and over again so many times in every day, and if you find that it is not pleasant for you to be in the presence of a person and you are free to leave, then leave. That can help you. Your interaction is still there at some level, but you're entirely free, if conditions permit, to move from the immediate presence of the difficult person, indeed to shift very considerably so that they're not really featuring in your life any more. 

25:00

If those are the choices that you make, and you're fully entitled to do it, then do your best to make peace with the choices you're making. For example, to let go of any notions of this being either defeat or victory. It's just you are choosing to be in a different place. That's all. This is a Universe which has a multitude of places. You don't have to stop in one place. You are fully free to move to a place that is more appealing to you and that's not defeat and it's not victory. It's just you taking a different choice. 

25:42

Now, I'd like to double back to the issue of attack. What happens after all, if you find someone who, as they say, has really got it in for you, someone who dislikes you quite a lot and needs to express that by some form of attack, perhaps not a literal physical attack, but something that is intended to upset you rather than being a kind of coincidental side effect of that presence in your life. That might be one of the times when you choose some form of defence. But remember what I've said, that when you place defence, you're putting quite a lot of energy into that. It may not be the most effective energy use for you. You may experience it as not really a solution, but more of a kind of holding place. Even here I would say, as much as you're able to, learn to look behind or within the attack. 

27:06

In this reality that is yours at this time, I would say that anyone who attacks you in this deliberate sense: ‘I want to cause you hurt or harm,’ is coming from a place of pain and that pain is going to be based on fear. You may not be able to act in such a way that healing comes in the immediate future to the pain and fear that that person is holding and attempting to project outwards towards you. As I’ve already indicated, if you want to sidestep, that's just fine. But do your best to know that really even the most attacking energy, the most attacking person, the most persistently attacking person, brings you a gift. 

28:12

Imagine it being your reality that no one ever enters your life except to bring you a gift. And that equally, you never enter anyone's life except to bring a gift to them. The nature of the gift is always the same. It is to help you to grow or help that person to grow. That's all your interactions are about in this reality. That's the fundamental, that's the bottom line. And so as we draw to a close, at least consider that becoming more sensitive is wonderful and advisable and helpful. It enhances your life. And as you become more sensitive, allow yourself also to enjoy that sensitivity and to remember that one of the principle ways in which you can enjoy your sensitivity is by allowing room for not knowing. 

29:25

When you let yourself have that room, you become much larger. You come to appreciate paradoxically that you are immensely powerful, not as a force, but as presence. In your interactions with people this knowing that you don't know, this willingness to be present without having all the answers is a wonderful gift to others. It helps them to relax into a deeper appreciation of their own sensitivity. So often when we look at hostility between people, then what we see is, if we're talking about two people, two people who are uncomfortable with their sensitivity and so try to protect their sensitivity, and in trying to protect their sensitivity, they become insensitive to the other and they begin to shift into a downward spiral. There is no need for that. 

30:51

Allow yourself - as much as you're able to (it’s a process, it’s a journey, it’s all right, it doesn't have to be done in an instant), but allow yourself to be more and more present. That's all. Just present, because this is one final point I will make about sensitivity: all of your fears around being too sensitive belong in the past or in the future; they’re not in the present. When you allow yourself to be present, you come to appreciate that your sensitivity is fabulous. It's wonderful, amazing, and you have this ability to respond to all that the Universe is. And in doing so, you come to know more and more of the Universe and you come to know more and more that ultimately you are the Universe you know and that there is no division between you and others, that you're all manifestations of the same oneness, and therefore in being sensitive to one another and more and more sensitive to one another opens you up to that oneness and that's wonderful. Thank you for listening.