Sensitivity
I took a very long bath today. I soaked and listened to music. And then I shaved my legs and mound, going over the skin a second time with a fresh razor. Then I spent 10 minutes rubbing oil into my skin. My skin is gently fragrant now, very smooth, very soft, very sensitive. My thoughts drifted to the sensuality that tends to be my most identifiable characteristic, and the sensitivity to my environment that feeds my senses.
Just before my birthday, Daily Om posted an interesting article titled Heights of Awareness: Highly Sensitive People I found myself identifying rather strongly with a good portion of the article, although some of it is no longer as applicable--I have managed to de-sensitize myself, particularly emotionally. The empath in me has always been overwhelmed by the daily demands of living, and in many ways I cut that off. I have been debating whether or not I want to reclaim it from my Shadow. Since most people understand empathy only in an abstract emotional sense, ie as "feeling for someone", the concept of empathy as concrete multi-sensory experience, ie "feeling what someone feels" is laughable. But for an empath, a sensitive, or any other multi-sensory person, it is not funny.
That "healing hands" run in my family, with my mother's father and my father's grandmother both being well-known for their healing via "laying hands" would be dismissed by most rational people, especially since neither are alive to "prove it". That I can touch someone and know what hurts and where, that I can give "ease", is unremarkable to me, because it comes naturally. However, most people, while willing to receive pleasure at my hands, do not really want to know the "unnatural" answers to the questions "How did you know it hurt there?" and "Why does that feel so good?" because it becomes a discussion about the mystical-mumbo-jumbo-new-age-world of quantum mechanics and metaphysics and bioelectric-field sensitivity and multi-sensory perception. I quit working professionally as a massage therapist because some people needed more than a good rub-down...and I gave it to them, and it was always so draining. I had training from mentors and other body-work professionals on "protecting the healer", read a good amount of literature on it, too, but ultimately, it came down to the fact that I am a two-way contact empath, and not only did I readily give "ease", I always drew the negative out of others and into myself. The blinding headaches just became too much. That, and forcing myself to touch people I didn't want to touch, because they had paid me good money for that privilege.
I remember that one man whose energy was so toxic I had a headache within moments. I forced myself to try to work past it for another 10 minutes, until I started to gag. At that point I apologized to him, and since there wasn't another therapist available at that time, gave him his money back and made an appointment for a free massage a week later. The same thing happened again, only I was prepared, and Judy filled in for me. She have a good swedish massage, but she was not a sensitive. When clients left her room, they always felt better, but they never glowed. And of course, she didn't sense a thing wrong with him. But there was definately something wrong with him, either something psychological, as in he was a sociopath, or something physical, as in he had cancer or some other illness. Whatever it was, he was the motivation to wind-down my practice.
So, anyway, after I saw the Daily Om article, I did some reading online, finding the website and books by Dr Elaine Aron on the subject of Highly Sensitive People (HSP). I took the self-test and answered true on all but three of the questions. I also remembered Gary Zukav's books. He had written The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (here is a good reader review) which had been put into my hands by a math professor I had bumped into at a bookstore when I was at college. David and I both read it, and enjoyted it immensely. Years later, Stephanie hooked me up with his other books, Seat of the Soul and Mind of the Soul, both of which resonated with me because I've long had this pressing feeling that Mankind is trembling at the end of an evolutionary leap, and he managed to find the words not only to describe what I was feeling, but to expand upon the concept of being multi-sensory as the next evolutionary stage of our development as a species. It is way out there sometimes, and I've been too well-trained as a doubter by my years in the sciences, but a lot of what he writes makes sense.
I have yet to bring up the subject of empathy with my therapist. I know that here are those, such as Dr. Sam Vaknin, who consider empathy to be an entirely subjective internal psychological response to external stimuli. His analysis makes perfect sense to me, and I accept it on a rational level, even though I know, experientially, that he is missing something. Empathy, for me, is not about projecting sympathetic feelings onto someone else based on verbal and visual cues. Yes, I do that, as do most other people, and yes, I understand that it is a conditioned response. The empathy I mean is the knowledge of another's physical and mental status in the absense of those cues. I have given it considerable thought over the years, and I think it has something to do with the interaction of bioelectric fields somehow facilitating the transfer of information, or perhaps the ability of some people to read bioelectric fields. Our five senses, even augmented, are extremely limited. We know today that we can't see infra-red and ultra-violet with the naked eye, but that they do exist, along with quarks and muons and viruses and prions. We now know that there are sounds we cannot hear, odours we cannot smell, and contact we cannot feel. I am not imagining what I sense in others. Others simply lack the organ or facility to sense what I do. The scientist in me doubts and refutes and collects data, eternally leery of anything remotely New Age. The mystic in me accepts it for what it appears to be, and smiles non-judgementally at the scientist, saying meditate upon it, practice samadhi, let it exist, and one day, perhaps, it will be revealed.
Just before my birthday, Daily Om posted an interesting article titled Heights of Awareness: Highly Sensitive People I found myself identifying rather strongly with a good portion of the article, although some of it is no longer as applicable--I have managed to de-sensitize myself, particularly emotionally. The empath in me has always been overwhelmed by the daily demands of living, and in many ways I cut that off. I have been debating whether or not I want to reclaim it from my Shadow. Since most people understand empathy only in an abstract emotional sense, ie as "feeling for someone", the concept of empathy as concrete multi-sensory experience, ie "feeling what someone feels" is laughable. But for an empath, a sensitive, or any other multi-sensory person, it is not funny.
That "healing hands" run in my family, with my mother's father and my father's grandmother both being well-known for their healing via "laying hands" would be dismissed by most rational people, especially since neither are alive to "prove it". That I can touch someone and know what hurts and where, that I can give "ease", is unremarkable to me, because it comes naturally. However, most people, while willing to receive pleasure at my hands, do not really want to know the "unnatural" answers to the questions "How did you know it hurt there?" and "Why does that feel so good?" because it becomes a discussion about the mystical-mumbo-jumbo-new-age-world of quantum mechanics and metaphysics and bioelectric-field sensitivity and multi-sensory perception. I quit working professionally as a massage therapist because some people needed more than a good rub-down...and I gave it to them, and it was always so draining. I had training from mentors and other body-work professionals on "protecting the healer", read a good amount of literature on it, too, but ultimately, it came down to the fact that I am a two-way contact empath, and not only did I readily give "ease", I always drew the negative out of others and into myself. The blinding headaches just became too much. That, and forcing myself to touch people I didn't want to touch, because they had paid me good money for that privilege.
I remember that one man whose energy was so toxic I had a headache within moments. I forced myself to try to work past it for another 10 minutes, until I started to gag. At that point I apologized to him, and since there wasn't another therapist available at that time, gave him his money back and made an appointment for a free massage a week later. The same thing happened again, only I was prepared, and Judy filled in for me. She have a good swedish massage, but she was not a sensitive. When clients left her room, they always felt better, but they never glowed. And of course, she didn't sense a thing wrong with him. But there was definately something wrong with him, either something psychological, as in he was a sociopath, or something physical, as in he had cancer or some other illness. Whatever it was, he was the motivation to wind-down my practice.
So, anyway, after I saw the Daily Om article, I did some reading online, finding the website and books by Dr Elaine Aron on the subject of Highly Sensitive People (HSP). I took the self-test and answered true on all but three of the questions. I also remembered Gary Zukav's books. He had written The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (here is a good reader review) which had been put into my hands by a math professor I had bumped into at a bookstore when I was at college. David and I both read it, and enjoyted it immensely. Years later, Stephanie hooked me up with his other books, Seat of the Soul and Mind of the Soul, both of which resonated with me because I've long had this pressing feeling that Mankind is trembling at the end of an evolutionary leap, and he managed to find the words not only to describe what I was feeling, but to expand upon the concept of being multi-sensory as the next evolutionary stage of our development as a species. It is way out there sometimes, and I've been too well-trained as a doubter by my years in the sciences, but a lot of what he writes makes sense.
I have yet to bring up the subject of empathy with my therapist. I know that here are those, such as Dr. Sam Vaknin, who consider empathy to be an entirely subjective internal psychological response to external stimuli. His analysis makes perfect sense to me, and I accept it on a rational level, even though I know, experientially, that he is missing something. Empathy, for me, is not about projecting sympathetic feelings onto someone else based on verbal and visual cues. Yes, I do that, as do most other people, and yes, I understand that it is a conditioned response. The empathy I mean is the knowledge of another's physical and mental status in the absense of those cues. I have given it considerable thought over the years, and I think it has something to do with the interaction of bioelectric fields somehow facilitating the transfer of information, or perhaps the ability of some people to read bioelectric fields. Our five senses, even augmented, are extremely limited. We know today that we can't see infra-red and ultra-violet with the naked eye, but that they do exist, along with quarks and muons and viruses and prions. We now know that there are sounds we cannot hear, odours we cannot smell, and contact we cannot feel. I am not imagining what I sense in others. Others simply lack the organ or facility to sense what I do. The scientist in me doubts and refutes and collects data, eternally leery of anything remotely New Age. The mystic in me accepts it for what it appears to be, and smiles non-judgementally at the scientist, saying meditate upon it, practice samadhi, let it exist, and one day, perhaps, it will be revealed.
posted by KR | 3/13/2005 10:11:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home