Empowering High Sensitivity - Interview Part 1 of 2

This transcript about empowering and transcending high sensitivity is from an August 2008 interview by Douglas Eby of Talent Developement Resources.
______________________

Douglas Eby: According to Elaine Aron, author of The Highly Sensitive Person, about 15 to 20 percent of people have this trait, which includes being highly aware of both the environment and inner experience. What are some of the main defining qualities of high sensitivity?

Jenna Forrest: People with high sensitivity are very intelligent, intuitive, perceptive, and creative. They're very diligent about caring for others and wanting things to be at peace. Where the difficulty lies is that the world isn't always at peace.

Challenges begin in childhood, when as toddlers and pre-schoolers they pick up subtle signals, thoughts, moods and other sensory energy from home, in the neighborhood, from TV or school, or from their playmates -- and they don't know what to do with it.

In a short time, the world's problems become their own. Millions of highly sensitive people right at this moment are carrying a heavier burden than the rest of society just because they're perceptive of the world's discord, which is coming at them every day from a laundry list of sources.

This is where many sensitive kids and adults are right now, thinking that all these energies going on inside them are because something's wrong with them.

Douglas Eby: And you're saying that is not really true.

Jenna Forrest: Right -- there's nothing wrong with them. And highly sensitive people have a beautiful ability to turn their burdens into art, inventions, writing, acting and other expressions that speak to the hearts of humanity.

They also have powerful, healing intuition that when developed, can be used to clear the suffering that's been endured by themselves and others.

People who want to heal from unhappiness, disease, trauma and other unwanted circumstances, can progress fast if they work with another sensitive person - like a therapist or teacher -- who has already transcended his or her sensitivity by turning it into empowered awareness.

That coaching relationship can help the sensitive person learn to release what isn't his and protect his energy field. This is especially important when longstanding energies cause a person's health to diminish into chronic pain or illness.

Douglas Eby: So you're saying that coaching, particularly with a sensitive coach can really help sensitive people heal more completely?

Jenna Forrest: Absolutely. All sensitive and intuitive people... we all have the capacity to develop the ability to heal themselves and others with training and practice.

A common trap that sensitive people fall into is trying to help others without having healed themselves - giving energy away with no fullness or energy to draw from. This can be life-threatening. Interestingly, part of this is wrapped up in low self worth.

Sensitive people have to believe they're worth saving, and worth loving. Affirming that they belong in the world and that their self-care is of primary importance changes things drastically towards the positive.

Douglas Eby: Yes, it must. Well, many of us have had hurtful and dysfunctional family histories; how does being highly sensitive impact or determine our future personal growth?

Jenna Forrest: I know you've covered a lot of A New Earth, and Eckhart Tolle states that highly sensitive children are particularly affected by their parent's pain and also by the collective pain of humanity.

If those children whose pain and whose parent's pain are not healed through awareness and presence to transmute that pain, the adult child can live out his or her adulthood holding onto an unbearable accumulation of pain.

When this pain is no longer bearable, it can become an intense motivator for some type of breakthrough.

This is when the path of personal growth opens up, and where our consciousness is awakened.

Douglas Eby: So pain, instead of being something to run from, can actually motivate us to change?

Jenna Forrest: It's something for us to use. Transcending what Tolle calls the "pain body" of high sensitivity means no longer building an identity around pain. This is a process that takes time - so it helps to approach developing a new identity as a free and peaceful individual with patience.

Month by month, year by year, as each layer of pain is observed, validated and cleared, the pain body loses its control over our emotions. This is transcendence of the pain that allows the individual to experience the truth and peace of his or her own being.

At this level of peace, high sensitivity is replaced by awareness. In other words, the awake being is fully expressed, no longer held back by the limitations of pain or resistance to life's circumstances.

From this viewpoint, we begin to see that we can now choose how we think and feel about things. We can now choose happiness or sadness and how we view our lives and our world. When we say transcending sensitivity, it's not denying it, it's becoming a different definition.

It's a matter of identifying ourselves with our pain body, versus identifying ourselves as a person of peace and fullness - which is us, standing in our awareness.