Transforming Pain Into Joy as a Highly Sensitive Person
When we lost my dad last year, I wanted to pay tribute to him the best way I knew how: with words. So, I asked my family if I could write his obituary, and they agreed.
As a highly sensitive person (HSP), I’m one of the more expressive members of our family. So, in my usual fashion, I poured my heart out into this tribute to my dad.
In my mind, there was no turn of phrase too flowery, no metaphorical tie-in too over the top to convey how loved he was. So, I did what I knew best and created a warm and loving remembrance by filling the pages with all the nicknames, family memories, and inside jokes that we had shared over the years.
Not only did it capture how wonderful he was as a father, but also how amazing he was as a man. I knew my family would love it, so after several rounds of editing and perfecting every word, I sent it off for review.
Instead of a few edits here and there, as I’d expected, it was flat-out rejected. Not only was my writing too much for everyone, but they told me it needed to be completely scrapped and started from scratch. No “this was beautiful” or “thanks for doing this.” No direction on how I could fix it so that everyone’s wishes were honored. It was simply, “This doesn’t work, and we’ll take it from here.”
As you could imagine, I was heartbroken…and so embarrassed. I felt rejected and ashamed for getting something as important as my father’s obituary so “wrong” during an extremely sensitive time for myself and my family.
It was especially painful since writing is one of the most vulnerable ways that we can express who we are and what we feel…and though my family didn’t mean for it to be personal, the rejection felt that way.
After sitting with it for a while, I recognized that there were two ways I could respond:
I could fall into the rabbit hole of despair, reciting the rejection over and over again in my thoughts and allowing myself to sink into feelings of worthlessness and shame (which would make me feel even worse and create feelings of distance within my family during an already difficult time).
I could breathe a lot of love and forgiveness into the situation…for everyone, including myself. This would require me to recognize that my family was grieving and, though they loved me dearly, what I’d written simply didn’t match the tone of what they wanted to share publicly about my dad.
So, I continued to sit with it and let the feelings come. I acknowledged each emotion and considered how I could see it from a loving perspective.
As I sat with the denser emotions and flooded them with kindness and understanding, I noticed a few shifts within me:
I felt lighter. The harsh thoughts that were racing within me subsided and slowed, and my mind, body, and spirit calmed and literally felt lighter.
I felt stronger. I healed something deep within myself and surfaced feeling more resilient and capable of facing difficult moments instead of wanting to shrink and hide away, which was my usual response (because, you know…out of sight, out of mind…).
I felt more loving. I was grateful that I could take a step back to recognize that we all need kindness and love, especially in the difficult moments.
The bigger truth is that everyone we meet is on their own healing journey, and each of us views our lives and conflicts from our own unique experience and perspective. The kinder and more forgiving we can be to each other — especially during the more difficult moments in our lives — the lighter our own steps become. This helps everyone around us heal and feel lighter, too…and before we know it, we’re spreading that joy and love that we’re finding within ourselves.
In other words, if we want to feel more love and joy in our lives, even when life feels heavy and difficult, we must practice being more joyful and loving.
For example, say you share an unpleasant disagreement with a friend. Think about how replaying the hurtful words in your mind creates more feelings of weight and density….how that uncomfortable energy would then grow and expand within and between you.
Now, imagine holding the conflict in your thoughts and filling it with your love and understanding, no matter what the other person has said or done. Notice how your body might feel lighter with that forgiveness and love coursing through you instead of the anger.
I am not saying it’s ok to let others hurt us. We must always speak up for our needs and share how we feel and, if necessary, walk away from those who can’t love us the way we need them to. But we can also do this with a loving and grateful heart.
This is how we heal ourselves and each other and spread more love and light into the world around us.
If we continue to face our hardest moments with courage, forgiveness, and love, it dissipates the denser energies and allows us to feel lighter. When we practice this over time, it becomes second nature, and the lightness and peace we feel growing within us becomes a tangible result of our healing.
One of my favorite books that explains this healing process in depth is The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer. In these pages, he explains how to recognize and heal your pain in a gentle way that is especially useful for HSPs.
It serves as an invitation to surrender to the process and be kind to ourselves during our healing. These journeys take time, but the lives we cultivate as a result — lighter, brighter, and much more joyful and loving — is worth this work.
So, what is one simple thing you can do today to breathe a little more love and gentleness into your life? What daily practice can you put into place that allows you space to heal organically and without force?
What helps me the most is to focus on my healing journey from an energetic perspective instead of spinning my gears with all the ways I can will myself to heal. My daily practice is focusing on lightening and clearing the denser energies around me so I can feel at peace more quickly and return more easily to this grounded energy throughout the day.
I recently took a certification course by Sonia Choquette that helped me use this approach not only in my life but also in my coaching process. It’s a beautiful and gentle way to use my intuition and ability to read frequency and vibration in the healing process.
This approach to coaching can help you get to the root of your challenges and tap into your true desires more quickly and efficiently, so if you’d like to explore this more, you can set up a free discovery session with me here.
I’d be honored to work alongside you and help you find the path to your greatest joy and soul-aligned life, one gentle step at a time.