Episode #13: Past-Life Regression, Somatic Healing, and the Spiritual Side of High Sensitivity

Exploring the mystical gifts of sensitivity with Dr. Katie Larson, from past-life regression to somatic healing and spiritual growth.

Welcome back to The Happy HSP Podcast. I’m your host, Kimberly Marshall, and if you’ve ever wondered if there’s a deeper, more spiritual side to being highly sensitive, this episode is for you. Today, I’m joined by Dr. Katie Larson. She’s a hypnotherapist, growth coach, and somatic practitioner who shares her journey with past-life regression, somatic healing, and the spiritual aspects of life.

Together, we explore how these practices can help highly sensitive people not only manage the overwhelm of the world but also embrace their unique gifts and live with more balance, meaning, and intuition.

I hope you enjoy it!

Kim: Hi, Dr. Katie. I’m so happy to have you today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dr. Katie: It’s my pleasure.

Kim: It’s good to see you. The first question I want to ask you is about your personal journey in high sensitivity and how you found out you were highly sensitive and what that journey looked like for you.

Dr. Katie: Sure. I love this one because I feel like so many of us didn’t know we were highly sensitive until we were middle aged. And mine was the same. It was 2020 and I was living in Hong Kong at the time, and we experienced the pandemic in Hong Kong a few months earlier than the rest of the world. So, I think the rest of the world was March, but in Hong Kong, because COVID was coming out of China. We were in January, had shutdowns and nobody was being able to travel around, et cetera, et cetera. So, like every high-achieving person during that time when shutdown started happening, I was like, what am I going to do? I need to do something. And so, I started certifying for a coaching certification that is coaching for spiritual emergence. And so, I’m sure you would be interested in that, but it’s like a certification that helps people that are kind of going under an awakening.

We’re all having this moment right now. And so, during one of the modules in the certification, it mentioned that highly sensitive people, and it was a link, tend to experience this more. And so, I’m highly sensitive people, what’s this right click? And it brings me to Dr. Elaine Aron’s work. And so, I’d go and I take the quiz and it’s like 90% or something, right? Like 99%. And I’m like, this is unreal that I haven’t understood this for so long because I knew I was an empath. I think I always recognized I was very absorbing of other people’s energies, and I could really pick up on the feng shui and the energy of a place and not just people, but I never really understood because high sensitivity could be so seemingly disjointed when we look at that acronym DOES it seemingly feels disjointed.

But when Dr. Elaine Aron presented it in a way of it’s not disjointed, this is a trait that we have, it blew my mind. It felt like a welcome home of this explains my entire childhood, my entire adulthood, why I leave parties early sometimes, why I can’t handle that jackhammer down the street and why did I hear too many noises at once? I’m going to be in a bad mood. So, that was the beginning of something for me. And as somebody that is highly sensitive and loves to go deeply, I read everything I could possibly read about it. I got obsessed with it. And then shortly after that I actually shifted all of my work to only work with highly sensitive people clients because I had noticed that the people that I had done the best with in the past as a coach were highly sensitive. And so, I’m actually, I would rather just niche to the people that are like me the most, who are these HSP highly sensitive people.

Kim: So, you initially went into a spiritual coaching path and found out about the high sensitivity during that and decided to kind of pursue the two at the same time?

Dr. Katie: Yeah, I had already been coaching for several years and I think it’s every one of us are like, I might as well just do another certification. This happens a lot. And like I said, 2020 just gave us the opportunity to dive deeply into something. We had a lot of time, didn’t we? And that was something that I felt really called to understand. And I actually started writing a book in 2021 called The Sensitive Journey, and I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit more about it later, but I never finished it because I got pregnant and had a baby and then moved overseas. So it was very like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So, every once in a while, I’ll put a couple few more sentences in the book and I’m like, one day, one day this book might get published, but I’ve put it down for now.

Kim: Yeah, you’ve been through a lot as those who follow along on your Instagram has seen, you’ve really shared and been so candid with that, that’s so helpful for people to see that kind of…

Dr. Katie: Yeah, we had a rough year this year. We actually lost our house in the hurricane, and it made us basically homeless for six to nine months. So, we were going all over the world trying to find places to stay, but we now are in a house again, and so we’re starting to root again and try to get our feet back in just in time for the next hurricane season. So, we’ll see how it goes.

Kim: I know, I’m so happy that you’re settled again. That was a long, long haul.

Dr. Katie: Thank you.

Kim: Especially with high sensitivity, that’s got to be so uprooting.

Dr. Katie: Yes. It’s interesting because the things we take for granted, hey of for example, temperature and air conditioning units and things, really simple things that you go to a different house and maybe their air conditioning unit is so loud or it’s filled with dust or it’s filled with things and it really influences because of your environment, there’s nothing you could do. And so, you have to find all these different ways to adapt and to train yourself that you’re safe. And we could talk more about how I did that. A lot of it was somatic practices is what I really got into during the last year. But yeah, it’s been a wild journey, having an environment change on a monthly basis.

Kim: I know when I’m in the wrong environment, I can be a monster. And I’m like, “Sorry, I’m an HSP”…

Dr. Katie: Yeah, I get you. I get you. Or if someone has air fresheners, I’m like, Woohoo. No, right. I can’t handle it. But if you’re staying in somebody’s house for free, you can’t be like…

Kim: Yeah, beggars can’t be choosers.

Dr. Katie: Yeah.

Kim: So, what was your spiritual journey? Did it begin in 2020 as well or you’ve been kind of spiritual all along?

Dr. Katie: I’ve been around the block my friend. I think you and a lot of us, I always had a thread of it throughout my life and I was a really interesting kid. I had past-life memories. So, I came in with memories that were more clear than even my own childhood. And at five, six, seven, eight, I was chatting about this stuff, and I started to forget around seven and eight as well. But I would bring up different things and they would be little snippets of a little vignette of a time and a place, and that would be a different gender, and it would be a different era. And I would be doing different things, and I would share it with my parents, and they were actually pretty supportive. They’d make jokes about it, but they would like, “Ooh, maybe you did live before” kind of thing. And I always had a knowing it was strange. I remember even seventh grade, we were reading some Plato, the philosopher and Plato was talking about how when we’re born, we go through the veil of forgetfulness and it was like, first of all, that was pretty intense for seventh grade, but I remember being like, yep. That’s what happens. I just knew it.

So, when I was in my mid-20s, I actually had my first past-life regression and it showed me a life that I actually didn’t have a lot of memories of when I was a child, but it was an entire life. You go through everything, you go through the death, you talk to the character. And afterwards the hypnotherapist was like, you’re actually really good at this. You might want to consider doing something called a life between lives session. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let me digest this one first. And I waited an entire year before I did the life between lives session, but that session significantly changed my life for the better. It shows you why you just go into trance. And these are things I offer now as a hypnotherapist because 20 years later I got into hypnotherapy because of this moment.

But I saw why I was born, why I chose the body that I chose, why I chose the family I chose, what were my purposes in this life, what were some, interestingly it would show prophetic things showed that I was going to have a girl and a boy that I was going to travel the world and these were all things that weren’t even on my radar in my 20s. So, it was very interesting from the perspective of if you didn’t believe in this, you might be like where I just making it up. But because I had already kind of believed in it and I was also really open, what is fascinating is those prophetic things have come true and all of the purpose has really grounded me. And so, the purpose of my life, if you’d like to know, is to educate and connect people to their purpose in life.

And so, I find that if I use that as my guiding force, it’s really helpful. But I had that experience in my 20s and then since then, I think similar to a lot of highly sensitive people who we would describe ourselves as seekers, we’re just seekers. We want to seek the truth. We want to feel deeply into something that feels really resonant to our soul. I’ve just tried on a lot of belief systems and a lot of experiences. I kind of do chase that for better or worse. And I am a seeker externally out in the world, but internally as well with different psychedelics and different other trance states and different things that I could just find some pieces and pockets of truth and I kind of weave them together. And I find that is the guiding force of my life is just to consistently remember who I am, remember why I’m here.

And every once in a while when life happens, shit happens, like losing the house, I will revert back into the more spiritual aspects of me to float me. But yeah, I could go on and on about that, but it’s been a real wild ride. But each little journey that I’ve gone on for spiritual exploration has really grounded me in that sense of we are unique, humans are unique, our souls are unique. And I think that’s part of why we’re here, is to remember why we’re the way we are and fall in love with yourself, to be honest.

Kim: Gosh, there’s so much there I mean…so, the spiritual journey for you, it’s funny because for someone like you who does the past-life regressions who does spiritual coaching, it was interesting for me to hear you say that when I need to be grounded. Would you say in your experiences, you sometimes get caught up in real life? Life as you’re living it and you kind of forget and spiritual stuff, it’s like a flow?

Dr. Katie: Both. I do both. And what’s so interesting is that I’m a very chakra-minded person and I live on the poles of the chakras sometimes I’m either stuck in my third eye, living in the realms, living in the outer realms, talking to my spirit guides and everybody. And I’m not in my body. I am not in my root, I’m not in my sacral, I’m not in my body and I’m either up there or I’m really embodied, and I am mucking around in the rest of the world and I’m really human. I’m really like 3D, and I can’t connect. And so, I find as somebody whose parents were really good about stressing balance my whole childhood, my parents are like, life is about balance. Life is about balance. And I wouldn’t say that they were necessarily the most spiritual or most emotionally mature people, but that little mantra really stayed with me. And when I found the chakras at a younger age, and here’s why I like the chakras so much, I can see auras and chakras.

Kim: Wow.

Dr. Katie: So, I didn’t realize no one else could do that, right? Because you just feel a color and it’s not like you see it necessarily, but you feel it and then you could see it as an overlay. And so that’s one of my superpowers as a highly sensitive person, I think a lot of highly sensitive people, we have these additional skillsets that are probably in all humans at some point, but we’ve maintained it and I could see chakras in other people, and I could see auras in other people. So, once I really honed that in my 30s, then I was like, it’s so important to keep your chakras aligned. And so, whenever I get a little too spiritual and I’m up in the ether in the third eye, I got to bring it down. And if I’m a little too embodied and a little too mucking around, I got to go up and get back into my heart or my crown and just feel more connected to the web of life.

Kim: So even someone like you who coaches in this, I wouldn’t say struggle, but you go back and forth it sounds like.

Dr. Katie: Yes, yes. And you know what actually is very interesting as a practitioner, and I think you’ll probably feel this too, because when you’re coaching how you’re an empath, sometimes you pick up on the energies of people. But what I often am doing as a hypnotherapist is I am in trance enough with you that I’m kind of following your journey internally. And so, I have to guide you into what these little realms are. And so, I’m kind of following along really intensely, so I’m kind of up in those realms with you.

And so, when a client leaves my office, if I don’t come out and get back into my body and kind of be like, you’re back here Katie, I will stay up there. I just stay in that realm. And it’s not your realm. You’re gone. I’ve disconnected from you, but I’m in that realm. And so, it’s like I really have to bring myself down and remember, okay, you’re human here, you’re human.

Kim: So, when you are up in that realm and you are seeing your visions and I’m guessing through your third eye, what is that experience like? Is it like a meditation? Is it dreaming? What is it like?

Dr. Katie: What’s crazy about it is I’m going to say how I learned it because if someone’s listening, they’re like, I want to do this. I’ll say I had a really good mentor in my 30s, so I’m 43 years old. So, 10 years, 13 years ago now, I met a mentor who was an intuitive coach, and she was a friend, and she was just like, Hey, you’re really good at this, this and this. You want me to help you get better? I was like, oh yeah, please. So, I was in a workshop, and we had to connect with somebody on a more intuitive level and just say what you were picking up on. It’s almost for me, I have a more clairvoyance and a clear sentience. It’s like a visual and knowing. So, I’m seeing all of these things and I’m like, oh geez, this is going to be weird.

I’m just going to say it out loud, this is weird. But I was like, I see you running through the subway. You dropped something. I see you in a bathing suit and you’re eating olives. Does any of that ring? And I’m like, in the moment, this is so fucked up. There’s no way that this is going to have anything to do with anything this lady’s saying. And she goes, you’re not even going to believe this. Yesterday when I was leaving work, I dropped all my stuff in the subway, and it was hot and rainy, and I was grouchy. So, I went home, and I sat down on the TV on the couch and watching TV, and I booked a flight to the South of France. I bought a new bathing suit, and the entire time I was eating olives, and I go, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

And so, then you say to yourself, I’m not making this up. And so, you start to trust it. And I think the more you trust it, the more you start to get, and you get these weird hits. And so, for me, in a normal walking day-to-day life, when I’m next to somebody, I’ll feel their energy. I’ll just feel their energy. And I’m one of these people who can tell that it’s not mine. And I think that I work a lot with clients that they’re trying to determine what’s theirs and what’s not. That’s something we work on a lot with certain people, but I can tell like, Ooh, that’s not mine. But then I can gaze at it and watch and feel and notice how it feels when I’m doing…and that’s just regular me…but when I’m doing the hypnotherapy, what I find fascinating is because hypnotherapy, you narrate your experience to the practitioner, me, I understand what’s happening and I follow along, but when it gets weird is when they say something after you see it in your own mind as a practitioner.

So, for example, I had a client where, and I asked my teacher about this, and so I was learning this and then I went and I said to the teacher, I said, “I had a practice client and saw in my mind the floor, like the black-and-white checkered floor and all of the architecture and everything. And then when she walked into the room, that’s what she described, but I saw it first. Is that common?” And my teacher’s like, no, no, not really. But I think it is common. And I think that’s what’s so interesting about this process is it’s like I’m not entirely sure what the feedback is if I’m technically picking up on her or if she’s technically picking up on me at times. But when they really are experiencing something that has a plot, like a past-life regression or inner child healing and it has a plot that they’re following along, sometimes I will see or know what they’re going to say before it happens.

Kim: Wow. What is your thought and on where we are now as a collective? Because there seems to be a lot of spiritual talk about a lot of things happening on a mass scale. Do you see that with some of your clients? Do you feel like more people are getting in touch with their spiritual gifts and being on the spiritual journey?

Dr. Katie: I do. I think there’s a lot of reasons and a lot of explanations. And I think for any of us who’ve kind of been into the esoteric stuff for a long time, this has been predicted that this has kind of been spoken about for a long time, that we’re going into an era where there’s a thinner veil. That’s what you’ve been kind of describing, that there’s a veil that between the dimensional worlds that we’re in the three-dimensional world where you’re just walking around in time and space. But what both I have heard from higher selves of clients and my own higher self as well as read is we’re more of the physical avatar of beings that live in another dimension.

And I heard many numbers, but sometimes it’s heard as the seventh dimension or the fifth dimension, but it’s like we’re a couple dimensions up actually. And so, the way that I like to joke about it with my clients is imagine you’re Mario from Mario Brothers and your real self is Player One playing you. That’s your higher self. They’re playing a video game version of you. And here’s where it gets really crazy in the sessions that I have with people where they meet their higher self, you’re not the only Mario. You’ve got Luigi and Peach and Toad and everybody else because your higher self wants to have a lot of different experiences in the material realm. This is where it gets crazy. You got to stay there. How do you feel about that?

Kim: I have chills, but I’m trying to think. So, you’re saying whoever is Player One, there’s a bunch of people up there kind of playing us, or not playing us, but guiding us. Is that what you mean?

Dr. Katie: I mean more one energy is playing five characters or six or more where it’s like your higher self has multiple versions of little avatars running around on a physical plane. And you might even have more avatars on a fourth dimension in a fifth dimension. You have these different levels of consciousness that are existing, but they all kind of go into one container that is your higher self, which is a little spark of the source. It’s a little spark that’s like what we call soul or spirit or your subconscious or something, the collective.

So, the way I like to describe it from my own experience is that when I’ve done lots of different past lives, or I do, I kind of just call ’em other lives now because they’re kind of, when you go at the finish of this experience and you talk to the character who you played or your higher self, they’ll say, this is still going. This isn’t really in the past, the time isn’t real lines don’t…

Kim: There is no time. When you look at quantum physics and how it plays into all this and timelines, it’s not…

Dr. Katie: And there’s a lot of statistics and probabilities involved. The person that doesn’t like math in me is like eeehhh.

Kim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Katie: There’s a lot of math involved of what you may choose tends to increase that trajectory or et cetera. But that’s literally what clients higher selves say. And what’s interesting is that the people that come into the session or just like me, and they’re not like, “I’m a very wise person and I have read many years on this subject, so I just want to confirm it with my higher self.” It’s like, like I don’t know what to think. And then they go into trance and they kind of channel their higher self and their higher self will say something like, you are here on earth at this point because you’re trying to learn compassion. And then if the person’s like, well, am I anywhere else? And they’ll be like, yes. And they’ll be like, where am I? And they’ll be like, well, you’re living other lives where you’re trying to learn humility.

And then there’s another life where you’re trying to learn patience and another life where you’re trying to et cetera. And so, you have these little lessons, and I’ve described it to someone before. I hope that you like these metaphors. I think this is the only way to talk about life is metaphors, but it’s like imagine your soul is a chunk of unpolished gemstone, ruby, just like that raw ruby, and then each life making a facet until it’s a beautiful gemstone. And so, all those beautifully cut stones, they have all these multiple facets, but in order to actually get the facet, you have to go into a physical life. And so, the physical life is giving you that understanding and then you kind of come out as this beautiful gem that did its time on Earth.

Kim: Yeah, the doctorate degree, the hard knocks.  

Dr. Katie: The hardest one. Yeah, the hardest one.

Kim: So fascinating. Gosh, you have such a gift. So, what about the somatic part of your practice? What does that look like and how does that help?

Dr. Katie: What I have found for me personally, and I don’t know if you’re this way, but I feel like every few years I forget I have a body. That’s what we were talking about. But it started out as a child, I had physical and sexual trauma as a very young child. So, there’s probably an origin of dissociation at that point. And this is all an unconscious implicit memory that I have. I don’t fully remember what happened to me except in snippets. And then I’ve kind of pieced it together through hypnotherapy myself. But I do find for me and for my clients, when you’re abused and you have physical trauma, you dissociate because your soul, if you want to call it that, or your emotions, your subtle body is like, “Hey, I’m going to leave while this is happening cause I don’t want to remember this. And the body can take the brunt of it, but what happens is the body still remembers the experience.

And so, for a lot of us highly sensitive people, even if you don’t have that trauma, but there was abuse. You have a sensitive body, and you have a sensitive nervous system. And so, in your childhood, you might’ve picked up little habits and little patterns and behaviors that were a result of being so sensitive. So, maybe you got whipped in the face with a dodge ball as a kid, and now you’re like, oh no, you’re not going to play this sport ever again. Or my story was that the stupid gym teacher made me kick a ball back and forth through the cones, and I kept messing it up and the teacher’s like, “We’re not leaving until Katie can do this right.” And then everybody was 15 minutes late and he’s like, you know what? Forget it. Everybody just go. And then everyone was like, “Katie, sucks, you’re the worst, Katie.”

And it’s like that lives in your body. So, then what happens is you kind of grow up and you have a very interesting relationship with your body. So, you’re either completely dissociated where you don’t even know where your body is. You don’t even know how to use your body where there’s a delay. And where I can talk about in a moment, remind me to go back to this, if I don’t bring it up, we have a little bit of a delay in proprioception is high sensitivity. Maybe I’ll just talk about it right now. Highly sensitive people. The research has shown have a very excellent interoception, which is our ability to understand the interior of our body and even articulate it really well. So, we can say something like, “I have a pain in my left side that’s the size and shape of a raspberry and it feels red or whatever.”

And they’ll accurately say, well, actually after the scan you have a tumor that’s, or we’ll say, oh, I feel gas coming, and the gas is feeling in this particular way. And you’re just really good at describing your interior body, but we’re not wonderful with proprioception and what proprioception is, how we move our body in time and space and be able to understand when someone gives you a cue, there’s a little bit of a delay in highly sensitive people. And so, we don’t necessarily, for example, let’s say you’re learning golf or you’re learning choreography and they’re like and left and left and you’re like…

Kim: Yeah, I need a minute to let that sink in.

Dr. Katie: And that’s not that common in non-highly sensitive people. So, a lot of people that are very athletic have a very good proprioception, but a lot of highly sensitive people, we err on the side of interoception and a lot of athletic people or somebody else that is less sensitive, they err on the side of proprioception. And if you’re like, where does that hurt in your internal body? They would have a struggle with that. And so, I feel like for me, a lot of my adulthood has been processing old traumas in the body by moving, trying to get it to come out and understanding how my body holds those tensions and holds those emotions and trying to release them. And also, being able to tap into the internal part of the body to give it what it needs, because it will tell you, I’m thirsty. Come on lady, drink another water.

Or it’ll even say, if you’re like, yeah, I’ll meet you there Saturday night, your body goes…

Kim: No, we don’t…cancel the plans immediately.

Dr. Katie: We don’t want to meet that person. And it’s not necessarily anxiety, it’s your body telling you chose something out of your boundaries that’s not cool. And so it’s trusting your body and learning those somatic practiceshas really helped me recover from this year, which we talked about of, I held a lot of stress in tension because so much of surviving a natural disaster is fight or flight where you’re just like, and it just stays in your body and it literally, your shoulders grow up, your tension and your neck and everything.

And so, you just have to work it out and work it out. Because when we don’t work it out, it becomes the way you move and then the way you move really reinforces it and it just stays in. So, when we aren’t able to move our emotions, emotions get emotions “in motion,” it stays, and the longer it stays, the more difficult it is to heal later.

Kim: And they’re finding, too, turn into disease.

Dr. Katie: Exactly. And that’s fun about studying this, right, is when you study it and you see that there’s not only a lot of correlations between the chakras, for example, the thyroid is often for especially women who haven’t felt like they have a voice, no one listens to them. They’re unable to speak the truth because they’re scared of what could happen to them. And that’s not new in Chinese medicine. In traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, this has been known for thousands of years, but I think the modern western allopathic medicine is finally catching on that. Yeah, emotions matter, right?

Kim: Yeah. We so forget, we’re so caught up in, like you said, living in our brains and our thoughts and our thinking and in our phones, we’re so dissociated with our bodies and how our energy plays into our health. We don’t learn that stuff in school. You don’t learn about chakras.

Dr. Katie: And shouldn’t we? Yeah, shouldn’t we…

Kim: Energy systems. And that your heart has its own nervous system…

Dr. Katie: And it’s sending out these little frequencies. And I think as empaths, that’s what we’re picking up on, the little frequencies of the heart. And they have heart math. If you’ve never looked into Heart Math Institute where it talks about we’re creating this little field around us at all times. And it’s like that’s why sometimes when you walk into a room and somebody’s field is chaotic, it can really disrupt the frequency of everybody else. If you have something in a pile or a bathtub that’s going like this and you’re just trying to float, you’re going to float up and down too. So, it’s really fun to see it in research. I have a science brain. I was a scientist from my first career. I love it when it validates what we’re saying as highly sensitive people that we just experience daily.

Kim: And all these fields I feel like are finally talking to each other with the neuroscience and the quantum physics and spirituality, they’re starting to find it’s all one and the same. It’s fascinating. So, what do you struggle with as a highly sensitive person? What’s the thing you say challenges you?

Dr. Katie: When you forget that lows feel lower, but highs feel high. So, you’re like, oh, great, I love this. But the lows, lows are lower. And I think what I’ve noticed as a woman, and I’m very good at, and I work with clients, is I recognize the cyclic nature. I’ll be able to say, okay, at day one and two, I’m fabulous. But day 14 and 15, I literally put in my shared calendar with my husband a picture of a swear emoji. That’s when my energy crashes. And it’s like, go Google the feminine cycle. What happens after ovulation? Her hormones crash. And that’s why we get so grouchy. And so, I have found, by understanding my cyclic nature, that has very much helped me be like, okay, just two more days of this, Katie, it’s going to go back up. And I’m like, this is a wave. Ride the wave.

But every woman around day 23 to 24, when you suddenly forget anyone at all likes you and that you feel like, “Everyone hates me. I hate my life. I want to burn my life down,” and day 23 and 24, but it’s like clockwork. It happens every month. Those lows really can take me. And I think as a younger, highly sensitive person, before I really understood my cycle and understood how hormones affect me and understood that I’m a highly sensitive person and what I need to get through those two days, which I’ll tell you in a minute, I would just ride the wave down and down and down and down and spiral and be like, oh, the worst.

Kim: The stories we tell ourselves…

Dr. Katie: Yes, yes. And I think that’s my biggest struggle. But that and air fresheners, can we be done with air fresheners? Please? Can this be please…can we just get through that trend? But I think what I try to do now is when those low days are coming, I could see it in the future. Even right now I’m like, I got two days till I reach that, so I better prepare to sink. It’s true. I need to give myself opportunities to cry. So, I’ll watch a sad movie. And my friend and I used to call it crygasm. I’m like, I need to crygasm. I just need to let it all out. It feels such a release. Or I will try to isolate because I snap at people if I’m really irritable or I will journal or I will go for a long hike alone. Just you have to prepare what you’ll likely need if you can recognize your cycle and your needs at different points in the cycle and give it to yourself. But I would say, yeah, my challenge is remembering it’s only temporary.

Kim: Yeah. What do you love about high sensitivity and what do you celebrate?

Dr. Katie: I am someone who really took to heart the advice from Dr. Elaine Aron, which is when you’re highly sensitive, you actually need to double your pleasures because then it cuts your annoyances in half because you’re actually increasing the tolerance of your nervous system. So, for example, I cannot handle jackhammers noises that are consistent like a beeping thing. That’s like a consistent noise. I’ll lose my mind. But if I give myself music I love and give myself sounds I enjoy, I can increase how much I can handle that. And so, I tend to err on the side of indulgence and pleasure. It’s the sacral chakra for those who speak chakras. I love smelling the flowers, touching myself. I like to swim. I like to touch my body. I really enjoy that. I love to eat layered foods like Indian food and amazing chocolate because I like the layers because my senses are so calibrated, I can really taste that.

And so, when I’m indulging in my senses daily, I do this very often. I pause and allow it in because think that allows me, when I don’t do that, I get really irritable. And I think when I, as you would know, and all of us that are highly sensitive know our senses are just pulling up tabs on our mental computer like, oh, that’s annoying, but let’s not bother her. Now let’s just pull up the tab. And it’s like I’m hearing the fricking barista make the espresso. So that’s a tab that’s open. And then somebody walked in, and they had bright shiny things. That’s a tab. Someone’s on a phone, that’s a tab. It just opens all these tabs and then you’re not aware of the tabs. And then all of the sudden someone maybe asks you a question in a kind of rude way and then you snap. But it wasn’t the question, it was the tabs. And so, if I don’t have enough things that I enjoy that kind of close the tabs, then I lose it.

Kim: Close the tabs and enjoy what you’re experiencing in the moment, it sounds like.

Dr. Katie: Yeah, that’s true. Hey, it’s just being present and really indulging in your highly sensitive nerves. I’ll say one more thing that I like. I like knowing less-sensitive people pay so much money to get the same experiences that we get naturally. They will pay to go to a roller coaster at an amusement park to get their adrenaline up and to feel alive. And I’m like, I feel that every day people will want these deep, meaningful experiences on an ayahuasca retreat. And it’s like, I can have that. I could tap into that.

And so, I think there are things that when I kind of read the collective conscious internet when they’re like, there’s this new trend out. And I’m like, highly sensitive people been doing that forever, naturally. And so, I recognize the less-sensitive people are actually really desiring what we have naturally. And I find that helps me float as well. When I’m feeling a little too sensitive, I’m like, actually, people would kill for this feeling of feeling this high and low, so close to each other, an amazing high and an amazing low, people like that.

Kim: And it even reminds me of Elaine Aron’s quote. I think it’s in The Highly Sensitive Person where she says A lot of people liken high sensitivity and non-high sensitivity as living in black and white versus technicolor. We are able to tap into so much more emotion, senses, feeling. It’s a gift.

Dr. Katie: It’s such a gift. And it’s so interesting when you speak to someone, I use the metaphor like highly sensitive people, well, let’s do less-sensitive people first. A less-sensitive person was born with a pack of eight crayons. They got ’em, they got eight colors. Awesome. But a highly sensitive person is like that 128 pack with a sharpener in the back, that one that everybody wanted as a kid, that badass crayon pack. And it’s like, I’ve got cerulean and aquamarine, and you have blue, and it’s like we still have blues, but I’m going to feel something completely on its own level and I’m not going to be able to communicate it to you perfectly because you only have blue. And so, I reckon that is a great metaphor for what Dr. Elaine Aron says is what’s so challenging but also beautiful to be a highly sensitive is when you’re communicating with less-sensitive people and you’re trying really hard to give that impression of what it feels like. And they’re like, “Nope, blue.”

Kim: Yeah. You’re like, whatever. I know what it looks like. So, what advice would you give to highly sensitive people who may be struggling to find their happiness and joy in life?

Dr. Katie: So, I used to be a scientist, and one of the things that I used to teach was population dynamics. And this is not going to be boring, I promise. But when you start to read the research and you see that every single species has 20% of the population highly sensitive, my science brain is like, that’s because it’s a very helpful trait and we need it. So, the advice that I would give is we are so needed in our culture, in our population, in our family, in our workplace, or we would be extinct. So, we are so needed, we are so necessary. So how are you needed? What is your role? Because maybe you’re the peacemaker, maybe you’re the dreamer, maybe you’re the healer, maybe you are the innovator. Maybe you are these big lofty energies that have carried humanity. When you really read the research, it’s like, oh, actually these are the philosophers.

These are the priests, these are the nurses and the healers. If we don’t exist, society collapses. And so, when you’re feeling like, oh, this is too much. This is a burden. This is too much for me, I would say, what are the bigger shoes that you could embody in this moment? What are the character traits of some of these things that you could really double down on and embrace and be that hero, those 20% of that people that have kind of carried humanity forward? And I tend to use that for myself when I’m feeling really low and I will be Super Listener, Super Healer and whatever I need to be because I know that I’m fully needed and valued.

Kim: Yes. And I love what you said to add to that. Not only would society collapse, but I feel like if we all really stood in our power and confidence as highly sensitive people, it would help our society thrive, especially all the love that we have to share and the empathy, we need that so much more.

Dr. Katie: And don’t you feel like we’re very living by example? I feel like so many highly sensitive people, and Dr. Elaine Aron’s work said, this is like we live with purpose almost unknowingly, but it is just a guiding force. We have integrity and we have a very strong compass, a moral compass. And it’s like, what a way to live. I’m proud of it. I’m so proud to be highly sensitive. I’m a disciple of sensitivity through and through. I will always sing the praises of sensitivity, and maybe one day I’ll finish that book, but it is important. I want everybody to feel whole in who they are and embracing their sensitivity is part of that.

Kim: Absolutely. That empowerment is so important. Speaking of empowerment, you’re working on an e-course, is that right? Can you share that with me. What is that?

Dr. Katie: Yes. So, remember when we were chatting about sometimes I’m just, I forget, I have a body for multiple years. What I recognize from working with my clients is highly sensitive people, but especially empaths, we have a really hard time being in our bodies because we’re really good at the upper chakras, which I call the “service to others” chakras, which is our heart, our throat, our third eye. We’re like scanning the room, being vigilant (third eye), we have to adapt our voice for who we’re around (throat). We’re constantly being compassionate and kind and caring (heart). So, we kind of live on the upper three chakras. But what we often forget are the lower three chakras, which I’ve nicknamed the “service to self” chakras. Because you have your solar plexus, which is like your willpower, your ambition, your structure. You have your sacral, which is that fun and pleasure and enjoyment and emotions.

And you have your root, which is stillness, stability, resting, grounding. And those three tend to get sacrificed when you’re working from the top three and only. And so, I have an e-course called Embodiment for Empaths that shows us how to get back into our body, but especially how to embody those lower three chakras because when we are so busy caring for everybody, we just sort of like, I can wait. I don’t need to have fun. I don’t need to rest. And that really throws our energy, and it throws us in ways that it’s very difficult to recover from. But if we just had a little bit more of a connection to how to move our body and how to be in our body and how to feel our body, then we actually can recover a lot quicker and just be a badass empath. And so that’s on my website, growthquests.com, and it’s under the little tab called E-course, and it’s called Embodiment for Empaths.

Kim: Amazing. And where can people follow along on your journey?

Dr. Katie: So, I’m on Instagram @drkatiegrowthquests, and I love it when people kind of comment on some of the posts and play along. And then on my website, growthquests.com, and I see people from all over the world. I’ve actually lived all over the world, so I have a lot of clients from all different places. So, I see online clients even for hypnotherapy, but I live in the state of Florida, and I live in St. Petersburg, and so that’s near Tampa Bay. So, if there’s anybody that likes to see me in person, you could give me a call. Otherwise, yeah, just send out an interest form on the website and we’ll have a free discovery call and then we take it from there.

Kim: Amazing. Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing, and thank you for joining me today.

Dr. Katie: Thank you. It’s been my pleasure. I’m so grateful that we did this, and this is a really good example of how Instagram can really connect people. Hey, because how you and I have connected, and I’ve been really grateful for our friendship.

Kim: Same here. The genuine connections. Yeah. Even on social media, you wouldn’t think.

Dr. Katie: Yeah, thank you for that.

Thank you so much for listening in on my conversation with Dr. Katie. I hope her story inspires you to see your sensitivity in a new light…and to feel a bit more free to explore the mystical and spiritual practices that can connect us more deeply to ourselves and the world around us.

If this episode resonated with you, I’d love if could write a review or share it with another HSP in your life.

Also, if you’re looking to finally find that path that helps you build a gentler and more nurturing career filled with lots of purpose, meaning, and joy, that’s the work I do. You can sign up for a free career clarity breakthrough session on my website at www.happyhspcocaching.com. I love to meet with you and learn more about the challenges you’re experiencing on your carer journey and help you find pinpoint your next steps.

Until next time. Take care!

About Dr. Katie Larson:

Dr. Katie T. Larson, Ph.D., is a hypnotherapist, growth coach, and somatic practitioner who works with highly sensitive people, empaths, and intuitives. She has helped initiate meaningful personal growth in thousands of individuals, but she is best known for guiding clients through “Quests” — inner journeys — that offer opportunities to explore their lives from deeper perspectives, bringing more purpose, meaning, and joy.

Follow along with Dr. Katie’s journey:

Instagram: @drkatiegrowthquests

Website: growthquests.com

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About Kimberly:

After 20 years in the publishing industry working for companies like Time Inc., Monster.com, and W. W. Norton, Kimberly Marshall left her corporate work to create a gentler and more nurturing career that better suited her as an HSP. After repeatedly struggling with burnout and low confidence in the workplace, she now helps HSPs create careers that bring them lots of purpose, meaning, and joy. With the Happy HSP Podcast, Kimberly hopes to shed more light on the reality of living with high sensitivity and inspire more HSPs to embrace their empathetic, generous, and loving natures.

• Hosted/produced by Kimberly Marshall

• Edited by Fonzie Try Media

• Artwork by Tara Corola